The Death Rag by Kevin Stadler

The

Death Rag Horror Film Magazine

Friday the 13th: A Look Back Analysis: The White Ribbon Review: Cabin in the Woods

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a look back on the iconic horror masterpeice

We are a society that “as the dying and the dead become removed from our everyday lives, our interest in images of death and dying [intensifies]” (Smith 2010). The horror film as a genre is often dismissed, along these lines, as belonging within the lowbrow culture of sexualizing violence for the purpose of entertainment (Smith). It is dismissed as merely being another way to degrade women, standardize violence, and also to disgust and shock audiences simply for a profit. This perspective ignores the true value inherent in the horror film in its ability to question the social structures, expectations, and norms of the society it was created by. The horror genre is particularly fruitful for considering from a sociological perspective because it is unmatched by other genres in terms of its shocking and fearbased nature. It represents the fears and paranoia of the society it was created for and by, but also reveals the sociological implications of the characters and their actions. Horror films represent their time period, their culture, and their people and so become representative of a widerange of people. “The horror genre has often been able to find national phobic pressure points, and those books and films which have been the more successful almost always seem to play upon and express fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people” (King 18). Horror can reach across social and racial boundaries in order to play with our most secret fantasies and exploit our darkest fears in such a way that it critiques the audience that finds its characters and plots disgusting but intriguing nonetheless (Williams). As can be seen in Friday the 13th

(Cunningham 1980) and Psycho (Hitchcock 1960), toying with the idea of people with gender identity disorders and multiple personalities is meant to make the audience uncomfortable, even frightened. Women playing the role of victim over and over again in horror films reveal a society that undervalues its women, viewing them as objects of pity rather than subjects of strength. In this way, we cannot separate the horror of films from the real and accepted horror of our lives. People’s “attitudes are reflected in the visual document [they] make” and people are always just a product of the society that raised them; we cannot separate the film from the culture. Horror can visually show us that which we fear, and not just pain

and death, but also that which is different and deviant. Slasher films, in particular, with its formulas and stereotypes, can be easily analyzed for its sociological explanations of the society that produced and celebrated its popularity. Friday the 13th (1980) is listed among the most notorious of the teen slasher movies. It was released only 20 years after Psycho (Hitchcock 1960) (credited with being the first slasher movie) and only one year after Halloween’s (Carpenter 1978) success revealed the popularity hidden within this genre (Clover,Dika 18). By then, the formula was not set into stone, and so the writers of Friday the 13th (1980) saw an opportunity to confuse the audience’s expectations. Following the param-

eters mapped out by Vera Dika, we can see that the film upholds the basic narrative aspects of the slasher film. First person shots from the psychotic killer point of view begin the movie, alerting the audience to the genre of the film (Dika 88). The characters are all middle class youths who take part in sex and drugs (Dika 89). The Final Girl is virginal, intelligent, paranoid and set apart from the other members of the young community (Dika 90). The killer in Friday the 13th (1980) is Mrs. Pamela Vorhees, the mother of a child who drowned while at Camp Crystal Lake. She typifies the killer of slasher movies because she has experienced a loss and is motivated by revenge, seeing the young community as responsible for her son’s death (Dika 93-94). The film follows the formula completely with the characterization of the victims and the female heroine. The only unconventional aspect of the film is the killer. By making the killer a woman, director Sean S. Cunningham toys with the psychological effects of loss and also the stereotype of men as the perpetrators of violence. Friday the 13th (1980) represents the early years of the teen slasher film and the building of the slasher formula with its punishment of sexual acts, the characterization of the Final Girl, and the creation of a psychotic killer. It is common knowledge of the

