The Cabin in the Woods

Fran Kranz, the Dollhouse star who also appears in the upcoming horror movie Cabin in the Woods, says the so-called game-changing movie isn’t so much about a twist.

Writer/director Drew Goddard and co-writer/producer Joss Whedon remain secretive about the plot of the film, saying only that it will subvert the horror genre.

Kranz, who plays computer genius Topher in Whedon’s Fox series Dollhouse, wouldn’t elaborate on his own intriguing description of the movie, saying only that it has to do with "the order in which these people kind of die," he said in an exclusive interview Thursday at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Pasadena, Calif. "That’s kind of the fun of the movie. We’re not hiding that we are so aware of the kind of context that we’re in. We make fun of it, and we have a lot of fun with it. The movie is extremely ambitious, lot of different stuff going."

In other words, you’ll just have to screen the movie.

"Reading the script was such an unreal experience," Kranz said. "The way the movie unfolds, there’s not just sort of one twist. It’s not really a twist movie. It’s kind of like, the entire time you’re wondering what the hell is really going on. While it’s amazing and entertaining, it slowly is unfolding. There’s not anything really to spoil unless you see it, so in that sense you’ve got to just wait and see it."

It’s still the classic setup of five teens who go into the woods and bad things happen, as Kranz described. The classic archetypes don’t change.

"They want to go party out in the woods. One of them has a cabin. That’s that," Kranz said. "Then bad things happen. Woods are scary. They’ve always been scary to us, going back to [Nathaniel] Hawthorne or something. We’re afraid of the woods, so that’s where all the monsters are. It was a natural setting, and also Vancouver’s gorgeous, so it was an opportunity to go hang out there in the woods."

As in the familiar story, each of the five teens fills an archetypal role before the film shakes things up. "I’m the party guy," Kranz said. "I’m that guy. You know how it is. There’s the jock guy. There’s the virginal kind of girl. There’s the party, slutty girl. There’s the kind of nice guy who kind of gets the girl. Then there’s the stoner. I’m that guy. I’m the party animal stoner guy, and it’s a lot of fun to play."

The Cabin in the Woods opens Feb. 5, 2010.