- Directed by Drew Goddard and co-written by Joss Whedon, The Cabin in the Woods evokes the Scream series of films by assuming a high degree of audience familiarity with slasher film villains and tropes. With the first Scream, this explicitly self-aware approach to horror cinema seemed fairly novel. Fifteen years later, The Cabin in the Woods dips into the same well again, but this time with even more meta-humor and self-reference. How is it possible that a movie's self-acknowledged contrivances still manage to seem so...contrived?
- Like most good (and not-so-good!) horror films, The Cabin in the Woods focuses on a group of college students (Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams) who transgress against the usual sex and drug taboos and pay the ultimate price. In this case, however, their transgressions are being monitored by a shadow agency whose job is apparently to torture and exsanguinate teenagers in painstakingly reconstructed horror movie scenarios. The two secret government employees (Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford) in charge of this operation operate primarily as amoral puppet masters, although one imagines their betting pools and office parties are designed to distract from the human pain they are both causing and meticulously observing. I suppose it goes without saying that their plans eventually go awry in the bloodiest way imaginable.
- Although the film's cast is quite strong (hi, Sigourney Weaver!) and Goddard's direction capable, The Cabin in the Woods is just too self-aware for its own good. As far as I'm concerned, the tacit agreement that the audience has with a movie is that the filmmakers pretend that their scenarios and characters actually matter while we try ignore the fact that one of the teenagers is Thor and that this rustic cabin has about 5,000 square feet of cellar floor space. Sure, it's fine for a film to toss the audience the occasional Easter egg (hi, creepy twins from The Shining!), but everybody involved has to suspend enough belief to pretend that something in the film really matters. The Cabin in the Woods knows that it does not matter and gleefully kills off all of its characters in an apocalyptic bloodbath that is far too nihilistic to be interesting. Ironically, the amusing film-within-a-film depicting Japanese schoolgirls transforming a demon into a happy frog seems more heartfelt than the main feature.
