Ryan McNeil
“Things aren’t always what they seem”
That’s a saying, right? That’s not just something I think I heard somewhere in a previous life? Sometimes misconceptions can be a bad thing, such as when an experience is stoked by expectation that are just waiting to be dashed. Other times, keeping your potential audience off-kilter can lead to something joyous.
Tapping into that audience giddiness takes more than enough slight-of-hand yank the rug out, it also requires the showmanship to sell the magic on the stage.
Thankfully, where THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is concerned, there’s more than enough magic to carry it through.
THE CABIN IN THE WOODS begins by introducing us to Sitterson and Hadley (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford). They appear to be government button-pushers in some sort of large facility, but where they are and what they’re doing is unclear.
The film goes on to introduce us to a group of teenagers headed for a weekend in the woods. To a man, they match the standard horror film group dynamic.
There’s the jock, Curt (Chris Hemsworth). Curt’s wildchild girlfriend, Jules (Anna Hutchison). Their brainy and seemingly innocent friend, Dana (Kristen Connolly). A bookworm Curt and Jules want Dana to meet named Holden (Jesse Williams). And finally, there’s the geeky stoner doofus, Marty (Fran Kranz).
They arrive at the titular cabin in the woods without incident, and it doesn’t take long on that first night for strange things to start happening. The key question, one that hinges back to Sitterson and Hadley, is why these things are happening? Turns out the bloodbath is not without reason.
But it’s the reason behind the reason that really gets the party started.
If you’ve been reading this space for more than a day, you’ll know that I’m not exactly steeped in horror movie lore (Would that be loreror??). Besides my well-documented lack of guts growing up, the thing that kept horror at arm’s reach for me was the formula I was only lukewarm on:
Innocent people gather…something begins to brutally injure and kill them for no earthly reason…they make bad decisions…get picked off one-by-one…one person remains (a young female from the mid 70’s on)…in an act of will and defiance, she seemingly defeats the source of violence and survives to tell the tale. Repeat at will for as many sequels as can be milked.
Then around fifteen years ago, the formula starting being augmented. First the films started winking: telling us that they too knew the rules since their characters had seen the movies that established the rules. This created some sort of odd ourboros where horror films were concerned. After that, horror films started passing judgement on their characters, and felt that their choices were widely irredeemable…thus they needed to be sadistically punished before they reached their fate.
Don’t even get me started on the glut of films presented in a manner suggesting that they were retrieved from a character’s own camera.
As a genre outsider, it just seemed as though the moment a film came along that was able to augment the formula, that the augmentation then became the new formula.
Enter Drew Goodard and Joss Whedon.
What Goodard and Whedon have done in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, is to set the story walking down three separate paths knowing the amount of joy it will bring the audience when those paths finally converge. Taking those mischievous babes in the woods and allowing big brother to toy with them would have been a wonderful play on the genre all its own. However, in pulling the rug out from under that with an entire act of the film left to be played feels like a spoil of riches.
Goodard and Whedon have been involved in some of the most well-crafted geek properties television offered viewers in the first decade of this new century. They both know how to craft intelligent dialogue that plays well in a group dynamic, and how to have fun with visuals that are unworldly. Thus what they were able to do with THE CABIN IN THE WOODS should come as no surprise. They have a knack for taking the song you know and rearranging it to give the notes new life. That’s where that final act comes in – the part that lifts the whole film. Anyone can bend a genre in another direction: It’s a sign of true greatness to underline that new direction with such cheek.
Within the film, everyone involved brings the goods. Every time the story flips to Sitterson and Hadley, they play their parts with just the right amount of snide humour. Marty one-up’s the Seth Green Jamie Kennedy character from the SCREAM franchise, mostly by feeling less self-aware. Finally there’s Connolly – who is a worthy “final girl”. If there’s a drawback to the film, its that in a year of truly bold heroines, Dana seems to have one hand tied behind her back when it matters most. Still, the story is able to work around it, a sign of the film’s quality as many other films would have caved on such a mistake.
THE CABIN IN THE WOODS over-delivers on its promise; what’s more, it serves up a final act that reads like a love letter to sci-fi geeks everywhere. It has no interest in re-writing the rulebook, and hasn’t given would-be followers a new formula to follow. It has created something that feels both familiar and fresh, and thankfully cannot be followed. Not only did the filmmakers close the door behind them, but they welded it shut.
If another filmmaker is going to take the horror genre and springboard off what THE CABIN IN THE WOODS has done, they will have to do so by taking everything in their own direction…and if that’s the legacy for horror that Goddard and Whedon have left, then the genre will be all the better for it
Yeah, you are definitely not that into horror films if you think Seth Green was in Scream (I believe you were referencing Jamie Kennedy)
Gotta love brain cramps.
Fixed now – thanks!
I like the film quite a bit as well. It’s a rare thesis film where it’s deconstructing its own genre while finding ways to entertain and surprise the viewers. I have a feeling that Whedon and Goddard watched Hostel/Cabin Fever and said “We can write something like this but smarter and has a fresh idea.”
I will have to watch it again and see if it works even knowing the surprises. I have a feeling that it will be fine.
That’s the thing I love about it – even though it’s built on something that should be kept quiet, it’s not like it lives and dies on “The Twist”. As such, I think it will stand up to rewatch quite well.
Happy that this film was able to catch people’s imagination after being stuck on the shelf for so long.
The Cabin in the Woods is a film that, like you said, isn’t rewriting the rules, but I think what it does that is gutsy and compelling is that it takes those rules to their logical conclusion. It’s part of what makes the last act so unexpected and spectacular, as well as one of the more thought-provoking endings I’ve seen in a horror film.
In a lot of ways, i think this film is starting to buckle under the hype surrounding it. That’s unfortunate because more than anything, what it is is a fun movie.
Unexpected is definitely the word for that final act, and the amount of energy it brings to the room is likewise unexpected.
Glad you made the trip out to see this one. I imagine it provided a welcome respite from all the hard work you’ve been putting in?
So, what’d you think of the film’s playing with audiences within the film and without?
Apologies for taking so long to respond.
I didn’t think it screwed with us as an audience all that much. All of it’s trickery comes from preconceptions, so once that first scene begins most of the trickery is moot.
As for the trickery it works with inside of the film, I liked it. It reminded me of a hybrid of CUBE and THE TRUMAN SHOW.
Cabin‘s open to multiple interpretations and represents one of the few films of 2012 that’s not only completely open to analysis but also made better and better the more you put into it. (And it improves on subsequent viewings, too.) Are Whedon and Goddard smashing contemporary horror to bits in that final image? Or are they demonstrating, through a metaphorical depiction of the wrath of the audience, why horror movies matter to us? Or is Cabin just an entertaining, smart, airtight horror lark? There’s so much to say about the film that I have a feeling we’ll still be talking about it years from now.
It’s crazy that a horror film has captured people’s imaginations like this isn’t it? However the question I’m most pondering three weeks later is this:
With the film’s box office take so very low, does any of that “game changing” discussion really mean anything? It’s not like its direction was something that fans flocked towards…so it’s not like every film in the pipeline needs to be rethought.
I think where it’s left me now that I reflect back is with a very satisfying and intelligent popcorn flick…nothing more, nothing less.