The Cabin in the Woods

Cabin in the Woods : Not just a walk in the woods

A quick look at the poster or trailer for Cabin in the Woods could lead one to suspect that it’s a simple horror movie. But the fact that it was co-written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard — part of the creative team behind Angel — guaranteed that it would not be simple.

Meta from its first frames, Cabin in the Woods inspired a lot of thoughts. Here are some of ours.

Note: Spoilers. It’s impossible to talk about Cabin in the Woods without spoilers!

I have been a fan of Joss Whedon’s for a long time, and his name on the writing credits would be enough to pull me out to a movie. I consume a lot of media, particularly film, and especially horror. The idea of mashing Whedon and slasher flick together into a gory feast of awesome could not have made me more excited. I couldn’t resist the trailers, and they blew my mind. I went in to Cabin in the Woods with high expectations. It did not disappoint.

I have a fascination with many Whedon creations because I feel like Joss Whedon and I share a love of the supernatural mixed with our everyday world. I am a devourer of horror films and novels. The premise that a stereotypical group of sexy teens encounters a monster in the woods is fun to me, but knowing that they are part of a modern-day sacrifice using science to force the scenario is hilariously entertaining. Cabin in the Woods deconstructs all of the typical horror plots and builds a world based on exactly what you expect to happen. The sexy teens act out the predictable plot, getting chased and murdered, but I found myself laughing and enjoying every minute, because like the architects of the sacrifice, I’m safe on the other side of the screen.

My favourite part of Cabin in the Woods is when, as everyone surmised, the monsters are unleashed inside the complex. You know it’s going to happen, but the carnage gets so crazy that you just hang on for the ride. It is a spectacular scene of mayhem and it is so fun to keep a look out for creatures you know and love. You cheer for the monsters, because the human beings are villains too. The best scary stories always leave you wondering what you would do and what you might be capable of. Cabin in the Woods is the kind of movie I could put in every Halloween, when I’m watching kids celebrate their love of spooky things. I love to be scared too, and thoroughly enjoyed this homage to the horror I grew up on.

Wolfen Moondaughter Assistant Reviews Editrix and Assistant Art Director

I heard about Cabin in the Woods in the spring of 2011, when Fran Kranz (Topher on Dollhouse) tweeted about it. The fact that Kranz, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (co-producer on Angel) were involved were enough to make me want to see it even though horror films aren’t really my thing. When I heard Chris Hemsworth (who played the title role in Thor) was in it, that added to my excitement. Then MGM went bankrupt, and suddenly it looked like the film might be permanently shelved — which would have been typical of Whedon’s luck, considering Firefly got a very premature axing, and Dollhouse didn’t survive much longer.

Thankfully Cabin got a well-deserved second chance. The only thing you can go in expecting from this film is that it will turn your expectations on their collective ears. In fact, I’m still fuming that the trailers for it revealed some massive plot points, ruining some surprises. Still, even with those surprises ruined, it was still a thoroughly enjoyable film (one that, happily, included a few more familiar faces besides the two I mentioned). And, well, this is a film involving Whedon, so even if you have a sensitive stomach, as I do, you’ll still likely laugh a lot, too, which is reason enough even without the meta aspects and great twists (and despite the trailer spoilers) to see it.

Now, understand that what I’m saying is all just my conjecture, how I interpreted what happened and what I gleaned. I don’t presume to know what Whedon or Goddard intended, and may be entirely off the mark.

One thing I want to discuss is how, despite how things turned out with the corporate entities of Wolfram and Hart in Angel (which the corporation in this movie strongly reminded me of from the get-go) and Rossum in Dollhouse, I still held out hope for a while that what was going on here was only some sort of simulation — right up until the first death. Then I realised that the company really was a bit like Wolfram and Hart, and there was some sort of ritual sacrifice going on. But it’s great wondering all that time what the hell is really happening! The part of the story about the college kids the company is observing is largely a run-of-the-mill horror tale on the surface, but the bits with the corporation keep the viewer off-balance and make it clear that things are not what they seem. Even the kids start to realize something is off, remarking on how everyone is acting a bit out of character.

