For the last couple of years Eileen and I have been slowly working our way through the complete series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It had been several years since I watched both shows during their original airing, and Eileen had only seen a few episodes. Now we’re coming toward the end, having finished Buffy and being some way into the last season of Angel (which carried on for another year on its own, after Buffy and co ran out of monsters to fight in Sunnydale). We’ll soon reach the end, and that means we’ll no doubt be feeling feel a certain withdrawal from Joss Whedon’s strange genius.
So it’s a good time for Whedon to be releasing a very cool looking new movie.
No, I’m not talking about The Avengers, although that does appear to hold a certain amount of catsuited charm. I’m talking about Cabin in the Woods, created by Whedon and former Buffy / Angel writer Drew Goddard.
If you watch the trailer you’ll see it initially looks like a fairly standard, cliché young-people-in-the-woods horror movie. When I first watched it I thought I was seeing a preview of an Evil Dead remake. But it never takes long for Whedon to throw convention on its head. By the end of the trailer it starts to look more like a twisted hybrid of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Truman Show.
Which would also like to see.
Cabin in the Woods premiered at South by Southwest at the weekend, and appears to have been received pretty favourably. Meredith Woerner from io9 calls it, “a shining beacon of promise for people that don’t need shaky cam to get their fear fetish rocks off. It’s the thinking geek’s horror film.”
I think it promises to be the best thing to happen to horror movies since Scream.