Normally I wouldn’t do this, but Cabin in the Woods relies so much on the element of surprise, that you should not read this post if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled on it.

As I wrote after seeing the movie at SXSW, Cabin in the Woods, I wrote that the movie is a fantastic extension of Joss Whedon’s long-running interests in the bureaucracy of evil and the beauty of the monstrous. The work that Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are given to do as the control room operators of the Apocalypse, the torture pornographers who happen to be humanity’s saviors, is just a delightful, funny, sensitive use of both men. And the gorgeousness of Whedon and Goddard’s monsters is something to behold—I found myself unexpectedly moved by the man with the gears embedded in his skull and the ballerina dentata that Dana and Marty encounter in the elevator.

But I was disappointed by one element of the movie, which felt to me like a bit of a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the treatment of Jules, the blonde sexpot who is the first of the characters to get killed by the murderous hillbillies the friends unwittingly unleashed in the basement. Whedon told Vulture that he sees Jules’ character as an attempt to answer some of the same questions as Buffy was:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people. There was never a question — the nudity had to happen, because the movie is about objectification and identification and that’s what horror is about. Drew and I were not unhappy if the hot blonde took off her shirt — hey, we thought it was a good decision! — but mixing titillation and mutilation started to become a very weird confluence. It’s not the same kind of pleasure for us. Those are two separate things. But that’s the foundation of what we knew was part of the film, and we were the most timid filmmakers ever about it.

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I asked Whedon about this at South By Southwest, where he seemed kind of irritated by the question, telling me that “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb…We did want to be making that movie at the same time that we were talking about that movie and making images that were sexual and sometimes exploitive.” (After that line drew a lot of applause, he noted “I don’t think I’ve ever been applauded for exploitation before.”) I agree with Whedon that those things aren’t incompatible. And a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show us. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

I ended up quite liking The River, ABC’s delightful piece of horror movie cheese about a reality show crew stuck on a boat in the Amazon searching for a vanished television star, which ended its first, and likely only, season last night. But I think that might be because I finally decided to read it as a show about a bunch of irritating white people (and one endearing gay, black cameraman, who informed his coworkers that his sexual orientation hadn’t come up on their trip because “I don’t go clubbing when I’m running away from ghosts.”) who got what was coming to them because they treated the Amazon as a mysterious place and ignored reasonable knowledge about the place that was available to them.

That’s really the core of the show: the main characters in The River treat the Amazon basin as a dark, mysterious place that can be made comprehensible by Western explorers who will approach it rationally. Rather than a place populated by, you know, actual people, it’s full of mysterious tribesmen, ghost ships, and cures for diseases that have a nasty tendency to zombiefy scientists if proper treatment protocols aren’t observed. Dr. Emmet Cole got himself in trouble in the first place when he strayed from his rational principles and started believing there was something mystical out there. That conviction lead him to take insane risks that endangered the life of his crew and his long-term friends, and also lead Cole into sin. His decision to abandon Jonas to a state in between life and death is reprehensible, the kind of thing that people who don’t happen to be pursuing wacky vision quests are relatively certain they’d never do.

But the truth is, for all the crew of the Magus are convinced that they can use logic and deduction to find Emmet, they’re awfully incurious people, by both the standards of Western rationality and beyond it. Maybe it wouldn’t serve the interests of the show to have them interrogate what in God’s name Emmet is doing in a giant chrysalis. But that seems like it might be a fairly relevant question to try to answer before he and Lincoln get to work on their mess of a relationship or he and Tess get all lovey-dovey again (if it were me, no matter how much I loved my missing husband, I would want to know what’s up there before I let him get near my lady bits).

And it’s deeply frustrating that, despite the fact that Jahel Valenzuela tends to be right about almost all the misfortunes that befall the Magus, and to have the power to summon resurrecting goddesses to boot, no one ever seems to have sat her down and done a comprehensive download on her knowledge of religion, folklore, biology, etc. The show’s getting somewhere in its critique of Western know-it-allism with scenes of scientists dissecting the native people of the region and keeping them in specimen tanks. But it’s not quite getting a central point. Emmet Cole might have had a better sense of a country that’s only Undiscovered to him and his ilk, and the scientists in that creepy lab might have increased the world’s store of knowledge more if they relied a little less on their own sense of their abilities, and tried a bit harder to talk to and learn from the people around them.

