The second issue of the Fang of Joy fanzine is hot of the presses (indeed, actual presses [of a sort] were involved this time!). Included within it, among fine pieces from Jose Cruz, Simon Wright, Brad Hogue, one Richard Glenn Schmidt, and many others, is a zine-exclusive essay by yours truly on a particular sub-subgenre of Italian horror-thrillers that I've christened The Scooby-Doo Gialli. Check out the first few paragraphs below and then watch a trailer I've prepared in order to get your further pumped up for your forthcoming purchase. (Is this the first time anyone has bothered to make a trailer for an essay? Is my pat on the back traveling through the post to me as we speak?):
"On Saturday morning, September 13th, 1969, American CBS stations aired “What a Night for a Knight,” the first episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The series would run for 25 episodes, concluding on Halloween of 1970. Each adventure more or less invariably found the meddling teens and gluttonous Great Dane of Mystery Incorporated breaking down in some remote American township and catching wind of a supernatural baddie haunting the area. After much spooking, munching, chasing, and sleuthing, the gang would discover that the supernatural villain of the week was no such thing: it was, instead, always a human in an elaborate costume, scheming towards some money-making human end.
Then, in the early-to-mid-1970s, several Italian and Spanish giallo horror-thrillers—with titles like The Red Queen Kills 7 Times, The Etruscan Kills Again, and Murder Mansion—employed a similar structure on the silver screen, incorporating faux-supernatural menaces into their convoluted plots as cover for nefarious inheritance schemes and psychosexual serial murder. Sure, you’d be hard pressed to spot a van full of adolescent gumshoes anywhere in these films, but the preponderance of red-haired leading ladies and sandy-maned, ascot-wearing pretty boys is certainly suspicious.
Was it merely a coincidence that these faux-supernatural gialli began cropping up immediately after Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! concluded its run on television?
Logline: After meeting James (James Davidson) and his close-knit group of drug-taking layabouts, the once clean-cut Sara (Sara Anne Jones) soon spirals into substance dependency. But when Sara begins searching for a high that will break down the walls of perception and elevate her into another realm of existence, James grows concerned about the radical shift in her behavior. He's especially worried about her desire to test out an old York, Pennsylvania, urban legend, that of the Seven Gates of Hell erected (literally or figuratively) deep within the woods. No one has made it all the way to the seventh gate and entered into hell, but Sara is determined to cross the barrier, with or without James' help.
Analysis: There's a strong temptation to read Toad Road as a stern note of caution against escalating drug use and addiction, but that would be ignoring the reality of the lives that the film presents us with: if not for the temporary release provided by drugs, and if not for the potential they might hold for opening up gateways to better worlds, then what else is there? We learn that James' parents are worried that his aimless, drug-taking friends are having a bad influence on him, but the truth is that James and his friends are drawn together because they're all equally unmoored from the lives expected of them. We see, particularly during Sara's induction into this group of friends, that no one in this ragtag group of kindred spirits is pressured into doing drugs. Rather, they all independently seek out the temporary escape from their lives that mind and senses-altering substances provide for them, and their association with one another is more akin to a support group than an influential social circle.
The film doesn't condemn or condone these young adults' use of drugs, but it does question the efficacy of their actions. Are they actually achieving liberation from their lives, or merely casting themselves into a sort of purgatory? As Sara explores her hunger for new chemical experiences, to the growing concern of even her constantly narcotized friends, she decides to discover the answer by achieving the ultimate high: an encounter with hell itself. She's determined to pass through the gates of hell symbolized by the town's local urban legend of Toad Road, which James references as a metaphor for the point of no return that one can fall into through irresponsible drug use but which Sara sees as a literal exit. This difference of outlook is the death knell for their romantic relationship, as James isn't brave (or misguided?) enough to take his recreational drug use and temporary sojourns from reality to their extreme. Instead, he imagines out loud the lives that he and Sara might be able to lead together: they can move away and start anew, he can go to college like her, and maybe they'll even get good jobs one day. Sara reminds him that she's failing out of school; she's moved far past the desire for leading a conventional life.
