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The Cabin in the Woods starts off with an old, well-known story template. One weekend, five college students get into a van and drive deep into the woods where they plan to stay at a cabin. Naturally, they make a stop at a gas station and meet a strange attendant who seems to know a bit too much about what will happen to them.
I feel like I let the cat out of the bag when I say this is not just a cabin in the woods, but the location of a monstrous scientific experiment. The cabin has a basement, and below the basement is a very immense modern laboratory that is led by tech nerds. Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are at the helm, twiddling dials, pulling levers, and monitoring every second on huge televisions. Their plan is to put the five guinea pigs into a situation where they will decide something, which will reveal, well, I’m not sure what it will reveal.
In your typical horror movie, that would suffice: OMG! The cabin is actually being operated by a secret facility underneath! Trust me, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It was co-produced and co-written by Joss Whedon, the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and other famous TV shows, and his business partner Drew Goddard, who directed and wrote Cloverfield. Whedon himself stated that it was made to serve as a loving hate letter to horror films and is a provocation into how to plunge into the genre itself: It has five basic characters in the ever so generic cabin in the woods setting. We can view the lab scientists as the directors and writers who are thinking about what will the characters do next. In a way, the Jenkins and Whitford characters stand for Whedon and Goddard.
Horror fans are indeed strange people. I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with the same archetypal scrutiny as horror aficionados do while observing myriad films in unparalleled detail. The Cabin in the Woods seems to be put together as a puzzle specifically for horror aficionados. What cliches are being played around with? What authors and films are being referenced? Is the film itself critiquing something?
While examining most genre films, we tend to ponder a very simple question- “Does it work?” The Cabin in the Woods does manage to provide some genuine terror, but that is not the main concern, much like doing a fanboy’s final exam.
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