I’m confused about Cabin in the Woods

I should probably start by saying that I liked “The Cabin in the Woods” a lot more than I thought I would. I expected it to make me want to kill myself, so it doesn’t necessarily mean much, but I was pleasantly surprised. I usually hate Joss Whedon, but I have to admit a lot of that hatred comes from having been more or less forced to watch the entirety of the “Buffy” series by my girlfriend at the time.

And for Alien 4.

But I had heard good things about “Cabin”, so I finally decided to watch it, and now I’m confused. If it had been written by anyone else, I would have said it was a surprisingly good jab at the horror/slasher genre, but the thing is, one of the biggest jabs it takes is at cookie-cutter characters that plague the genre, which is also a staple of Joss Whedon’s work. I mean, the guy’s good at making his stereotypes interact with each other, but… hey, they’re still stereotypes, and whatever trace of originality his characters might have had in “Buffy”, Whedon’s just kept the exact same models for anything he’s created since.

I mean, he doesn’t really write characters, he just fills a template for “knowledgeable, socially awkward guy”, “hot, plot-irrelevant girl”, “wisecracking but otherwise unhelpful sidekick”, “love-torn leader with a ton of baggage”,  etc. It gets extremely obvious when a character leaves and another character has to fill the template. Happened in Buffy, happened in Angel, probably would have happened in Firefly if it had lasted more than one season.

Now, as I said, the movie itself is pretty good; it’s one of those rare movies that manage to be a satire of overplayed movie tropes without becoming what it’s trying to critique (I’m looking at you, Sucker Punch!), but written by someone who’s made his entire career of those overplayed movie tropes. Makes me feel dirty for liking it. Like Joss Whedon doesn’t deserve my praise. I was watching the credits, thinking it’d been a pretty good movie, and suddenly I got mad at Joss Whedon, thinking “You can’t make fun of horror movies always using the same characters when that’s exatly what you do!”.

There’s also one cliché that’s played unironically in the very early third act, which I think kind of illustrates my point, but it’s hard to discuss it without spoiling a somewhat important twist.

Bottom line, it’s an entertaining, sometimes clever, sometimes forgettable, but all in all, above average light-hearted (like everything Joss Whedon) take on horror clichés with a pretty nice ending. It’s just unfair that Joss Whedon wrote it.