This post contains minor spoilers about The Cabin in the Woods, but not anything that I think would ruin the viewing experience if you haven't seen it.
I saw Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods weeks ago. I thought it was one of the most brilliant movies I'd seen in a while. It gave me new respect for what you can do within the horror genre. It made me think about things in my own work, and weeks later, I'm still interested enough to write a blog post about it.
Many, many critics have written about how classic horror movies resonate with their audiences because they reflect bits of the real world. The films of George Romero and John Carpenter are some of the most frequently-talked-about in terms of social commentary, but I'm sure conclusions could be drawn about many other popular horror films. Horror has enormous potential for social and political commentary, because it's about the bad things in our world, and what you think about who, or what, those bad things are and where they come from says a lot about what you think about how our society is structured.
It's not very much of a spoiler to say that that real bad guys in The Cabin in the Woods are not the zombies (or, to be precise, torture-worshiping zombie hicks) who terrorize our group of seemingly-stereotypical-college-kid protagonists. The zombies are just tools in an environment entirely remote-controlled by cold-hearted technocrats in a secret facility for the purposes of...oh I can't tell you that. Watch the movie.
The people who control the monsters (who, in fact, are the first characters we meet) seem, for all the world, like normal office workers anywhere in corporate America. And yet, their job is to think up new and creative ways to kill innocent people, and then to do so, over and over and over again.
The staff at this secret facility do not, on the surface, seem bothered by what they are doing. In fact, they seem to be having fun. They crack jokes. They place bets. They drink--a lot. Like violence workers the world over, they create a self-supporting and self-justifying in-group of people who understand their work and believe in the value of their mission. When once--just once--one of the torturers-in-charge seems to have a moment of sympathy for his victim as she struggles for her life, he quickly covers it up, from his coworkers and himself, with booze. An astute observer might read all of these behaviors as defense mechanisms, ways of insulating themselves from the reality of what they are doing.
Perhaps most importantly, these horror apparatchiks rely on a carefully constructed ideology to justify their actions. They are doing all this, they tell us, for the greater good--to preserve the world we live in and make sure our children can sleep soundly at night. Their evil is a necessary evil, regrettable but unavoidable to preserve our way of life. The alternative is somewhat unknown, but, they assure us, it would be much, much worse. Stop me if this is starting to sound familiar.
When I first saw The Cabin in the Woods, I immediately thought of this: US soldiers in Iraq, laughing and joking as they mowed down Iraqi civilians from the cockpit of an Apache helicopter. It occurs to me now that a far better parallel is this, Obama's coldblooded executive murder squad, dispassionately selecting whom to kill via Powerpoint presentation and staff meetings dubbed "Terror Tuesdays."
You can pick your analogy, but what stuck with me about The Cabin in the Woods was its thoroughly modern version of evil. In this universe, the monster is not something aberrant and freakish that was never supposed to exist. It is institutional, bureaucratic, well-funded, and it sincerely believes it is doing this for the good of humanity. I kind of wondered if Whedon and Drew Goddard had read The Liberal Defence of Murder. Or maybe they have just been paying attention for the past twelve years.
I would not dream of revealing the plot twist that leads into the film's virtuoso third act. Let us just say that the helpless victims turn out to be less helpless than everyone thought, including themselves. If you take The Cabin in the Woods as a metaphor for US imperialism, or any system in which a small group of people dominate others by violence, fear and superior technology, then the third act of the film is not just a clever twist. Its message is downright revolutionary.
I saw Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods weeks ago. I thought it was one of the most brilliant movies I'd seen in a while. It gave me new respect for what you can do within the horror genre. It made me think about things in my own work, and weeks later, I'm still interested enough to write a blog post about it.
Many, many critics have written about how classic horror movies resonate with their audiences because they reflect bits of the real world. The films of George Romero and John Carpenter are some of the most frequently-talked-about in terms of social commentary, but I'm sure conclusions could be drawn about many other popular horror films. Horror has enormous potential for social and political commentary, because it's about the bad things in our world, and what you think about who, or what, those bad things are and where they come from says a lot about what you think about how our society is structured.
It's not very much of a spoiler to say that that real bad guys in The Cabin in the Woods are not the zombies (or, to be precise, torture-worshiping zombie hicks) who terrorize our group of seemingly-stereotypical-college-kid protagonists. The zombies are just tools in an environment entirely remote-controlled by cold-hearted technocrats in a secret facility for the purposes of...oh I can't tell you that. Watch the movie.
The people who control the monsters (who, in fact, are the first characters we meet) seem, for all the world, like normal office workers anywhere in corporate America. And yet, their job is to think up new and creative ways to kill innocent people, and then to do so, over and over and over again.
The staff at this secret facility do not, on the surface, seem bothered by what they are doing. In fact, they seem to be having fun. They crack jokes. They place bets. They drink--a lot. Like violence workers the world over, they create a self-supporting and self-justifying in-group of people who understand their work and believe in the value of their mission. When once--just once--one of the torturers-in-charge seems to have a moment of sympathy for his victim as she struggles for her life, he quickly covers it up, from his coworkers and himself, with booze. An astute observer might read all of these behaviors as defense mechanisms, ways of insulating themselves from the reality of what they are doing.
Perhaps most importantly, these horror apparatchiks rely on a carefully constructed ideology to justify their actions. They are doing all this, they tell us, for the greater good--to preserve the world we live in and make sure our children can sleep soundly at night. Their evil is a necessary evil, regrettable but unavoidable to preserve our way of life. The alternative is somewhat unknown, but, they assure us, it would be much, much worse. Stop me if this is starting to sound familiar.
When I first saw The Cabin in the Woods, I immediately thought of this: US soldiers in Iraq, laughing and joking as they mowed down Iraqi civilians from the cockpit of an Apache helicopter. It occurs to me now that a far better parallel is this, Obama's coldblooded executive murder squad, dispassionately selecting whom to kill via Powerpoint presentation and staff meetings dubbed "Terror Tuesdays."
You can pick your analogy, but what stuck with me about The Cabin in the Woods was its thoroughly modern version of evil. In this universe, the monster is not something aberrant and freakish that was never supposed to exist. It is institutional, bureaucratic, well-funded, and it sincerely believes it is doing this for the good of humanity. I kind of wondered if Whedon and Drew Goddard had read The Liberal Defence of Murder. Or maybe they have just been paying attention for the past twelve years.
I would not dream of revealing the plot twist that leads into the film's virtuoso third act. Let us just say that the helpless victims turn out to be less helpless than everyone thought, including themselves. If you take The Cabin in the Woods as a metaphor for US imperialism, or any system in which a small group of people dominate others by violence, fear and superior technology, then the third act of the film is not just a clever twist. Its message is downright revolutionary.
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