Cabin In The Woods

Aaaaaaanyway, back to this movie. One thing I also liked was how they played with the Final Girl and Virgin Sacrifice tropes. Ultimately whether she lives or dies is unimportant. But the fact that "The Virgin" is a character archetype rather than a literal description. I guess that in that context "Virgin" is similar to "sweet and innocent", even though she had slept with her professor.

One unspoken recurring theme in these sort of movies is that the characters are being "punished" for something, usually sex-related. (Although I suppose other behaviors can figure into it, i.e. drug use for example.) Like the guy said in Scream, Rule Number One: Don't have sex. I guess it only matters if you have sex on-screen. Perhaps by that logic, I wonder if the most promiscuous girl in town would qualify as "The Virgin" if she had the right personality and didn't actually have sex during the movie.

edited 13th Aug '14 11:28:50 AM by Lawyerdude

Actually, its a plot point that the characters don't fit their supposed archetypes.

• The Virgin has actually slept with her professor.
• The Slut is acing all her classes and it takes being drugged out of her mind to act slutty.
• The Jock is lovable and rather well read.
• The Fool is the only one who knows what's actually going on, arguably making him the smartest person in the film's cast
• The Scholar is supposedly not that scholarly and he has the least personality of all of them.

I believe the meta message here is that characters who could be really interesting and likable in this situation are being forced into these stupid old archetypes that have been long since dated.

edited 13th Aug '14 2:38:50 PM by lancesolous13

I don't know, the cast does kinda fit those archetypes. The villains just are trying to shoehorn them into the wrong archetypes.

Not always. No one is the Virgin or the Jock period. I don't think.

I spent the entire movie expecting to find out that the reason the ritual failed was because they were so busy shoehorning people into roles that they missed the fact that Marty is the Virgin.

My headcanon is that's why he survived.

Same here.

That's basically the thing.

The crews putting together the horror stories are misusing their characters and monsters because its what consistently sells. And since they're the only ones 'selling', they need constant hits.

Yeah, the movie was good at averting Twenty Minutes with Jerks: the characters came off as really lovable and witty and warm-hearted. I actually cared and rooted for them.

And then, Chris Helmsworth crashed his bike into a forcefield, and I stopped rooting, and started laughing.

That and the scene with the Merman. That's just good Karma.

I had a theory that the reason the ritual all the rituals failed at the same time is because the big guys running the show decided to be dicks and make them fail, getting their jollies out of watching the dudes in charge of the show scrambling to fix things before it all went to shit.

I think the Merman scene is probably my favorite example of Foreshadowing being paid off.

"I'll never see a merman."

"Be grateful. Those things are terrifying. And the cleanup is a pain." (or whatever he said)

I just watched that movie again on Netflix. Honestly the Mayhem part is, in my opinion the Most Triumphant Example of Bloody Hilarious.

I cracked up laughing when I saw "Angry Molesting Tree" on the whiteboard. That immediately became my favorite monster, for the absurdity. I was trying to pick it out of every scene that monsters appeared in.

I was very pleased when it showed up.

edited 16th Aug '14 8:34:03 AM by TobiasDrake

That one's from The Evil Dead.

Cross Post:

There was a comment that was posted in a really terrible article that really struck a cord with me.

Slasher films (or at least the ones I had seen) do seem their fair share of youth tropes that seem to permeate the genre. Scream essentially parodies those tropes and seems to be a critique of sorts on the very genre that it parodies. I wonder about those so called "youth hating" tropes that Cabin in the Woods lampshades about the film.

edited 22nd Aug '16 11:27:21 AM by GAP

What made Scream exceptional is the fact that, unlike nearly every other slasher movie that came before it, it takes place in a world where slasher movies exist. Or at least the characters talk about them and are aware of the genre conventions.

It's sort of paradoxical when it comes to movies that involve the supernatural. If the supernatural were real, more people would be aware of it, and consequently they would know not to read the ancient inscriptions out loud. But in the real world where all that is just made up, you can chant all the ancient invocations you want and know that nothing will happen. But in movies, the characters come from a world like their own, but are also unaware that magic is real.

Indeed. Scream is self aware commentary on the genre that is parodies.

It's an Indecisive Deconstruction that ends up playing its tropes straight. Cabin goes deep into the fundamentals of the tropes, the middling bid bads are stand-ins for the movie industry, and the true villains stand for the audience. It's pretty fucking rad.

It is? Then again, you aren't wrong as Scream became just as cliched as the very genre it mocks while Cabin is a deconstruction through and through. Also, why do you think of the so called 'youth hating' tropes that Cabin addresses?

Is Cabin a deconstruction? Things happen in the story because they're engineered that way by the crew, and they have to go that way because that's how the Eldritch Abomination watching the story unfold expects them.

In-Universe, Cabin does take extreme measures to justify the characters behaving like their stereotypical roles, and tries to keep the story from going Off the Rails. The man difference between Cabin and other films in the genre is that it's explicitly set up as being a human sacrifice, and the monsters are just tools for the sacrifice. I'm not really sure where I was going with this...

Yes, it's a Deconstruction of traditional horror tropes. It's made by Joss Whedon, famously known for his previous deconstruction of horror tropes: the Buffy The Vampire Slayer series. The entire concept of Cabin in the Woods is that every Hollywood horror film happened in the same universe and these guys are the ones responsible for them. It's the "explanation" for all horror movies.

Like, the archetypes are in every movie because these guys select them. Everyone's a f*cking moron in horror films because these guys are drugging them with airborne chemicals into making bad choices. Nobody just leaves because they're fenced in by laser grids. Etc. Every coincidence, every weirdly bad choice, every time the universe and/or characters seem to be conspiring to get someone killed in horror, it's all because of the puppet masters working behind the scenes to make it so.

There's even a sly reference right at the beginning, where Sitterson mentions that they "haven't had a glitch since '98." 1998 was the year that The Faculty was released, a horror film in which all the archetypes are present but they team up, work together, and defeat the monsters without getting slaughtered.

edited 23rd Aug '16 12:10:43 PM by TobiasDrake

And don't forget, The Faculty was also the film where the innocent virginal girl turned out to be the monster.

I get the feeling I'm missing out on a lot of this movie by not being familiar with horror films in general...

You really only need to know the most basic of tropes.

The Five Teen Archetypes: The Slut, The Jock, The Nerd, The Stoner/Outcast/Joke, and The Virgin. And then how they all relate to each other and think/act: The Slut and the Jock are usually a couple unless the Virgin is a dude in which case the Slut might end up with them at some point. Usually the group splits up or otherwise do REALLY stupid things like have sex when you shouldn't, don't check the car for the killer, try to do Big Stupid Damn Heroes moments, and split up.

And then basic horror genre: American sensibilities to horror films are VERY cliche and conventional where not much 'original' is done, while Japan is one of the very few horror film competitors out there and they tend to have very different and unusual horror tastes, if still within their own cliches. Basically all of the dialogue of 'The Organization Workers' can be applied to Horror Fans or the Audience in general.

I think that's pretty much the basics.

Okay, so I didn't miss that much then. I had that much. Still, the pages of discussion, and the "1998" comment made me think I was out of the loop somewhat.

There are A TON of injokes like that, but you're not missing too much if you don't get them.

What happened with Chem department, then?