It’s difficult to talk about The Cabin in the Woods, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s much-delayed, highly mysterious horror without spoiling it altogether. And while I’m not the world’s most spoiler-averse person, I am going to hold off on discussing the film in any specific detail, though this post will affirm that certain elements are present in the movie, until it’s in theaters, and I’ll revisit it once folks have had a chance to see it. This post is spoiler-safe if you are only concerned about specific plot points. But if you don’t want to know anything about the movie whatsoever, hold off.

In very general terms, it turns out I was right that the movie is about the bureaucracy of evil. And in a lesser way, it’s a sustained exploration of another major theme in Whedon’s work: the beauty in evil.

Over the course of Whedon’s career, he’s shifted from writing purely about the people who escape from bureaucracies and started to spend more time on the people who participate in running organizations, some of whom commit significant evil in the course of their work. We see the Watchers largely from Buffy’s perspective, and the ones who are allowed to have stand-alone stories, and whose perspectives and growth we have access to, are apostates. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is fired for incomepetence, and Rupert Giles defies the council before he is dismissed. Maggie Walsh is murdered as a direct result of her manipulation of the Initiative beyond its original parameters. Riley’s struggles against the Initiative, first as a reformer and then a flawed revolutionary, are as important an aspect of his character arc as his relationship with Buffy. He finds peace when he finds a role that suits him within the government, and that new organization becomes not just the source of his job, and his family. In Firefly and Serenity, we see the same pattern again: we see the agents of the Alliance through River Tam’s memories, or through their encounters with the crew of the ship. And the Operative is redeemed when he accepts the truth about the creation of the Reavers and calls off the agents of the Alliance.

Dollhouse, however, spends substantially more time with the agents of both the U.S. government and the Rossum Corporation, tracing the damage that they do to other people and that participation in the system does to them as well. Corporations, it seems, are self-replicating machines. And fully half of The Cabin in the Woods is spent with and told from the perspective of the movie’s bureaucrats. They get to be just as quippy as the average teenage Whedon hero or heroine, and they get to be tragic in a way that’s compromised and adult.

That’s not the only way the movie feels like it’s different in degree, if not in kind, from Whedon’s past work. It’s also got some of the best monster design in his ouvre. Whedon’s always been very good at creating novel monsters—the Mayor’s demonic form, the gods breaking through from Glory’s ritual. But often, he creates unease by implanting monstrous behavior and worldviews in extremely beautiful human forms. We’re disturbed by seeing David Boreanaz, James Marsters, or Clare Kramer behave in ways that are horrifying particularly because we’re taught to equate physical beauty with goodness. The monsters in Cabin in the Woods can, at times, be much more foreign than that. The loveliness in some of that moster design is impressive, an inverse aesthetic subversion. I found some of the monsters genuinely moving. And for someone who suffers from unusually bad nightmares and has low tolerance for horror, that’s saying something.

The bridge is yours.

-This is a pretty plausible explanation for why CBS does so well.

-Louis C.K. starts a movement.

-Jonny Lee Miller is Sherlock Holmes because why not?

-Chernobyl as horror movie.

-And the streak continues:

I really wanted to like Red Lights, the Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver-starring thriller about investigators who debunk paranormal hoaxes that premiered at Sundance this week. I like skepticism! I like Sigourney! But to my disappointment, Red Lights turns out to be a somewhat astute academic farce wrapped up in a deeply, profoundly silly paranormal quasi-horror flight.

