If you go down to The Cabin in the Woods today you can be sure of very little in the surprise department and an insufferably dreary time of it. It’s a comic horror film and although I do not like horror, comic or otherwise, it’s the only major release this week, so I felt compelled. Also, the website www.rottentomatoes.com, which aggregates film reviews, had given it a 95 per cent approval rating based on critics calling it both ‘hilarious’ and ‘frightening’ and ‘a game-changer’ even though it is none of those things. Still, at least it does go to prove what I have said all along: I am the only one you can ever trust, and the only one you should trust. Now, although I don’t have much else to say, look from here to the bottom of this column. It is full of words, right? This is my genius, and my gift to you.
Directed by Drew Goddard (a writer from Buffy and Lost) who co-wrote it with Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy), this story-within-a-story is about five young people who clamber into their SUV and, indeed, head to a remote cabin in the woods for the weekend. The boys are Chris Hemsworth (Curt), Jesse Williams (Holden) and Fran Kranz (Marty) while the girls are Anna Hutchison (Jules) and Kristen Connolly (Dana) and, naturally, the girls are hot, because who cares if a homely girl is terrorised? This can never be of interest. Homely girls only ever terrorise, as in Misery. (For more information on this subject I would direct you to my seminal thesis — ‘Hot Girls as Horror Victims, with Particular Reference to Slasher Films’ — had I ever bothered to write it.)
And the story outside the story? As quickly becomes apparent, the cabin and its surrounding land, which is wooded, as it happens, is an artificial environment controlled from a high-tech underground lab by two corporate-style workers (Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford) who mastermind the action and take bets on how long until these sacrificial lambs meet their slaughter. Once we know this all the characters, as characters, are dead-meat, not that they had much character beforehand.
Anyway, back to the cabin where the young people do what young people do — i.e. make out — until the cellar door blows open with a loud thud. ‘It’s the wind,’ says Marty, who is a stoner, and talks like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, and has about as much charm. The five traipse down to the cellar where they find all sorts of spooky objects plus a girl’s diary from 1903 detailing the bloody, butchering religious fanaticism of her father. A Latin inscription, once read, triggers pandemonium as red-necked zombies emerge from the ground, swinging knives and steel claws and bear traps, and a little girl in a nightdress with a blank face wanders around, and from here on in the carnage is not only routine but also does not scare.
I know it does not scare because I was not scared and if it did scare I would know it, because I am always the first to scare. When I saw Paranormal Activity, didn’t I actually only see 4 per cent of it, because for 96 per cent of the time I was too scared to look anywhere other than my lap? Eventually, two of the cabin survivors turn the tables on their tormentors and unleash all manner of deadly creatures and freaks — werewolves. giant snakes, monsters etc. — but it is all very Doctor Who-ish. And as for the comedy, where, where, where?
This is, I know, a self-aware film: its clichés are parodies of horror clichés generally, but to subvert a form, it should, first and foremost, work as an entertainment, and it most surely does not. I don’t think it’s because I don’t know enough about the genre. I got Scream, didn’t I? And as for the one surprise — a cameo at the end from someone who may or may not be Sigourney Weaver; I’ll leave you guessing — it’s purely so they have someone to blather on about ‘appeasing the ancients’ while pretending the plot, which is a tortuous mess, makes any sense at all.
And now, look! I have filled this space with words, and we have made it to the end. This is my genius, and gift to you.
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