The Cabin in the Woods

(Movie Review)

Why I Watched this Movie

            As always, I’m a few weeks late getting this up on the blog, but this was originally a Halloween movie.  A few of us got together on Halloween night to watch a horror film.  My friend the Cinephile  chose this movie as one of his favorites.

The Review

            I walked into this movie knowing nothing about it.  Which is the best way to see this movie.  So if you haven’t seen this movie yet, stop reading now. 

…If you’ll still reading this, I’m going to spoil things….

            Because I was unaware of all the various surprises and plot twists this film had, I walked in expecting a normal horror movie, and was pleasantly surprised by everything.

            My friend the cinephile commented, “It didn’t blow my mind, but it was very clever.”  And this would probably be my review as well.

            Of course, this isn’t the first self-aware horror film and after Scream series and the Scary Movie series, some of this did at times feel like retreaded ground.  (The joke about the characters all splitting up when they should be staying together, for example, has been done before.)

             But on the other hand, if done intelligently there’s no reason why another self-aware horror film can’t be enjoyable.  And I thought this was intelligent.

            The equivocation of the movie’s target audience with old gods demanding human suffering and sacrifice was a nice touch, and all the following jokes about pandering to that audience were cleverly done.

             A few of the plot twists, and fake-out endings, took me completely off guard (and I mean that in a good way.)  The movie teased out its central mystery very nicely. 

            I was thoroughly entertained while I was watching it.

            The ending was slightly unsatisfying, but it may have been the only ending possible.  (I’m not sure I could think of another way.)

Notes (Warning—More Spoilers)

*          The woman at the end of the film says that the scenario is different in every culture, and that it’s changed over the years, but that it always needs youth and there must be at least 5 characters: the whore, the athlete, the fool, the scholar, and the virgin. 

            But these characters clearly weren’t present in the scenario they were running in Japan. 

            I’m not sure whether to count this as a plot hole or not.  The movie does seem to imply at different points that there are different scenarios being run in different countries, and yet the woman at the end seems to say it is always the same 5 characters.

*          On the subject of the 5 archetypes, what does everyone think of the term the whore used to refer to the sexual active female in the group?  Is this the old double sexuality standard?  Or is the movie making just making fun of the double sex standards usually used in horror movies?  If the latter, I think the wink could have been a bit more obvious.

*          My Cinephile friend is fond of talking about Alfred Hitchcock .  According to him, one of Hitchcock’s favorite techniques is to use suspense to play with the sympathy of the viewer.  For example in the movie Psycho, in certain scenes the viewer is supposed to feel worried that the killer might not get away with the murder. 
          My Cinephile friend claimed The Cabin in the Woods  used this same Hitchcock technique of playing with your sympathies.  Are you rooting for the teenagers in the cabin, or the men in the control room? 

            This tension is all throughout the movie, but in particular this applies to the scene in where the teenagers are trying to escape through the tunnel, and there is suddenly panic in the control room because they forgot to cave-in the tunnel.  The suspense of the scene is orchestrated in such a way that the viewer is supposed to feel worried that Oh no, the teenage victims might escape without getting murdered!

            It wouldn’t have occurred to me on my own, but once my friend pointed it out to me I thought he was right.  The film was totally messing with your sympathies throughout.

*          But, actually talking about that scene, this brings me to another question I had about this movie.

            Did I miss something, or was it never explained why the demolition department didn’t get the orders to blow up the tunnel?

            Also, remember this scene? 

            At the celebration, Gary (the character played by Richard Jenkins) is talking to the demolitions department.

            “You knuckleheads,” he says, “you almost gave me a heart attack with that tunnel.”

            Demolition responds: “Like I said, it wasn’t our fault.  We didn’t get the order.”

            Gary: “I’m just giving you a hard time.  Come on. Give us a hug.”

            Another demolition guy: “No seriously. That wasn’t our fault.”

            The demolition girl: “There was a glitch. Power re-route from upstairs.”

            At this point, Gary starts to look worried and his tone becomes serious: “What do you mean upstairs?”

             Right here, he seems to realize something has gone wrong, but the conversation is interrupted by the red phone ringing.

            My friends and I watched this scene twice, and we still can’t figure out what happened.  Why was there a power re-route from upstairs, and how, from this brief conversation, does Gary know something has gone terribly wrong even before the red phone rings?

            Any help out there?

*          Another question—at the beginning of the movie, they make the comment that they haven’t had a failure since 1998.  But what happened in 1998?  Originally I thought that conversation was foreshadowing something that would be revealed later on in the movie.  But (again unless I missed something) there was no reveal.  Then I thought maybe it might be one of the movies meta jokes.  A reference to a horror movie that came out in 1998, perhaps?  But I’ve now searched the Internet, and I can’t find anything.

            Either that joke just went right over my head, or the writers of this movie got lazy and made a throw-away comment at the beginning of the movie that they should have followed up on but didn’t. 

            Again, can anyone out there help to clarify this?

*          I once saw a film critic on TV complaining about the switch in The Bride of Frankenstein.  This, you’ll recall, is the switch the monster pulls at the end to destroy the whole castle where Doctor Frankenstein and his rival have been working.  The film critic complained, “What is the deal with the switch?  Is this some sort of European housing device?”  Although the switch served a dramatic function at the end of the movie, it was difficult to see why someone would deliberately put a self destruct switch in the middle of their castle that anyone could just pull at any moment.

            The same critique could be made of that red button which releases all the monsters at once.  Why they even designed it is a mystery to me, but even assuming they needed it for some reason, you would think something like that would have been put under guard.  Or need a password.  Or something.

            Unless….could it be that this was meant as a tribute to Bride of Frankenstein?

* Other notes: My two other friends talked about the horror movie trope that the black character almost never lives to the end (George Romero being the notable exception) and debated with each other how this movie addresses that cliché.

            Me, I stayed out of that debate.  I think race was just outside of this film’s focus, and so it is useless to over-analyze it.

            My friends also compared the plot to the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.

            However I must admit (with shame) that I’ve never read any of H.P. Lovecraft, so for the moment I’ll also have to refrain from comment on that.  (Although perhaps in the near future I should work to remedy this deficiency in my literary education.)

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The Cabin in the Woods: Movie Review (Scripted)