Have you ever cut yourself shaving? Be it while scraping stubble off your chin or smoothing out your legs, it is a pretty universal experience. We’ve all done it and because we’ve all done it, we know how delicate an endeavor shaving can be. You’re running literal blades across your body, cutting hair but not skin, and there’s so very little stopping that balance from shifting. We’re all too aware of how precarious a position it can be – hell, there’s an entire Sondheim musical that preys on that fear that your barber might slip up and accidentally slit your throat (or, you know, intentionally slit your throat).
There’s something particularly effective about horror that preys on familiarity, on common experience. Not everyone has seen an exorcism performed in a child’s bedroom, but we’ve all had to walk home alone at night and felt that there may be something following us. We’ve all taken a wrong turn on a trip out of town and gotten lost. And we’ve all cut ourselves shaving.
I’d just started learning to shave when I saw Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever for the first time. A promotional package from Gillette had somehow been mailed to me by name in a box that read “HAPPY 18TH BIRTHDAY!” in big bold letters (I was about 13 with a birthday at least eight months away at the time). Like any 13-year-old learning to shave, I’d had my share of knicks. I knew how easy it was. And then I caught Cabin Fever on HBO one night on vacation (to a lake house, the same setting as the film no less) while staying up past my bedtime with the explicit intent of finding a movie I wouldn’t be allowed to watch were my parents awake.
I got what I deserved.
Cabin Fever is a rough watch. Eli Roth’s breakout horror film came out in 2002 and made a hell of an impression. Breaking out right before Saw kickstarted the torture porn wave, it’s a relentlessly mean little movie about a group of college kids who contract a flesh-eating virus during a weekend trip to a lake house. It’s the quintessential gross-out horror, though the film is deceptively crafty when it comes to creating a genuine sense of terror. It’s hard to say that the mania and paranoia the kids are experiencing ever tops the gore, but that’s mostly because the gore is next-level unsettling – in fact, it’s really what the film has going for it more than anything. Cabin Fever is, all things considered, not particularly good.
It’s not such a rough watch that it descends into so-bad-it’s-good territory or anything, and it’s also not the kind of bad that doesn’t even make for a fun watch. It just feels crucial to note upfront that what we’re examining in this column is a moment of extreme effectiveness in a relatively so-so (at best) movie, not the crowning achievement of a masterpiece. If you’ve seen any of Roth’s other films, you probably already know how you’ll feel about this one (though it’s safe to argue that it’s ostensibly his “best” work). It also feels pertinent to mention that if you’re not a fan of gore, maybe just click the “back” button on your browser because oh man, it’s about to get nasty.
Photo Credit: Lionsgate Films
The moment in question is, like The Conjuring’s clap-clap scene, a simple one-woman show. Actress Cerina Vincent plays Marcy who, after having sex with her best friend’s boyfriend Paul (played by Boy Meets World’s Rider Strong), tries to unwind and wash away the guilt with a bath. It’s while she’s in the bath that she decides to shave her legs…in the middle of a flesh-eating viral outbreak.
You can probably see where this is going.
It’s a moment in which familiarity and the inescapability of the inevitable meet. As soon as she rubs on the shaving cream you know what’s coming, but there’s no way you can be prepared for it. You know what’s going to happen, you just don’t know when.
Photo Credit: Lionsgate Films
The first stroke reveals the scabs we’ve learned at this point indicate infection. We know what’s going to happen, and to make it all the more painful, Roth cuts to Marcy’s reaction. She knows too, entirely unsurprised but no less horrified. The next stroke of the shaving razor reveals the blades scraping away at her flesh as it peels off like a postage label. The sight of it alone is enough to turn your gut but the sound really drives it home – it might even be the worst part. The film’s sound editors recorded the familiar gritty scrape that comes from shaving and played with it ever-so-slightly, creating a sound that is somehow entirely familiar and unremarkable and yet entirely nauseating when paired with the visuals.
It’s utterly vile, truly an all-time great gross-out scare. It’s also just as effective today as it was upon release. In the interest of transparency, I tried to rewatch the full clip to prepare properly for this piece and couldn’t get through the whole thing. I’m in my late twenties now and I still find it just as unsettling as I did as a kid.
I, like everyone else, know what it’s like to cut yourself shaving, how little it takes to go from shaving hair to scraping skin. Almost every time I look at a shaving razor with packaging boasting its newly-added extra blades, I flinch a little to this day. And while it’d be an exaggeration to say that Cabin Fever was the impetus behind the decision, I can’t pretend that fifteen years of associating shaving razors with this scene doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’ve sported a full beard for five years now.
More on Geek.com:
- The Scariest Part: A Round of Applause for ‘The Conjuring’
- 11 Scariest Religious Horror Movies
- Top 8 Scariest Places to Visit in the United States
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