More
often than not, horror films come under fire for being guilty of producing the
same conventions and tropes over and over again. In a way that reinvents these
archetypes of the genre, postmodern horror movies such as The Cabin in the Woods include characters that accurately portray
the rules and regulations of horror movies, to the self-referential point of
the film acknowledging its generic lineage.
White males sitting behind a desk construct the story of the film as
they transform formerly unconventional characters into common horror movie
tropes, including the slut, the athlete, the fool, the scholar, and the virgin.
It’s
hard to miss the strong sense of reflexivity in the film, as it starts with the
title. Five friends go out for a fun
weekend at a cabin in the woods and encounter more than they bargained for,
sound familiar? The desolate cabin is a long-standing “terrible place” in
horror films, where Carol Clover notes in her essay Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, is “the place where
the victims often meet their fate” (Clover).
Several past horror films have used this convention to set up the
terror, including Cabin Fever, Evil Dead,
Friday the 13th, and Secret
Window. The Cabin in the Woods uses this trope to set up its initial reflexivity
and expands on it, using the “terrible place” to manifest the expected rules
and perceptions of the horror film genre.
Warning:
Spoilers ahead!
The
film begins with a point of attack that swiftly delivers on the ready-made
audience perceptions horror films typically deliver on. Sitterson and Hadley are the two white males
running the show in a manner that accurately captures how the film industry
most likely comes up with a vast majority of its projects. In a room filled with other (mostly white)
people, they crowd around a white board saturated with ideas scribbled on it
that could deliver the biggest scare and most frightening fate to the
protagonists. Ideas include “Sexy
Witches”, “Mummy”, “Giant Snake”, and, the one that wins its chance in the
spotlight, “Zombie-Redneck-Torture-Family”.
By indulging its audience in a plethora of ideas commonly conceptualized
in horror films, The Cabin in the Woods
readily admits to the genre’s basic stock.
Another
way in which the film blatantly exposes itself is through its characters. The five friends, Dana, Kurt, Holden, Marty,
and Jules, start out as characters that could stand out in terms of their
(un)conventionality, but instead are swiftly robbed of any characteristics that
make them unique to the genre and instantly morphed into their chosen
archetype. Jules, who is established as
scholarly and in a committed relationship with Kurt at the beginning, gets a
dye job, goes blonde, and instantly has no problem making herself a direct
subject of the male gaze in a strip tease like dance and make-out session with
a mounted wolf’s head. She later meets
her demise while her and Kurt hook up in the woods, playing to the common theme
in horror films where “Sex = Death”.
It is later
revealed that the white men behind the desk, exposing the ways in which they
literally transform her into the object of desire, had tampered with her dye
job. The same fate lies in store for the
other characters. Kurt drinks a beer
that slowly turns him into the aggressive, proud, and manly-man athlete and
Dana fulfills multiple tropes of “the final girl” archetype that place her in
line of being the most accurate “virgin” the engineers can get their hands
on. The film cleverly plays to each
convention of the genre as it knowingly puts on display the tropes that have a
common occurrence throughout it. The
only character directly unaffected by the influence of the engineers is Marty;
his toking has spared him, which arguably places the movie as an advocate for
weed culture (but, sadly, that’s another topic for another time).
Starting with the
title of the film, which acknowledges the reoccurring “terrible” place the
movie plays off of, to Sigourney Weaver’s character, who ultimately controls
the entire project and is appropriately named, “The Director”, the film
completely encompasses all generic tropes and regulations of horror movies and
exploits them in order to cleverly create an unexpected scare in the postmodern
horror genre.
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