Horror Movie of the Year 2012 - The Cabin In The Woods

Let me stop you right here. This post is going to be FULL of spoilers, so if you haven't seen The Cabin In The Woods and you think you might want to, go watch it now and come back. I'll wait.

Okay, did you see it? Amazing, right? What about the part where the cabin floods with water and our heroes have to fashion a raft out of the front door?  Yeah!

No.  That's not in the movie. Stop trying to trick me and go watch it. It's at your Red Box right now.

Okay, now are you ready? Good. Let's do this.

The above situation with the flooding and the door and such is about the only thing that didn't happen in The Cabin In The Woods. Seriously, this movie had it all.

NO REALLY ---  SPOILERS ARE HERE  ---  PROCEED WITH CAUTION

It had pain-worshipping redneck torture zombies, regular zombies, werewolves, demons, scarecrows, ghosts, Japanese little girl ghosts, killbots, blobs, faceless serial killers, giant snakes, unicorns, a tooth-faced ballerina, and Lovecraftian elder gods. It even came through with a merman, for crying out loud. But it all starts with a cabin in the woods.

Oh man, am I glad they didn't unleash Kevin.

Like a thousand movies before it, Cabin sends a handful of stereotypical college-age buddies out to spend a weekend of good-natured debauchery in a ramshackle shack out in the middle of nowhere. You know them well - the jock, the hottie, the stoner, the nice guy, and the studious, virginal nice girl. Generally, this type of cookie-cutter characterization is what horror fans have come to put up with over the years in service of the action, the violence, the gore. With Cabin, for perhaps the first time ever, the stereotyping isn't just something to accept as par for the course - it's actually vital to the story.

I won't spend a lot of time tying the plot together. You've seen the movie, right?  Turns out the whole trip to the cabin is being orchestrated and monitored by a massive global secret organization dedicated to annual rituals of horror. If the rites go according to plan, the victims will die in the proper manner and order, and the ancient gods sleeping beneath the surface of the Earth will be appeased enough to spare our world. The horrors we see on the silver screen are all real, and are all tools in the arsenal of this organization to kill the right people at the right time. Better a handful should die grizzly deaths than the end of the world, right?

On this surface level, we have one of the most creative and convention-defying horror movies ever made. Co-writer Joss Whedon wasn't content to make a simple slasher homage sprinkled with a bit of Buffy-speak. Instead, Whedon and co-writer/director Drew Goddard took the classic horror tropes and turned them on their ears, making an epic sci-fi horror mind-trip full of scares, laughs, and applause-worthy moments of just plain awesomeness. (No one who sees this movie will ever see a lobby full of elevators in the same way again.)

Ding!

And while they were at it, Whedon and Goddard blew up the horror genre as we know it. Blew it right the hell up.  

The whole movie is a love-hate letter to horror. Whedon and Goddard know the genre. They respect the ritual of horror and even have a good idea of its purpose, albeit with exagerated consequences (I hope). They get all the details right and they make a horror flick that's pretty darned effective as such until they decide to yank the rug right out from under you. Then it becomes apparent that these two have had about all they can stand of conventional horror, especially in the direction the genre has moved over the past decade or so. 

It's all put in its place - the slasher sub-genre, classic movie monsters, the J-horror explosion, the CGI SyFy monster cheapies, and with perhaps the most relish, the torture killer movie. The main message seems to be that horror has sacrificed creativity and originality on the altar of violence, and the bloodlust of the audience is getting worse with every copycat cash-grab pumped out from year to year.

It's not that Whedon and Goddard are against violence per se. But the violence has to serve more than the studio paymasters (the guys downstairs). It has to serve the story. It has to mean something. This is what they are getting at when a character humorously makes the distinction between a zombie (classic monster that served as a backdrop for social commentary) and a "redneck zombie torture family" (a stand-in for the recycled remakes and homages that take classic concepts and up the gore factor with lingering torture while dumbing the stories down to nothing.)

The whole horror genre is fair game. In the end, every kind of horror monster you can imagine is unleashed at once on the organization that heretofore controlled them. It's no coincidence that the big red button that looses the "army of nightmare creatures" is marked "SYSTEM PURGE." Whedon and Goddard want to reboot the entire genre in one fell swoop in the hopes that it will be replaced with something new, something original. Something created for love and art like horror used to be, and not just there to feed the machine and keep the gods appeased. Some new blood, you might say. 

So what or who might this replacement be?  What kind of horror movie can rise from the ashes after Cabin In The Woods nuked the genre from orbit?  Whedon and Goddard don't provide any answers. All they do is give us a fun horror romp that, in a better world, would wipe the slate clean of remakes, sequels, torture porn, and churn-em-out studio horror crap. Hopefully, they have at least paved the way for that next originator and innovator to break through the system and give horror back it's true power.

As one character puts it, "it's time to give someone else a chance."