A Look Back At THE CABIN IN THE WOODS: Overturning Horror Plot Devices

 “The horror genre gets (us) in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives (us) this chance to … reflect on who we are and look at the … uglier side that we don’t always look at, and have fun with that very thing.”

—Drew Goddard (IMDb)

I may be a little late to the party (by about four or five years) but for those of you who have not yet seen Drew Goddard (writer and director) and Joss Whedon’s (writer and producer) The Cabin In The Woods be forewarned, this article contains spoilers.

If you are unfamiliar with Whedon and Goddard’s previous work, suffice to say that Joss Whedon is the creative force behind a few shows you may have heard of, namely, the much beloved Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the short-lived but fiercely worshipped series, Firefly, and director of Marvel’s first two Avengers movies (just to name a few), and Drew Goddard, who cut his creative teeth on Buffy,  is one of the Lost writers and is currently a producer and writer on the Daredevil series, as well as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter for Sir Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

Now, ordinarily, I would be at the front of the queue to see a project by the man who gave us Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but somehow Cabin managed to slip through the phosphorescent cracks in my radar. Fortunately, while in the midst of researching anthology films, Goddard and Whedon’s meta-genre-film popped back onto my faulty radar, and I’ve been kicking myself (rather gleefully) ever since.

Strictly speaking, Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin In The Woods is not an anthology film, but the framework of multiple-choice horror scenarios upon which its story is constructed has the makings of one. The movie’s meta-fictional concept of a horror film — teenagers traumatized by evil forces deep in the woods — tucked within the confines of a sci-fi thriller — scientists and technicians manipulating the victimization of said teenagers — is just a hint of the fun that the writers were having while playing with the usual audience expectations that accompany the genre of horror films.

Whedon and Goddard locked themselves away in a creative tryst as they co-wrote Cabin, and when they emerged, they held between them this hell-spawn of inspired lunacy auto-asphyxiating on its own umbilical cord of dark hilarity. It was not an easy transition to take it from the page to the screen, but in the realm of horror, the messier and bloodier, the better.

How much is that monster in the window?

As the plot thickens and the bodily fluids coagulate, Goddard and Whedon turn well-worn plot devices on their collective heads. Whether or not those heads will remain attached to the shoulders they began the story with —well, that would be telling. However, one can tell that the writers had one whiz-bang of a time subverting story elements, especially when it came to the not so young and not quite so innocent being tortured and killed in the name of mass entertainment.

The rotating menagerie of monsters was a particularly brilliant stroke of narrative construction as the audience, along with the crew within the movie, wait to see which horrors will ascend to undo the latest cohort of drugged and hyper-sexualized victims. The technicians have been stacking the deck of possible outcomes by pumping the cabin’s environment full of chemicals that increase the libido while decreasing IQ points.

Since this movie was conceived by two writers who are experienced with the structure of episodic storytelling, its story is a conceit that this reviewer wishes they had adapted to a series, if only to give more scream time to the monsters and boogey “men” that await their turns inside each cuboid of horror. No strangers to the tropes and myths of the horror genre, the filmmakers have built a tale whose blueprint was drafted from the skeletons of dozens (if not hundreds) of horror stories that preceded their own.

The layers at play in their movie are worth noting, especially the fact that the grown-ups in the control room are cogs in an entertainment machine that hails from a cynical, results-driven, adult world. These technicians (metaphorical stand-ins for the writers and production team) monitor and control events inflicted upon an ensemble of college-aged victims, while providing a societal subtext,  an us-versus-them conflict of which the film’s writers appear to be implying.

Behaving with the nonchalance and sunny disposition of a bully poised above an ant-hill with his (or her) magnifying glass, it is as though the working-class techies are punishing the unwitting “teenagers” simply for being what they can no longer be: young and filled with a naive optimism for a future that doesn’t yet include the drudgery of baby-proofing drawers and cabinets. Perhaps I’m projecting a passive-aggressive subtext that isn’t there, but that’s the nature (and beauty) of storytelling: who is to say that hostility isn’t lurking beneath the surface of a work-force whose very job description enables the torture and murder of others?

What happens in the basement never stays in the basement

Whedon and Goddard delve a little deeper into the universal mythology of horror films with the utilization of the cabin’s basement as the gathering of totems and talismans that will predicate the force(s) of opposition against which the protagonists will have to do battle. This is a brilliant plot device that taps directly into the roots of horror: fear of the unknown that plumbs straight down into the depths of the human psyche. The filmmakers give an architectural wink to the audience as the technicians, scientists and engineers of our protagonists’ fate take bets as to which monster (manifestation of the id) will be unwittingly summoned to become the  group’s mortal undoing.

Keeping in mind that the film’s ending raises the stakes as high as they can possibly go, I  am still somewhat skeptical about the ultimate explanation, the raison d’être for the elaborate machinations which have been constructed to ensnare the ensemble cast of nubile victims. And not even the cameo appearance of Sigourney Weaver as “the director” helps to wash down that bitter pill of exposition (well, she may have helped a little) about an ancient race of giants which require continual blood sacrifices to remain sated and submerged in the bowels of the earth.

It is, however, an allegory which reaches back to Greek Mythology, mirroring the Titans’ imprisonment by Zeus and the new gods. I suspect that Whedon and Goddard wanted to end with a tabula rasa at the conclusion of their movie as a way to free them from any contractual obligation to return for a sequel, but lame plot device or not, the conceit of the buried giants does up the ante—the very survival of humanity itself is at stake.

That being said, I tend to prefer the earlier supposition for televised torture, dismemberment and death as a modern gambit for attracting viewers in the increasingly dissipated world of episodic programming. The subsequent bloodbath that ensues after the monsters are purged from their containers is highly entertaining and one supposes that the ancient gods truly are particular about whose blood gets spilled (and in which order) on their behalf — a fact which figures in Ms. Weaver’s expository dialogue. Either that or the architects and engineers of the subterranean facility neglected to see the need for blood-gutters that could feed directly into the lair of the ancient ones.

Conclusion

The fact that I was actually lamenting the loss of each character was a testament to the movie’s casting as well as its writing and directing; it was a smart maneuver to utilize actors whose personalities preceded them. I was pulling for Richard Jenkins’ (Six Feet Under) cooly sadistic Sitterson and Bradley Whitford’s (The West Wing) jaded Hadley to survive just as much as I was for Fran Kranz’s stoner-friendly Marty, or Kristen Connolly’s semi-virginal Dana, or even Chris Hemsworth’s pre-Asgardian Curt.

Ultimately, Cabin understands the need for both terror and humor in a horror movie.  It is that tongue-being-torn-out-of-cheek nod to ingrained traditions within the genre, and the mischievous turning of the tables and the screws that hold said tables together that makes Cabin deliriously fun to watch as victimizers suddenly become the victimized, and the monsters wreak havoc in the goriest free for all this side of Peter Jackson’s 1992 horror classic, Dead Alive.

Before dropping the dismembered hand that holds the microphone, I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention two of my favorite lines from The Cabin In The Woods: “How hard is it to kill nine-year olds?” And “Good work, zombie arm!”

Would you want to see a sequel to Cabin In The Woods, or would the studio be beating a dead (albeit reanimated) horse? Do you feel humor has a place in horror?  There are more than a few memorable snippets of dialogue from The Cabin In The Woods — What would your favorite line(s) be?