Film review: The Cabin in the Woods (15)

It’s an impulse that can be put to playful use in genre cinema to revitalise tired tropes in postmodern, self-referential ways. As with everything else in movies, though, it’s also an impulse that’s rife for abuse by profit-hungry studios looking for a way to bleed more money out of the same concept.

Thanks to its exploitation roots, horror has proved particularly susceptible to the latter. The success of Scream, for instance, quickly spawned a series of increasingly lazy, genre-dissecting sequels whose self-congratulatory efforts to make horror ironic not only obscured what was actually subversive about the films (the presence of an indestructible heroine rather an indestructible killer) but also inspired the redundant Scary Movie spoofs. Thus, what began as a reasonably clever attempt to revitalise the American horror movie soon devolved into a tired subgenre in its own right. The slasher film, meanwhile, was reset to its default position both by a new generation of fanboy filmmakers determined to pay slavish tribute to the plasma-drenched video nasties they grew up devouring in the 1970s and 1980s, and the studios that began raiding their vaults and remaking those exact same movies for a new generation whose first exposure to gore was, irony of ironies, through the Scream films. Which is roughly where The Cabin in the Woods comes in.

Co-written and produced by pop culture maverick Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and director of the forthcoming superhero juggernaut Avengers Assemble), and directed by fellow co-writer Drew Goddard (who got his start writing for Whedon’s TV shows before moving on to JJ Abrams’ stable via Lost and the screenplay for Cloverfield), it’s a film that takes the whole exhausted genre, makes a virtue of both its limitations and our familiarity with them, and manages to unleash horror’s potential as the ultimate forum for crazy-as-a-loon storytelling.

It’s this last aspect that helps distinguish it from other meta-movies. The Cabin in the Woods doesn’t pull back the curtain on the mechanics of horror so it can pat itself on the back for being the umpteenth movie to point out how derivative all horror has become. It does it to welcome audiences into its world in order to take them on the kind of anything-can-happen roller-coaster ride horror frequently promises but rarely provides.

Discovering the exact nature of that ride is, of course, one of the chief pleasures the film has to offer, though it’s important to keep in mind that reviews and social media reports urging audiences to avoid any spoilers are in danger of hyping the twists to a level of expectation no film can possibly sustain. The Cabin in the Woods is not mind-blowing in the sense that it will redefine the way you look at horror or change the way it’s made in the future.

What it does do is craft an engaging, deliriously entertaining story that comments in amusing ways on the importance horror stories have always had in our culture without ripping us out of the action or requiring an intricate knowledge of horror to appreciate what it’s attempting. Not that old-school fans won’t get a kick out of the nods to Evil Dead 2, Hellraiser and the many others conjured by a deliberately hoary premise that strands five horror stereotypes in the titular location and revels in showing us bad things happening to them. But the point is that the film doesn’t discriminate against its audience on the basis of geek credentials: its understanding of the way all forms of horror have become ingrained in western pop culture ensures it’s just as welcoming of casual cinemagoers – not to mention younger horror fans coming to this via the likes of Saw and Cabin Fever – as it is seasoned aficionados.

Its success here is partly down to the care Whedon and Goddard have taken to create sympathetic characters. Played by the relatively unknown Kristen Connolly, Anna Hutchison, Jesse Williams and Fran Kranz, as well as Thor’s Chris Hemsworth, their awkwardness in conforming to type plays into the film’s mischievous mood. As does the way Whedon and Goddard have successfully engineered a multilayered story that can jack-knife from one reality to another without cheating viewers. Indeed, even when they’re slyly acknowledging that they’re messing with the parameters of the movie – via a parallel plot featuring Richard Jenkins and The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford as hellion government bureaucrats – the foundations for every twist and turn are laid far in advance.

It’s this kind of attention to detail, this drive to deliver on the fundamentals, that makes The Cabin in the Woods seem special. It’s a love letter to horror made by talented fans who are clearly head-over-heels.

The Cabin in the Woods (15)

Directed by: Drew Goddard

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz

Rating: ****