horror film audience that once a couple takes part in sexual acts, their lives are in danger. In Friday the 13th (1980) the sexual act itself is made into a perversion, offering the audience a reason for the couple’s death. The sex scene is carefully crafted. The sex is tame; the girl quietly mews her ecstasy into her boyfriend’s ear and very little nudity is actually shown. The audience is not disgusted at the act because their relationship falls within the realm of the charmed circle; the girl and boy are obviously in an acceptable heterosexual, monogamous relationship; their sex is in private, non-commercial, and with bodies only (Smith). But as the camera pans to the top bunk of their bed, the audience realizes that they are having sex with the dead body of their friend above them. Without cutting away, the camera rolls back down to the couple just as the girl reaches orgasm (Cunningham 1980, 39:19 – 40:16). This makes their once acceptable sex into a perversion, in which the audience is disgusted at the girl’s orgasm and their playful banter post-coitus. What furthers this perversion of the sex act is the audience’s later knowledge that the killer has been underneath the bed the entire time. The film surrounds this couple’s sex with death, above and below. They surround them with voyeurs, dead and alive. (The camera focuses on the dead boy’s eyes, emphasizing

“The film surrounds this couple’s sex with death, above and below.”

his position as a witness. (Cunningham 1980, 40:12) Friday the 13th (Cunningham 1980, 40:12) The couple moves out of the charmed circle and their behavior becomes deviant. The film quickly punishes this behavior as the killer penetrates the boy through the throat with a sharp point, just as the boy had been presumably penetrating the girl (Smith). Blood spurts from his neck, reminiscent of the boy’s earlier ejaculation. This is the pornographization of violence. The film juxtaposes sex with murder. The murder itself becomes like the act of sex. Whereas the sex scene shows very little detail (one short clip of a breast and half a butt cheek), the murder scene is graphically detailed. The sharp point pushes through the neck, blood squirts and pours. This characterizes slasher films; sex is rated PG while the violence is rated R because of its graphic detail and because of its own sexual undertones. Whereas the girl quietly moans in her lover’s ear, she screams into the killer’s face. Making violence pornographic does two things. We can see how these two genres affect the audience to such a degree because they are “body dramas” (Williams). “Body dramas” affect the body; the desired effect is that the audience will feel the pleasure from the sex scene and the pain of the murder scene. By using pornography and violence, the film can achieve a more intense reaction from its audience, awe them and shock them. Looking at the frames of the girl’s orgasm and

the moment before the killer’s death, we cannot help but see a similarity in facial expressions (Cunningham 1980, 40:16; 1:28:12). Friday the 13th (Cunningham 1980, 1:28:34) Awe and surprise fill their faces, making violence and sex almost interchangeable. Friday the 13th (1980)does this so well because the sexualized violence is done by a woman to a man. A woman penetrates the man; a woman

commits rape; and woman is the perpetrator of sexual abuse. By playing with the stereotypes and boundaries of the audience, the film was able to create a bodily reaction, not just to the violence or the sex, but to the gender barriers it broke. Friday the 13th (1980) confuses the audience’s cultural expectations, playing on their fears of gender bending and their conceptions of rape. The most important aspect of the early slasher films is their heroines. They must fall into a

very distinct set of credentials in order to be the sole survivor of the killer’s mad rampage. The heroine is set apart from her women co-stars. “While the typical female victim is sexually active, the Final Girl is not; where the former is naïve and oblivious, the latter is ‘watchful to the point of paranoia’” (Wee 58). She always knows more than the other characters and her knowledge saves her from a quick end. She also must be “‘intelligent and resourceful in a pinch”

(Clover 204). In a single word, the heroine must be “boyish” (Clover 204). Alice from Friday the 13th (1980) fits this mold perfectly. She is virginal, unsure about removing her clothes during the strip board game. Without even viewing a dead body, her paranoia leads her to insist she and Bill call the cops. After discovering Bill’s corpse, she smartly runs for shelter, quickly tying the door shut with a rope (Cunningham 1980, 1:12:02).

Friday the 13th (Cunningham

1980, 1:12:02) And she is boyish. She has short hair, wears a collared, long-sleeve shirt and avoids the attention of the men around her. Alice survives to the end of the film, stopping the killer by using her own machete to cut off her head. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the slasher genre. The heroine must have the capacity for violence that the victims do not in order to survive. Only through using her brains and her brawn can she outlive the murderer.

