The Cabin in the Woods
starts like any horror movie of its ilk. A group of frisky young people head
off to a remote location for a raucous vacation. This time around, as so many
other times around, the group consists of people who can be broken down into
all the usual types: a good girl (Kristen Connolly), a bad girl (Anna
Hutchison), a jock (Chris Hemsworth), an egghead (Jesse Williams), and a stoner
(Fran Kranz). On their way to the jock’s cousin’s summer cabin, they stop at a
dilapidated gas station where the grizzled creep owner (Tim De Zarn) spits out
chunks of tobacco and warns them away. Getting to the cabin is easy, he says.
“Getting back will be your business,”
he growls.
Of course they go anyway, because that’s the kind of movie
this is. But before you can say, “Stop. I’ve heard this before,” screenwriters
Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer and Firefly) and Drew
Goddard (of Cloverfield) have
something cleverer up their sleeves. In a pre-title scene we’ve met two
middle-age white guys (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), each in shirt and
tie, chatting all the way down a long, white and grey corridor, waving I.D.
badges and getting in a couple of jibes at the expense of a coworker (Amy
Acker). This seemingly unconnected scene is ultimately integral to what we’re
about to see. This is no young-people-stalked-in the-woods movie like The Evil Dead or Friday the 13th or, or, or. There are definitely elements of that
here, but Whedon and Goddard pull back and show us the strings. These guys have
the cabin under close watch with a sharp eye for the expected.
You think you know where this is going. The characters are
certainly familiar and won’t be explored for depth of characterization. You may
even think I’ve spoiled things by revealing that the seemingly average
bureaucrats have something to do with what’s about to go down in the cabin in
the woods. But this movie’s better than that. It’s a work of supremely slippery
genre craftsmanship with more twists than you’d think, that plays on what you
think you know in order to double down on the unsettling dread that begins to
sink in. When you go to a horror movie, you know things are going to go badly
for the characters. When these young, vibrant people head down into the cabin’s
mysterious basement and examine the creepy artifacts, yellowed photographs, and
ominous incantations, you just know that soon it’ll be more than leaves
rustling out there in the dark.
Because we know that there are others watching, we know that
the characters are headed into a trap. This takes away some (but not all) of
the scares from things going bump in the night, but it also proposes
provocative questions of genre introspection. Why are horror movies capable of
scares even when characters are driving headfirst (even knowingly) into predictable formula? And why is puncturing the
illusion of these characters’ free will so destabilizing? You know going into a
slasher movie that a masked killer’s going to hunt down some victims and the
results will be bloody. Why, then, are these films still capable of great
effectiveness and suspense? It’s all about the execution. When one of the
bureaucrats says, “We’re not the only ones watching,” it’s clear that the movie
is implicating us, questioning why we want to see what we’re about to see.
Goddard directs the script with confident genre expertise,
staging jump scares with great playfulness. As the movie goes on, he and Whedon
find ever more rugs to pull, ratcheting up the tension and dread. It’s all that
I can do to restrain myself from writing in extensive, spoiler-filled detail
about just how ingenious a genre deconstruction this film becomes. At one
point, the chaos in the cabin – the running, the screaming, the hiding, the
splitting up, the disappearing, the bloody implements of death – appears to be
winding down to a grimly satisfying genre endpoint, the exact point that a
lesser, even a slightly lesser, horror film would conclude with the feeling of
a job well done. Indeed, I was prepared for the final freak out and the smash
into the end credits. If they had arrived just then, I would have still found The Cabin in the Woods to be a
reasonably clever genre exercise. But just as it’s coasting to a close, Whedon
and Goddard tighten the screws and ratchet up the intensity one more time. The
movie grows stranger, funnier, and bloodier, dissecting an impressive number of
horror styles in a descent into the fiery pits of unsettling territory. The
final twenty minutes or so are some kind of inspired genius.
However hugely entertaining, the movie is only about the
essential nature of horror movies. The characters remain thin and, despite the
cascade of topsy-turvy, surprising yet inevitable plot adjustments and a couple
of killer cameos, it’s not exactly a movie of any deep humanity. (If it was,
and just a little icier or more confrontational too, I’d call it popcorn
Michael Haneke.) What Whedon and Goddard stage is an intense, oftentimes
hilarious, slashing of expectations, a veritable thesis on the nature of point
of view and audience identification in horror cinema. The final moments of the
film have us asking anew whom to root for and questioning which outcome is
actually the best outcome. It sets up the clichés so skillfully that, as the
world of the film is so thoroughly ripped apart, subversion itself is
ultimately the biggest source of both knowing winks and destabilizing fright.
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