To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Next up, The Cabin in the Woods…
Warning – if you’ve not seen The Cabin in the Woods, don’t read this review. Watch the film first as it’s best experienced knowing nothing about it.
As discussed in yesterday’s Countdown to Halloween, remakes are at their best when they take the core idea of the movie it’s re-telling and then going in a new direction. If you were to put both versions of The Fly side by side, the two share very few things in common, which is why Cronenberg’s adaptation doesn’t feel like a remake. Not only that, but because the films are so different, you rarely see the 1986 version compared to its predecessor. This is in a stark contrast to The Evil Dead and it’s 2013 counterpart, where there are so many similarities that comparisons had to be made, meaning it could not be judged as its own movie.
And while it will never fully be considered as one, there is a strong argument to be made that Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods is the true remake of Sam Raimi’s 1981 Video Nasty favourite. In short, Goddard went down the route of The Fly and not 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Cabin in the Woods tells the story of a group of teenagers doing that time honoured tradition of going out to a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere to do the usual things teenagers do. Smoking pot, drinking, truth or dare, promiscuous sex and, of course, accidentally raising a group of zombie that being to stalk and kill them. Standard stuff you might say, but there’s a twist to this tale – the world in which these teenagers live is not real and is part of a network broadcast who control the elements to appease God-like creatures that will destroy the Earth should the show not be a success.
Honestly, who saw that coming?
Co-written by Drew Goddard and King of all Nerds Joss Whedon, The Cabin in the Woods is perhaps the most refreshing take on the genre since Raimi set the standard back in the early 80s. While The Evil Dead has had a lot of imitators over the 30 years since its release, The Cabin in the Woods is the first movie that is actually saying something new about the concept rather than just doing the same thing again only bigger and bloodier. It’s smart, funny and an entertaining thrill ride from start to end.
Well, that’s not entirely true.
While the stuff with the teenagers in the woods is performed with a knowing sensibility, it is perhaps the most uninteresting thing about the movie. The true brilliance of The Cabin in the Woods is centered around the two controller-type characters, played perfectly by The West Wing‘s Bradley Whitford and the always fantastic Richard Jenkins who are phenomenal additions as they bring the much needed light-hearted tone. And because they are playing the Ed Harris role of The Truman Show, they are the most interesting characters because they’re the ones we know the least about.
But of course, it’s hard to talk about The Cabin in the Woods without discussing the final 30 minutes of the movie where it stops being a clever, knowing horror movie and turns into the most insane amount of blood, gore, violence, irony and laugh out loud moments that have been committed to cinema in quite some time. And it is glorious. With a handful of references to the previous work of Whedon as well as iconic horror characters like Pinhead and the ghost pirates from The Fog, the final act of The Cabin in the Woods is a jaw-dropping amount of fun that will constantly have you saying, “blimey – what next?”
If you remove all the Whitford and Jenkins segments, The Cabin in the Woods would be nothing more than a cheap knock off of The Evil Dead and a pretty piss-poor attempt to cash in on it’s popularity. But Goddard and Whedon did what David Cronenberg did with The Fly – they took the core idea and turned it on its head to create a movie that can be judged on its own merits and not compared to the movie its based upon. It’s a very fun horror movie and is worth watching just to get to the crazy ending. Without looking at it with rose tinted glasses, the movie does nuke the fridge in its closing moments, but The Cabin in the Woods is the kind of fresh and original movie that the horror genre needs.
In short, it is a better remake of The Evil Dead than Evil Dead was.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published October 14, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