In this way, she is more like the killer than she is like the victims. The victims’ flaw is in their inability to fight back. They die quickly and quietly because somehow they have been denied the capacity for violence (Clover). The Final Girl on the other hand, usually without hesitation, looks for a weapon or a means to defend herself. Alice uses a fireplace poker, a frying pan, a rifle and finally a machete to attack her assailant. The question the audience must answer is whether this violent reaction is a sym-

bol of strength or the heroine’s own desires to be violent? In the final battle scene between Alice and Mrs. Voorhees, Alice inhabits the role of the murderer. As they struggle on the ground, Mrs. Voorhees bites Alice on the arm. The tides turn when Alice returns the favor, biting Mrs. Voorhees. After this act, she is without hesitation. She throws off the killer, runs directly to the machete and without thought, decapitates Mrs. Voorhees. The chilling aspect of this clip is the smile that comes to Alice’s face when she realizes precisely what she has done (Cunningham 1980, 1:27:47 – 1:28:39). Friday the 13th (Cunningham 1980, 1:28:34) The audience roots for the heroine and celebrates her final blow against the psycho killer, celebrating the violence that they earlier detested. Trying to determine what is acceptable violence and what is not is one of society’s classical dilemmas. But the audience does not question the violence of self-defense. Alice could have easily tied up Mrs. Voorhees earlier when she was unconscious, waited until morning for the cops to arrive and watch them cart her off to the prison. However, this is not an option for the modern audience who still believes in “an eye for an eye.” By looking into the expectations of the horror film’s audience, we can see the ideologies that rule that culture (King). We espouse that we detest violence on all levels, but then find pleasure in the retribution violence can allow. Alice represents modern culture’s belief in violence against those who cause violence,

a real belief in this perpetual cycle of violence. Friday the 13th (1980) followed the formula of the slasher film entirely, until it came to the gender of the film’s killer. They make the killer an almost elderly woman. Upon first sight, she is a godsend. She represents the home and safety, plays the role of the mother-protector. But the audience has been fooled. This woman is troubled (like all slasher movie killers) by a traumatic event from her past; the death of her son (Dika 93). She takes on the personality of her son and this convergence results in her blaming the camp and its counselors for Jason’s death. This is a classic case of “the horror of personality” in which the killer is an “authoritarian, crippled parental figure” with a “split personality” that has a monstrous past (Derry 164). What is different about about Mrs. Vorohees in particular is that she is not frightening only because of her split personality and her past, but because of her gender. She is the “abject”, that which does not “‘respect borders, positions, rules’” and “’disturbs identity, system and order’” (Wee 55). She makes us uncomfortable because she breaks from the socialized stereotype of man as violent killer. She disrupts our understanding that women are nurturers (Smith). Stephen Prince explains that by “mapping the contours of our own beliefs … and the nature and location of the internal and external social boundaries that are under threat” we can understand our reactions to the film better (Prince 123). We are most shocked because Mrs. Vorhees represents an

“anomaly” because she “escapes established social classifications” (Prince 122). Friday the 13th (1980) does more than just create a psychotic killer with a split personality to frighten us, they play with our understanding of gender norms and boundaries. She is mother and she is killer. Depending on gender roles for identity and understanding society, we find any disruption in this pattern to be frightening. Alice, like the audience, has difficulty coming to terms with Mrs. Vorhees’s role as mother-killer. In their second battle scene, Alice uses the gun in an attempt to castrate (and de-power) the killer. Instead of hitting her in the stomach or chest, Alice rams the rifle into Mrs. Vorhees’s groin (Cunningham 1980, 1:22:06). Friday the 13th (Cunningham 1980, 1:22:06) This sends her stumbling backward, but does not achieve Alice’s desired effect. Since Mrs. Vorhees is a woman, she cannot be harmed in the same way as her male counterparts. This is frightening to the heroine because that is how she has been taught to fight attackers because attackers are men. The fact that Mrs. Vorhees speaks sometimes in a male child’s voice does not help to masculinize her. Instead, her gender is only further complicated and the audience and heroine can understand her in terms of their gender categories even less. By making the killer a female in Friday the 13th (1980) the film is able to disturb its audience, not just with violence and psychosis, but also with gender-bending. If they did not know

