The Cabin in the Woods

Drew Goddard puts the surprise at the start, not the end. The film opens on two middle aged technicians chatting in an office before any teenager appears, so within minutes you know the cabin horror is run from elsewhere. There is no final twist. The structure is given away first and you then watch the cliché executed knowingly, which kills the game for anyone who likes guessing who dies next. The register changes in the last stretch, horror handing over to crowded spectacle and jokes. A viewer who wants the dread held to the finish may feel dropped, because the film deliberately stops trying to frighten. Shooting happened in Vancouver in spring 2009, but the studio’s financial trouble shelved the film indefinitely and it did not reach audiences until 2012; a plan to convert it to three dimensions pushed the date back again, and the rights changed hands in 2011. Goddard and Joss Whedon wrote the screenplay in three days. On the creatures he set his crew a hard rule: if a thing could be done practically it would be, and computer effects a last resort. Good if you enjoy the rules of a genre listed and then applied one by one. Not for a viewer who wants to be genuinely scared alongside those kids.