THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*  

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I can understand why a lot of horror-fans like CABIN IN THE WOODS. It's written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, and the latter, in addition to being CABIN's director, wrote scripts for Whedon's signature TV shows BUFFY and ANGEL. On the face of things, CABIN looks like a lot of the 21st century's neo-slashers, focusing on the sufferings of five college-age youths in a lonely "cabin in the woods." Yet even a brief summary of the plot reveals that Whedon and Goddard are trying to undermine the usual setup of such ultraviolent scenarios, and Goddard publicly stated that he was trying to do something more than the "torture porn" seen in some modern horror films. The question, though, is whether or not they succeeded.

         

Cabin-bound are two females, Jules and Dana, and three males, Marty, Holden, and Curt (the latter played by Chris Hemsworth in the same year he first essayed Thor). The five youths are given reasonably lively characterizations, but not much more depth than the bare stereotypes one sees in any FRIDAY THE 13TH movie. Now the usual script in cabin-horror movies is that the cabin-mates all get besieged by some menace local to the vicinity: a ghost, a witch, a book filled with Sumerian demons. And the youths are indeed menaced by one particular set of menaces: a family of zombies. However, this time the menaces are just one potential peril that gets chosen, all but arbitrarily, by a secret cabal of conspirators far beneath the earth of the cabin.

  Whedon's BUFFY may have been one of the first TV shows to play around with the idea of a secret installation that collected and confined monsters, possibly influenced by 1968's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. Usually the mission of such organizations is to study monsters to nullify and/or control them. However, the men and women of this installation-- under the control of a mysterious "Director" (Sigourney Weaver) -- are actually using caged monsters to assail campers as sacrificial victims. These sacrifices of young people are meant to placate ancient Lovecraftian entities by exposing the victims to the murderous rampages of all sorts of boogiemen and boogiewomen-- killer clowns, mermen, werewolves, witches and even a giant snake.

This could have been a damn good idea for a monster-mash, a way of establishing that all the lesser, more-or-less human-sized horrors somehow owe their existence to some colossal, super-monstrous evil gods. Whedon and Goddard, though, don't exploit this idea for its full impact, because their script is too busy hauling out one joke after another, both from the collegians and from the employees of the secret installation. The collegian Marty, in fact, sounds a warmed-over Xander Harris, whom I've often suspected to be Whedon's identification-figure in BUFFY. When the writers try to sell the idea that these sacrifices are for no good reason patterned after American slasher movies, using tropes like "the virgin is the Final Girl," it's clear that the metaphor escaped the control of Whedon and Goddard, and that they just started piling on things they thought funny. 

I still rate the mythicity of CABIN as "fair" for trying something different. But most of the symbolic discourse, like the personalities of the protagonists and their enemies, is shallow. I might consider Weaver's Director (who gets into a hand-to-hand with Xander, I mean Marty) to be the main menace, since she's apparently the source of the whole project-- even though the actress is only in the movie for five minutes.