earlier that this kind of disruption in their social fabric was frightening, watching Mrs. Vorhees cut the throats of young victims will. The horror film is special in its ability to represent, not just the bodily fears of its audience, but also its fears about gender identity and the roles inherent in them. Horror offers the sociologist a means to understand, through their own reactions as well as those of the time periodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s audience, why certain formulas exist and why certain actions and characters are punished (King). Horror exploits the fears of its culture, and by looking at these fears, we can understand what social structures have been jeopardized (King). Friday the 13th (1980) focuses its fear on the question of the pornographization of violence, by showing sex and violence and also by offering a means of finding violence pleasurable. It also plays with the slasher filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s formula for a villain, showing how manipulating gender can be more frightening than the male-attacker stereotype. Images surround us; we are a visual culture (Postman). In a society that purports that any type of violence is detestable, we continue to surround ourselves with images of death and violence. A way to understand this phenomenon is to look critically at the horror film and analyze its depictions of gender, race, class, and sexuality and the fears that surround them.

an analysis of Michael Hanekeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

The White Ribbon 12

AS EVERY CONNOISSEUR OF horror films knows, the scariest monsters aren’t the ones you see but the ones you don’t. In his latest film, The White Ribbon: A German Children’s Story, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or inCannes and Germany’s Oscar submission for 2010, director Michael Haneke presents his audience with the creepiest film of the decade without showing a single creepy monster. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he does indeed show an entire village filled with creepy beings, leaving us to figure out which among them are even more monstrous than the rest. It is the year 1913 in the fictitious northern German village of Eichwald – an innocuous enough name in itself (“Oakwood”) that nevertheless leaves a creepy taste in the viewer’s mouth due to its associations with Eichmann andBuchenwald. Everything should be just fine here, because these are, after all,Germany’s good

old days. The First World War has yet to erupt (it will before the film is over), Wilhelm is still wearing the crown of the German Empire, and the Nazi Party is not even a sparkle in the eye of a young Munich painter called Adolf Hitler. And yet all is not well in this picture book quasi-feudal community. Three men reign supreme: the feckless baron (played by Ulrich Tukur) in his manor house, who owns all the means of production for miles around (assisted by his violent and lecherous administrator, played by Joseph Bierbichler), the tyrannical Lutheran pastor (Burghart Klaussner), and the incestuous and seemingly psychopathic village doctor (Rainer Bock). The regime they maintain is characterized

by violence, misogyny, stupidity, systematic hypocrisy, and “God-given” authority. As the narrator (the empathetic village schoolteacher, played by Christian Friedel) says retrospectively at the start of the film, what happens in Eichwald “may cast light on other events in this country.” Harvest time in Eichwald: The “good old days” were never so sinister Life is ugly enough in this world already, but a series of cruel and inexplicable events transforms dowdy Eichwald into a village of the damned: In the very first scene, the doctor is brought down from his horse and nearly killed when unknown persons string a wire between two trees at the en-

trance to his property. One of the baron’s barns goes up in flames. A peasant woman dies in an accident that occurs in the baron’s dilapidated sawmill. At the annual thanksgiving festival, the baron’s young son is kidnapped and later found in the same sawmill, tied up and brutally beaten. A poor local farmer turns up hanged in his own shed, an apparent suicide. A few months later, the out-ofwedlock Down syndrome son of the village midwife is discovered tied to a tree with his eyes gouged out. Clearly someone is taking revenge for something. Yes, the perpetrator or perpetrators represent pure evil. But considering everything else that is going on in Eichwald, can you entirely blame them for fighting back?

est children, the alarmingly passive-aggressive Klara and Martin, for coming home late on the evening when the doctor was nearly killed. He not only beats the two preteens with a cane and sends the entire family (himself and his wife included) to bed without supper, he also decrees that both children will henceforth wear a wide white ribbon – symbolizing “innocence” – on their persons to remind them of obedience and the wrath of a vengeful god. (Oddly enough, it never occurs to him to ask what they were really up to that fateful day…) Later on, he accuses Martin of masturbation, feeding him a cock and bull story about a local boy who supposedly died from it, and then ordering that his hands should be tied to the bedstead every night to prevent him from “polluting” himself further. Like all the children in the village, Martin meekly submits to his father’s divine judgment, but clearly draws his own conclusions from this humiliation – and bides his time.