After Sara has slipped through the seven gates, abandoning James, her disembodied voice seems to report back with her findings. As she passed through each successive gate, a little bit more of her previous life-- her self-doubt, pain, disappointed parents, fractured relationships-- faded from existence, replaced by nothingness, through which she gained power. Past the final gate, Sara experienced the embrace of "a black void," offering "ultimate solitude." But, if so, how can she communicate this information from her state of solitude back to us, those imprisoned souls who have refused to pass into hell? Are these words we hear her own, or merely James' imaginings, as he's left behind with his guilt and numbness and only able to hope for the best? We never see the other side that Sara allegedly passes over to, nor the other possibilities it might have to offer, even if those "possibilities" are no more complicated than the oblivion accompanying death. What we do see is life grinding on for James and his wayward friends, and a decided lack of improvement in their situations. And, after long enough, not even the drugs help anymore.
Technical Merits:Toad Road exists as a curious hybrid of style and genre, in part documentary, found footage, low budget drama, and psychological horror. Director Jason Banker, who also wrote the film and acted as its cinematographer, blends Cinéma vérité documentary footage of his cast of non-actors going about their aimless daily business with scripted scenes of those same non-actors contemplating their actions, relationships, and futures. The obvious ease with which the actors perform in the authentic hangout and party scenes provides a nice thematic contrast with the discomfort they appear to display when grappling with the somewhat stilted dramatic scenes, as they endearingly stumble their way through the words written for them. Like the actors who portray them, these characters act more naturally when under the influence of the artificial haze produced by drug and alcohol consumption than they do within the confines of the scripted "reality" that forces them to consider their relationship troubles, family issues, poverty, and collective inability to lead "normal" lives. The film's style is such that the characters' words seem false and contrived whenever they're required to deal with existence beyond the next high or juvenile gag. And that's appropriate, because for them adulthood is a role for which they are poorly suited. When, in one of the film's scripted scenes, James lays out his sketchy plans for attaining a "normal life," he sounds like he's stealing half-remembered lines he once overheard from a bad movie. But when he's having Vicks blown into eyes during one of the many documentary sequences, and he breaks out in tears at the bizarre physical sensation it's producing within him, we witness an uncomfortable human rawness that couldn't be captured in the performance of any actor.
Relevance: This is reality horror. Toad Road captures the meandering, blitzed out lives of its very real characters with uncanny, documentary precision. Because the film is, in part, a document of its actors' actual lives, it also stands as a universalizing summation of the general malaise felt by so many emotionally deadened suburban teens and twentysomethings. I knew a version of every one of the film's developmentally stunted characters back in high school. Our parties looked exactly like the parties they throw (with fewer hard drugs, maybe), and our stunts and pranks were much like theirs. Our interactions were as shallow, and our prospects about as promising. We even had our own urban legend out in the woods, and our own ill-advised adventures bent on testing out its reality. The film understands, as we implicitly did, that the societal expectations for those youths of the mid-to-lower middle class to develop into "normal human beings" can be crippling, and that the appeal of simply slipping away from it all, by aide of illicit substances or by some worse method, is difficult to ignore. That the film can't settle upon which fate is worse-- oblivion or the average life of an American adult-- points towards an existential horror that's far more chilling than any monster creeping in the forest.
The real life death of actress Sara Anne Jones from a drug overdose not long after the film's completion stands as a tragic, melancholy reinforcement of the film's observations, and it situates the fictional action as a truer reflection of reality than we might like to admit. Toad Road is haunted by Jones's ethereal image. (Eerily, the last time we see her in the film, she's swallowed up by a gigantic video distortion leading to hell, as if the medium itself has consumed both character and actress.) If we are aware of Jones's death going into Toad Road, her presence compels us to wonder about the validity of her character's claims. Is there an alternative to the existence we're pressured to embrace? Is it possible to enter hell and emerge out the other end, into the possibility of "something better, something real"? Or do we, in our search for that other plane of existence, only manage to kill ourselves, out of frustration, ennui, or fear? We can't possibly know. The fictional Sara and the actual Sara aren't around to tell us, and we're left, like James is, slamming our fists uselessly against the foundations of the unfinished structures we've built around us, hoping for it all to collapse but knowing it won't.
