‘The Cabin in the Woods:’ The Perfect Horror Movie For People Who Have No Patience for Horror Movies

Every Halloween, there’s a lot of talk about horror movies. Here on Decider, for instance, you can read all about the best horror movies on Netflix, the best horror movies on Hulu, and the best horror movies on HBO. But not everyone vibes with the horror—not because they’re scaredy-cats, but simply because a lot of horror movies are, uh, kinda bad.

If that sounds like you, I have the perfect horror movie for you this Halloween: The Cabin in the Woods. Produced by Joss Whedon back when he was still cool, co-written with his longtime collaborator Drew Goddard, this 2012 horror-comedy satirizes horror tropes. But unlike 1996’s Scream—which successfully deconstructed the horror genre with biting humor—The Cabin in the Woods also successfully indulges in them. Put another way, after I watched The Cabin in the Woods for the first time, I came away thinking not, “Wow, horror movies suck,” but, “Wow, I understand why horror movies are so popular, even if they are annoying sometimes.”

Look, every genre has its fair share of bad movies. Every genre contains tiresome tropes. Perhaps horror gets a particularly bad rap because—like romantic comedies—it’s usually so reliably predictable. Raise your hand if you’ve ever shouted at the screen when one of the following happens in a horror movie: Someone suggests the group split up, someone goes down into the basement, someone forgets to pack their gun… the list goes on. There’s also the fact that some horror tropes are downright offensive, like when the black guy dies first, usually quickly without ever becoming a real character; or when the slutty girl dies first, usually slowly, after being tortured in a way that reminds viewers uncomfortably of rape. Watch enough films that do these things, and you’re left with the distinct impression that they are written by lazy, sadistic, white guys.

Spoiler alert, but The Cabin in the Woods—the directorial debut for Goddard—gives you a face for those lazy, sadistic white guys. They’re Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, who play engineers Sitterson and Hadley. Sitterson and Hadley work in an underground laboratory where, essentially, they design a real-life Evil Dead scenario. The unwitting participants in their simulation are American college students Dana (Kristen Connolly), Holden (Jesse Williams), Marty (Fran Kranz), Jules (Anna Hutchison), and Curt (Chris Hemsworth—yes, Thor is in this), all of whom embark on a weekend away in an isolated cabin.

Each student is meant to embody an archetype, as the two men explain at the end: the virgin (Dana), the whore (Jules), the scholar (Holden), the fool (Marty), and the athlete (Curt). Of course, most do not fit neatly into that box. Jules criticizes Dana for sleeping with her professor. Curt—though he looks suspiciously like a certainly muscular Norse god—is an academic, while Holden is the more athletic one. Sitterson and Hadley nevertheless force the kids into playing out their slasher-film stereotypes, with the help of mind-altering drugs. Then the two engineers gleefully select which monster to unleash to kill them, with one stipulation: It’s vital that the whore die first.

It’s an ingenious set-up is perfect for mocking the many flaws of your average bad horror film and the knuckleheads who—like Sitterson and Hadley—sit back in their rolling chairs and sip coffee as they concoct the scenario. But at the same time, it works as a horror movie in its own right. At its core, The Cabin in the Woods is still a movie about a group of young people in a secluded area who die violent, unnatural deaths. It revels in scaring you and delights in its monsters, many of which are references to classic horror films. Whedon summed it up best with this 2012 quote to total film: “I love being scared. I love that mixture of thrill, of horror, that objectification/identification thing of wanting definitely for the people to be alright but at the same time hoping they’ll go somewhere dark and face something awful.”

If you love horror movies, you’ll have a lot of fun with this one, and if you hate horror movies, you might just have your mind changed by The Cabin in the Woods. But if you hate being scared, I can’t help you. You’ll just have to wait until it’s Christmas movie time.