“Among the film’s many horrors, it also presents the decade’s most horrific sex scene...”

A semi-feudal regime: The pastor, the Baroness, the Baron, and their son The essence of this film can be summed up in just nine words: “The birth of terrorism from the spirit of fundamentalism.” As revolting as most of the villagers are – the abusive doctor is particularly contemptible and well deserving of the attempt on his life – the village pastor is probably the most sinister character and may even surpass the Bishop in Fanny and Alexanderfor puritanical viciousness. In a vital scene early in the film, he lashes out at his two old-

Condemned to wear the white ribbon of innocence: The pastor’s passive-aggressive son Martin (Leonard Proxauf) Among the film’s many horrors, it also presents the decade’s most horrific sex scene, a rear-entry encounter between the doctor

and the village midwife (Susanne Lothar), his despised live-in assistant/mistress, against the dining room buffet just moments before a joyless lunch. True, the scene lasts only about five seconds, but that is part of what makes it so horrible. The only flicker of humanity comes from the sensitive, liberal-minded village schoolteacher/ narrator in his courting of the lovely but sexually repressed farmer’s daughter Eva (Leonie Benesch). Her abusive father (Detlev Buck), who embodies the pure malice of the Wilhelmine patriarchy, is visibly torn between his desire to get rid of his elder daughter (“You can see how many other goddamn mouths I have to fill”) and his obvious delight in tormenting the poor teacher by postponing the young people’s marriage as long as possible. The schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) and the farmer’s daughter (Leonie Benesch) Haneke filmed The White Ribbon in color and then remastered it in an icy black and white. This was an inspired choice, since the shades of gray practically pull you head first into those morbid photos of long dead ancestors you find lurking in the pages of your family photo album and on the whitewashed walls of your local historical museum. Many of the images seem to spring from the Weimar era photos of August Sander. In case you ever wondered this: Were the lives of our forefathers really as gruesome as their images suggest? Yes, Haneke tells us, they really were that bad – and perhaps much worse. Moreover, he seems

to be suggesting, our own brave new world of 2010 may also be a great deal less ‘enlightened’ and ‘innocent’ than we might try to kid ourselves into believing. Casting the film proved to be a challenge. Haneke hired not only a number of outstanding German actors (most notably Tukur and Klaussner) but also an immense number of complete unknowns. Most notably, he spent half a year looking for what must be the scariest-looking children in all of Germany, testing more than seven thousand of them until he finally identified the most terrifying of the lot. Whenever evil appears, the children are never far away. Director Michael Haneke screened over 7,000 children before making his selection. Ah yes, the children. I must say that when I left the cinema in Berlin’s Hackesche Höfe two and a half hours later I was still wondering what this frightful but accurate deconstruction of Wilhelmine rural life had to do with Nazism. But then I remembered the film’s subtitle - A German Children’s Story- and then it all came home to me. Whenever something sinister happens, those “innocent” children are always on hand to observe and perhaps also to laugh behind their inscrutable stares. No, we can’t be certain what part the children play in all this, if any (only Klara commits genuine violence on camera when she crucifies the pastor’s parakeet on a scissors out of revenge for his repeated cruelties), but their utter passivity combined with their sneering facial expressions

suggest that they can hardly wait to make their move on the older generation – or on anyone weaker than themselves, like the midwife’s disabled son – and pay it all back with interest. Now, jump ahead just a few years and give them access to modern technology and organizational structures – and equip them with an ideology that replaces the pastor’s docile submission to traditional authority with one based on genocidal radicalism – and watch what they do with them. The birth of terrorism from the spirit of fundamentalism: German-Austrian director Michael Haneke These terrorists in waiting are around ten or twelve years old, and as such are too young to participate in World War I. No, instead of experiencing the disillusioning meat grinder of attrition warfare, this lot will instead soak up the dying Empire’s “victory” propaganda and later join the Freikorps, the Storm Troopers, and the Nazi Party. In 1933 they will be around thirty years old and will form the backbone of the new regime. They will indeed take their revenge, and we will all feel it for generations to come. Previously, much of the important critical work on the horror film genre has been cloaked in the language of dense, sometimes convoluted film theory. This work has certainly been fruitful in legitimizing the study of the popular horror film in advanced film and cultural studies programs. However, the majority of this previous work has not been successful,

