Cabin in the Woods - it's horror: Buffy style

I've known about this film for a good while now but it has taken me an age to watch the thing. Given that the script was co-written by Joss Whedon I'm amazed it took me so long, normally I'd be all over anything he or the Buffy writing staff generate. Though I still haven't watched Dollhouse, so maybe that's not quite true. Be this as it may, on Friday I finally watched Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard's take on this classic horror trope. You don't have to be a fan of horror to be aware of what I'm talking about. The classic set up is thus: a group of middle class American teenagers drive off into the woods / mountains / wilderness anticipating a fun weekend of inebriation and limited inhibitions. On the way they are warned about some non-specific danger by a weird yokel type but they carry on anyway and eventually encounter some sort of generic evil monster type thing. This is the plot of countless studio productions like Cabin Fever or Evil Dead as well as classic B-movie stuff like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a whole host more.

100% of this happens in Cabin in the Woods. But Joss Whedon made his name by taking the horror genre in a skewed direction, and he and Goddard keep that up here. The film opens with a couple of men in white coats walking through a research facility having a conversation about some kind of generic experiment and generally shooting the shit. One of these guys is Bradley Whitford (that's Josh from West Wing to you) and so I'm immediately interested but thinking - isn't this a horror film? Then the action freezes and the title of the film flashes up on the screen in huge letters and a blood red font; cut to a group of sexy carefree teenagers preparing for their big trip. This scene sets the film up perfectly, it's a tongue-in-cheek cheesy opening that lets us know we're in for a horror film with a huge dollop of Wheedon-esque wit. The teenagers drive up to the cabin having the standard weird encounter with a local along the way and encountering something even stranger as they approach the cabin itself. They then start to get drunk and 'discover' that the cabin they're staying in has a mysterious basement filled with a cornucopia of mystical gizmos and ancient inscriptions in Latin. Who knows what evil they might stumble across while rifling through this junk? Who knows what horrors they might unwittingly unleash from all this surprisingly-convenient paraphernalia?

When Joss Whedon has done horror in the past he has done it in a funny, witty and sometimes bafflingly simple way. If the boogey man really existed, doesn't it make sense that The Man would be doing tests on it?  Season 4 of Buffy anyone? Such is Cabin in the Woods. The film is scattered with appearances from actors who were Buffy / Angel staples and also stars Chris Hemmsworth who has since gone on to play Thor in the Marvel comics film adaptations. The effects are cheesy but they're obviously like that deliberately, with the emphasis on the story and the comic unreality of what's going on. The overall visual style is to make the film feel like an darkly humorous feature length episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with 'they always come back' and a superbly zany turn of events for the final act.

Fans of Wheedon's work should love Cabin in the Woods (I am and I did). Fans of the horror films should enjoy the comic deconstruction of the fallacies of the genre's common tropes. Normal people should also enjoy the film for what it is, funny and jumpy in all the right places. It's not a particularly frightening watch (only a 15) and the blood and gore that you do see is clearly over-egged to the point of deliberate unrealism. Almost all of the gory bits happen off camera, are implied or are so cheesy as to defy anyone being frightened of them.

In conclusion, Cabin in the Woods is yet another brilliant production from the creative geniuses behind Buffy - directed by Drew Goddard though this time rather than Wheedon. They're going to have to slow down or they'll run out of ideas soon.