Eli Roth

Cabin Fever cost $1.5 million and sold at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival for $3.5 million, the biggest sale of the festival that year. Reportedly Roth spent six years collecting rejections before Lionsgate picked it up. Tarantino saw it and publicly called it 'the best new American film,' which functioned as the kind of endorsement no publicist can buy. That relationship turned into Hostel, a $4 million film that opened at #1 with a $20 million weekend and grossed $82 million worldwide, with 'Quentin Tarantino Presents' plastered across the marketing.

Borderlands flopped badly in 2024, the kind of studio implosion that usually ends a director's access to that budget tier. He didn't wait for the industry to reassess. He launched The Horror Section, his own production company with fan investment through stock ownership, and announced a pipeline of originals and revivals of his own franchises. Ice Cream Man, a script he has held for over 20 years, is the first major release. The strategy is deliberate: control the IP, control the budget, control the result.

Before directing anything, he worked as a cybersex operator for Penthouse, posing as a woman in online chat rooms. His father is a Harvard psychiatrist. The gap between those two sentences explains most of his career. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU Tisch in 1994, and his student film was a Reservoir Dogs homage nominated for a Student Academy Award. The Cabin Fever premise came from a real flesh-eating skin infection he contracted in Iceland in 1991. He also played Donny 'The Bear Jew' Donowitz in Inglourious Basterds, because when your mentor is Tarantino, you end up in his movies.