Which brings me to my next point, how this is potentially a great meta commentary on writing. These teens are not really the tropes they are being boxed into — no one is just a jock or geek or slut. To write a story, we often oversimplify the lives of characters, which, while it acts as a shortcut to explain who the characters are to the audience, and can have resonance in the form of archetypes, also can also detract from the story by making it improbable and emotionally unrealistic. It’s highly unfair that these kids were basically chemically reprogrammed to behave in ways that don’t fit their core personality, and then sacrificed for it. (It reminds me of the bit in the Bible about how God caused Pharoh’s heart to become hard and then punished the man for how God made him be — well, depending on the interpretation, anyway.)

But even without the chemical reprogramming, it’s pretty awful that our horror stories punish sex with death, making the slut the first to die. The first to go here was the "slut" as well, a woman so horny she made out with the taxidermied head of a wolf (which was upsetting for me on a whole other level). Sitting there watching her strip down and bare her breasts while her lover remained clothed, I was confused. Surely Joss was against pandering? But of course it turned out that the scene was not gratuitous, it had a purpose: we were looking over the shoulder of two of the office guys as as they drooled over her and what they knew (and we could guess) was about to happen to her, this woman who had essentially been roofied. One has to wonder which they found more exciting, her semi-nudity or her impending death. As we were sitting there watching with them, it was a commentary on we the audience — the office workers were us at our worst.

And it’s an oddly double-edged sword. Ogling over someone in a personal situation without their knowledge is wrong — it’s why two characters earlier experienced a moral dilemma with a mirror that allowed one to watch someone in the next room. But at the same time, while we shouldn’t be salivating over a woman whose judgment has been tampered with and who is being used to bring sexual excitement to others, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with her wanting to have sex — it’s not something she should be punished for.

Personal experience has led me to believe that for many, the main point of a horror film (at least as far as slasher films and monster movies go) is to watch people get ripped apart. For some, at least, it seems the idea is to experience that heart-pumping fear vicariously through those being chased. But for others, it’s simply the enjoyment of watching violence, as if it were cool for people to die horrifically. (Frankly, I think this is a commentary on the humiliations people suffer in reality television for the sake of the audience as well.) We consider it to be okay to enjoy the violence because it’s fake, just fiction, but why do we like it in the first place? It seems to me that while the film throws more than a little gore at us, since the office workers are us, the film is asking us, how would we feel if we the monsters suddenly came after us instead of the people on the screen? If the people of that office are us, and we think letting a few people die against their will (as opposed to them making the choice to sacrifice themselves) is worth the collateral damage to save billions, then no wonder at the end Marty suggested that humankind was not worth saving.

I must admit, I thought it was going to turn out that Marty was the Virgin and Dana was the Fool, and that Dana would die, but the real ending was better than that. And despite my talk of the badness of stereotyping, Marty did make a great Fool — not just in the fact that he acted like a clown in the beginning and was (arguably unintentionally) funny quite a lot of the time, but in that he was the only one with a real grasp of what was going on, and spoke wisdom. (The Fool and the Wise Man may seem like contradictory concepts, but are often really the same thing.)

I suppose I should be grateful that the commercials tipped me off that he wasn’t actually dead when he’d seemed to be killed — they’d showed scenes with him that still hadn’t happened by the time of his "death." The same went for Dana, so when it seemed like the movie was ending, I already knew that it wasn’t. Instead, that’s the point when things really got shaken up. I have to say, they packed a lot of story into just an hour and a half!

I wish Hemsworth’s character had survived to the end too (his end was somehow the most horrifying for me, even though I figured that he was going to hit the grid when he made the jump), but part of the great shake-up was that it was the Fool who survived to the end rather than the Jock (who I think would typically become the Hero). And I must say, I loved seeing Marty’s collapsible bong-mug (cool in its own right, the badness of drugs aside) also being useful as a baseball bat! Fran, boyo, you looked pretty damn badass wielding that thing!

