The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie that has already been made in 2009 but due to studio bankruptcy has taken 3 years to hit the silver screen. Directed by Drew Goddard (screenwriter Cloverfield) and co-written by Joss Whedon (Avengers, Firefly) the movie seems to be just another horror flick.

Let’s go into the woods!
We are watching a group of teenagers (unspecified horror age ranging from 16-40) who are heading into this very very isolated area to spend a weekend in the title giving Cabin in the Woods. It is so isolated that not even GPS is working there. And naturally the redneck gas station owner says some creepy words to the teenagers.

We know the drill!
We have seen this movie 1000 times!
The teenagers are already dead people walking!

And within the first minutes we started taking bets on who would die first:

• Black guy?
• Stoner guy?
• Blonde chick with tits?
• Thor?
• Girl #2?

And to the film’s credit nothing really happened the way anyone thought it would happen – and this alone is already something very rare in the teenage horror movie genre.

The clean slate movie
I missed to opportunity to watch this movie in April and actively tried to avoid spoilers for this movie. Many reviewers said that one should be completely unprepared and I wholeheartedly agree.

• Don’t watch any trailers
• Don’t look up a synopsis
• Don’t read reviews
• And just watch this movie.

Cabin in the Woods is just so refreshing because it seems to go everywhere at once. There is a lot of confusion and strange mix of so many things. And eventually it boils down to a pretty fun meta-statement about horror movies – it is very similar to the Scream series in what it says about horror conventions and filled with an incredible amount of Eater Eggs and winks.

I know that this review is not really saying much but this is really a movie where you should take one’s advice without many reasons why the movie is that interesting. If you have watched a lot of movies about stupid teenagers and know the rules then prepare for a quite different trip – stupid teenagers still included.