I’ve seen many horror films in my life, and am frankly quite tired of the whole endless remake / reboot / sequel thing.
Yet this is why Cabin in the Woods was really enormous fun for me. It’s both a film that pays tribute to many of the great horror flicks in history, and is also something completely different at the same time.
It is indeed true what that you can’t give away much of the movie without spoiling the whole thing, and we’re certainly not going to ruin the Cabin experience for anyone. We definitely want you to go in pure, and the less you know going in the better.
However, we can tell you that Cabin in the Woods is what a good horror film should be, which is purely and simply a lot of fun. There’s a lot of humor in it, which some hardcore horror fans may have a problem with, but it also delivers with the scares and the gore, making it all a really fun roller-coaster ride.
At the film’s premiere, several greats of the genre came out including Wes Craven of Last House on the Left, Scream, and Nightmare on Elm Street fame, Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins and the original Piranha, and Edgar Wright, creator of Shaun of the Dead.
Craven gave his thumbs up to the Hollywood Reporter, and summed it up quite well: “I thought it had a fun, meta feel and a lot of quotes to films of mine and my friends. But it also went off in its own direction. It’s not the last horror movie but it may be the last horror film of this kind. And that’s good. It will challenge people to do something totally different.”
In its review of the film, Foxnews wrote that Cabin “resurrects horror,” and called it “a truly rare and original horror film. Cabin uses the horror medium to create a very funny, very scary commentary on our exploitative culture and the gratuitous turn of horror movies in the past twenty years.”
While I didn’t see it having that deep of subtext, it is indeed very clever and fun, and I honestly had a very good time watching it.
Although it would be nice to think Cabin might inspire more original horror films, the news hit Deadline the other day that one of the most blasphemous horror remakes you can think of, Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria, will be going forward.
Yet even if the remakes keep on coming, Cabin in the Woods should be a good change of pace from the usual tired old genre shtick.