Carnage aside, the monsters were cool, especially the killer unicorn (which actually fits many of the legends). And while I don’t want to watch people die, I can’t deny a certain sense of justice, the office people (monsters in their own right) getting their karmic retribution, like Hadley getting killed by the merman he’d wanted to see kill the kids. I was actually expecting the security guard to become a hero, but really, the very fact that he just stood by in the first place (say something is wrong all you want, but it’s action that matters) meant he wasn’t. Dana’s betrayal was great, too — I appreciate why she did it, but in the end it meant she wasn’t a hero either. And, arguably, she wasn’t pure-hearted enough to be a "virgin" — but then, why should she be spared over anyone else, even if she had been?

All the little nods to various horror films over the years were a hoot, films like Wrong Turn (which starred Whedon alumna Eliza Dushku, and featured both a creepy gas station and a cabin in the woods owned by a band of cannibalistic mountain men), Evil Dead II, and Hellraiser. There were also classic monsters like werewolves and dragons, and hundreds more. Even as the film arguably criticizes the genre, it’s also a love letter to it — a really fun love letter from a pair of great writers.

Erin Elizabeth Fraser Staff Writer

Oh Cabin in the Woods, you had me at Bradley Whitford. I’ll be perfectly honest; I didn’t want to see this movie. I largely consider myself to be "over" Joss Whedon, and if his script was the film’s main selling point, I wasn’t having any of it. But my boyfriend wanted to go, and it’s no secret that I love going to the movies and will do so as much as possible, so I sat down in the theatre and prepared to be unimpressed. Except I wasn’t. The film had me with Bradley Whitford. It might be a cheap quirk, but it works on me. Whitford and Richard Jenkins play middle-aged corporate lab / office techs who discuss the same things as any other co-workers: their wives, kids, and how they measure up to the other global branches. Except their company isn’t developing technology, but torturing innocents to appease the vengeful "Ancient Ones." So while the college students go off on their doomed weekend camping trip, Whitford, Jenkins, and the rest of the U.S. office watch and manipulate from afar, crafting the horror movie.

This is the film’s central conceit. There are little flourishes here and there. The kids have to choose what sort of monster will come and attack them, and an elaborate betting pool starts up at the office. Of course it turns out to be a zombie redneck torture family, despite Whitford’s desire for a merman. The techs control the players’ hormonal balances, thus ensuring that the important horror movie archetypes like the Whore and the Fool are met. And there’s the director, Sigourney Weaver, behind all of this overseeing the operation.

The film is a roadmap for horror cinema. Explicitly and playfully showing you all of the parts and how they dance. The monsters they choose from all reflect established sub-genres and aesthetics, most noticeably so a riff on Cilve Barker’s Hellraiser series. The movie takes place in the cabin in the woods, with our group of college students as the actors, putting on different guises to get the job done. The writers, Whitford and Jenkins, sit behind a desk crafting the narrative. The office is the studio, hoping they have a hit on their hands and aware that they rarely pull off as masterful work as does the Japanese office. And Weaver is quite literally the director, overseeing the operation. It’s not an overly sophisticated metaphor for genre filmmaking, and it’s not supposed to be.

Where this gets interesting, though, is with the representation of the audience within the film and the film’s relationship to its audience. The viewers within the film are the Old Gods threatening to destroy the world if they are not entertained. Thus film audiences are aligned with a vengeful all-powerful group that decides whether humanity lives or dies. The film argues that, at least in contemporary genre filmmaking, the audience has all the power. Noticeably absent are any form of critics, to establish whether or not the film is good. The production’s success is completely dependent on whether or not it satisfies the appetite of the Ancient Ones. But the film doesn’t stop there. While it gives all of the power to the audience, it also subversively argues that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. With the Old Gods’ desire for certain classic archetypes to be represented, all of the players must be tortured and maimed as horrifically as possible, except the Final Girl, the Virgin: she just has to be punished. The film understands audiences’ tastes to be sensationalist, crude and traditional. The film fights against this, arguing that there is another way to tell a compelling story and has two of the doomed players, the Virgin and the Fool, battle for their lives in the face of apocalypse.

