I saw "The Cabin in the Woods" yesterday, and I don't think it was really the Second Coming of Horror that it was billed as being. I understand that when Joss Whedon cranks something out, his dedicated fan base/cult, much like the fans of Wes Anderson, will breathlessly gather and sing the praises for his work, rendering it critically bulletproof.
Not going to go into the movie, lest there be spoilers to it -- but while I enjoyed the movie well enough, I wasn't blown away by it. It's hard to put it into words, exactly. I would classify it more as a horror-comedy than a de facto horror movie (although there were certainly horrific moments to it, they're all fairly wryly delivered, with that trademark Whedonian smirking smugness framed by an affably earnest self-consciousness that characterizes a lot of his work, and is likely why it's popular with a given group of people).
I didn't find it terribly surprising, found it hard to really shocked by anything in it. I dunno. I think it'll be a tempest in a teapot; it comes off as a kind of critical takedown of Horror as a genre without actually getting at what's horrific (and cathartic) about Horror. The very nature of Horror implies an ineffability, a sense of the sublime -- it's hard to be snidely aware of the sublime, really, and this movie tries to kind of square that circle -- to try to invoke this otherworldly dread while at the same time smugly having a "Relax, I'm just joking" kind of mindset to it that undermines the former.
There are enough Whedon groupies out there for this to likely do reasonably well, or be a cult movie or whatever. But unlike, say, "Evil Dead," which managed to actually channel some real dread, this movie was just sort of an exercise in something else. Like a group of people congratulating each other on how smart they all are. It's like how nobody thinks advertising (or propaganda) affects them -- if you ever see surveys where people are asked about advertising, nobody ever admits that advertising influences their decision-making.
So there is this multibillion-dollar industry that inundates our world, surrounds and enfolds it, whose entire purpose is to manipulate, cajole, wheedle, seduce, and persuade you -- something as omnipresent as water is to fish -- and you're unaffected by it? Immune to it? Why? Because you're too smart to be affected by something like that, you know when you're being influenced. Riiiight. Pat yourself on the back one more time, as you're off buying whatever it is you were persuaded to buy.
That is what this movie felt like. An hour-and-45-minute mutual back-patting from a creator of a particular type of entertainment to his acolytes -- there's nothing to be afraid of, because we already know everything there is to know about Horror, and we're just too smart to be affected by it, too worldly and jaded to be influenced by something as retrograde and yucky as Horror. Riiiiight.
That said, I enjoyed the movie reasonably well; I just didn't think it was half as smart as it (or its audience) thought it was.