Logline: Marianne (Susan George), a psychedelic suntanned bikini dancer, has spent the last six years fleeing across Europe in order to evade her father, mysteriously known only as The Judge (Leo Genn), and whatever nefarious plans he has for her and her approaching inheritance. When she shacks up with her new accidental husband, Eli (Barry Evans), and finds that her association with him is putting his life in danger, Marianne resolves to confront The Judge and her estranged sister, Hildegarde (Judy Huxtable), at the family estate in Portugal. But Marianne must take care, for someone there wishes to see her die screaming...
English director Pete Walker's first hesitant toe into the pool of horror cinema, Die Screaming, Marianne has the lousiest reputation of any of his major films. Scouring the web for reviews leaves one with the general consensus that it's a bore, a thriller minus the thrills, and a creaky bit of mod sexploitation. Honestly, the film fits that consensus, but not necessarily to its detriment: sometimes gazing at a weird, snail-paced moddish thriller is precisely how one wishes to spend one's lazy afternoon. And it's not as if the film is a chore to sit through, coming equipped as it does with whiffs of style (split screens! those opening credits!), scenic location shooting (beaches! canyons!), and some competent and appealing acting (particularly from a young and ever-feisty Susan George, though Judy Huxtable-- as Marianne's smirkingly deranged half-sister-- is no slouch either). Moreover, to focus too much attention on those perceived flaws of Die Screaming, Marianne is to ignore its intriguing code-switching between genres and its atypical construction of its female heroine.
The abrupt, muddy transitions between genres throughout are the film's defining characteristic. Marianne neither sits still nor focuses on any one genre in particular over the others; it seems as if it would rather have them all in equal measure. A woman-on-the-run thriller cuts to a swinging '70s sex comedy which then bleeds back over into a thriller (with assassins!) before becoming a romance and then an incestual family inheritance drama and then eventually settling in as a sort of coastal Gothic suspense film. The film shifts between these different genres (and their attendant tones and styles) as if it wasn't asking much of the audience to follow along. It's a wonder that the film feels as unified as it does; usually, these sort of shifts leave the audience feeling disconnected and adrift from the main narrative. The presence of some strongly realized characters helps anchor us, of course, but probably a bigger factor in our continued engagement in the film is Walker's clear skill in employing each of these genres. Though you'd imagine them being weird thrust up together (and they are weird, sort of), disparate scenes coexist peacefully because Walker directs and edits with the confidence that they will. Some small moments, like Marianne's not-quite-bashful flirtation with her new husband and Eli's slow realization that the men in his apartment are there to kill him, are fantastically crafted and hint that Walker would have been equally adept in genres outside of horror. (Early in his career, Walker did in fact experiment with other genres like sexploitation and crime, in films such as School for Sex (1969) and Man Of Violence (1971), before dedicating himself wholly to horror. Having not seen any of these early oddities, I can't comment upon whether or not he pulled off their respective genres with grace, but Marianne certainly suggests the possibility.)
But more so than its unlikely coherence, Marianne is the film's main appeal. She's not the usual sort of heroine that you find in ostensible thrillers like these, which generally feature multiple parties conspiring to kill or drive crazy a helpless innocent female who is severely limited in both the available thought and action open to her. Take for example, the young heiress of two film versions of The Cat and the Canary (1939; 1978) that I watched recently: in both, the heroine sat by, meekly, as all the film's men either tried to kill her or save her. The same cannot be said for Marianne. Upon her first recognition that her father and sister were up to no good with regard to her future and inheritance, Marianne split and spent the next six years on the lam, providing for herself while depending upon no one else (especially men) for anything other than small favors. Marianne displays a fierce independence throughout the proceedings, like when she refuses to be tied down in marriage to the weaselly Sebastian (Christopher Sandford) when he insists by intentionally screwing up the marriage license and quickly moving out when he gets angry, offering him some choice words in return: "Look, mate, I've looked after myself for the last six years, and believe me yours was the most amateur attempt yet." She chooses her own lovers, feels empowered dancing around in a bikini, and literally evades patriarchal authority personified in the character of her father, The Judge, a figure whose symbolic significance couldn't be more obvious if he'd been named, say, "The Man" instead.
