If The Truman Show had been a horror movie, it might've looked a lot like Drew Goddard's The Cabin In The Woods. Heres the basic setup: the film opens in an underground facility, where two lab techs - Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford) - are preparing for some sort of mysterious ritual. From here, the camera quickly travels to what is a much more familiar horror movie setup: five college students setting off for a peaceful weekend in the woods. On the surface, the group seems to be comprised of all the regular cabin in the woods horror movie stereotypes: the girl next door, the jock, his hot blonde girlfriend, the good guy intellectual, and the goofball comic relief. Though, of course, things aren't exactly what they seem. Deconstructing nearly every overused horror movie trope in the book, the film presents a lot of the silly things modern horror is rightly derided for - people wanting to split up, oversexed teens stripping down when they should be running off - and manages to come up with a clever way to make fun of it. As a result, in realizing the place of the characters in this narrative, they are still likeable despite their stupid decisions, and the film is all the better for it. The finest horror comedy in years, The Cabin In The Woods is a potent, hilarious apology for decades of generic horror fare.
Jesse Gumbarge is editor and chief blogger at JarvisCity.com - He loves old-school horror films and starting pointless debates. You can reach out at: JesseGumbarge@JarvisCity.com
