For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
Within the first few minutes of the new horror/thriller Cabin in the Woods you get an immediate sense that something’s not quite right. Two nerdy looking scientist types, Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitfield, are working in what looks like a secret underground site run by the government, or some wealthy financier, we’re never quite sure.
Nothing is given away in their dialog – they’re talking shop – but it looks odd, and you just know that what you thought was going to be straight forward is going to be something quite different. It’s the same feeling you might have felt from watching TV’s Lost when a polar bear suddenly ran out of the tropical jungle – it looked odd.
The initial setup is what you would expect from a teenage slasher; five kids – the jock, the stoner, the brazen hussy, the nice girl, etc., - take off in their van for a weekend in the woods. Obviously nasty things are going to happen – the cabin itself looks exactly like the cabin in Evil Dead 2 – and we’re not disappointed. Before long, redneck zombies are attacking the five friends. So far, so normal, for a teenage horror flick, that is. So why does the film cut back to the underground cavern with the scientists who are watching every move the teenagers make on TV monitors? And why aren’t the scientists making a move to help the teenagers from being killed? “Something weird is going on,” declares Marty, the stoner, in a moment of clarity. No kidding.
This is the point where I stop with the synopsis. To tell you any more would spoil the fun, except to say that whatever you think might be going on, don’t put your money on it; you’d be wrong.
Writer/director Drew Goddard – whose TV credits include Lost, Alias, Buffy the Vampire Killer and Angel – obviously has a skewed look at things. He takes genres – in this case, the teenage horror flick – messes around with it and comes up with something so uniquely individual you have to wonder what must his nightmares look like. It’s as if he’s rattled the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and come up with a picture entirely different from the one on the box, and it looks better.
Cabin in the Woods isn’t exactly scary – unless, of course, you’re the kind that scares really easily – but that’s not the point; it’s actually a unique thriller that borders on something quite ingenious. The final twenty minutes is so jaw droppingly over-the-top bizarre it literally defies description. Try explaining what you’re watching and what it means and you’ll fail. In fact, if a friend even starts to tell you what he or she saw, don’t listen; you need to discover it for yourself. Thank goodness it wasn’t filmed in 3D; you’d feel the need to wipe the blood from your clothes as you leave the theatre.
The problem now, of course, is that this horror genre has been so thoroughly dismantled by Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon it will always be difficult to watch a teenage horror flick again and not be bored. No matter how fast Jason in a ski-mask chases and attacks a teenager in the woods, compared to Cabin he’ll forever now appear quite pedestrian.
