Critique from Within: Cabin in the Woods portrayal of the Horror Movie industry

      In his film Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard uses a film within a film narrative to expose and critique the repetitiveness, stagnation, and seeming lack of care towards characterization that seems to have taken over the Horror Movie industry.  Throughout the film the viewer is presented with a dual narrative, one story focuses on the officials who are trying to preform some kind of ritual to please an offscreen entity known as the Director, and the other narrative follows the group of college students that are selected for this ritual, only crossing over when the officials preform certain actions or pull certain strings to move the other narrative in the direction they want it to go.  Through this structure, Goddard presents the viewer with a story about the creation of a horror film, it is a narrative about the Director and the people under him/her using various techniques to create a pre-formatted ritual, the ritual being the creation of a horror movie.  It is here that Goddard begins his critique,starting with the lack of characterization or character design that Horror movies use.  The cast is always the same: the demure, innocent protagonist (the virgin), the druggie or idiot (the fool), the overly-sexy beautiful girl (the whore), the sports jock or strong man (the athlete), and the smart, bookish man (the scholar).  Both in the film within the film, and outside of it permeating the entire industry, this very same cast can be seen perpetuated again and again, only varying genders or maybe throwing in a couple more characters with the same traits.  Some films don't even go so far as to do that, instead just relying on a large cast of bland characters to get killed in various gruesome ways (see the Saw franchise, or Final destination franchise).

      As the movie gets underway, Goddard introduces his second critique of the industry, the repetitiveness of the plot and pacing within almost every movie.  The plot of the meta-narrative in the film follows a suprisingly linnear path as laid out by the "producers" of the meta-film: the cast takes off, they are warned by the Harbinger (gas station attendent) that the place they are going to is evil and that they will die, they ignore him and go anyway, they spend the first day, and most of the night partying, then the horror strikes in the night.  Beyond this, there are the various ways that each of them die, all of which also follow convention:  there is the person that dies before/during/after a shower/sex scene (Jules), one that dies while trying to escape (Kurt), one that dies while in the middle of a realization (Marty, although this is subverted in the film), and one that dies saving the main character (Holden), while the main character is left to either live or die.  Again, this same narrative structure is increasingly prevalent in most slasher films or horror films in general, and the times that the characters die have become almost industry standard.  By subverting this, Goddard disrupts the standard film narrative, and it is from this disruption onward that he begins to develop his film as a completely separate narrative evolving on its own, combining the outside producers and the students turned  "actors."  At the same time, by showing this kind of ritual as a successful procedure, he critiques the industry as following this preset plan or ritual, and so long as all the elements are present, that is all they care about, thus encouraging repetitiveness and bad, soulless movies.

      The final critique that Goddard makes of the industry is in its stagnation and lack of creativity in regards to the horror, or what serves as the driving antagonistic force.  In the film, the "producers" have a large studio -wide betting pool on what kind of creature the "actors" will bring about, and all the possible results are listed on a standard size whiteboard.  While not given very long to look at it, the whiteboard contains three distinct categories of creatures, creatures that have been used before in previous successful horror films, creatures that are very slight alterations of ones that have been used and have been successful, and creatures that are references or tributes to other movies or that might have inspired Goddard.  In the first category,  the list of creatures includes such standbys as Clowns (It), Zombies (Night of the Living Dead), Werewolves (heck if I know), Vampires (Nosferatu), and so on and so forth; all recognizable, all famous, and all already used to death.  In the second catagory there is a small attempt at innovation, but most monsters vary little from what they are based on; Fornicus Lord of Bondage and Pain (Pinhead from Hellraiser), Zombie Redneck torture family as opposed to just Zombies, ect.  Finally, there are the references to other movies, such as the Evil Raping Trees from the Evil Dead, Various infected from Left 4 Dead, and Twins that look very similar to those from Kubrick's The Shining.  Through this, Goddard critiques the stagnation and repetitiveness of the creatures used in films, where the horrors are all ones that have been used before, or ones that are very slight variations of famous ones.  All possible creatures are listed on the board, there is no deviation both in the meta-film or in the industry, you will always see the same creatures, with very little innovation.