Cabin in the Woods

Cabin in the Woods (2012)


Director: Drew Goddard


Cast: Kristen Connoly, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Chris Hemsworth

**(The following review contains spoilers throughout)**

Cabin in the Woods features a scene where one of the female characters, Jules (Anna Hutchison) is dared to make out with the walled, taxidermied head of a snarling, ferocious wolf. Unexpectedly, she dives into the challenge, seducing and then sensually licking the inside of the mouth and teeth of the stationary bust.

This ridiculous and disturbing scene is one of many arbitrary interludes that help to contribute the sense of anything-goes, a general feeling that pervades throughout this hilarious and insane genre melding of classic horror shtick, governmental conspiracy, and ancient occult fanaticism. 

The film begins with two middle-age bureaucratic workers ( Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) chatting casually over coffee in a high security facility.  They are preparing for an operation that remains a secret  to the audience until the last third of the movie. All we know is that we are competing with the Japanese, and that much is at stake if the project goes bust. The title of the film is blasted across the screen of these two men's sterile environment, a display intrinsically opposed to audience conception of the milieu of a "cabin in the woods."

Cut to our heroine Dana (Kristen Connolly) in her undies, preparing for a weekend get-away to aforementioned cabin with four other college students-- hottie Dana, hunky Curt (Chris Hemsworth), stoner Marty (Fran Kranz), and demure new guy Holden (Jesse Williams). They head out for the cabin and their journey is interrupted and their scenes spliced with the white-collar happenings of the "puppeteers", the government workers who infiltrate and engineer their inevitable deadly and gory fates.

Once the horror begins, with a spike through the hand nonetheless, what follows is an incessantly entertaining phantasmagoria of 19th century zombies wielding iron farm tools, deadly electric nets, and a rubric of rotating cubes all housing every conceivable monster known to man. An interesting concept by itself, Goddard actively choose to hold nothing back and mercilessly unleashes every worst fear onto its characters. It comes as no surprise,then, that in the final scene, the "real" monsters are unleashed as well, ancient underground gods that will cause the suffering of every human being on earth because they were not satiated.

Cabin in the Woods is so self-aware, so tongue-in-cheek, and so thoroughly creative that it begs to answer the question of whether we have entered a new era of horror-- one that sets the bar high for the survival of the fittest writers and directors as far as sheer originality goes. If this movie can feature a scene where dozens of elevators are opened at once and a heavily armed SWAT team is devoured by every horror creature from dozens of past classic films, where does that leave audience imagination?  How are we to be frightened by being eaten by one monster, when we have a film that features all? 

It is evident that this movie was greatly motivated by copious amounts of weed smoking, both in its construction (the ancient sacrifice must involve the death of the five figures of "whore", "athlete", "scholar", "fool", and "virigin, classic horror tropes), and how the central, uncharacteristic hero is fool/stoner Marty, who becomes impervious to government mechanics because of "all the shit he smokes". Regardless, Cabin in the Woods is a wonderful exercise in how we should never hold back our craziest cinematic ideas, and how to, more basically, write a fantastic fucking screenplay. 

B+