Rating: R
Run Time: 95 minutes
Director: Drew Goddard
Starring: Kristen Connelly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchinson
SPOILER
ALERT: if you have not seen this movie yet, do
not read this review, which is really more of a commentary anyway...
Cabin in the Woods/CITW is
probably one of the most written-about horror movies in recent memory.
I'm not so much of an egotist as to believe I’m going to add a whole hell
of a lot to what’s already been said. Then again, what the hell.
Since I'm merely going to add my two cents to what's already been said by
perhaps more eloquent voices, there's no real need to rehash the plot in
anything other than the broadest of outlines; you probably already know
it anyway. So, here we go: the cast of college students, all of whom
cut against type in one significant way or another, travel to a cabin in the
woods and, in short order, start dying. That, in a nutshell, is our
point of departure.
I have come here to praise CITW,
not bury it. But I’m going to address the things I didn’t care for
first. My criticisms are nothing new either, but they diminish, just a
smidgeon, the overall accomplishment of the film, although I'm torn as to
whether it compromises the experience of watching it. Drew Goddard and
Joss Whedon made a decision to riff on a pretty specific sub-category of horror
cinema but seem to imply that their commentary has universal application
to the horror movie genre, which I’m not so sure of. As has been
said, the whole cabin in the woods scenario (specifically, the locale)
would seems to specifically apply to The Evil Dead, its sequel, maybe the F13 franchise and its various first cousin
campgrounds slasher flicks (movies like The
Burning, Sleepaway Camp, The Final Terror, and these
specifically in terms of locale and the slasher rules of the
game: character types, Final Girls, sex=death, etc.). I don’t think
they care to reference Wrong Turn
and its sequels or Cabin Fever and its sequels.
Yet the motif we have here,
despite the multiplicity of options available to the players (all of which end
in death, of course), adheres much more closely to the slasher film than any
other recognizable form I am aware of. The archetypes of
slut, athlete, intellectual, fool, and virgin more properly belong to that
playing field than anything else today, and that whole genre is beginning to
run out of steam…yet again (save for the recent unnecessary remakes
of so many of them; will the slasher never die?). The director
Goddard’s explanation is that the guises of the game have changed over the years,
or even centuries, but the stakes have always been the same and the formula
must stay fresh and current, consistent with any particular society's
(Western, Asian, racial/ethnic) prevailing cultural fears and
apprehensions. If that is true, then maybe the filmmakers’
explanation for why we are presented with some strange combination of the
demon possession slash-zombie gut-muncher-slash redneck/hillbilly
horror-slash-lonely woods slasher killer sub-genres is a valid one. I can
live with that. Particularly when that distinctly Western image is juxtaposed against the
J-horror trope in another environment.
Still, I don’t know if it is true
that the most enduring horror tropes of the current cultural landscape still
involve a manipulation of clichés developed in movies from the ‘80s. That
certainly doesn’t seem to be the case in the other countries we are shown who
participate in the ritual, whose horror motifs seem more current that our U. S.
variety (although, admittedly, the Asians have been making horror movies about
ghosts for years; we have only recently taken notice). Still, I must
admit that a perusal of new horror releases at Netflix or Vudu seems to
confirm the Whedon/Goddard argument.
Whatever the case, the experience
of watching the movie is still dizzying and thought-provoking. Not
perhaps as thought-provoking at the intellectual level as a classical
philosopher's dialectical discussion of, say, Virtue or Justice; but still,
one demanding the viewer pay close attention to the film to get the
absolute most out of it. CITW
is one worth repeat viewing to tease everything out (unless I'm just
obtuse).
I don’t often read much after the
fact to learn what the creators of most forms of art or entertainment were
trying to say with their creations; it is, I think, a fault of mine.
Still, a benefit to this approach is that, if or when I do go back to look for explanations, it
can be personally gratifying to see how closely my understanding of a movie
matches the creators’ intentions, and that can’t be a bad thing; unless, of
course, my thoughts don’t match the creators’ own, in which case
I feel rather like a fool. I find that I feel like a fool frequently.
In any event, if it is true that
Whedon and Goddard were trying to revitalize certain older forms and parody torture porn equally (as
has also been suggested), I say the result is a failure. If, on the other hand, they are
commenting on how humanity’s appreciation of scary stories is rooted in a much
deeper, darker, more sinister precedent, then the result is nothing less than
brilliant…or at least pretty damned smart. I’m going with the latter,
because that is much more interesting an idea anyway and seems to be an
explicit theme in the screenplay. That the rules of the game are merely
symbols of fetishistic elements in a ritual designed to save us by appeasing
something terrible; that, for me, adds a depth of meaning to our viewing
experience that makes us simultaneously voyeurs and co-conspirators.
