As a horror movie, Cabin in the Woods is pretty terrible. It’s hilarious, well-acted and my favorite movie to come out this year, but it’s a terrible horror movie.
It’s similar to Scream in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of winking and nodding at the audience, but where Scream decided to be scary, Cabin in the Woods went down a different trail.
I like to think of the two movies as two sides of the same coin: a reverent acknowledgement of horror movies. Scream was constrained, somewhat, by the fact that it was still trying to be terrifying and grounded in a real world. Cabin in the Woods just laughed and away it went. There were nods and smiles to Evil Dead and Hellraiser and The Ring and every slasher movie ever made. It was a movie that felt like it was made by people who knew and loved the genre and weren’t afraid to make fun of it along the way.
They stripped horror bare and showed us what it really was: it’s our fears and our nightmares imprinted on celluloid. When we go to the movies and watch them to be afraid, we’re not just trying to be entertained. We’re trying to exorcise the demons from a time when we were lost and afraid in the woods and we didn’t know what terrors the shadows could hold.
That is the beauty of horror. It lets us be afraid in a safe place, a warm place, with other people and friends.
And Cabin in the Woods is a hurrah to that. It has us look at those celluloid monsters and peels back at the shadows and lets us laugh at our fears.
In no way is Cabin in the Woods scary, which it makes it a terrible horror movie, but it’s of the same spirit and gives us the backbone we need to look into the darkness and just…laugh.
-D-