Besides these welcome signs of a developed and complex female character, Marianne also fulfills the traditionally male role of rescuer at the film's climax: when locked in a deadly hot steam room by her wicked sister, Marianne is forced to rescue herself and gather enough strength in order to mount a final face off against the conspirators out to kill her (which she does, aptly, with a little help from a menacing butler). During her predicament, Eli-- her knight in shining polyester-- was off somewhere being a corpse and providing no help at all. Gender roles successfully inverted. However, the film isn't content to proclaim that Marianne's status as an empowered woman is unambiguously good for her: the film's bleak final message for Marianne (surrounded as she is by the dead bodies of everyone she knows) is that her independent lifestyle, though perhaps the only way to shield herself physically and psychologically from the sleazeballs and would-be murderers of the world, dooms her to loneliness. As the theme song says, "Love's not for you, Marianne," and that's unfortunate.
Logline: Chuck Norris vs. a genetically modified, indestructible slasher villain. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Crime in the Past: More of a crime in the immediate present, but it's important because it bestows upon us our monstrous killer: a psychologically disturbed man boarding with a shrill family is driven crazy by their kids running around shrieking so takes an axe and, after lazily swinging it at a pile of wood, decides to chop up the mother and father instead. The cops are called, Sheriff Dan (Norris) arrives, he tussles with the killer, apprehends him, killer breaks free, is shot up to high heaven by the other cops on the scene. Cue the doctors and their desire to try out their experimental genetic modifying serum on a near-corpse.
Bodycount: 10, most going out silently.
Themes/Moral Code: The standard dangers of irresponsible science and reckless experimentation spiel. We have a doctor, Dr. Spires (Steven Keats), with a very serious Frankenstein complex, who is obsessed with "advancing science" without ever bothering to consider the cost or, y'know, morality of his actions. Though, unlike the good Doctor Frankenstein, Dr. Spires is in denial over his creation's monstrous nature (when Kirby shows back up at the Institute covered in blood and riddled with bullet holes, Spires assumes that it must be because people were attacking him). This blind faith in his monster's inherent "goodness" leads to Spires getting his neck snapped while trying to embrace the killer-- yes, justly, science is held accountable. Here is a series of representative quotes spouted out by the three prominent doctor/scientist/psychiatrist characters supporting this theme: "you going to talk to me about 'souls' and 'playing God'?"; "he's as grotesque as anything created by man"; "we're scientists, not moralists"; "nobody's going to give us a Nobel Prize for murder."
Killer's Motivation: The killer is John Kirby (Brian Libby), a "social mutant" who at least has enough self-awareness to know to call his shrink before he's about to flip out and start murdering people. His motivations are totally unclear. Perhaps he kills the family in the opening because they're so darn loud (and, as we're assured by his later muteness, this is a man who prizes silences). But later on he kills the Genetic Research Institute staff indiscriminately, so who knows. He's not very compelling on this level, so the filmmakers try to spice him up with some boogeyman attributes. Once he's on the Institute's slab and is injected with a serum called something like "Might-A-Gen 35," he gains the ability to regenerate and heal wounds instantaneously, Wolverine style. This ability, paired with his tremendous strength and predilection for silence, renders him a suitable match for the Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers category of indestructible super villain-- a similarity that the filmmakers are all too aware of (like Myers, he wears a blue jumpsuit and takes a tumble out of a high window (which he survives); like Jason, he becomes horrifically burned and pops out of standing water (twice)).
Final Girl: The sort-of final girl is Alison (Toni Kalem), a young woman who cannot resist the Norris charm. She and Norris' Sheriff Dan carried on a relationship precisely 5.5 years prior, but Dan ditched her for some reason that's never made entirely clear, that rascal. She spends most of the first half of the movie protesting that they'll Never Ever Ever Get Back Together before we hard cut to a scene of them rolling around in bed, which then segues to her telling him that she refuses to see him anymore. She's rather indecisive, but whenever Dan does something irresistible, like lightly stroke her chin while she's driving a car, how can she refuse his natural magnetism? Unlike a lot of final girls, she is allowed to have lots of sex and isn't punished for it (though the sex is more of the cheesy romance montage variety than the steamy, lustful, passionate kind-- the apex of eroticism between Dan and Alison is when we see them eating from an apple and champagne gift basket together in bed, shortly before lounging and laughing in a hammock). She runs and hides from the killer on multiple occasions, and helps Sheriff Dan in the final brawl by jumping on the killer's back and holding him at bay. She's nice, but, let's not mistake the real final girl for anyone but Norris.
