The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Directed by Drew Goddard
Five friends set out for a weekend at a remote cabin in the woods, expecting nothing more than fun and relaxation. As night falls, they discover that something far more unsettling is at work and that nothing about their getaway is what it seems.
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There are clear parallels (and homages) to The Evil Dead and, well, let's just say other '80s horror films.
Can you say "The Evil Dead" rip-off?
It references slasher classics such as “The Evil Dead” and “Hellraiser” and plays corny cliches like a fiddle.
The Cabin is, as you'd expect, crammed to the rafters with genre references, among them The Shining, The Evil Dead, Cube, Hellraiser, The Blair Witch Project, the 1950s EC horror comics, Japanese horror (there's a delirious running gag about weird happenings in Kyoto), H P Lovecraft, even Michael Haneke's high-minded chiller-as-treatise Funny Games.
“Cabin” consciously evokes “The Evil Dead” as five college students gather to drive in their RV to a remote (i.e., scary) cabin.
Fans of rip-roaring horror films like “The Evil Dead” will have a field day with this ingenious sendup, which Joss Whedon—the mastermind behind the TV cult classics “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly”—produced and co-wrote with the director, Drew Goddard.
There's a little Sam Raimi here (more Evil Dead II or Army of Darkness than the straightforward Evil Dead ).
(He has the aid of veteran cinematographer Peter Deming, who shot “Drag Me to Hell,” “Evil Dead II,” “Mulholland Drive” and three of the four “Scream” films.)
But ultimately, for all the outstanding gags dotting the whole picture, it's not a satire of horror as a whole genre, but of a very specific horror movie that doesn't necessarily exist outside of Whedon and Goddard's minds (the best we can say is that it's a parody of The Evil Dead, but that doesn't feel like what they're gunning for, and if they were, Evil Dead II already did it better).
There's a little Sam Raimi here (more Evil Dead II or Army of Darkness than the straightforward Evil Dead ).
The Cabin in the Woods is a modern-day Army of Darkness .
Drag Me to Hell , to name drop yet another Sam Raimi movie, makes us constantly aware of what we're doing by watching this horror movie right now, The Cabin in the Woods makes us aware of what we're doing when we're watching those horror movies other than this one.
Making his directing debut with “Cabin,” Goddard, cinematographer Peter Deming (“Drag Me to Hell”) and production designer Martin Whist (“Super 8") have packed the dark shadows and tight spaces of the cabin world with countless nostalgic touches — if you can call weird porcelain dolls, rusted chains and rows of knives nostalgic.
(He has the aid of veteran cinematographer Peter Deming, who shot “Drag Me to Hell,” “Evil Dead II,” “Mulholland Drive” and three of the four “Scream” films.)
Atmospherically photographed by Peter Deming (his films include Mulholland Drive , Screams , Drag Me to Hell ), this directorial debut by the author of Cloverfield is a forceful, funny, frightening and ingenious horror flick.
Goddard has a good understanding of the genre, just as Raimi exhibited in Drag Me to Hell.
Horror fans will dig the references and the numerous subversions, which recall the intelligence of Wes Craven’s original Scream and then some, while even the more meek among you can’t fail to be impressed at how this keeps you guessing.
The premise isn't that original, harkening back to other self-referential films like Scream , (a friend also reminded me of one 1988 horror film in particular that has a strikingly similar plot), but the execution is satisfying, and the last 15 minutes or so are just about enough to make any horror fan worth his/her salt squee in delight.
Like its spiritual heirs - the "Scream" franchise, Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever" and the collected works of Sam Raimi - "The Cabin in the Woods" comes not only to praise the slasher-, zombie- and gore-fests of yore but to critique them, elaborating on their grammatical elements and archetypal figures even while searching for ways to put them to novel use.
Whedon has a distinctively snarky, smart-alecky writing style that has earned him legions of fans, and it is certainly on display here: the dialogue is full of knowing, sarcastic asides, and an aggressive pop culture awareness that recalls Scream.
It's a witty deconstruction of fantasy genres in the post-modern Scream vein and a weirdly wonderful twist on the whole Evil Dead scenario that ensures continual surprises.
"The Cabin in the Woods" is fun and meta-aware, but hardly original - it's like the Scooby Doo group entered an Evil Dead/Chainsaw mashup via The Truman Show and "Scream" already ran with the concept.
…this, in and of itself, is nothing particularly new for a horror film--Wes Craven has repeatedly utilized such self-reflexive motifs in films like "Wes Craven's New Nightmare," "Shocker" and, of course, the "Scream" series--but it has rarely been done with the kind of style that has been used here.
It references slasher classics such as “The Evil Dead” and “Hellraiser” and plays corny cliches like a fiddle.
The Cabin is, as you'd expect, crammed to the rafters with genre references, among them The Shining, The Evil Dead, Cube, Hellraiser, The Blair Witch Project, the 1950s EC horror comics, Japanese horror (there's a delirious running gag about weird happenings in Kyoto), H P Lovecraft, even Michael Haneke's high-minded chiller-as-treatise Funny Games.
Sly reference is made to The Grudge and Hellraiser, to werewolves and zombies and fishmen and pretty much everything else known to go bump in the night.
The list of horror references in here is mind-boggling, from George Romero’s early work to The Shining , Evil Dead , Hellraiser , J-horror and all manner of others more subtle and obscure.
Along with numerous slashers and the Evil Dead series, there’s “J-Horror”, Hellraiser and gleeful nods to the duo’s previous work, both through casting (peripheral players such as Amy Acker and Tom Lenk are reassuring Whedon / Goddard regulars) and in overarching ideas - Season Four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer springs to mind as an example.
