By late 2011, deconstructing horror movies was fairly old hat thanks to the efforts of four Scream movies and any other fright flick that fancied flinging a little meta in their plots. However, while the genre always benefits from a spot of gentle ribbing, even the astute observations of Kevin Williamson’s slasher knowledge had to shield its eyes from the blinding, self referential glow of Drew Goddard’s addictively fun Cabin In The Woods. While Williamson, West Craven and Ghostface simultaneously roasted and embraced the proclivities of the slasher film, the team of Goddard and writer Joss Whedon aimed their sights at virtually every trope the horror genre had to offer.
The result is a witty, genre blowout that really doesn’t get the modern mentions it really deserves, as it mocks/celebrates dozens of familiar tropes while refaming it all in various, ingenious ways. And on top of all that, it also doles out one of the most genuinely fantastic, crowd pleasing third acts the decade had ever seen.
Stop me if you heard this before… five college students decide to spend their weekend fooling around at a remote cabin in the woods that a relative has recently purchased. Leading the group is Curt Vaughan, a strapping athlete who also exercises his brain as much as his cardio, and going with him is girlfriend, Jules, stoner Marty and friends Dana and Holden. On their way to the titular woodland residence, they experience the sort of things anyone who has watched a horror flick would be fairly familiar with, but after negotiating their way past narrow mountain roads, creepy store owners and an expansive collection of strange nick-nacks the cabin contains, the quintet settle in nicely, blissfully unaware that they are being watched….
If for some reason you haven’t actually seen Cabin In The Woods, it’s about here that you should really stop reading this review and get around to watching it (why on earth are you reading this if you haven’t seen it? Gwan, get the fuck outta here!), because while the college kids get on with their night, we keep cutting back to a pair of men in shirts and ties who seem to be technicians in some secret, underground facility. These guys are Gary Sitterson and Steve Hadley and they’re about to embark on possibly the most important night of year as they – and the various other departments who answer to them – are gearing up for something desperately important. Like, end of the world important.
As the night goes on, it seems that the guys in the secret bunker are manipulating the five kids at the cabin, using various chemicals and pheromones pumped into the air to make them not only more susceptible, but to alter their personalities become more generalised. Curt becomes more alpha male, Jules becomes more promiscuous, Dana becomes more virginal – and so on. But when they discover a cellar filled with more creepy looking collectables than Ed and Lorraine Warren’s spare room, they unleash an undead evil that tries to kills them. But according to Gary and Steve, everything is going to plan… huh?
So, while screaming “spoiler alert” at you over a film that was released fifteen years ago may sound like closing the door while the horse (or killer unicorn) has bolted, Cabin In The Woods is truly one of those film is that simply fucking soars if you go in blind as a bat. However, it’s also one of those movies that – after it’s blown your socks off the first time round – is even better the second time as you truly get to settle in and watch that meta humour take playful potshots at every textbook horror trope you’ve ever seen. The big trick here is that everything that Curt, Jules, Dana, Holden and Marty are going through has been engineered by some secret society to perform some sinister, annual blood ritual that demands the sacrifice of a bunch of innocents.
As we go through the film Whedon’s script drip feeds you information in order to gradually explain why we keep cutting from kids stuck in a very Evil Dead-esque scenario, to seemingly unrelated scenes involving two middle-aged desk riders who engage in amusing office politics at work. Of course, we soon discover that the gag is that this secret facility is attempting to maneuver the oblivious youths into releasing some sort of evil in order to facilitate their own sacrifice, but as it goes, it artfully uses this plot to amusingly skewer many infamous aspects of the genre. Chemicals pumped into the air not only makes the victims become living genre archetypes, but it also makes them dumb enough to make them want to split up or investigate strange noises. Similarly, the game is rigged to the points where hidden electrodes shock people into dropping weapons and doors will lock at will to seal people off.
However, while all this playing around with overused motifs proves to give the younger cast (including a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth) and our sense of humour a vigorous workout, it’s the bits set in the secret facility that actually takes Cabin In The Woods above and beyond. While the teens fight for their lives, both Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford engage in magnificent office-based humour as they have conversations concerning wrangling supernatural creatures or even betting on what entity will eventually be chosen. All the whip-smart, Evil Dead coded horror stuff is good, but the office stuff is fucking exemplary. But while watching the team of Jenkins and Whitford piss off jobsworth doomsayers over the phone, or lament that no victims have ever selected the Merman, Cabin In The Woods has one last gear shift to play – and it’s a godamn doozy.
After Kristen Connolly’s Dana and Fran Kranz’s Shaggy-esque Marty (Scooby-Doo, not Mr. Lover Man) manage to find a way behind the curtain, we find that the facility has a whole bunch of monsters kept in storage that resemble various familiar characters. There’s giant snakes, killer clowns, werewolves, silent masked murderers, soul-stealing ghosts, bladed robots, leech-faced ballerinas, a dude that looks suspiciously like a Hellraiser Cenobite, a unicorn (?) and – at last – a slithering Merman that blows blood out of its blow hole; and once the movie let’s them loose, it goes from being a horror literate comedy, to becoming one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. Add to this a Sigourney Weaver cameo and a darkly hilarious downbeat ending, and you have something of a near-perfect horror stew. One viewing of the film simply is not enough, and not only does repeat viewings allow you soak in all the gory details you may have been missing, but watching the film once you already know what’s happening add yet another layer of fun to the meta madness.
Taking the horror-knowledgeable wit of Scream and expanding it beyond anything we’ve seen before, Cabin In The Woods may sometimes feel like low hanging fruit during its earlier scenes, but once it gets up to speed, it’s a meta-locomotive that just piles on one crowd pleasing moment after another. Taking horror to epic proportions doesn’t always work for the genre, but a trip to this cabin provides an absolute monster mash of gargantuan proportions.
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