You’ll never meet a more meta horror film than The Cabin in the Woods. It’s Luigi Pirandello with more zombies and blood. In its surgically precise (and loving) deconstruction of trashy horror cinema, it touches on a great point: the traditional Final Girl in horror movies hasn’t really won the day until she gets revenge on the moviemaking imaginations who’ve been forcing her to dodge axes for the past hour-and-a-half. Along the way, director and co-writer Drew Goddard (and co-writer Joss Whedon, whose voice is all over this) also allow one of the traditional victims in horror movies to have his own moment of redemption.
If you haven’t seen at least… 542 horror flicks from the past thirty-odd years (that’s my own very scientific estimate), you might not understand this at all. The parodies and references to everything from slasher movies to Asian horror to torture porn fly freely and artfully. Goddard shoves ’em in all over the place like a comic book artist who sometimes stretches out on a full-page panel that’s crammed with information. It’s so thorough an examination of the genre that it doesn’t even leave any room for a sequel. It makes its statement and then destroys the whole world. Goddard and Whedon push this engine to its limits and then brilliantly burn it out.
This is one for the geeks. The Saturday night crowd probably didn’t know what to make of it overall, which why this was a fairly modest box office success. Look for its cult reputation to increase over the years.