The film stars Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent, Joey Kern, and Giuseppe Andrews.

Inspired by a real-life experience where Roth developed a skin infection during a trip to Iceland, the story follows a group of college students who rent a cabin in the woods and fall victim to an unknown flesh-eating disease.

College students Jeff, Marcy, Paul, Karen, and Bert take a vacation to a remote cabin to celebrate October break.

Returning to the cabin, Paul finds Marcy's bloody remains and sees Dr. Mambo feeding on a weakened Karen.

Various elements of the script were inspired by Roth's favorite horror films, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Last House on the Left (1972), and The Evil Dead (1981).

In the scene, Marcy is convinced that all the students are doomed and despite Paul's reassurances, she describes their situation as "like being on a plane, when you know it's gonna crash.

Eli Roth and the producers tried to cancel the Marcy auditions, but the general chaos caused by the attacks made it impossible for them to reach many of the actresses who were scheduled to try out for the role.

[14] Roth originally wanted Cerina Vincent to show her naked buttocks during her sex scene with Rider Strong.

Vincent, who had previously played a nude foreign exchange student in Not Another Teen Movie (2001), was afraid that exposing too much of herself would lead to being typecast as a nudity actress and vehemently refused to bare her buttocks.

[18] Cabin Fever was released on VHS and DVD in March 2004, which includes audio commentary tracks with director Eli Roth and the main cast as well as a featurette entitled "Beneath the Skin", which provides a behind the scenes look on the film.

[11] Their characters, however, were met with negative reactions: IGN and the Los Angeles Times' Manohla Dargis described them, respectively, as stereotypical[10] and "monumentally irritating".

[10][24][27] IGN said Cabin Fever "struggles valiantly to be both a worthy addition and simultaneous homage to these genres ... becoming instead a passably enjoyable slab of schlock", criticizing its failure to reinvent the films that inspired Roth's.

[26] Stephen Hunter in The Washington Post said Cabin Fever compared poorly to The Evil Dead and The Blair Witch Project, describing it as "a loud, derivative grade-Z horror film of no particular distinction".

[28] McDonagh said Cabin Fever was "more Straw Dogs than Night of the Living Dead", citing its theme of "degeneration of relationships under pressure".

[22] Some critics said Cabin Fever suffered from genre and tone inconsistencies,[11][29] with Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times comparing the flaw to "kids on those arcade games where the target lights up and you have to stomp on it".

[30] Ebert was critical that the film alternates between horror and "weird humor", getting nowhere; he said it "could develop its plague story in a serious way, like a George Romero picture or 28 Days Later".

[30] Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly said, "Cabin Fever is what 28 Days Later would have looked like had it been made without style, subtlety, grunge-of-night video photography, or fashionable apocalyptic pretensions.

"[31] Ebert gave Cabin Fever one-and-a-half stars out of four,[30] and Gleiberman said it was "a big, dumb, crude, noisy, goose-the-audience bash and proud of it".

The website's consensus reads, "More gory than scary, Cabin Fever is satisfied with paying homage to genre conventions rather than reinventing them.

Having seen the film from a print sent to him, Jackson suspended production on The Return of the King twice in his native New Zealand to have it screened to his cast and crew members.

[34] Roth revealed in a 2010 interview that he had written a treatment for the sequel to Cabin Fever as part of Lionsgate's distribution deal, pitching it as "a Song of the South horror movie filled with corpses and sex.

[37] A remake of the original, also titled Cabin Fever, was subsequently announced that same year, with Roth staying on as executive producer.