{"id":289,"date":"2004-04-08T23:23:21","date_gmt":"2004-04-09T03:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=289"},"modified":"2004-04-08T23:23:21","modified_gmt":"2004-04-09T03:23:21","slug":"cabin-fever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=289","title":{"rendered":"Cabin Fever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eli Roth”s Cabin Fever<\/em><\/a> doesn’t break any new ground in horror, but it’s a shrewd and effective little film, combining dread about infection and bodily fluids with clever revisionist takes on many genre cliches. You’ve got your five young people trapped in the woods, far away from civilization (they are all quite disagreeable college-student types, from the loutish frat boy to the sensitive trixie), and your surrounding community of “rednecks” (all played, unlike the college kids, so as to upend the usual stereotypes). Many horror films are really about a small group, some sort of recognizable microcosm of society, and what happens to its members when placed under conditions of extreme stress. But the small group in Cabin Fever<\/em> is so atomized, its members so utterly selfish — each of them regarding others only as sources of potential profit or danger, and ready to betray lovers or long-term friends at the drop of a hat, if that is what ‘looking out for number one’ seems to require — that they barely constitute a “society” at all; they are instead the reductio ad absurdum<\/em> of post-Reagan Homo economicus<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eli Roth”s Cabin Fever<\/em><\/a> doesn’t break any new ground in horror, but it’s a shrewd and effective little film, combining dread about infection and bodily fluids with clever revisionist takes on many genre cliches. You’ve got your five young people trapped in the woods, far away from civilization (they are all quite disagreeable college-student types, from the loutish frat boy to the sensitive trixie), and your surrounding community of “rednecks” (all played, unlike the college kids, so as to upend the usual stereotypes). Many horror films are really about a small group, some sort of recognizable microcosm of society, and what happens to its members when placed under conditions of extreme stress. But the small group in Cabin Fever<\/em> is so atomized, its members so utterly selfish — each of them regarding others only as sources of potential profit or danger, and ready to betray lovers or long-term friends at the drop of a hat, if that is what ‘looking out for number one’ seems to require — that they barely constitute a “society” at all; they are instead the reductio ad absurdum<\/em> of post-Reagan Homo economicus<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}