Michael C. here to talk horror and I left the spoilers back in civilization where they can't be reached. If Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods ends up the cult favorite it is so clearly destined to be, it will not be simply because Whedon’s acolytes turn up automatically or because the film is tremendous fun that efficiently presses every horror geek button known to man. Cabin has a lock on cult status because it so perfectly captures a moment in time.
Cabin in the Woods can't stop looking at Horror's reflections
If Scream’s purpose in ’96 was to take the piss out of the slasher movie, Goddard's film uses the slasher flick as a jumping off point to take on the whole horror genre, top to bottom. In this era, when even non-horror fans chuckles when the dead teenager clichés make their appearances on cue, Cabin pulls back the curtain on the machinations of the whole show until it resembles a viral supercut of the horror genre’s interchangeable, formulaic parts, and it expects the audience to laugh with recognition at each one.
So if audiences are as savvy as the Cabin's filmmakers expect them to be one wonders: Have horror movies lost the ability to play it straight? Have they given up trying to surprise a fanbase that is perpetually in on the joke?
On a purely mercenary economic level, sincerity should win out every time since the audience looking to be genuinely involved is always going to dwarf the ironic detachment crowd. Look no further than the record numbers put up by AMC’s Walking Dead, which, whatever its numerous flaws, doesn’t lack for earnestness. And admittedly, it’s not hard to come up with examples to contradict this idea. This year has already seen the well-received classical ghost story The Woman in Black, and just recently there was Tom Alfredson’s masterful Let the Right One In and its better-than-anyone-had-reason-to-expect remake.
But still even a cursory glance over the upcoming cinematic landscape makes these films look like members of an endangered species, what with the rash of Emo monsters, lame Johnny Depp monsters and the one-two punch of horror movie ass-kickers Abe Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe. Even if Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter plays it’s Confederate ghouls plot as straight as Glory there is no way to get around meta mashup cuteness of the concept - to say nothing of Poe running around the forest with a pistol in each hand like he’s auditioning for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, when his character should rightly be busy dying of tuberculosis.
One can argue that the much-reviled torture films of the past decade at very least played their violence with a grim seriousness, but this sub-genre’s game of grisly one-upsmanship was always a barrier between the film and the audience. The escalating silliness of these movies allowed audiences a way to safely distance themselves from the on-screen carnage. The same goes for the wave of horrific foreign releases like France’s Martyrs, which has picked up the torture baton and are now on a mission to make American audiences look like delicate hothouse flowers for being shocked by the likes of Hostel.
the divisive "Martyrs" from France(I read that the producers seek to remake Martyrs for American audiences. Uh…good luck with that)
Now that the found footage horror film has replaced torture porn as Hollywood’s ridiculously profitable mass-market horror film of choice, it would appear to be a step in the right direction. It’s as if audiences have become so aware of the mechanics of scares that the only way to provoke a response is by stripping horror down to the total artlessness of the Paranormal Activity films. Yet this technique can quickly go from stylistic innovation to distracting gimmick, especially when duds like The Devil Inside exploit the technique in order to lazily make a wide release profit on direct-to-video quality production.
One of the genre's most encouraging developments has been those movies which became so meta that they went full circle back into sincerity. Just watch Ti West’s '09 retro-flick House of the Devil, which does such a superb job aping the rhythms of a 80’s schlock-fest that it manages to shake of the last quarter century of genre tics and be a great economical little chiller. It makes me hope some enterprising director will be inspired by the success of The Artist and create a black and white creepshow which reaches all the way back to the style of Murnaus’s Nosferatu or Fritz Lang’s M, ditching 90 years worth of horror cliches in the process.
House of the Devil goes full circle
Where do you stand on this? Is the horror genre too busy winking at the audience, or will the in-on-the-joke crowd always be in the minority? You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm or read his blog Serious Film.