in this reviewer’s teaching experience, as an introduction for undergraduate students either to film studies, generally, or to the horror film genre, specifically. For several years, I have tried to pull readings together from disparate sources that would provide an accessible entrée into the guilty pleasure of the horror film as popular culture, but with only varying degrees of success. Now, with the publication of Rick Worland’s The Horror Film: An Introduction, I no longer have to cull my readings from a variety of sources for my undergraduate horror film class. Worland has written a solid history of the contributing sources in the evolution of the horror film genre, as well as analyses of specific horror films that illustrate the continuing impact of those sources.

those influences. While noting the horror film’s ongoing gothic fascination with social decay, corrupt authority, and violent eroticism, Worland points out that the three major monster tropes of classic gothic novels persist as the bases for present-day monsters. Frankenstein’s monster as the signifier of human attempts to control nature through science, the struggle between the more civilized nature of Dr. Jekyll and the animal nature of his alter ego Mr. Hyde, and the unbridled eroticism of Dracula continue as the underlying thematic conflicts in the contemporary horror film, even one hundred years later. Also, horror films continue to utilize the visual style of German expressionism to convey the interior psychological turmoil of heroes, heroines, and monsters.

The overarching strength of The Horror Film: An Introduction is the exploration of cultural and social forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the horror film genre. Although both the themes of gothic literature and the visual style of German expressionism have been acknowledged by other film scholars as important generative mechanisms of this particular film genre, the book’s discussion expands beyond the parameters of

In addition to graphic impact of German expressionism, Worland makes a thoughtful case concerning the visual impact in the horror film of Georges Melies’s trick films. Melies’s films broke down clear distinctions between the waking world and the dream world, often conveyed through “the orchestration of spectacle alone, the display of visual effects” (33), an emphasis that still holds sway in many contemporary

horror films. Contributing to this visual spectacle, the author argues that the Grand Guignol Theater of Paris, with its live graphic on-stage depictions of murder and insanity, became an important influence for the horror film genre. This influence was somewhat subdued because of various censorship forces in horror films produced before the 1960s. However, the implementation of the film content ratings system and the rise of independent filmmaking during the 1960s factored, and continues to factor, into increasingly more explicit representations of grand guignol gore in the horror film’s cinematic excess. Finally, though not the least important factor, an important element of the horror film genre grew out of the Hollywood studios’ practice of cloaking early film monsters with pathos and sympathy, drawn mainly from the psychological conflicts the monsters experience. The paradox between repulsion and attraction often fuels the sympathetic fascination with the fate of the monster, normally not a narrative function associated with the supposed villain of most Hollywood films.

REVIEW

The Cabin in the Woods I preface this article by saying that you need to stop reading unless you have already seen “The Cabin in the Woods.” This article will ruin your experience of an amazing film, and I will be personally hurt if you don’t see the movie before reading. That said, I will continue with the assumption that you have seen “Cabin in the Woods.” One other thing—as you read, you should operate under the assumption that this film is awesome. This article is not a review, but an analysis. Enjoy! I saw “Cabin in the Woods” on this Friday, April Thirteenth, and I was completely blown away. I read the first couple paragraphs of a review by our friends over at IGN before my viewing, and I stopped because I did not want to ruin my experience of the film. The rating alone caught my eye. I mean, four-and-a-half out of five stars is a seriously amazing rating, one worthy of great films that scream artistry and intelligence, not a campy slash flick about a bunch of teenagers camping out in the woods, fornicating, smoking pot, and getting hacked to bits and pieces. While “Cabin in the Woods” is definitely campy, the intelligence it brings to the silver screen challenges the horror genre by assigning significant meaning and purpose to the brutal

happenings of gory films. The entire premise of “Cabin in the Woods” is built upon the idea that an ancient power dwells in the bowels of the Earth, and it is only appeased by an offering of pain and blood. A global company with a mission to successfully complete such an offering works in unison, presumably on one given day/night, hoping that one cell of the organization is able to complete the ritual offering successfully, which must conclude with the optional life or death of a virgin after the brutal killing of four other people by supernatural forces. As long as the ritual is appeased, the ancient power maintains its slumber, thus allowing humanity to continue.

