To what extent can Scream and The Cabin in the Woods be regarded as postmodern horror films?

Reviews:
The Cabin in the Woods

Adverts make this look like a cliched exploitation film, with good-looking young people murdered one-by-one in a spooky forest cabin by, as one of the characters says with understandable resentment, ‘zombified, pain-worshipping, backwoods, redneck idiots’.

But don’t worry — it’s anything but conventional in where it goes from there.

Those directions are hinted at by the opening titles. They depict ancient scenes of ritual sacrifice.

Then there’s the first scene, which shows two middle-aged technicians (well played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) swapping banalities as they prepare for a day at the office or wherever it is they work.

Their cheery badinage, jokily reminiscent of Ricky Gervais’s The Office, is interrupted by more menacing titles which drip blood in a way that clashes with the tone of the opening.

The endearingly playful, dazzlingly unpredictable movie that follows — and I’m not going to spoil it by telling you too much — shows Hollywood at its best. 

This is a hugely entertaining, brilliantly crafted entertainment that’s witty, ground-breaking and — most important of all — fun. 

We’re still only in April, but by the end of 2012, millions are going to be talking about this as the outstanding film of the year.

The actors, inspired by a screenplay that miraculously bothers to give them funny things to say, hang around long enough to suggest they are capable of more than the necessarily stereotypical characters they have to play here.

Two make a particular impression. The more-or-less virginal heroine — in the Neve Campbell (Scream)/Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) role — is engagingly played by Kristen Connolly, a redhead who’s the spitting image of the young Shirley Anne Field. 

And Fran Kranz, looking like a youthful, even more frazzled Owen Wilson, is a hoot as a young man whose cannabis intake has unexpectedly revelatory side-effects.

The first picture to be written and directed by the co-writer of Cloverfield, Drew Goddard, The Cabin In The Woods is a personal triumph for him, but also recognisably the work of his co-writer Joss Whedon, who helped give us Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Lost and (a credit less well known) Toy Story.

Both men deserve credit for artistic integrity. The Cabin In The Woods was shot three years ago. 

The delay in releasing it came about because Whedon and Goddard objected to the studio Lionsgate’s plans (later shelved, thank goodness) to convert it to 3D.

The creative influences upon Goddard and Whedon are clear. The scarily effective mixture of black comedy and horror is reminiscent of Sam Raimi’s first two Evil Dead movies, and of Wes Craven, who gave us three of the other most memorably innovative achievements in the genre, Scream, Scream 2 and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. 

The plot is also indebted to Welsh director Marc Evans’s intelligent horror movie of 2002 My Little Eye, sadly underestimated by most critics at the time.

The spooky corridors, chilly vision of the future and skilful blending of horror with social comment recall Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr Strangelove.

Less obvious influences are two British authors, Clive Barker and Douglas Adams, both of them always keen to deconstruct the appeal of horror and science fiction and reveal why they’re important to so many of us. Their ideas underpin the entire movie.

Add to these ingredients five charming performances by the doomed college kids (you’re actually sorry to see them die) and an unexpectedly lavish special-effects extravaganza for a finale, and you have an innovative mixture of at least three genres: horror, science fiction and  black comedy.

It’s much cleverer and more mature than The Hunger Games, but it’s about very similar things. 

The Cabin In The Woods ends up as the more biting satire on the entertainment industry, man’s appetite for violence and older people’s love-hate relationship with youth.

And don’t worry, I’m not spoiling anything by saying that. It’s clear from very early on that our two boffins are desensitised workers in an entertainment machine that regards human life as something that can be cavalierly ended in order to appease the audience. 

Who and what that audience is, the movie leaves teasingly uncertain until a big guest star cameo reveals all — but it may not be the answer you’re expecting.

If you wanted to be hyper-critical, you could argue Cabin is guilty of the sins that it condemns. 

It values narrative ingenuity over genuine horror and treats with flippant callousness the characters it slaughters for our gruesome scary-movie delectation.

But I’m happy to swallow a small amount of hypocrisy in exchange for the pleasures this movie gave me. 

I haven’t enjoyed a film as much since The Artist, and this is easily the most fun I’ve ever had watching a slasher movie.

I’ve only five stars to award, but it deserves an extra one for being about 30 IQ points brighter than it needed to be. Of how many Hollywood movies can you say that?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-2129045/The-Cabin-In-The-Woods-review-Surprise-smash-hit-year.html

Scream

I’m sure someone is screaming bloody murder that I would dare say the film is far from groundbreaking but what did it change. It’s still a group of teens getting offed by a masked killer. It didn’t change the formula. It was a well crafted story though with a level of intelligence that slasher flicks fail to have. Craven and Williamson made a smart movie. Maybe that is groundbreaking when it comes to the horror genre! The best thing that Scream did for the horror landscape was bring it back from the dead in terms of general public opinion. Horror films still would have been made but at least the studios would try to take them a bit more seriously now. Of course they’d also start pumping out the Scream ripoffs and the teen slasher genre is still flooded with all kinds of terrible films. The studios may understand that there’s a large market for horror but they still don’t know how to make them properly.

This is still the only good entry in the Scream series. It’s a bit bloodier, it’s grounded more in reality and it isn’t a ridiculous joke yet. The reveal of the killers at the end is great. We knew all along and just couldn’t accept it. It’s a great murder mystery that just happens to be drenched in blood. Easily the best part of the film is how it references other famous horror films. That gives the movie a sense of reality as the characters are watching and talking about the horror films that we, the viewers, watch ourselves. Of course nobody does that better than Randy (Jamie Kennedy). His rant about the ‘rules’ of the horror film have become the distinguishing feature of the series, even being used to promote the fourth film with the phrase ‘New Decade, New Rules’. It’s that exact reason that the film fails to be groundbreaking.They spend a good part of the film talking about the ‘rules’ of the horror film and then they break every single one with typical results. The film follows every cliche that makes up the horror genre but because they admit it that somehow makes it groundbreaking. Honestly, what saves the film from being just another generic slasher flick is smart writing and a great villain. Ghostface has now become one of the greats, overshadowing some of those that have come before. Freddy, Jason, Leatherface and Ghostface. Those are the go-to characters for horror villains now. Nice to see that Craven had his hand in half of those.The fact that there’s really two villains in the movie makes it so perfect. It’s hard to figure out who it is when it’s not just one person. That gives them the chance to build up an alibi so we can never really be sure of who it is even when it’s made obvious early in the picture. It’s where the other films start to fail. The lame revealat the end of the sequels are painfully stupid and are almost impossible to figure out by using characters we sometimes barely see. The best performance of the flick is Jamie Kennedy. He steals the show and is a great representation of the horror fanatics that were actually watching this movie. He says what we’re all thinking and it’s sad to know that he doesn’t get to make it through all the movies. I’d rather have him around than Neve Campbell! Another great horror franchise started right here. It’s too bad that the entire series didn’t try to make itself different from everything that had come before it.

http://www.the-filmreel.com/2011/04/15/scream-1996-review/