The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Note: The Cabin in the Woods is an exceedingly hard movie to review without giving away everything that makes it worth watching. If you haven't seen it, it's best if you know nothing about it. Spoilers follow this section.
What It's About: The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie. A group of college kids decide to spend the weekend at a cousin's remote mountain cabin. Drinking, sex, all that stuff that gets you killed in horror movies. You pretty much know the characters by now. The asshole jock, the stoner, the hot nerd, the dumb blonde, the one girl who's generally wholesome and, of course, happens to be a virgin. Ignoring the ominous warnings of a creepy old gas station attendant, the five proceed as planned and, by coincidence, discover an old diary in the cabin's junk-filled basement, detailing the exploits of the depraved Buckner family -- residents of the cabin in the late 1800s. After reading some mysterious Latin phrases scrawled in the back of the diary, the friends unknowingly resurrect the Buckners, who attack the cabin and start picking off our heroes one by one.
There are no surprises here.
But.
Beware spoilers below.
What It's Really About: The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie. A group of college kids decide to spend the weekend at a cousin's remote mountain cabin. Drinking, sex, all that stuff that gets you killed in horror movies. You think you pretty much know the characters by now, but you don't. The jock is a friendly, funny sociology major. The nerd is also a star college football player. The dumb blonde is neither dumb nor naturally blonde. In other words, they're ordinary people with their own quirks, flaws and interests. And they are all, unknowingly, part of a larger operation run from behind the scenes by a mysterious organization whose purpose remains unknown until the end -- whose members are also quite likable, ordinary and, especially in the case of Hadley and Sitterson, the two we see the most of, funny. They're workaday office stiffs and technicians (you know, like the people who make horror movies).
Every cliche, every poor decision is enforced through lockdown procedures, subliminal hints, careful monitoring and mind-altering chemical mists. Even the undead Buckners are resurrected purely by chance. It could just as easily have been demons. Or a killer robot. Or a ghost, or mutants, or an alien creature. Everything is accounted for, catalogued, contained and followed to the letter, but even then, one can't always account for every variable, and the kids have reason enough early on to suspect that something's up when they discover a one-way mirror in one of the bedrooms. They're part of what amounts to an annual human sacrifice, reduced to meetings, paperwork and standard operating procedure. The organization exists, as it turns out, to appease the Ancient Ones, Lovecraftian elder gods who demand a yearly sacrifice of standardized archetypes, according to a specific and unchanging formula (you know, like...well, like you, us, the people who watch horror movies).
As it turns out, Curt doesn't even have a cousin, let alone one who owns a cabin in the woods. It's the opposite of Scooby-Doo. It is all manufactured -- everything except the monsters.
Why You Should Watch It: The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie -- sort of. It might be better classified as a very gory, superficially scary comedy about horror movies, and it was probably the best film of 2012. It was co-written by Joss Whedon and frequent collaborator Drew Goddard following a discussion in which the two of them lamented the current state of horror in film -- namely the proliferation of torture porn following the success of the first Saw movie (which is a weird cultural phenomenon, because Saw was neither gory nor, strictly speaking, torture porn at all, as the series started as a sort of gimmick-based serial-killer movie along the lines of Seven; The Passion of the Christ is more torture porn than the first two Saw movies). The Cabin in the Woods is described by Whedon as a loving hate-letter to the older horror movies he and Goddard grew up watching. An examination, dissection and critique of all the well-worn elements of the genre that have been pushed aside now that people would rather see someone tortured to death for an hour and a half.
It's a little like Alan Moore's Supreme, in that regard. Supreme was a comic about the history of comics, and it really didn't have much appeal for anyone who hadn't been reading comics for a while. The Cabin in the Woods isn't quite so dependent on prior knowledge of the medium or the genre, but its gags and references run from the obvious (pointing out that is seriously makes no sense at all to think that the wind blew open a trap door in the cabin's living room) to the obscure (the fact that said trap-door scene is a nearly shot-for-shot homage to a scene in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead).
It's kind of post-postmodernist, and in many ways, intentionally or otherwise, seems more an answer to the postmodernism of Wes Craven's Scream, which Craven intended to kill the slasher genre once and for all but succeeded only in a popularizing an overabundance of slightly-more-self-aware-than-usual slasher movies for the next decade or so (which, as killing goes, is kind of like aiming for the other guy's head and shooting yourself in the foot instead), than anything else. If Scream was a horror movie made in response to twenty years of Friday the 13th, The Cabin in the Woods is the answer to fifteen years of Scream. While Scream points out its formula, the formula still stands on its own; it's merely joked about in the process. The Cabin in the Woods' characters are smarter than the average horror protagonist, and while they know something's wrong and try everything they can to remove themselves from the game, the cards are simply stacked against them.
It's also extremely funny. I'm not much of a comedy guy, but it's one of the few movies to make me laugh out loud in a long while. Whedon and Goddard's dialogue is witty, the characters -- even the "evil" ones -- are all likable, and even someone who doesn't enjoy horror movies can appreciate a guy getting killed by a unicorn.
"I just think it would have been cooler with a merman."
Trivia: Madea's Witness Protection has a higher rating than this movie on Amazon Prime Video. Maybe Marty made the right choice in the end after all.
Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.
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