If that is so, are we
experiencing some crazy movie within a movie? Is art imitating
life? That is, are the creators suggesting that the tropes of horror
films developed from genuine rituals? Not literally, of course, but in
the Jungian archetypal sense? Race memory, even. Does horror fulfil
a need similar to the Aristotelian theory
regarding tragedy, to trigger some cathartic event that allows us to
vicariously relieve ourselves of the weight on our souls? It cannot be as
simple as pure escapism, because we could say all movies fulfil that role; all
are fantasy, after all. Horror satisfies the need in us to be horrified,
which is distinct from terror. If a simple definition of horror
describes the intrusion of the unnatural or abnormal into the
natural/normal, perhaps horror operates to allow us to view our otherwise
shitty, dissatisfied lives through a different prism.
Yes, it is true that my life
sucks, but I’m not:
- The parent of a child who is possessed by a demon
- Being stalked through the woods by an indestructible, zombie serial killer
- In thrall to a vampire who is slowly draining my life away
- Haunted by a malevolent ghost who won’t quit fucking with me
This view is a little like
Alvie Singer's philosophy concerning the horrible and the miserable, which
I paraphrase: the horrible are people who have three eyes, are horribly
disfigured, or who are double amputees; the miserable is everyone else.
Or, more cynically, is the
movie just an example of the tail wagging the dog? Is it all a big
joke? Like, “Hey, let’s make a movie where, come to find out, the horror
in horror movies is really orchestrated by a cynical cabal of corporate types
to appease the angry nether gods?” Because, you know what? There is
a sense in which it is! The corporate types are Hollywood executives, who
are the cynical arbiters of what kind of horror we want to see (unless they
decide we don’t want to see any kind of horror during a certain period; in
which case they’ll nix any plans and bury anything in production or even some
stuff already in the can, like, oh say, The
Cabin in the Woods- It’s ultimately all about the money, after all, isn’t
it?); anyway, that would make us the angry crowd that needs to be fed
Christians. Is that my original idea? No. Is that necessarily
even valid? Who knows?
And please let’s not use the
prefix “meta” to define all of this, shall we? We hear meta this and meta that being tossed about far too liberally
and often these days; its misuse has diminished the term’s value
considerably. I say, meta-fuck it…let’s meta-move on. Oh, and while
we’re at it, down with “post-modern,” too.
The movie doesn’t work without
Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford as Sitterson and Hadley. They walk the
fine, perfect line between irreverent disregard for the victims they are
condemning to ritualistic death and a solemn appreciation for what compels them
to do so. It is often difficult to tell whether or not their
inappropriate jokey banter is a defense mechanism against the greater
realization of the awful truth of what forces them to sacrifice these victims
(who are, by the way, unlike so many characters who populate shitty movies of
this ilk, likeable people; I don’t think that was accidental on the filmmakers’
part) or whether they’re just dickheads.
The screenplay presents them as
cocky assholes, but we have not scratched too far beneath the veneer before we
reinterpret what we’ve seen to conclude that they are, if nothing
else, highly competent professionals whose skill in orchestrating and
directing each aspect of the ritual is vital to its success. And they are
two very frightened men. Really, imagine the incredible pressure inherent
in the job. In terms of CEO pay, if these guys are executive level, they
fucking earn that 200 times the amount of the least
highly paid employee at the Facility. They’re still assholes, though.
The last show to attempt anything
quite as tricky as CITW (one or two false moves and the
edifice crumbles) was, I suppose, Wes Craven's Scream, itself viewed by most as a post-modern twist on the
slasher. I love Wes Craven. His ability to reinvent himself through
consistently developing good ideas that resonate with the prevailing culture in
at least three different decades is as uncanny as it is ultimately profitable
to the studios that trust him. I think we could even say CITW is something of an elaboration upon
the ideas elucidated within his New
Nightmare in the
sense that he posits a real and frightening actuality behind what we horror
fans look upon as just plain fun.
Much has been said regarding how
the movie works as a loving homage to and a subversive critique of the horror
genre. How exactly the film works as this nifty hybrid is another
story, and I still have a host of unanswered questions that bugged me,
mostly in a good way, about the movie:
- Are the monsters real or facsimiles, cloned, robotic, what?
- How are potential employees of the Facility introduced to its purpose and the horrible truth it conceals from the rest of us? What if they decline the job after it's offered?
- How exactly did the sacrificial system develop over time and what might have been earlier
- scenarios and victim archetypes?
- Just how does the movie within a movie work? Are horror tropes (literary or otherwise)
- borrowed from the reality of the sacrificial system, or is the converse true?
- What exactly do they do the other 364 days out of the year?
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