If you wish, you can extrapolate this meditation on filmmaking within the framework of Joss Whedon’s career. More often than not, Whedon’s been played off as this misunderstood genius, who only gets a certain length of rope to try and craft his masterpieces. Always cut down by the studios that want something more conventional. Here, Whedon goes for conventional, but he shows us the costs of that conventionality by having the film’s surrogate audience destroy the world. While I don’t personally feel that Whedon is a genius or a tortured artist, I do agree with his disinterest in conventional and unimaginative storytelling. And ultimately, I come around to champion Cabin in the Woods not just for the presence of Bradley Whitford, but for the statement it makes on the box office game.

Suzette Chan Features Editrix

Oh my Joss! Cabin in the Woods pushed all my geek buttons. Horror? Check. Hilarity? Check. Man — and Final Girl — versus the supernatural? Check. Genre discourse? Check. Let me count the ways.

If it looks like a horror movie...

This genre-mixing movie hangs on the horror movie structure.

It begins with the scary teaser. Often, the first scene of a horror movie is a flashback to a key, and usually bloody, event. It might focus on a recent killing that is the first in a series, or it might be older, showing the origin of the evil to come.

Cabin in the Woods starts with a workplace scene that ends with a title card that uses an archetypically gruesome horror-movie typeface. The contrast seems like a throwaway gag. It’s only later do we realize that we were watching the serial killers begin their spree.

Once the pieces fall into place, it becomes apparent that Cabin in the Woods nests fictional worlds within fictional worlds; each one is organized around a specific understanding of reality that corresponding to a different genre. The camping kids think they’re in reality — indeed, they aren’t horror movie stereotypes when they are introduced: there is a jock who is perfectly capable of talking economics with the smart girl, a smart girl who embraces a frivolous side and a dumb blonde who is neither dumb nor naturally blonde. However, they are soon manipulated and drugged to act as if they were horror movie characters. Pulling the levers are the technicians, who seem like characters from a near-future science fiction movie. But even they are conscious that they are serving other masters: their project is to satisfy gods who exist at a cosmic level.

The technicians, or, as Erin refers to them, the "writers" of the cabin scenario, are determined to maintain the status quo. Despite the blood and guts, horror movies often harbour a fondness for the status quo. Backroads, hillbilly murderer movies — symbolized by the creepy dude at the run-down gas station on the way to the cabin — tend to play out as critiques of how modern, superficial society has contained rural America to the point that its growth is deformed, and must turn on itself to stay alive (hence all that incest and cannibalism). The heroes or heroines fight valiantly to keep those human atrocities contained.

Meanwhile, monster movies have been read as expressions of anxiety over repressed desires. For example, in Monsters in the Closet, Harry M. Benshoff views monster eruptions as queer-coded threats to the heterosexual norm. In The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the monster arises from the depths (underneath the Earth, where Hell might be) of an archeological dig — that is, from the implicitly un-evolved past — in contrast to the protagonists’ rivalrous pursuit of the only woman in an all-male research colony: science, the idea of a future that includes a "nuclear" family, are all jeopardized by the inconvenient emergence of the creature.

In Cabin in the Woods, the scientist / creators suppress the truth of the human world: that it exists because of blood sacrifices to the gods. This is their concrete reality, but it’s also a self-referential nod to the situation of horror filmmakers: to keep movie franchises alive, they must continuously write and execute (excuse the pun) gruesome murders to satisfy audiences. Ironically, Cabin in the Woods breaks this pattern with an ending that makes a sequel pretty much impossible.

Conventional expectations

The scene where we watch the writers watch the doomed campers pick up objects was fascinating. In addition to determining which specific monsters might appear, the characters’ choice would determine the type of story that would unfold. To quote Patricia Holland, who wrote about UK television in The Television Handbook:

"Familiarity with a genre means building up a set of expectations about a programme’s style and content, both on the part of the producers and on the part of the regular audience. This includes accepting the conventions — like the laughter from the unseen audience during a sitcom — and it also includes relishing a knowledge of the genre itself: as in the endless self-reference of the entertainment world in which soap opera actors appear on chat shows to discuss how their character is doing, comics do impersonations of other comics, and competing programmes trade sly digs with each other."

