Cabin in the woods review guardian năm 2024

Joss Whedon’s highly praised screenplay for the satirical horror movie The Cabin in the Woods was ripped straight from the pages of a 2006 self-published novel, according to a new lawsuit claiming $10m in damages.

Writer Peter Gallagher filed a suit in the US district court in California against Whedon and film studio Lionsgate on 13 April, claiming ideas that originated in his book The Little White Trip: A Night in the Pines were pilfered wholesale for the hit slasher flick, The Wrap reports.

“Comparing the book to the film, the plots, stories, characters, sequence of events, themes, dialogue, and incidents portrayed in the two works are fictional and, in many respects, the elements in the two works are virtually identical,” claims the suit, which alleges copyright infringement.

The claim continues: “Like the book, Cabin in the Woods tells the story of five friends (three guys and two girls) between the ages of 17 and 22 who take a trip to a remote cabin in the woods. The cabin’s previous inhabitants were murdered by the father of the family, who returns to terrorise the group of friends. In the end, it is revealed that the friends are being filmed and manipulated by persons behind the scenes, thus becoming inadvertent characters in a real-life horror show for the enjoyment of others.”

Gallagher reportedly printed 7,500 copies of his book and sold them on the street in Santa Monica, Venice Beach and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The key female characters in The Little White Trip: A Night in the Pines are named Julie and Dura, he says, while the film featured protagonists Jules and Dana.

The Cabin in the Woods, which was co-written by Whedon and Drew Goddard, with the latter also directing, was hailed as a self-reflexive take on the horror genre when it debuted in cinemas three years ago. The film, which starred Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchinson, Fran Kranz and Jesse Williams, played on Hollywood teen slasher-flick tropes (as well as those of other horror movies) and currently boasts a 91% “fresh” rating on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

This is not your ordinary horror film. It starts out rather puzzling and just gets weirder and weirder. To explain further would be spoiling. I’m not a fan of horror films, yet I found plot twist after plot twist highly attention getting. Unless you abhor such stuff, I’d recommend this highly imaginative work.

18 May 2012 11:13PM

Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods is here to remind us how cosmopolitan the horror genre is. There's a good joke when this postmodern gore flick begins to let the audience peer deeper into its machinery, and we realise there are other parallel horrorshows going on around the world: some kind of Kong-type abomination going ape-shit in Sweden (if my eyes didn't deceive me), and a group of cute Japanese schoolgirls being terrorised by a dank-haired Ringu-style phantom.

I think horror could be the most universal genre. I was interviewing an Indonesian director with expertise in that area recently, and I asked him if – bearing in mind his country's high output of scary films – there was something in the national psyche that gave them a special talent for it. The brutality of Suharto's regime, maybe, or the survival of strange animistic religions in the jungle? Nice try, he replied. But he reckoned horror featured in all cultures and all media, and Indonesia had no special predisposition whatsoever.

He's probably going to enjoy The Cabin in the Woods. It's more inquisitive than the original meta-horror, Scream, and it finally reminds us what elemental needs the genre serves everywhere. All societies have their taboos, their outcast emotions, and that's what makes horror so universal: every culture has to let off that psychological pressure somehow.

Whether it's Cabin's redneck zombies, or J-horror's "dead wet girls", or Indonesia's pocong (a ghost wrapped in a Muslim burial shroud that often features in its low-budget spookers), they're expressions of the violence, shame and isolation that underlies whatever collective traumas those cultures are shaped by. The Japanese yurei, the vengeful female revenant, is supposed to have its roots in the subservient, mistreated women recurring in that country's folklore; the climactic emergence from the TV screen of the ghost in Ringu has eerie echoes in an 1830 woodcut by Hokuei Shunkosai, with its female spirit bulging out of a distended paper lantern. The print was based on the 1825 Yotsuya Kaidan, probably Japan's most famous ghost story, which has been filmed more than 20 times.

Joss Whedon,creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and producer of The Cabin in the Woods, tells Xan Brooks how his new horror flick subverts the worst aspects of the genre guardian.co.uk

Horror is relatively cheap to film, which partly explains why it keeps bursting through the topsoil. But it wouldn't be able to without its own source of strength. Even when it's not popular in the mainstream, it seems to have the ability to pull the coffin lid over, and survive in the lower echelons of film-making: cheap-and-cheerful video industries across the world – J-horror evolved in Japan in the early 90s.

It's significant, too, that in infant film industries, it's often one of the first creative impulses to rear its head: as well as Indonesia's gore-obsessed cottage enterprise, Nollywood films about black magic are its big-selling line. Cinema often springs up when countries are crossing the threshold to modernity, and I wonder if there is something traumatic about that transition, too – in severing connections with tradition. I'm struck by how often horror films from developing countries deal with scenarios in which characters leave the city and return to the countryside, and stumble on dusty cabins, abandoned wells and the old ways.

Nor does horror suffer from the travel sickness that seems to affect comedy – the only other genre that deals so purely in the irrational, and with such primitive emotions. Horror's localised incarnations just seem to add to its fascination and its ability to travel. The peculiar malevolence of J-horror, and its emphasis on atmosphere over cheap shocks, brought it global attention in the early noughties – and it has been influencing its western cousin (as seen in The Woman in Black). But key J-horror luminaries such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hiroshi Takahashi (Ringu's scriptwriter) were fanboys first and foremost, and were inspired by British and US horror, including Hammer studios, Tobe Hooper, HP Lovecraft and MR James (his short story Casting the Runes was the basis for Ringu's curse).

It almost seems irrelevant to talk about plagiarism when, the dark tropes circulating like Ringu's videotape, horror directors, wherever they're from, are clammily groping around in the great universal darkness. Horror deals with things in the raw, and it's the bluntest reminder of how global culture is now. You can talk about the anxiety of influence, but it's about time we paid dues to the influence of anxiety.

Is it worth watching The Cabin in the Woods?

A self-aware twist on haunted cottage slashers, the movie contains a lot of secrets, and oh-what-fun the audience will have discovering them in this funny, shocking, and intriguing arena. Leave it to Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard to take the genre, turn it on its head, and give it a good shake.

Why is cabin in the woods so good?

"The Cabin in the Woods" is a weird movie that can not be precisely genre determined. It gathers horror ideas seen countless times and turns them upside-down. Nothing in this movie is new, but the greatest thing about it is its ability to make something very original using totally outworn horror cliches.

Why is The Cabin in the Woods rated so high?

Violence & Scariness. The Cabin in the Woods starts out like a "normal" horror movie, with zombie attacks, blood, and gore. There's stabbing, sawing, and a kind of "steel jaws"/bear trap weapon on a chain. Viewers see severed heads, spraying blood, throat-stabbing, motorcycle crashing, and falling from heights.

What was the point of cabin in the woods?

The film satirizes horror movie tropes, depicting horror movie monsters as interchangeable and mocking the conventions of the genre. The climax of the film serves as a commentary on horror movies as a whole, with the protagonists outwitting the organization but ultimately losing to the monsters.