The Cabin in the Woods: metafilm tropefest brilliance
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Forget Tropfest, see tropefest. Cabin in the Woods, a compendium of horror cliches, is showing in just one cinema in each city — it’s a film for people interested in film, which is as elitist any discrete group of art aficionados. So, you know who you are — enagaged and too clever by 50%.
Above: Both of these two images are accurate evocations of Cabin.
Resist reading any reviews (this is a spoiler-free anti-review)
It’s an extremely tricky film to “review” as speaking about any part of it beyond the first five three minutes is spoiling the fun; it kicks off with, ahh I can’t say anymore. Even the trailer is too revealing. Indeed, I haven’t read any reviews that don’t give too much away, so it was a good thing I didn’t read any till later.
Two things: 1) This is a double-genre film: it’s primary genre is meta, and the genre it’s meta-ing is horror — and you’re right, there are X number of sub-genres, but you’ll see that literally listed, passingly, in the film itself; it’s a comprehensive critique of horror movies dressed early on as a satire. (2) I scare easily, so I watched not as a fan intent on getting the howling fantods but because I had heard just the right things about it: very smart fun with lashings of splatter.
Horror, not horror: You might read a comment like this: “Very bad movie, don’t waste your time and money … its not scary at all … Bad bad bad bad.” My mainstream standard, Dana Stevens at Slate (she’s Margaret and David in one) wrote a half-heartedly complimentary review remarking: “I thoroughly enjoyed this movie’s gory silliness.” Josh Larsen, half the estimable duo at Filmspotting said, “I didn’t have a problem that it wasn’t scary.”
Which makes me realise that a professional film watcher, or a genre fan, is pretty blase about “horror;” I was pretty icked out a lot of the time and if not howling fantodly, at least spooked and jumpy, which was plenty sufficient for me. This desensitisation works as well with our relation to special effects and rock music and hot food. For Cabin, the”normal” audience is evidently not me. Larsen usefully adds, “I don’t think it’s a horror film really, it’s doing other things, it’s interested in other things.”
Above: two very apposite posters for Cabin with the slogan: “You think you know the story”
Too smart for the critics: I fully agree with Larsen, its interests lie beyond horror. To have been seriously (sickeningly) horrific would have been a distraction from the ideas at play — to discuss which would be a spoiler. It would be like an extremely violent film moralising about violence in movies.
I can say this: the sentiment of the very last line is taken, surprisingly, all too literally by pratically every critic who’s mentioned it. The filmmakers Whedon and Goddard want to tear everything down, but the critics — most of whom are generally but curiously, guardedly positive — have not (why not?) desisted from noticing that “everything” here has a specific context which we’ve been considering the whole time; it’s a not insignificant key to looking back on the movie, which they all seemed to have missed. (Why am I so smart? I’ve no idea; it did take a little time after for the penny to drop but it’s perfectly obvious then. You‘ll see.)
Reasons to go: It’s a great start; four of the five young folk are total eye candy — note Chris Hemsworth, Our Chris, just pre-Thor, who has the appeal of early Crowe/Pearce/Jackman — it has non-stop reversals and surprises and if you’re not satisfied by one just wait a second; and the end sequence is as much fun as any climax can get (Rise of the Planet of the Apes-fun, if you’ve seen it).
And if you care about this sort of stuff: It’s about how we watch what we want to watch (ie, genre), and if that thing is horror, why we want to see bad things happen to more or less innocent people. (Though I think they don’t answer that question; their hands are full just showing us the how.)
For what it’s worth, Best-Horror-Movies.com (“We’re purists”) have given it five freakheads out of five.
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Late to the party, I saw this last Friday and I loved it. I agree that the trailer shows too much, but this is no surprise. In fact, given the spectacular money shots in the finale, it was quite restrained in terms of spoilers, for this day and age. I do think it’s OK to discuss the premise of the story and its “extra” component given that it’s not introduced as a twist — it’s there almost from the get-go. But to describe anything that happens in the last act would be a travesty. This is certainly one of the year’s highlights for me.
But isn’t it so much better not to know anything! And the ending is as exhilirating as anything I’ve seen.
Dear Luke,
On consideration, this is a movie that’s designed for long, fecund diuscussions — hopefully you will do a (spoiler) podcast? By the same coin it is impossible to talk about without likely robbing some pleasures of those who haven’t seen it yet.
As for the critics’ reactions: Dana Stevens/Slate: “a minor success, a pleasant trifle;” Roger Ebert: “The Cabin in the Woods does have some genuine scares, but they’re not really the point. This is like a final exam for fanboys;” David Edelstein/New York magazine: “The movie is fun—but any resemblance to what drew us to the genre in the first place is coincidental” — the guardedness seems to arise from this film being located in pure genrespace, therefore anyone not specifically interested in this kettle of fish couldn’t really enjoy the contents. In other words, the presumption is that it can’t support the kind of criticism that a realistic-ish emotional drama — Checkov, Bergman, Kurosawa, Scorcese — might call for. Which condescension is definitely not merited in this case.
The greatest problem for a critic is that this is the most frustrating of subjects; it’s a film ultimately about ideas. Of a “non-genre” film one might write about the acting, the emotional resonance, the psychological drama, without revealing any twists. With a conceptual work, the “scare,” the “acting,’ the “emotional” content are slihghtly beside the point. And spoiling is against the code.
And I think why they do not cotton on to the meaning of the last phrase (see Slate’s Spolier Specials, 3 May 2012, or Filmspotting, above) is that at the end they’ve become so caught up in the world of the film — after the crucial intersection has occurred — that they have adopted the viewpoints of the characters — which is rather a triumphfor the filmmakers. But of course, as critics, it is their business to inspect the entrails after.
whc
Racking my brains now to recall which is the last line. To my mind the whole “meta” thing has been (understandably) a bit overstated: the film is an allegory which can be interpreted on various levels, not all of them directly related to horror cinema or spectatorship. A friend of mind says it’s about capitalism and considering the textbooks left behind at the outset, I think I agree.
Dear Jake,
(reader, if you haven’t seen the film I’m gonna mention stuff.)
The second book was something like “the Structure of Soviet Economics” — and that’s a cute reading. But as the film is about how we render our notions of the supernatural I’m not buying it. As The Fool correcs, this is not what our nightmares are made of, it’s what makes them.
The last line is something like, maybe it’s time a new lot took over. (shades of Easy Rider’s “We blew it.”) Dana Stevens and Filmspotting’s Adam thought it was simply nihilistic. (Shades of my once hoping that the Python’s Meaning of Life would provide one.) Of course in the context Whedon/Goddard were most likely suggesting that the tropes were worn out and utterly, mechanically predictable and that it’s time for this horror-fantasy world to be destroyed. They aren’t offering a solution but a hanging judgement.
(more spoilers)
Oddly enough, that’s the line that clinches the interpretation for me, given what we’re shown beforehand: a global system which depends on squeezing blood from its victims and which ultimately fails (despite official optimism) in one country after another. “Maybe it’s time a new lot took over” is something many people would have been thinking in 2009 when the film was shot.
In that case, your notion that Cabin is an allegory with various possible readings looks good. But neither of us thinks the frame presents a picture of mere nihilism, a positive mood more consonant with the anarchic joy of the preceding climax.
Agreed — it’s an upbeat ending, in a punk rock kind of way. You could say that about Rise of Planet of the Apes as well.
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