‘The Cabin in the Woods’

Director: Drew Goddard

Cast: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz

Release Date: April 13

4.5/5 popcorns

There’s a mythical air surrounding ‘The Cabin in the Woods.’

Part of this comes from its screenwriters Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, considered forefathers of today’s geek culture. After all, Whedon created ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and Goddard worked on ‘Lost.’ Who better to subvert the scary movie genre than these two?

The other part comes from the movie itself. Touted as another typical teen slasher, ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ is anything but typical. Credit goes to the movie’s marketing department for masking this movie – Goddard’s directorial debut – as mindless torture porn like ‘Saw’ rather than the subversive horror study it secretly is.

The best way to understand and absorb ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ is walking into it blindly. Anyone familiar with work by Whedon or Goddard knows the value of avoiding spoilers and preserving the experience. With a quick 90-minute runtime and plot twists left and right, it’s hard to discuss the movie without giving too much away. The less theatergoers know, the better.

The trailers and posters all boast the same tagline: You think you know the story. It wouldn’t ruin anything, however, to say the movie starts with a traditional setup. It follows five college students on a weekend trip to the titular cabin, a destination so remote that it’s ‘unworthy of global positioning.’

These characters aren’t remarkable departures from their scary movie predecessors. In fact, the movie bypasses character development altogether for the sake of molding them into classic stereotypes instead: the whore, the athlete, the fool, the nerd and the virgin. It’s frustrating and usually the mark of a lesser movie, but these archetypal portrayals have massive payoff.

Within the first 30 minutes, the audience follows their RV through every standard horror setting imaginable: an abandoned gasoline station straight out of ‘Deliverance’; an isolated mountain pass reminiscent of ‘The Evil Dead’; and the eponymous cabin that might as well be pulled directly from ‘Friday the 13th’– eerie lake and all.

As expected, things take a turn for the worse.

The trailers divulge one of the movie’s key but not entirely unexpected elements: They aren’t alone. The cabin is under the watchful supervision of two middle-aged researchers working in a far-off laboratory. They’re capable of adjusting everything in the woods, from moonlight brightness to pheromone levels. Any other movie would save this plot point for its big reveal, but Whedon and Goddard throw it into the first frame. After all, you think you know the story.

But ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ is actually a very funny movie. Make no mistake; this is a scary movie through and through, but there are enough inside jokes and jabs at slasher movie clichs for die-hard horror fans to appreciate. After all, why not walk into a creepy basement? Why not have sex in the middle of the woods?

In Whedon and Goddard’s hands, this is both a love and hate letter to the scary movie, a genre that has practically collapsed under the weight of self-awareness and endless spoofing. But not since 1996’s ‘Scream’ has a self-proclaimed horror movie dissected the genre so effortlessly. Rather than embracing the usual scare tactics, the movie collects these tropes to deconstruct them.

Even the title is about as classic as it gets: Fear of isolation and things that go bump in the night still ring true today. ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ is a self-aware exploration of what it means to be a scary movie. And infused with Whedon and Goddard’s cheeky wit, it’s the first scary movie in a long while worth watching.

dataroy@syr.edu

Published on April 18, 2012 at 12:00 pm