The Good, the Bad, & the Cheese: If there's anything that can almost match my affection for the horror film, it's the big dumb '80s action film. Silent Rage-- be still my heart-- is both. While it never totally embraces either genre to the extent it would need to in order to prove itself as a classic, it still demonstrates enough skill in each sensibility that it winds up as a supremely entertaining hunk of brainless genre mashup. The first half of the film dedicates itself to the action side of things, but is rather aimless throughout, only really punctuated by an excellent barroom throw-down, in which Sheriff Dan single-handedly pummels about twenty rough-and-tumble bikers. It's at the midpoint that the genetically-enhanced killer is set loose and the film transforms itself into what is impossible to mistake for anything other than a slasher. In fact, this final forty-five minutes stands as a blatant condensation of the locations and scenarios of both Halloween (1978) and Halloween II (1981)-- it begins in a dark domestic setting, in which the killer chases the final girl around a house wherein he's arranged the bodies of his prior victims, before shuffling quickly to these same characters running about the Institute (which is in no way distinct from a hospital setting), where the killer continues to chase that final girl around and even kills someone with a syringe. If you watch this second half imagining the killer as Michael Myers, Alison as Laurie Strode, and Sheriff Dan as Dr. Loomis, then you have expended the same amount of mental effort as the filmmakers. The final minutes attempt to blend the action and horror elements, with Sheriff Dan and John Kirby squaring off mano-a-mano. It's a decent fight, but it ends (confusingly) when Sheriff Dan throws Kirby down a well, and then seems totally convinced that he's finally vanquished his indestructible foe (after having already shot him, burned him, and thrown him out a window, all to no lasting effect). I suppose he's a sheriff who lives by the code of the three act story structure.
And let me not neglect to speak briefly about the performances, which in a situation like this require a good deal of flavor to carry us through the quieter moments. To its advantage, Silent Rage keeps its characters weird and silly for the duration. I like Brian Libby as the killer-- he manages to infuse the rather bland job he's required to do with a physical awkwardness, manifested through bizarre body language and facial contortions, which I found compelling. More noteworthy is that Chuck Norris is more charming and likeable here than I've ever seen him before; he's a soft-talking, tea-sipping, lady-loving sheriff who cares about his stetson, his flannel, his jeans, and soft rock, in that order. He has only a smidgen more dialogue here than usual (which is still next to none-- he's one of the rare '80s action stars who doesn't sport a goofy accent, and yet he's almost always given the fewest lines to deliver), and he smiles through most of it. His romance with final girl Alison is very hokey, but I couldn't have enjoyed it more (seriously, if you ever wanted to see Chuck Norris swinging in a hammock and laughing joyfully, here's your ticket). Otherwise, Norris is accompanied by an almost unreal supporting cast of character actors (William Finley, Ron Silver, Steven Keats, Stephen Furst). Of these, Stephen Furst goes the most all out, as Norris' roly-poly, mildly mentally-deficient deputy, who manages to say a lot of bizarre things over the course of the movie, with the most horrifying being a heartfelt story from his youth that he relates to Norris about the time that he deep-freezed (and so, murdered) a puppy that he accidentally got all dirty because he thought doing so would clean it. Silent Rage lets a lot of questionable things like that story slide by without comment or reflection, so it only seems fair for me to do the same for it.
Logline: The Harmon family is falling apart after a miscarriage and an illicit affair, so perhaps moving across country into a notoriously haunted house replete with a gaggle of poltergeists will bring them back together.
