Master of puppets

Did you happen to catch the Joss Whedon-scripted horror flick Cabin in the Woods when it played very briefly in Manila? Most people missed it; I managed to catch it on a plane recently. It’s an entertaining twist on the teen slasher genre in which the scenario of about half a dozen horror movies are thrown into the Osterizer and out comes a postmodern commentary on violence and viewing.

Wait: that makes it sound too deep. Cabin in the Woods is really a teen horror comedy (even the title is a send-up of generic horror conventions) that’s actually effectively scary. But not in the way that Wes Craven’s Scream series was supposed to be scary.

Take five teens — three dudes and two girls — and send them off on a weekend in a camper van to a remote cabin. Make one of them a buff athlete Alpha Male (Chris Hemsworth), one kind of slutty (Anna Hutchison), one kind of bookish (Jess Williams), another virginal and timid (Kristen Connolly) and the last a wisecracking stoner (Fran Kranz), and you’ve got… well, you’ve got the Scooby-Doo team. Like most dumb teens riding vans to remote locations in horror movies (Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, et al), they encounter an odd, unfriendly local (this time at a gas station) who practically wears a sign around his neck announcing “YOU’RE ALL GONNA DIE.” Yet they choose to plod ahead anyway.

What marks Cabin in the Woods as different from the average teen slasher outing immediately is the opening tracking shot of two white-coated engineers (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) locking down some details on an unnamed mission. They ride in a golf cart through the facility, genially yakking about baby-proof cabinets and weekend recreational activities. Then the screen freeze-frames and the movie’s title is splattered in big red letters, as doomish heavy metal blasts on the soundtrack — the same sort of opening used in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in fact, in which sadistic, manipulative teens hold a family hostage and torture them for our — the audience’s — voyeuristic benefit.

The five teens practically embrace every red flag of horror movie clichédom you can think of: a cellar door opens mysteriously in the living room (“Must be the wind,” comments the athlete; “How does that even make sense?” quips the stoner) and they all dumbly file downstairs and start picking up various objects — a weird Rubik’s cube à la Hellraiser; spools of 16mm film; a spooky musical box with spinning ballerina; an ancient-looking book; a weird necklace — at which point audience members are conditioned to talk to the screen and say: “No! Stupid! Put down!! Leave cellar now!!”

That a pack of pain-worshipping redneck zombies is soon unleashed on the cabin is actually just a matter of random luck: it turns out any number of horrible nightmares waits in storage for these teens (a scenario borrowed from Saw and Hostel) based on their own bad choices. As engineer Richard Jenkins puts it: “They have to choose; they must transgress.”

What Cabin in the Woods offers is almost a slacker’s thesis on horror movies and the thrills they provide. In that, it’s somewhat like the postmodern exposition of Scream, in which we know we’re watching a rethink of horror movie clichés and how the characters react to them; but in placing all the marbles in the hands of the engineers, who know more than even we the audience do, it actually threatens to be scarier, in the way that Funny Games (both the original German and American remake) was scary and disturbing. Because the killers in Funny Games ultimately admit they’re not quite sadists; it’s all meaningless death and violence to them, and so they make the audience complicit for sitting still and watching the movie.

That chilling thought exists only briefly in Cabin in the Woods. It’s replaced by another scenario, then another, until ultimately we realize the movie is more interested in pushing our buttons than making us think too deeply. In fact, the slowest parts of the movie are those that recycle horror movie clichés and stock situations and play it straight. We’ve seen it all before, so it’s really only the packaging that matters.

Director Drew Goddard manages to work up a standard teen slasher vibe — whether it’s kids running through woods or kids opening doors they shouldn’t — while his co-script with Whedon is packed with funny one-liners and moments. It’s this stuff that will be prized by the Comic-Con crowd, not the usual slash-and-run action. The teens spout clever lines that nobody stupid enough to stay in a creepy cabin as long as they do could possibly think up. But that’s the movie’s main charm. Hemsworth is probably the big name here (thanks to Avengers and Thor), and he’s funny as a dumb jock who’s really a sociology major; the dumbness has been imposed on him by outside sources (and mood-altering drugs). Kranz gets some of the best lines as stoner Marty (“Good work, zombie arm”) while Connolly gains strength as the “last girl,” in horror scholar lingo, who manages to remain alive through pluck and moral worth. The two veteran character actors, Jenkins and Whitford, are like an Abbott and Costello team here: they are the benign face of evil, trading banal chat and jokes, working for what they see as the “greater good.” And they’re really good at their jobs, as most nerds are.

The parade of horrors (kept in underground cubicles until their release at the end) are really a visual feast — everything from Japanese Sadako types to creepy white-masked killers — but it’s the last that register the most here. Best comic relief bit: when the creepy old guy at the gas station, Mordecai, unleashes Biblical epitaphs over the phone to engineer Bradley (Whitford): “Cleanse them. Cleanse the world of their ignorance and sin. Bathe them in the crimson of… Wait, am I on speakerphone?”

Bradley: “No, no of course not.” (Snickers to others in the room.)

Mordecai “Yes I am. I can hear the echo. Take me off. Now.”

Bradley (still snickering): “Okay, sorry.”

Mordecai: “I’m not kidding. It’s rude. I don’t know who’s in the room.”

It’s hard to keep a straight face while watching a horror movie when you know who’s pulling the levers.