Festival: If you go to the woods

Cabin Fever marks a return to classic horror, before the genre was hijacked by computer effects and tongue-in-cheek jokiness, but gives the form a new twist, eschewing misogynist slashers in favour of a new enemy - a flesh-eating virus that consumes his characters, male and female, as they holiday in an isolated cabin in the woods.

The world premiere, at the Toronto Film Festival, prompted a bidding war among studios. Ironically, most of them had turned down the film at the script stage, forcing Roth to shoot the film as an independent production, on a modest $1.5m budget. But then Roth has spent his life making movies for next to nothing. It is just that up until now virtually nobody has seen them.

"I became really obsessed with horror movies when I was a kid," says the spiky-haired Bostonian, with the Super Cool Manchu T-shirt and handsome looks undermined by a manic intensity. "When I was eight years old I saw Alien and I actually vomited in the theatre," he enthuses.

After that incident, Roth's mother and father, a psychoanalyst, banned him from seeing horror movies. He soon persuaded them to relent. The young Roth may have been physically revolted by gore, but he was also fascinated, and he knew the difference between reality and illusion.

"When I was 13, at my bar mitzvah, since I wasn't really friends with any girls and I didn't have a dance, I had a magician and he sawed me in half with a chainsaw. That was kind of like my dream come true."

Graduating from New York University's film school in 1994, he wrote Cabin Fever the following year. His aim was to return to the horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s, which mixed gore with suspense. "There was the classic set-up of a bunch of kids going into the woods and getting into trouble . . . You can go into the woods in America and really very quickly get isolated."

He was inspired by an experience he had when he was working on a ranch in Iceland a few years earlier and contracted a skin infection cleaning out a barn.

"I woke up in the middle of the night, scratching my cheek, thinking I had a mosquito bite," he says. "I looked at my hand and saw chunks of skin. The next morning I attempted to shave, and literally, shaved half my face off."

After reading an article about a flesh-eating bacterium that can eat through a human body in a day, he wrote a script. All the studios he sent it to told him that straight-faced horror had had its day. This was before The Blair Witch Project became one of the most profitable films ever, on the back of a similar danger-in-the-woods scenario.

Meanwhile, Roth took a number of junior posts on films and carried out research for a musical that David Lynch was planning about scientists in New York. In 1999, he moved from New York to Los Angeles and continued his association with the older director, who had de facto become his mentor.

Roth does an excellent impression of Lynch and his slightly stilted way of talking: " 'Eli, man, we're going on the Net. Davidlynch.com is going to be f---ing beautiful, man.'

"David starts spouting out probably 200 ideas and I'm just trying to write everything down on note-cards. I would go over to his house every day, which was like the greatest job ever . . . And we would grab a camera, sometimes Digital Video and sometimes 35mm, and shoot these crazy experiments."

Lynch agreed to allow Roth to use his name as executive producer on Cabin Fever in an attempt to attract financiers. "It was no longer a straight theatre movie," says Roth. "It was an artsy film." Here Roth adopts the slow, ponderous, pretentious voice of the cinephile: "It's so Lynchian."

Roth shot the film in 24 days in an out-of-season Scout camp in North Carolina. To play the hostile backwoods folk, he enlisted locals, including a recently released mental patient. Some rural communities, notably Burkittsville in Maryland, where The Blair Witch Project was filmed, have been less than enamoured with their portrayal on film, but Roth insists everyone knew what they were letting themselves in for.

"These communities were so thrilled to have us filming there. They're all like, 'We're so happy, we can't wait to go see Cabin Fever' . . . I just say, 'Please don't, don't ever see this movie, you're just going to hate it and I want you to think I'm a nice guy.' "

Although no Scouts were staying at the camp and the manager was warned about the nature of the film, he still insisted on bringing youngsters to watch. "Every time he brought a group of kids, there was always someone covered head to toe in blood going, 'F---, f---, f---.' And the kids loved it."

Roth recalls one of his actors, Rider Strong, star of the long- running American television series Boy Meets World, was out walking when suddenly he came rushing back to base, chased by 30 or 40 pre-teen girls. "Those girls were like ants," he says. "I saw them descending over the hill . . . They chased him like A Hard Day's Night, Richard Lester-style, through the woods.

Meanwhile, though Roth found himself labelled "David Lynch's protege", he also found Cabin Fever referred to as David Lynch's film. Lynch advised him to drop his executive producer credit. "He saw the movie and said, 'This is great, you don't need my help any more, you're going to be fine on your own.' The two best things he did for my career were putting his name on a movie and taking his name off a movie."

Roth has subsequently been linked with other more prestigious projects, including an adaptation of the Stephen King story 1408, but he is not forgetting his beginnings. "Splatter on the Linoleum may make its way to the DVD," he jokes. But, then again, maybe it isn't a joke.

Cabin Fever receives its British premiere as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (0131 623 8030) at the Cameo on August 15