The first season of the FX television program American Horror Story is one of most successful and satisfying pieces of horror fiction produced in a filmed medium over the last ten years. Bold, maybe, but I have no qualms about saying as much. The program is contemporary while, by design, mired in history (historical, diegetic, and cinematic)-- the sort of program that will provide its viewers with a brief vignette visualizing a hypothesis about the death of Sal Mineo alongside a scene wherein a teenaged ghost attempts to type into his browser the correct spelling of "YouTube." It has all the lurid, melodramatic appeal of an addictive daytime soap opera but shot through with a manic sensibility in the construction of its characters and the progression of its storylines. While aware of its own pleasures as a product of kitsch, it does not settle for conducting itself with nothing more than knowing irony, instead striving towards a sense of commingled earnestness, eccentricity, and situational levity. Moreover, despite its many narrative curve balls, its mini-series ethos concludes the first season as a cohesive whole-- an independent narrative successful in crafting a universe with an internal logic all its own. One could call it an amalgam of Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks with a more prominent injection of horror into its veins, but that would be discounting the sense of condensed completeness that American Horror Story revels in, and which neither previous show (in their much longer, eventually stifled runs) was able to so deftly attain.
The first season of American Horror Story stands as a concentrated assemblage that culls inspiration from all areas of the horror canon, both cultural and cinematic: haunted houses, mad scientists, monstrously deformed children (It's Alive), the reanimated dead, home invasions, bodies in meat grinders, school shootings, gaslightings, leather-clad rapists, demonic pregnancies (Rosemary's Baby), the Antichrist (The Omen), The Black Dahlia, psychotic lovers (Fatal Attraction), Halloween hijinks, the lost colony of Roanoke, and ghosts who think they own the place (Beetlejuice). And although it is a program marked by its excess (sex, violence, and perversity are omnipresent), it never feels bloated or overblown. The writers mesh these elements together in a not-too-trying nonlinear presentation that feels only occasionally episodic but (finally) thematically sound. Its peculiar, breakneck editing (coupled with scenes that play out in what's closer to double-time in comparison to other prime time fare), kept me in a state of constant alert, regardless of the logical narrative turns that were being made-- this disorienting effect softened as the series fell into its groove and I became more attuned to its whims, but the approach never disappeared. Even more, at times the show manages to be unpredictable without resorting to unresolvable mysteries or incongruous twists-- another leg up over certain recent programs that shall not be named.
All of this said, I'm also convinced there's a bit of depth here beyond its transcendent use of pastiche. The inability of the Harmons to see beyond the surface of their house's ghost infestation is reflected in the show's actual production-- it is slick and glossy with an almost obscene suburbanized Gothic aesthetic, its apparitions more often mundane than terrifying (we're talking about a show that, in the season's later half, features a cast consisting of almost 80% ghosts). The recurring gag of the Eternal Darkness car tour (showing you the locations of all of L.A.'s most gruesome murders) underlines the show's central ambivalence towards its own concerns with history: when history is preserved, it faces the inevitability of becoming a commodity (example, one ghost is thrilled to have become a news item in L.A. history as "The Boy Dahlia," and seems less concerned with the fact that he's now dead). The Harmons' Murder House is a haunted American icon, representative of a horror tradition at large that needs preserving (in film, primarily, but also to some extent in reality, as the absence of such iconic locations renders the fictional situations implausible and lifeless-- as Phil Coldiron wrote about Ti West's The Innkeepers and its equally traditional horror location, "who could imagine a ghost story set in a Courtyard by Marriott?"). But, that history which goes through the conscious act of preservation becomes something quasi-artificial and archetypical, rather than singular and untouched (I think the show's title can be taken literally, as in: this is "the American Horror Story"-- maybe all of them). It's an odd fate for traditional horror to have, but the alternative is worse: one character in the show wants to buy Murder House in order to raze it and build affordable housing on top. Thankfully, the show's ghosts refuse to sit idly by while that happens, and the season's finale reemphasizes the expressed desire to let sleeping houses lie (the anthology aspect of the series, promising no continuation of the Harmon family's story, helps further this point), although its pre-epilogue Hallmark Christmas tableau complicates any such easy proclamations about preserving the sanctity of traditional horror sans commercialism. American Horror Story pillages the corpus of American horror for every usable item of interest, but it does so with obvious affection and respect. Could one make that same claim for the hollow cinematic cash-ins of the past decade, those banking on brand recognition and our desire to dumbly cozy up against past images of terror embedded in our cultural memories?