Along the same lines, Cabin in the Woods is a genre movie about genre movies. But which genre? As I mentioned, the framework is horror, but within this framework, many kinds of stories can be told (just ask Supernatural, ostensibly a horror series that incorporates melodrama, crime, folklore, fantasy, the western, etc.). In Cabin, Hadley (Bradley Whitford’s character) wanted a sea monster story. Other artefacts would have called up monsters that could have turned the scenario into a science fiction movie, a slasher flick, a ghost story, and so on. The writers were even watching a J-Horror scenario in Japan.

In real life, audiences have been conditioned to create a set of expectations based on the genre clues promoted in movie trailers, posters and production news. As my sister Tarts have said, Cabin in the Woods turned those expectations on their heads. However, the movie was also a victim of its own cleverness: some reviewers counted the mixing of genres (especially the "switch" from horror to fantasy — you could say it was a supernatural drama all along) as a fault. Many of my literary minded friends refused to go because they don’t like gory movies. As a result, the box office take for Cabin in the Woods was typical for horror films, but did not follow the pattern of crossover hits like the horror-romance Twilight.

Breaking with movie conventions altogether, the object-choosing scene promoted me to recall a different kind of artwork. It reminded me of Dark Pool, an installation by visual artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. In a gallery space, they "recreated" an attic full of early-20th century relics like a phonogram, old pictures, music boxes, etc. Audiences were encouraged to rummage through the objects; picking up select objects would trigger sound cues, and you would hear ambient sounds and bits of dialogue that could be associated with the object (as opposed to, for example, explanatory narration about the objects). That’s how I felt watching that scene: it approximated natural action (I have had the same sense-memory experiences picking up old photos and objects), but it was also very specifically curated to generate our own stories.

Speaking of agency

My, oh my, did I geek out when actual characters in an actual horror movie articulated the Final Girl theory posited by Carol J. Clover in her book, Men, Women and Chainsaws. Whedon and Goddard went a meta-step further than Wes Craven, whose Scream movies depended upon a key character’s knowledge of horror movies. Cabin in the Woods hinged on a key character’s knowledge about the discourse about horror movies. Dana was a consistently imperfect fit for each one of Clover’s criteria for a Final Girl: she’s not an actual virgin, her name is not entirely male-associated and, most significantly, she is not alone in the end. Like any good Final Girl, she survives through knee-jerk reactions and luck, until the end, when she makes the choice to trust Marty (who, probably not incidentally, bears as much of a gender-bendering name as Dana). Together, instead of thrashing their way to possible survival, they make an informed and considered decision to let the world die. That is more agency than most horror movie protagonists are ever credited with.

The Generation Gap and the Panopticon

I saw The Hunger Games the same week as Cabin in the Woods and noticed a major similarity. In both movies, young people are dropped into an artificial world that is created, manipulated and monitored by people a generation older. The teenagers in The Hunger Games have the advantage of knowing that they’re being jerked around, but the co-eds in Cabin in the Woods have no idea that the world is rigged against their survival.

Hadley and his co-workers seem to be The Powers That Be in Cabin in the Woods, until we hear that there is a director. And the director seems to be running the show, until she explains that the entire production is put on to appease the gods.

In The Hunger Games, the tribunes have to act to survive physically, but also to appeal to an unseen audience’s sensibilities. The audience reaction is something that the gamesmaster has to factor in as he manipulates the play. However, the gamesmaster has to answer to a higher authority: President Snow, who heads a government that controls Panem through lotteries, games, constant surveillance and false scarcity.

The games in the Hunger Games and the scenario in Cabin in the Woods end with doubly defiant acts: the young people choose to stand together and actively choose passive actions. It means certain death for them individually and it means destabilizing the world as they know it. But the only way to beat TPTB is to refuse to play into their rigged games of losers (plural) and winner (singular).

The producers of the "show" in Cabin are cruel for withholding the truth from the unwilling participants, but at least their larger goal is altruistic. The producers of the Hunger Games are just plain evil for orchestrating a circus that rewards a few while condemning millions. In both movies, an older generation is desperate to preserve the status quo. Rather than lay the foundations for new stories, the older generation uses technology to create innovative ways to kill young people to preserve the status quo. Whether you read this as a metaphor for horror filmmaking or real life politics (the Toronto G20 protests and the Occupy movement come to mind), the endeavour is perverse; you might say it’s horrific.