I wanted to make a film where people thought they knew what would happen from the first ten minutes and then twists every convention on its ear. A good horror movie has the same vibe as good punk rock, in that anything can happen, and there's an element of danger to it. ![]() I wanted to make a film that 30 years later kids would still be watching at sleepovers. I love these movies, I can watch them endlessly and I see the creativity and artistic achievement in all of them. I had made a study of it, in horror, the scare's the star, and people don't care about the budget so long as the scare works. All my favorite directors, from David Lynch to Sam Raimi to Peter Jackson, started making independent low budget horror films, and that was how I wanted to start as well. I also knew that your first film has to make money in order to survive, and it just so happens the thing I love is low budget horror movies, which almost always turn a profit. It was very hard to get people to take us seriously - other directors at film festivals made fun of me because it wasn't as "artsy" as their movies. And by 2000 PG-13 had taken over with the ghost films, and there was this myth that people didn't want R rated movies, and that they wouldn't make more than $12 million at the box office. Suddenly it was no longer about being scary, it was "how can we kill the kids this time?" Horror in the 70's had A-listers like Spielberg, Kubrick, Phillip Kaufman and Ridley Scott behind the camera, but by 1990 a horror movie was synonymous with cheesy straight-to-video. But by the time I was 18, in 1990, horror had died. At my Bar Mitzvah I was sawed in half with a chainsaw, and since I wasn't friends with enough girls to have a dance we watched the horror film Mother's Day. I have drawings from when I was that age of Alien and The Exorcist and pictures I drew of the crew filming those movies. I grew up wanting to make horror films - it was my dream since I was 8 years old. Looking back it was insane what we did, but it all worked out and really launched my career. The cast, crew, everyone just bet on the film and worked for a point in it, so we all shared in the success. ![]() The film went on to be their highest grossing film in 2003, and helped usher in a wave of R rated horror movies, which was the goal all along. 15 minutes into the film we had an 8-studio bidding war, and eventually sold it to Lionsgate for $3.5 million. The film was the last one to screen at Toronto - at midnight - out of 350 movies. The fate of the film came down to the taste of a 12 year old, if you can believe it. Turns out they were showing a VHS of our rough cut to one of the investor's 12 year old kid! He watched it and said "This is better than American Pie." Then they agreed to wire the money. We were on the mixing stage when a group of investors was holding off on wiring in the final $350,000 so we could sound mix and negative cut. We limped back to Los Angeles with an incomplete film, raised the other $700,000 we needed, and got into the Toronto Film Festival in 2002. The Union members from NYC drove down in the middle of our shoot and although we were doing nothing illegal they threatened crew members in their hotel rooms at night to "turn the film union" and took all our money. We never fully had the money, though, we started with $50,000 and just figured we'd get the rest while we were shooting. We teamed up and raised $1.5 million dollars of private money and just went to North Carolina and shot it. Literally every studio, production company, and producer in existence passed on the film, until I partnered with independent producers Lauren Moews, Evan Astrowsky, and Sam Froelich, who really believed in it. I spent six years raising the money, going to every studio over and over, and they all passed repeatedly. But as I learned very quickly, it's not so easy to get people to give you money to make a feature when all you have is a student film under your belt. We had gone through NYU film school, collaborating on all our films, and this was going to be a continuation of that. I wrote Cabin Fever when I was 22 with my roommate Randy Pearlstein.
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