moot point

April 24, 2012

Notes on Cabin in the Woods [includes spoilers]

- I’m in a really Joss place right now. I’ve been watching Buffy reruns and this got me watching Angel on Netflix. I get that Joss can be annoying (valid critiques usually involving smugness + “Funny Games for fanboys”), but I find his whole brand of playful genre exercises + feelings + making ideas that are usually metaphors into the story central enough to my own aesthetics that my critical faculties are basically disarmed in the face of Joss-ness.

- But I still kind of feel like there’s something vaguely embarrassing about my Joss love. I don’t know if I’m doing some kind of commodity fetishism here or if I feel embarrassed because it’s actually great, but I do feel like I need to acknowledge that along with my love.

- The best thing about Cabin in the Woods is the way it slowly reveals its central metaphor, the horror movie as ritual sacrifice. I think it’s made pretty clear long before Sigourney Weaver (final girl extraordinaire) comes along to explain it.

- I like how the cabin-in-the-woods characters have to be drugged and manipulated into acting like the characters from a horror movie.

- The part where the girl makes out with the wolf. The part where the girl makes out with the wolf. I want to see a whole movie that felt like that.

- I like how the good/evil status of the control room staff is unclear. At first it seems like they’re really nonchalant bad guys. But then, slowly, their spectatorship starts to look really familiar, and it does become clear that they have their reasons for doing this. They need to make this sacrifice to keep the demons at bay.

- This is why it’s kind of hard to watch them die, because they’re us, really. They start out snarky, but by the end they kind of find themselves rooting for the last girl alive.

- But on the “Funny Games for fanboys” tip, for someone as historically invested in the horror genre as he is, Joss has a history of this kind of thing outside filmmaking. Remember when everyone was really mad about Captivity, a completely mediocre entry in the post-Saw "torture porn" generic cycle? Joss wrote a blog post comparing it (based a trailer) to a video of an actual girl getting stoned to death. I can’t even. I mean, I’m glad he’s in favour of women not getting murdered for being women, but I think it’s probably important to make a distinction between a real, horrible, awful thing that happened and a made up thing that is supposed to make people uncomfortable sd its primary function. (I watched Captivity for a paper and it’s really not defensible, but there’s the symptom and there’s the disease, and while I can understand that the symptom is upsetting to people I feel like stamping out the symptom is going to fuck-all to cure the disease, but that’s just me.)

- Anyway, if Cabin in the Woods is supposed to make me feel bad for liking movie violence, it did a pretty bad job of it, what with some of the best scenes involving hilarious movie violence. (The motorcycle jumping the gorge and crashing into the forcefield and the killer unicorn.)

- I think it succeeds as a horror comedy - and in the fact that it disrupts the rules just enough that I legitimately had no idea how it was going to end.

- But I do think it could have done that and been more scary.

9:46am | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZSRIbyKEFHvj

(Notes: 6)