Review: The Cabin in the Woods

       If you've seen the trailer for Cabin in the Woods, you probably think you know what the big surprise is. You're wrong. While it's certainly a surprise to the characters in the movie, the audience is made aware of the fact that there is more going on behind the scenes from the beginning of the film. What follows is a wonderful deconstruction of the horror genre that plays with the tropes we've come to expect from the generic “college kids spend a weekend in the wilderness” horror premise. Producer and all around awesome guy Joss Whedon described this film as a “loving hate letter” to the horror genre, which has become increasingly founded on torture porn movies like the Saw franchises, rather than actually building suspense. True fans of horror movies will love all of the references to this film's predecessors and clichés of the genre. This film is something like a final exam for horror fans.

       Cabin in the Woods begins like so many horror films have. A group of five college students go off on vacation to a borrowed cabin for a vacation filled with of debauchery. All of the classic stock characters are here. There's Curt the jock, his slutty girlfriend Jules, Dana the virgin, Holden the mature intellectual, and Marty, the stoner goofball. On their way to the cabin the stop at a run down gas station run by a creepy redneck who warns them not to go up there, yada yada yada, they discover a creepy cellar and awake an long dead evil. What the characters don't know is that there is a group of people controlling the situation as it develops. They pump the cabin with mind-altering drugs to increase libidos and influence their behaviors. They cause a tunnel collapse to ensure that there is no escape from the death trap. This would be enough of a twist for any other horror movie, that there is some sick maniac controlling the murder of these college kids, but this is a Joss Whedon movie, so we're just getting started. The people controlling the incident are actually sane, rational people working for some sort of secret government agency. They need the kids to die as part of an ancient ritual of sacrifice to appease the ancient and unspeakable ones. Governments across the globe are performing similar rituals and all the others have failed. If these college kids don't die, Cthulu and company will rise from the depths and bring about the apocalypse. This puts the audience in a uncomfortable position, unsure if we should cheer for the college kids fighting for survival, as we have in every other horror movie, or if we should cheer for the guys in the control room trying to prevent global annihilation. Other than the menagerie of nightmares, there is no clear line between protagonist and antagonist, and this causes some moral ambiguities that many other horror films don't even try to bother with.

       I was floored by this movie. I'm generally not a fan of horror movies, but I loved this one, probably because it's not generally a horror movie. It has it's fair share of laughs and only a handful of scares. The focus is on building suspense, with little focus on actually resolving it. It just builds and builds until the final scenes and unleashes it all in a fury of violence. The film itself also works as a metaphor for the relationship between directors and their fans. The fans are represented by the ancient and unspeakable ones who will go berserk if they don't get what they want from the directors (the guys controlling everything). This movie establishes conventional rules of horror and then breaks them in order to give us a magnificent end result. The comedy also works well. The members of the government agency place bets on which horror the sacrifices will choose to awake, highlighting the difference between zombies and a redneck zombie torture family. The stoner's paranoia serves to discover what's actually going on as he questions every move the other member's of the group make asking “Really?!” when Curt suggest they split up to cover more ground. I also enjoyed the film's take on Japanese horror as we see a group of school children being terrorized by a ghost that looks just like something out of The Ring or The Grudge. This is a masterful deconstruction of the horror genre that delivers more than what you expect from a seemingly worn-out premise.