The Cabin in the Woods

    When Wes Craven’s Scream was released in 1996, it was hailed as a unique take on the horror genre.  The plot was standard issue slasher flick.  There was a killer.  There were victims, most of them young, many of them girls.  There was an attractive cast of teenagers destined to either solve the mystery or die trying.  But unlike so many teenagers in so many horror movies before it, these kids knew they were in a horror movie and tried to use the rules of the genre to their advantage.  That gave the movie a satirical edge, but as layered as Scream became it never broke those rules, even if it had some fun bending them.

    Not so with The Cabin in the Woods, a new movie co-written by geek god Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, Whedon’s longtime collaborator and the film’s director.  If Scream attempted to deconstruct the horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods rips it open stem to stern, stuffs it full of dynamite, lights a match and lets the chunks fall where they may.  It starts, as these flicks so often do, with a group of photogenic college students: there’s good girl Dana (Kristin Conneley), bad girl Jules (Anna Hutchison), alpha jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth, lately of Thor), beta jock Holden (Jesse Williams), and affable stoner Marty (Fran Kranz).  As this quintet sets off for a weekend at the titular cabin in the woods, we can already tell that the script is more carefully written than we might have expected.  It would have been easy to write these characters off as stereotypes, but the writers actually give them personalities and at least a few clever lines apiece.  As a longtime Whedon devotee, I enjoyed hearing his brainy brand of banter battered across the big screen.

    But it soon becomes clear that the film has other things on its mind.  For even before the kids set out on their vacation, the audience has been privy to the pithy discussions of two office drones (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), bored salary slaves who work in some vast underground complex teeming with employees all seemingly bent on monitoring the every move of our protagonists.  Much of the fun in these early stretches comes from slowly uncovering the details concerning just what these two layers have to do with each other.  Unpredictability, it turns out, is one of the film’s strongest assets.

    For reasons I’ll leave you to discover for yourself, it ends up that the underground office exists to manipulate our heroes into acting out a typical American horror movie, and Whedon and Goddard spend the film’s middle sections poking fun at familiar horror staples.  Characters who are otherwise well-rounded individuals find themselves devolving into genre stereotypes, amalgamated redneck zombies rise from the earth to splatter our group’s guts across the forest floor, and the heroes inexplicably want to split up (to cover more ground, of course) even when it’s painfully clear they should stick together.   At this point, I became a little concerned that the movie would be satisfied to just point and laugh at the absurdity of the horror genre, but it’s in the third act, when the movie’s two worlds collide, that things get really interesting.  To spoil what happens would do you a disservice, but rest assured that the film’s final third is very dynamic, very imaginative, and a lot of fun to watch.

    The final act also takes a bit of a left turn into profundity that comes off as a touch insincere.  The script goes beyond satire into something approaching philosophy, openly pontificating about the nature of horror movies, why people continue to see them, and why society may need them.  The Cabin in the Woods is practically made out of right angles so the shift isn’t as jarring as it might have been in a different film, but some of the diatribe still made me want to roll my eyes.

    The movie, perhaps inevitably, is unable to find a consistent tone.  Parts of it play like a straight-up zombie flick, parts like an office sitcom, one chunk like a special effects bonanza and one part, at once the most interesting and tiresome part, like a sociological dissertation.  At a lean 95 minutes, The Cabin in the Woods is probably too short for all of these segments to be fully realized and joined into a cohesive whole, but if it went on any longer I fear it would lose its frenzied, sharp-turn-over-a-deep-drop spirit.  It’s too bold a movie to be perfect, but it’s a lot of giddy fun and should especially please those who take their humor with a heavy dose of irony.