Trivia for
Cabin Fever (2002)

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• Joey Kern was rushed to the hospital four separate times for different eye injuries.
  
  
• Sound mixer John Neff survived the real flesh-eating bacterium, which he contracted in a hospital during minor surgery. It took 13 days of non-stop intensive care medical attention to save his life. Neff maintains the make-up in the film is 100% accurate.
  
  
• While filming a particularly bloody scene, Rider Strong decided to go for a walk in the woods between setups. Covered head to toe in blood, he happened upon a group of 35 schoolgirls, who were on a field trip. The girls screamed at the sight of this blood-drenched hiker, and then screamed even louder when they realized the hiker was the star of "Boy Meets World" (1993). The girls chased Rider through the woods. Strong eventually made it back to the film crew, and vowed never to wander off between scenes again.
  
  

• The highest selling movie at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival. Nearly all of the nine studios who engaged in a bidding war had passed on the movie at the script stage (the exception being the eventual winner, Lion's Gate, which was not in existence when the script was first written).
  
  
• Peter Jackson stopped production on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) three times to screen this movie for the entire crew. Jackson was so enthusiastic about the film he gave director Eli Roth publicity quotes.
  
  
• This movie had the lowest budget of any Lion's Gate Film released in 2003, ($1.5 million) and was their highest grossing film of 2003 ($22 million box office.) It was also the most profitable horror film released in 2003.
  
  
• Crew member Robert Jones took home the decapitated body prop once the film wrapped, and was pulled over while driving home by police officers who saw the corpse and thought he was a serial killer. The police held Jones at gunpoint until he was able to convince them the lifelike body was only a prop.
  
  
• Director of Photography Scott Kevan is visible in the rearview mirror in the truck when the kids are driving to the cabin. Director Eli Roth noticed this in the editing room, and kept it in so Scott would be in the movie because he has appeared in all his movies that he had shot.
  
  
• Director Eli Roth originally got the idea for this movie when he was visiting Iceland and helping to clean out an old barn there. He got such a bad allergic reaction from the rotting hay in the barn that his face broke out and bled from the sores.
  
  
• The "pancakes" scene was made up during filming after the director saw Matthew Helms practicing tae kwon do during a break. He discovered that Helms was a real-life black belt, so he decided to add the scene to give a chance for Helms to show what he could do.
  
  
• The credits list characters named Shemp and Fake Shemp. This is another homage to the "Evil Dead" series. 'Sam Raimi (I)' called his stand-ins Fake Shemps, also in homage, but to The Three Stooges. The Stooges filmed four comedy shorts after Shemp Howard died in 1955, using old footage of him mixed with brief appearances (from the side and back) of actor Joe Palma, who often played bit parts in the Stooges' films and was also a stand-in and stunt double for them.
  
  
• The song "Wait for the Rain", heard at the beginning of the film as the kids are driving to the cabin, was originally the theme song for Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972). An updated version of the same song plays over the end credits, sung by the kids of David Hess, the singer/songwriter of the 1972 version.
  
  
• Eli Roth and producer Evan Astrowsky named the Sheriff "Frumin" after their beloved Russian N.Y.U. film school professor Boris Frumin.
  
  
• The original killer dog was so old and tired that all of his scenes had to be re-shot with a new dog. With no time or money to find a replacement, the producers cast a real police attack dog that was so vicious and unpredictable no actors could appear with it on camera. The crew would hide behind trucks during its scenes, and cameras were operated by remote control.
  
  
• Lions Gate Films bought the movie for an undisclosed sum in the "high seven figures", with an eight-figure commitment to prints and advertising. It's the most money Lions Gate has ever spent acquiring a motion picture.
  
  
• Randy Pearlstein, who receives a co-writing credit, was roommates with Eli Roth in film school. Roth had already written a rough draft of the script and enlisted Pearlstein's help in fleshing out the script into feature length. Pearlstein was not present during the filming and did no further rewrites of the script.
  
  
• The rifle used by the group throughout the movie is an older model Ruger Mini-14, chambered for the .223 Remington.
  
  

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