3.5 Artificial-scenarios-designed-for-monsters out of 4
Horror movies have gone downhill in recent years. Perhaps this all began with the Saw franchise, or perhaps horror movies were never that compelling to begin with, but horror movies just aren’t what they used to be. Of course, “what they used to be” is violent, spectacularly misogynistic, and insistent on pandering to humanity’s more basic instincts, so maybe there wasn’t much there to begin with.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of horror movies. I get scared easily, so they make me jumpy. I’m not the biggest fan of blood and gore, so I avert my eyes for most of the movie, and they’re never really written well, so I don’t get a kick out of writing about them. In all, horror movies just don’t do it for me.
Thriller movies, on the other hand, are what scare me. Circumstances and people are scary, not monsters jumping out from off-screen. The scariest movies are the ones with the darkest characters and the most malicious editing – violence occurring off-screen, leaving me to imagine the horrors that lurk in the depths of the human soul.
I digress, however. The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie. It has jump-scares and gore, it’s got misogyny and violence, and it’s about a bunch of university students slowly dying for something they each did wrong. There are three male characters – a fool, an athlete, and a scholar – and the only two possible female characters in horror – the “whore,” and the virgin. They take an RV to spend a weekend at a strange cabin in the woods. They get settled in, they drink, they gallivant, and eventually, they get picked off one-by-one by a zombie redneck torture family.
There’s a twist here, and I’m going to spoil it. Everything that happens to the students is determined by a group of scientists in a control room. The students have no control over their lives – all they can do is choose how they die. That’s not the twist, this is: The Cabin in the Woods is satire; it’s a parody of the horror genre, and it subverts every possible horror movie cliché imaginable while simultaneously invoking genre staples. It’s not a love letter to horror film fans, it’s a love letter to those who despise everything the horror film genre has become.
In recent years, horror movies have become less thriller and more torture porn. Audiences turn up in droves to watch young, good-looking people gallivant, get naked, and die in spectacularly violent fashion. We’re no longer scared by the simple, and very real, horrors of our world – illness, corruption, prejudice – and so we need a new elixir to whet our palates. What The Cabin in the Woods does is critique the state of horror movies by suggesting, and creating, alternatives.
This is a movie directed by Drew Goddard, and written by both Goddard and Joss Whedon. For those who don’t know, Goddard and Whedon have history together – they collaborated on both Buffy the Vampie Slayer and Angel. This is a movie crafted carefully by two people who understand film and literature – two people who can recognize the weakness in films in order to impose strength. Their script is tight and well-paced. Their characters are recognizable yet fascinating. Their plot is compelling and their thesis is absolutely devoid of any fluff.
“Ask for something new,” Goddard and Whedon seem to beg of their audience. “Ask for something more, and you’ll receive it.”
The Cabin in the Woods is formulaic, both in the horror movie, and satirical, sense. This is not a weakness. The greatest way to prove absurdity is by confining oneself to the rules of a situation. Goddard and Whedon prove how absurd horror movies are by executing a masterful horror movie. This means that characters split up for no reason, they drop weapons that can be used for defence, and they go into the cellar when they obviously shouldn’t. In short, the characters do everything that horror movie characters do, and they suffer because of it.
This is a film that deserves to be studied. It is an exercise in superior film-making, and it is an excellent example of how to create parody. It adheres to the rules of its genre, and, more importantly, does something special with it.