Cabin Fever, X

Cabin Fever

Two horror films I caught recently led me to muse on the strains of American Gothic that have persisted in our cultural landscape. The two prime inventors of the American Gothic template are two decadent Romantics, Poe and Hawthorne. Poe's influence on the horror film is too obvious to be belabored, but I want to stress that Poe's literary and cultural models were European. Many of Poe's famous stories are set in a real or imagined Europe (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum) Hawthorne's Gothic legacy is almost wholly focused on his disgust with his Puritan forebears. Since the 19th century, writers from a variety of regions in the US have utilized the Gothic genre to express a dark ambivalence towards their homeland: Faulkner, O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, S. Craig Zahler. Hawthorne's influence on the American horror film has been less prevalent than Poe's, but it still survives. Josephine Decker's Shirley certainly takes some of its cues from Hawthorne's forays into the forest in The Scarlet Letter.

Most American films before 1968 take a sunny view of rural Americana. John Ford's films with Will Rogers are a good example. However, there are exceptions. The Story of Temple Drake, an adaptation of Faulkner's Sanctuary, caused a furor in 1933. The film is dreck, but the subject matter is tawdry enough that it could be made today as an exploitation film. Other, better films with elements of rural Gothic Americana (such as Frank Borzage's Moonrise in 1948 and Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Psycho, etc.) reflect the rise of socially conscious films following the Second World War. America was more fully ready to face its dark side after the unspeakable horror of global conflict.  George Romero's The Night of the Living Dead, from 1968, signaled a further shift. Horror film's became a venue to express the counterculture's disgust with mainstream America. Films like Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes express a disquietude with a mutated primeval horror emanating from America's heartland. Other examples include Eaten Alive, Motel Hell, and even Deliverance. 

Eli Roth's Cabin Fever, from 2002, mixes several subgenres including American Gothic. The premise is that a group of comely recent college graduates shack up in a rural cabin and sinister events unfold. The obvious template is Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. Roth, in his directorial debut, even mimics Raimi's Steadicam shots whooshing through the forest. A mysterious toxin has infiltrated the local water leading to vomiting of blood, peeling of skin, and general body horror. The film, thus, shows it debts to the ecological horror of such films as Romero's The Crazies and The Toxic Avenger. The locals in Cabin Fever are uniformly distrustful, ignorant, and violent. One of the interlopers is greeted in the local burg with a bite on the arm by a seemingly rabid youngster.

I'm no fan of Roth's subsequent career, but Cabin Fever show promise. The camera set-ups are exactly judged and the cast of relative unknowns is well handled. The most stupid and macho of the grads is, presciently,  a proto MAGA figure, baseball cap and all. The film was received negatively for its mix of humor and horror, but I think the yuks are its saving grace. It is a pity that Mr. Roth's subsequent and more successful films seem to end up in torture chambers, but, then, I haven't seen 2018's The House with a Clock in Its Walls. 

Mia Goth in X

Ti West's recent X is a slightly better film with a slightly bigger budget. Mr. West had access to a crane and demonstrates he knows how to use it. An adult film crew rents a cottage on a rural property in 1979 and are soon besieged by the gothic couple who have resided there for decades; and their antsy gator. The body horror, juxtaposed with the nubile flesh of the porn stars, is more palpable than in Cabin Fever. The ancient couple seems to be decomposing before our eyes. X is a film geared to horror aficionados who can cite its antecedents rather than the general audience, but it represents a step forward for Mr. West. He has toiled making genre films, mostly horror, for over a decade and seems to have honed his sense of craft.

He is greatly helped by his lead, Mia Goth, who plays both one of the porn stars and a mad crone who has issues with physical decomposition. The roles allow her to show the full range of her talents. A woman who has worked with Lars von Trier and been married to Shia LaBeouf deserves our sympathy and consideration. While not a film I would recommend to strangers (or you Mom) , X resounded enough for horror fans to have spawned both a prequel, current release Pearl, and an upcoming sequel, MaXXXine.