FOREWORD: This was an assignment for a media course I took last school year. I can't particularly remember the assignment's specs other than the fact that we had to examine or compare two films of the genre of our choice. Big surprise: I chose horror. Bigger surprise: I chose Martyrs and TCITW. Expect that the first handful of posts I make will be assignments I've done in school. Most will be relevant!
Martyrs (dir.
Pascale Laugier ) VS The Cabin in the Woods (dir. Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard)
In all film genres alike, there
are certain films which, rather than sticking to the conventions of their
genre, stray far enough away from those conventions that they are able to
explain them instead. A good example of this would be a film about filmmaking.
The mystery behind plot, camerawork, casting, directing and editing disappears.
When this happens in genres like Drama, Romance or Comedy the techniques used
to achieve such a film becomes evident. But even still, though we know that
there’s a man standing behind a camera on a back-lot somewhere in Hollywood, we
can accept that they’re trying to tell us a story. In Drama, Romance or Comedy
we are less likely to feel let down by learning that these scenarios are
fabricated. Without trying, the situations they portray are more plausible than
other genres.
Horror, however, is a completely different ballgame. In a horror film, one of the characters itself is the “Unknown”. Horror as a genre has always dealt with themes that are much more abstract. For example, horror films involving torture and brutality rely on the idea that the antagonist is “crazy” or “disturbed”. In other film genres, characters are simply happy or sad or angry. When watching a horror film and seeing that someone has come back with a vengeance strong enough for them to kill, we really have to tap into the part of our minds that acknowledges that it’s something we simply can’t understand as rational human beings. The same goes for ghosts, monsters and spirits. In order to be affected by a horror film, we must put a certain distance between ourselves and what’s happening on screen. The minute we start to question it is the minute the movie becomes either, all-to-realistic, or completely un-scary. The simple question “why?” must always be present while watching these films.
For my comparison I will be
looking at two horror films that take the “why?” out of the plot, and in some
cases, out of the entire genre.
The first is the 2008 film by French director Pascale Laugier, Martyrs. The film’s premise is anything but simple. In short, the story is about two girls who have grown up in an orphanage together and are entering the real world. Lucy is hell-bent on finding the people who tormented her as a child and taking out vengeance. Anna is along for the ride but hopes to mediate things if they get out of hand. When Lucy brings a shotgun to the house of her tormentors and takes out the entire family before killing herself, Anna has no choice but to try and cover up the scene knowing that she will be the first suspect when the police arrive. While trying to deal with the horrific afternoon she’s had, she comes across a strange kind of dungeon in the basement, almost identical to the one Lucy had always described from her childhood. Immediately after, Anna is seized by guards dressed in black who lock her up in the dungeon and explain that she has been recruited by an underground organization and will, quite literally, be tortured until she transcends and sees God. She will of course report back once this happens, thus is the purpose of her capture.
Besides the obvious themes of brutal torture and sacrificing another human for the betterment of a handful others, what is the most horrifying about this movie is that it gives you a reason for the brutality that occurs. This film would be a whole lot easier to watch if you could believe that the people locking her up were just “crazy”. “Crazy” implies that there is a lack of objective and you could find a way to wiggle your way out of the situation. This movie however, shows that there is a very concrete reason for her capture and enough people backing it for her to find a way out. This is any example of a film where the presence of the “why?” results in a concept that is that much scarier. You’re left with a voice in your head saying “hey, this could happen to me”.
The second example of this is a film that takes the “why?” factor out of all horror films ever. This movie is 2012’s The Cabin in the Woods directed by Drew
Goddard and Joss Whedon. The plot
goes from almost naively simple to mind-bogglingly complex. The exposition of
the film contains two separate storylines that gradually merge until they come
crashing together at the film’s climax. On one side of the story you have your
standard group of kids heading out to the woods for a weekend of R&R. On
the other side, a type of workplace comedy is carrying out. Two men in lab
coats are complaining about their love lives while endless other men and women
in lab coats shuffle past them in some sort of giant office building. It takes
a while before we realize that the men in the lab coats are observing the kids
in the woods, who are going about their way practicing their less than
exemplary behavior. It’s only when the men in the office start flicking
switches that open cellar doors in the cabin that we begin to put things
together: What is happening in the cabin is being directly manipulated by the
control panel in the office. As the kids begin to be tormented and
systematically massacred by a family of zombies, they are picked off in a
surprisingly generic way; promiscuous blonde, suspecting stoner, disgruntled
jock etc… But before the plot can run it’s course, the last to die (the pure
one), and the back-from-the-dead stoner beat the system, by figuring out that
there is a system.
The Cabin in the Woods is a film that would be devastating to have ruined for the viewer, which is why I’m going to stop there. What struck me so much with this film was that not only was the “why?” dissected straight out of the genre of horror films, but that it was then transplanted into a completely different genre. In a film like Martyrs, the “why?” factor is explained on a small but horrifyingly simple scale. It gives systematic-torture films a reason for being truly scary. But in The Cabin in the Woods, it doesn’t just spell-out the objective of the storyline, it points out every cliché and convention under the sun that could exist in a horror movie. Never again will anyone be able to look at a film like Friday the 13th and think “huh, I wonder why Jason is killing everybody”. They will instead think “Oh right, Jason is killing the cliché band of college kids because he was randomly selected to punish the ‘sinners’ and sacrifice them to the Gods to stop the impending threat of an apocalypse”.
By Matilda Davidson, 16
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