It should be abundantly clear that the ancient power is equivalent to The Titans, the parents of the ancient Greek gods. Hadley, played by Bradley Whitford, practically spells it out at one point in the film, explaining that “The ancients are the gods that ruled the Earth in old times, and if they were released it would mean the end of humanity.” I was convinced when Hadley explained that sacrificial killing is not enough—there must be fear and torturous death involved as well. The Titan god, essentially, is sentient and has demands. We aren’t talking about a mindless beast but a powerful being that can and will decide the fate of humanity if unleashed. In “Clash of

the Titans” (pretty much every rendition), the Kraken, a Titan itself, could only be appeased by the blood of Andromeda, the virgin princess. Similarly, “Cabin in the Woods” appeases its gods with ritual killings in the style of horror movies with big bad monsters. The ritual is even completed with prayers, sacred medallions, and the release of blood into a basin that, when filled, will complete the offering and save humanity. Perhaps my favorite part is how the sacrifice must choose its destroyer, and one of the victims must be a virgin or something close to it. While the movie dips into ancient mythology with extreme success, it also captures the essence of basically all of the big hitters from the classic horror genre. The most stark and blatant was “Hellraiser.”

When I saw one of the characters (I can’t remember which one at the moment) playing with a small sphere that resembled the Hellraiser puzzle box, I thought to myself: “Hey, wait a moment, that reminds me of Hellraiser.” Then came the elevator scene, and I was like: “Holy crap! That’s Pinhead except with razors coming out of his head and a puzzle-sphere instead of a puzzle-box!” Other instances include the lake, which most definitely resembles Camp Crystal Lake. I mean come on, when the zombie with the giant animal-trap goes underwater then pops his head back up, how could you not think about Jason Voorhees? I won’t go through all of the nods to classic horror, but please do feel free to post your favorites in the comments. Joss Whedon and Drew God-

dard also masterfully include all of the important sequences you would expect in a campy horror film, even down to the obligatory sex scene. You know that feeling you get in horror films, the one that tells you your characters are being watched? Yea, in this movie it is because your characters are being watched—by a group of horny middle-aged men waiting to see boobies. All of the elements seem carefully placed. The sex scene itself was the only one of its kind, it was short, and it only displayed a brief moment of nudity. Gratuitous use of “The F-Bomb” stays consistent with classic horror films such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13th,” and the use of drugs and alcohol top off the list to make obvious connections to classic horror. I never got the feeling that I was

watching a film that just randomly throws R-Rated material around for good fun—it all adds up to form well-crafted piece of work where every element is an integral part of the whole. I was also struck by the audience safety mechanisms employed by “Cabin in the Woods.” Though I definitely felt moments of suspense, I never really got scared because I kept going back and forth between the office building and horror scenes. In a real sense, I did not feel deeply connected to the teenage victims because I always felt like I was watching them, not being them. Well, that is mostly true. When the rug got pulled from underneath the audience and the monsters let loose, I felt a bit more connected with the characters. Even then I was having a more jaw-dropping, “This is freaking awesome!” reaction than fear. Maybe I’m just that weird. In any case, “Cabin in the Woods” seems to be less of a frightening experience and more of a thought-provoking encounter for film-goers.

run into a film that fundamentally alters your perception of every horror flick that comes before it. Now I need to go watch me some horror films and see the poor little teenagers get hacked to bits and pieces to appease the ancient Titan, lest it rise up and destroy us all. Phew! Now I can go finish reading that review.

As I left the theater, my head was spinning with all of the wonderful details and analyses that quickly formed in my head. I honestly cannot wait to see it again, as I’m sure I’ll catch new details and form new connections, then start freaking out some more. “Cabin in the Woods” takes camp-horror and makes it awesome. My love of Greek mythology bounced up and down when I saw this film (and no, I have not yet seen “Wrath of the Titans,” though it looks terrible). It is not very often that you