Lastly, as with most involved soap operas, American Horror Story is also by parts an ensemble character piece, and the performances from the cast are appropriately unrestrained. Of particular note is Jessica Lange, of whom not enough good things can be said concerning her virulent, Gothic Blanche DuBois, and Evan Peters, whose character is one of the more nuanced portrayals of a bonafide sociopath I've seen (he plays Tate not with barely-concealed monstrosity but self-deluding crocodile tears). Knowing that both of these actors (and a few others) will return for more next season in an entirely different story and location has me looking forward to this October with more than the usual enthusiasm.
Logline: Five attractive young people head to a dusty old cabin in the woods for the weekend. You think you know where this one is headed? Now think of all the other directions it could also head in. Crush. Blend. Stir. Serve.
Cabin in the Woods has put me in a bind: I would love nothing more than to talk at length about it, but—on opening weekend, no less—I feel that overt spoilers should be avoided. Generally, I could care less about spoiling, but as has been widely noted by about everyone, a good amount of fun can be had by letting Cabin in the Woods unfold without bringing too much prior knowledge into it*. However, it is worth mentioning that the film has far more to offer than those initial surprises. This is an intelligently-made modern horror film and a sharp piece of genre criticism. I think what I’ll try to do is write about what the film is talking about without explaining how it accomplishes those critical arguments. There are a couple different ways of reading the film:
One interpretation would have to do with examining the creative process behind formula horror pictures. The film seems less interested in poking fun at these inherent genre conventions than in explaining them (why does the heroine always drop her weapon after using it? Why, because it would ruin the plan). There is some requisite snark here and some commentary on voyeurism**, but mostly I was pleased to find Cabin in the Woods actually celebrating the formula as an art form in itself. Because as un-formulaic as so much of the film is, it is simultaneously purely by-the-numbers—so much of the film’s first section feels (intentionally so) exactly like similar pictures of the past decade, with the major disparity being how charming and well-crafted Cabin in the Woods is and how dull and abrasive so many others are.
Another reading can be looked at only from a wider cultural (or, as the film suggests, global) perspective: horror films represent a 20th-21st century form of religious sacrifice. Horror films fulfill a basic human need for bloodshed in hopes of reasserting a grand moral order. As we grow older and look at the youth of the new generation, we are horrified by the corruption we perceive them instigating (even if the perceptions are wrong, as the film shows, and must be enforced). This is why so many formula bodycount horrors feature the young as protagonists: they are sacrificial lambs on the altar of mass culture. While the film does make use of the fact that these sorts of horror films are created by corporate adults, it doesn’t really explore the other implication: formula horror is a genre marketed predominantly to those same teens who are slaughtered on screen. Perhaps Cabin in the Woods is making the point that formula horror is both a symbolic purging of that nasty, youthful moral corruption and a cautionary preventative (Don’t go into the woods… without condoms)?
Another impressive aspect of the film is how well it manages to chart the various directions formula horror films have taken over the decades. Whedon and Goddard cram in implicit references to almost every horror trend in recent memory (I think the only one it missed was the found footage film, but the inclusion of such might have stretched the meta-reflection to its limits), and all these influences crescendo almost sublimely near the film’s conclusion (there’s one 20-second sequence in particular that deserves frame-by-frame viewing). While postmodern in approach, the film is actually a direct archetypal analysis, and so in that way it’s sort of inimitable and beyond the ken of more straightforward meta-horrors (Scream, Behind the Mask). If it has any sort of legacy to stamp on the horror genre, hopefully it’s the realization that these archetypes, conventions, and formulas do have a sort of cultural significance for us—fittingly, a truly modern horror film can either play with or perfect them. Cabin in the Woods does both.
*TBH, an observant genre cinema fan should probably be able to figure out the broad strokes after the opening credits and first scene.
**One character comments, after a specific revelation, “We’re on a reality show,” which is not entirely incorrect. Like reality shows, horror films of the formulaic variety deal in archetypes whom we want to see perform certain roles. We never get upset when reality show stars fail to act as human beings do, but it often feels ludicrous to some when watching these types of horror films. Others of us know better.
