CABIN IN THE WOODS Tom White reviews the recent Joss Whedon and Drew goddard horror
Alright first off, I geek out pretty hard on Cabin in the Woods in this article, so if you haven’t seen it yet, I wouldn’t recommend reading any further. Hang on, you haven’t seen Cabin in the Woods? What are you doing!? Go watch it, I’ll wait right here..........................Done? Okay., let’s do this. While the Horror genre doesn’t have a set era of greatness like the Action genre (the 80s if you are wondering), every couple of years we get a concept that is fantastically realised and plays to the strengths of the genre, but it is
then made stale and useless by an endless stream of knockoffs and unwanted sequels. Cast your mind back to when Scream was released. While it was a great film, and a commentary on the state of the genre, it gave rise to a wave of rip off ’s, Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cherry Falls, etc. It just became what it was parodying. The same thing is happening at the moment with ‘torture porn’ and ‘found footage’ movies blotting the Horror landscape. But thankfully there are people out there, better connected and with better resources than me, who saw what was happening and decided to do something about it. Those people were Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard. And what they did was make Cabin in the Woods.
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What co-writers Whedon and Goddard are planning is a commentary on the genre on a scale that Scream could only dream.”
Tom White
Living comfortably in a bubble of popular culture, Tom is a blogger and aspiring script writer. His poison of choice is comic books, much to the distress of his bank account.
On paper, Cabin in the Woods sounds like your normal Horror flick: a group of college students go to a foreboding cabin for a weekend of partying and soon find themselves picked off one by one by a mysterious force. Hell, if