Review: The Cabin in the Woods

Joss Whedon has a troperiffic romp over every horror movie staple he can pack into one film. Warning: Spoilers.

I’ll say it again, just in case it was missed above: This review has spoilers…but in case you clicked in here by accident, I’ll put the non-spoilery stuff first so that an accidental glance doesn’t ruin your moviegoing experience.

First things first, though: going into Cabin in the Woods, you need to know that the movie is a satire of horror movies, horror tropes, and the like. If you go in expecting a standard horror movie, you’ll probably be disappointed; if you go in knowing this, you’ll like it a lot more. This is something that the movie’s marketing had trouble carrying off, according to a number of sites…but apparently, satires are also harder to advertise for.

The movie starts out with a boilerplate horror film setup: A group of five college-age friends, consisting of the normal archetypes, are heading off to a cabin in the woods (duh!) for a weekend away from society. As they head off, though, it is made clear that this isn’t going to be an ordinary trip…but we all knew that anyway. That’s the A-Plot of the movie, and at its heart it is a purposefully standard horror movie. In a vacuum, it is set up to be nothing more than what one expects from these films…and Whedon delivers very well here, loading the film with lots and lots of horror movie staples…but at the same time, this plot is purposefully overwhelmingly your stereotypical weekend-of-terror plot. This portion of the movie stays more or less on course for the first 30-45 minutes with little more than lampshades being hung on those overused conventions.

The B-Plot, however, is where the movie delivers. The A-plot alternates with sequences at a large, advanced, and presumably underground industrial facility that is highly reminiscent of 1960s NASA, recalling to its distinctive dress style and culture. It is made very clear from early on that this weekend in the woods is being stage-managed in great detail to have a specific outcome, and that the team there has done this many, many times before.

You see, in Whedon’s work, there is a reason that horror movies pretty much all have the same plot: In so many words, there are a bunch of Really Bad Elder Gods slumbering underneath the Earth who have to be given a very specific set of sacrifices reminiscent of The Wicker Man, lest they rise and kill off humanity:

• There must be at least five victims — namely, The Whore, the Athelete, the Scholar, the Fool, and the Virgin.

• The victims have to have been warned by a “Harbinger” (i.e. the creepy guy at the gas station/general store) about something kooky at their vacation spot and chosen to continue.

• They have to pick an artifact and use it to trigger a horror of some sort. In the words of one of the B-plot bureaucrats, if they fail to “transgress”, or activate one of the artifacts, they’ll be safe.

• The Whore must die first, then the non-Virgin others. Once the Virgin is the last one of the five alive, she may or may not be killed; her death is an “optional extra”, so to speak.

• This must all be complete by sunup of the following day, or the world will be destroyed.

This is done in several countries around the world every year; Japan is the best at this, followed by the US, with a number of other countries trailing. Each carries out different sets of these rituals, all more or less aligning with their culture’s horror film types. At one point, it is made clear that there is some flexibility within the requirements, though how much there actually is isn’t.

The brilliance of the film is not just in either plot, but in how they interact: For example, The Harbinger calls the underground facility to announce in very arcane words that the victims are on their way…and gets put on speaker phone, to his outrage. As evening falls, there is an office betting pool for which horror is going to be triggered. Some options of them are absurdly specific: One horror is “Redneck Pain-Worshipping Zombie Family”, versus just “Zombies”, another option on the list. The standard sex scenes and questionable behaviors of horror films (splitting up, for example) are induced through the use of pheremones. Once the staff have been informed that the first four are dead, the stereotypical Final Girl fight is shown taking place behind a classic rock-soundtracked office party.

Unfortunately for humanity as a whole, things don’t go according to plan: One of the characters thought dead actually survived off-screen, sending the A-Plot crashing right into the B-Plot as the survivors get loose of their trap and race through the underground facility, encountering dozens of rooms of classic movie monster archetypes “in storage”, ranging from wraiths to the aforementioned zombies to mermen (to dozens of others). And all of this occurs as every other country also sees their ritual derailed by uncooperative participants (with a group of Japanese schoolgirls banishing an Asian-style ghost into a frog).

Whedon pulls the movie off brilliantly, mocking not only numerous overused horror film tropes (the guy at the gas station being a plant, for example) but also the audiences for those tropes (as audible groans of disappointment are heard in the control room when a traditionally revealing scene fails to develop on cue, or as the “mission accomplished” party plays out to the backdrop of a brutal attack on one of the characters). The audience is served a wonderful comeuppance by proxy in the end as the survivors trigger a “system purge”, releasing all of the monsters into the facility and triggering a darkly comic mishmash of attacks involving every sort of horror villain that you can imagine, as ghosts, mutants, and swamp creatures easily overwhelm the facility’s security.

As a satire of the horror genre, Cabin in the Woods is quite possibly the best I’ve seen; as a satire of a genre, it probably ranks up there alongside Airplane’s skewering of 1970s disaster movies. The overwhelmingly positive reviews include 92% positive on Rotten Tomatoes and an average score of 72 on Metacritic, making it among the most positively-recieved films currently in theaters — a well-deserved reception. The movie will inevitably lose some viewers with its subject matter; if you’ve never seen a horror movie, you may have trouble getting into it. That said, if you’ve seen a few horror flicks in your time, then Cabin in the Woods is a real treat.