The students pick up what appear to be different horror film artifacts—a dusty diary, a Hellraiser-like puzzle, etc.—and one of those items activates a relatively scary horror scenario involving killer zombies.
It's all very much like The Truman Show (which is given a nod), and even more like The Hunger Games , which wasn't yet anything approaching a cultural phenomenon when Cabin was produced, but it still says something that of the two films from the first third of 2012 that heavily focus on a team of bloodless bureaucrats playing young people like rats in a maze in front of an infinity of cameras and with the apparent idea of producing populist entertainment, the one that is far more intelligent about its concept and more rigorous about how that concept would work in the "real" or at least real-enough world, is not the one that's making shit-tons of money.
Slowly, sneakily, Cabin has become a combination of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Truman Show .
I’ve seen a lot of rip-offs of “The Truman Show” and a lot of rip-offs of “Scream.”
As with “The Truman Show” (1998), there isn’t a sufficient amount of context and background to allow for a satisfying story to be told.
I won't spoil the film's surprises, but suffice it to say they find common ground with both The Truman Show and H.P. Lovecraft.
But there's also a hint of The Truman Show and a smidgen of The Matrix .
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It's possible to be funny and make a horror film that deconstructs itself--I'm thinking not of The Monster Squad, probably The Cabin in the Woods' closest spiritual analogue (and even as I say that, I feel bad--while Fred Dekker is an idiot, he's our idiot), but of genuine genre masterpieces like John Landis's An American Werewolf in London, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead.
It's possible to be funny and make a horror film that deconstructs itself--I'm thinking not of The Monster Squad, probably The Cabin in the Woods' closest spiritual analogue (and even as I say that, I feel bad--while Fred Dekker is an idiot, he's our idiot), but of genuine genre masterpieces like John Landis's An American Werewolf in London, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead.
The Cabin is, as you'd expect, crammed to the rafters with genre references, among them The Shining, The Evil Dead, Cube, Hellraiser, The Blair Witch Project, the 1950s EC horror comics, Japanese horror (there's a delirious running gag about weird happenings in Kyoto), H P Lovecraft, even Michael Haneke's high-minded chiller-as-treatise Funny Games.
The list of horror references in here is mind-boggling, from George Romero’s early work to The Shining , Evil Dead , Hellraiser , J-horror and all manner of others more subtle and obscure.
The references to the iconic elevator in The Shining are priceless.
From its hilarious opening sequence (complete with a reference to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," another film that dealt with the question of why audiences enjoy violent entertainments so much) to its genuinely breathtaking final image, "The Cabin in the Woods" is a keeper that will send viewers out into the streets afterwards in the throes of a cinematic contact high and the urge to tell friends who haven't yet seen it that they need to see it right that second.
The Cabin is, as you'd expect, crammed to the rafters with genre references, among them The Shining, The Evil Dead, Cube, Hellraiser, The Blair Witch Project, the 1950s EC horror comics, Japanese horror (there's a delirious running gag about weird happenings in Kyoto), H P Lovecraft, even Michael Haneke's high-minded chiller-as-treatise Funny Games.
If only the technology existed to turn the movie screen into a reflective surface - now *that* would have worked, like Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" played for actual comedy.
Because, you see, The Cabin in the Woods is the closest anyone’s ever likely to get to a lighthearted stoner version of Michael Haneke’s grueling movie about violence and voyeurism, Funny Games.
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Like its spiritual heirs - the "Scream" franchise, Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever" and the collected works of Sam Raimi - "The Cabin in the Woods" comes not only to praise the slasher-, zombie- and gore-fests of yore but to critique them, elaborating on their grammatical elements and archetypal figures even while searching for ways to put them to novel use.
The group seems fairly typical, comprised as it is of a high school jock (Chris Hemsworth), a nerd (Jesse Williams), a blonde bombshell (Anna Hutchison), a shrinking violet intellectual (Kristen Connolly) and a stoner (Fran Kranz), while the scenario seems fairly bog-standard and derivative of everyone from Sam Raimi (and The Evil Dead) to Eli Roth (and Cabin Fever).
After all the “Friday the 13th” films, the soon-to-be-rebooted “Evil Dead” films, Eli Roth’s 2002 effort “Cabin Fever” and last year’s abysmal “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil,” what is left of this let’s-get-some-young-people-into-the-woods-and-slaughter-them genre?
It's not going to reinvent the horror genre, though, but if we get any sort of attendant backlash against the likes of Hostel and the Saw series, maybe that's good enough.
The set-up is executed with a tongue-in-cheek attitude but presented with a straight face that could be off-putting for viewers who are expecting a straightforward slasher film or a “gritty” and serious scare-fest (such as The Descent or Hostel).
Are the people behind some grisly "Hostel"-like enterprise that stages real-life horror movies for the delight of rich sickos who prefer their low-rent trash entertainment to come with an exceptionally nasty edge?
What they don't realise is that this cabin is in the middle of a massive high-tech controlled reality where a whole corporate hierarchy full of drab businesspeople are engaged in creating optimal cheesy horror movie shocks and violent deaths, in what I persist in believing is a cockeyed slam on Hostel , which is also about drab businessmen blandly killing young people in a controlled environment.
“Cabin” takes to task a variety of horror films and their sequels like “Saw,” “Hostel” and “Dawn of the Dead” that have seemingly made the genre clichéd and stale.
The "Lost" writer, in his directorial debut, has an appreciation of satirical subtlety and visual excess that is reminiscent of "Robocop" director Paul Verhoeven in his prime.