Where Have I Seen That Before?

Cabin Fever's influences are clear and Eli Roth makes no secret of it. The movie is loaded with references to other horror films that Roth grew up admiring. As I mentioned in a previous Haven't I Seen That Before? post a while back, the ending of the film is lifted almost directly from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. But the most amusing of the homages Roth payed was to Stanley Kubrick and The Shining.

The Shining contains a scene that seemingly no one is able to explain. And with Kubrick being long dead now, it's becoming pretty evident that we may never know what the fuck the intention for or meaning behind this scene was...if in fact there is any at all. Nearly every frame of Kubrick's films seem to contain something of deep significance, so it's hard to believe that this scene was intended to simply bewilder the audience, but if it was, Kubrick certaintly did his job.

You probably have a good idea of what scene i'm referring to. Most refer to it as the "bear suit scene". Late in the movie, Shelly Duvall is running around the Overlook Hotel and she comes to a room with it's door open and sees...this :



The look on her face. It's as if she's just seen a man in an assless bear suit blowing a wealthy businessman type. Well, has she?! Just what the fuck is that! The bear suit man clearly appears to be performing some kind of mouth to genitalia sexual act on the other man and he doesn't look too happy about being caught doing it. I cannot come up with a more innocent explanation then that.

Well, Eli Roth was clearly just as amused by this scene as all of us and so when Cabin Fever rolled around, he decided to give a little nod to the bear blowjob scene. Towards the end of the film, as Rider Strong is being wheeled around the hospital on a gurney, he passes a room with an open door and sees this :



No sex act act is taking place but the quick glimpse of an unexplainable man in an animal suit doing something bizarre to another person in an open room is a clear homage to the bear scene in The Shining. Roth stated in an interview, "Actually the Bunny Man was very influenced by The Shining. There's a scene in The Shining where Shelley Duvall's running around the hotel and she sees these creepy things. There's a guy in a bear suit who is just really, really, really weird. It always stuck with me as a kid so it's kind of my little nod to The Shining.” He went on to say "We just couldn't find a bear suit. I think that there's something very evil about a bunny suit."

Keeping up with the mystery of the scene in The Shining, Roth threw this into the end credit sequence :



It looks as if we will never know the identities of bear suit or bunny suit man =(