"Cabin in the Woods” pays loving homage to every horror film you’ve likely seen, and is unlike any horror film you’ve seen. If you enjoy modern horror classics such as “Hellraiser,” “Evil Dead” and “Friday the 13th,” then you should beat a path to the theater and see it in all of its big screen glory. If you find horror distasteful, reprehensible, or simply too gory, then you should avoid it because things get very, very messy.
Have you ever thought about why certain archetypes pop up in horror film after horror film? Most scary movies pit a group of teen or college-age stereotypes against a maniacal villain or a supernatural force. The cluster of ill-fated pincushions is usually made up of a jock, a stoner, a virgin, a woman who sleeps around and a nice guy. The job of the antagonist is to dispatch these characters one by one until only the virgin remains. In cynical films, the virgin dies, too, although she usually escapes.
Deepak Chopra calls archetypes “individual expressions of a collective conscious.” They’re important to understanding and defining who we are. So what are we saying as a society when we punish the drug user, the egotistical jock and the woman who likes sex, but let the puritanical virgin live? Are we confessing our sins while projecting an idealized version of ourselves?
Moreover, why is the evil in horror movies virtually unstoppable? Does the world in which we live frighten us? Do we feel powerless against tyranny, cruelty and even nature?
There are other questions to consider. Are our ritualistic sacrifices of archetypes in books and movies our way of working out our fear of things we don’t understand, such as the supernatural? In the end, we usually overcome evil. Is this our way of comforting ourselves?
Written by Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and director of the upcoming “Avengers” movie, “Cabin in the Woods” explores these and other questions through a tight and witty script. As expected, five characters representing each of the above archetypes pile into a van and head for the woods for a weekend of relaxation and debauchery. The location to which they’re traveling is so remote, it doesn’t show up on their GPS, so they stop at a rundown gas station to get directions. As the owner squirts thick jets of tobacco juice between rotten teeth, he tells them how to get there but also says getting back is up to them.
Meanwhile, white collared workers in a vast underground complex guide and watch their every move. Once the kids reach their destination, the watchmen step up their manipulation of the events of the weekend. Whedon and director Drew Goddard slowly reveal what’s going on, and once they make the full truth known, they pull out all of the stops for an insane finale.
As fun as the last 20 minutes of “Cabin in the Woods” can be for horror buffs, the most interesting aspect of the movie is how it takes established archetypes and turns them inside out (not literally) to serve a new purpose. In this way, even the lamest aspects of most scary movies, such as when people do things that defy logic simply to propel the story forward, become crucial pieces of a larger puzzle. It’s rather ingenious.
You might have noticed how I haven’t mentioned the names of the characters. That’s because their names don’t matter. The important thing is how well the actors handled their archetypes. Their performances both adhere to convention and rise above the acting in most scary movies.
It seems as though Whedon and Goddard are not only paying their respects to their roots but also calling for new archetypes. If we understand who we are and why, then perhaps we can change. That’s a heavy load for a movie that throws around buckets of gore to carry, but “Cabin in the Woods” pulls it off while managing to be entertaining.
Rated R for violence, gore, language, drug use, sexuality and nudity. Three stars out of four. Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.