The Script In The Woods
Although I am obsessively avoiding spoilers for Dollhouse, last night I broke down and plunged into reading the script that’s circulating purporting to be that for The Cabin In The Woods, the horror movie from Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard which is scheduled to begin filming in British Columbia just over a week from now.
My full intention, after shuttering Its Own Sub-Genre at the start of this month, had been to avoid most discussion of Cabin as well. But I’d become increasingly frustrated with writers of movie websites and horror blogs who seemed intent on telling people that the filmmakers have been running around proclaiming that this is some sort of “game changing” movie that forever will alter the horror genre.
Most of these people point to how Whedon described the project when he first announced its existence (in then-unsold script stage) way back in 2007 at Comic-Con: “The horror film to end all horror films, literally.”
For these movie and horror critics, this comment has become the proof that Whedon’s ego has gotten the better of him. The problem, of course, is that almost everyone else who saw him make that remark didn’t take it that way. Most people who know anything about how Whedon talks about his work instead took it to be something of a tease about the plot, not as a statement of Hollywood braggadocio. In other words, took the use of the word “literally” to have implications for the story in the film, not for the real world reaction to it.
Having now read what purports to be the film’s script (and presuming, for the moment, that it is authentic) that reality is more clear than ever, and the early critics are shown to be more interested in trying to puff up their own traffic and reputations by mischaracterizing the filmmakers’ teases as swagger, than they are in trying to discern the reality of the remarks and communicating it to their readers.
As for the script itself, I’m not going to say anything specific. But I will say what I said about it on WHEDONesque: If this script is real, then by my read The Cabin In The Woods is about the legitimate psychological reasons for horror and the ways in which we pervert and abuse those reasons. That, in fact, is entirely consistent with something else Whedon has said about it: “Ultimately, it’s my and Drew’s take on the classic horror movie, which means that it is a classic horror movie, but we also have something specific to say about it.”
Except, of course and as might be expected, not quite in as dry, boring, and lecturous way as my statement makes it sound. In the end, I hope this script is the real one, or at least a version of it, because I’d like to see how it plays out — both on screen and off.