Murphy plays Dr. Tom Buckley, an assistant professor who works with famed hoax debunker Dr. Margaret Matheson (Weaver). As their departmental budget crumbles and they lose ground to Dr. Shackleton (Toby Jones), a “parapsychologist” who believes in paranormal phenomena, Tom pushes Margaret both to take on a pair of student research assistants, sexy Sally (a woefully underused Elizabeth Olsen) and Ben, and to investigate a famous blind psychic, Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro). As the pair proceed, they’re plagued by creepy phone calls, birds flying into windows fast enough to kill themselves, and mysteriously bent spoons. Ultimately, Silver agrees to undergo trials run by the friendly Dr. Shackleton with Tom as an observer, and as the results are released, Tom confronts him at a show in a packed theater.

When the movie explores the horrors of academia, all is well. No self-respecting university would put this much muscle behind paranormal research, but no matter. Watching Margaret make a fool of Shackleton by beating his tests is tremendous fun, even if it doesn’t do any good. “There only way they could make it clearer they don’t want us is a marching band,” Tom grumbles as their position relative to Shackleton’s erodes further. Later, he forces Shackleton to at least let him observe Silver’s trials, shoving him up against a wall and screaming “I want to be on that committee, Shackleton! Don’t give me more excuses! Just do it!” Silly stuff, but it conveys some of the desperation of being shut out. I can imagine graduate students struggling to keep their funding will empathize. Ultimately, it’s Sally and Ben who make a critical discovery, rather than Tom, and their revelation turns out not to matter very much anyway. While I won’t reveal it, Tom ends up meeting a more dramatic fate that suggests whatever time and money he spent on his PhD may have been a waste. Academia has rarely looked worse.

Red Lights is also, briefly, a promising movie about doubt that brings some novel perspectives to common decisions. “If I thought there was something else, I’d turn off all that crap and let my son go,” Margaret says of her son, who has spent years in a coma in an interesting inversion of the rationalist’s approach to brain death. Other times, it’s less convincing: at one point, Tom compares acupuncture and homeopathy to belief in the paranormal despite the fact that the former is in use by military doctors. It’s a weird little slip that suggests the movie isn’t very serious about the line between hoax and scientific validation. And the movie’s twist ending ultimately undermines any commitment or rigor the movie has to the ideas it spends much of its time exploring.

It’s a perfect example of reaching for something more than human and coming away with junk. It’s too bad Rodrigo Cortés, who wrote and directed Red Lights, didn’t trust Tom and Margaret to be interesting enough on their own.

The bridge is yours.

-The world probably does not, in fact, need a Hannibal Lecter TV show, but I guess horror is in these days.

-The story behind Contagion‘s amazing, eerie posters.

-Information about celebrities can be remarkably difficult to find.

-Apparently, the apocalypse will cure homosexuality.

-New Ladytron!

Ladytron – Gravity The Seducer by nettwerkmusicgroup

I’m not a Ryan Murphy fan — neither increasingly grim plastic surgery nor singing after-school specials are really my jam (though I love me some Brittany and Santana) — but I admit I’m intrigued by his new show, American Horror Story, about a couple who, in the wake of a miscarriage, move to Los Angeles for a fresh start only to find out that their new house is haunted. He’s already hit the obvious button with all his might by declaring that “the monster in the closet is infidelity,” which should be a change for star Connie Britton after the end of Friday Night Lights. And I’m less interested in this show in particular than in the possibility that it could take horror shows mainstream.

Glee succeeded less by founding a new genre of television show, or firmly establishing it for the first time, than by revitalizing a genre that’s had its ebbs and flows. America has always been pretty fond of its musicals. But with the exception of Twin Peaks, if that counts, I’m hard-pressed to think of a horror television show that a) develops a story from episode-to-episode rather than being a showcase for one-offs, b) that is considered a television classic, c) that is scary in the way that horror movies are scary and visceral. So American Horror Story, if it works, could break new ground even if it’s on cable TV rather than the networks, where you’d have to compromise quite considerable on sex and violence a la Buffy to avoid the wrath of the FCC.

I’m curious about horror in part because I have an extremely hard time watching it myself, and am tentatively working towards understanding it better. When I was quite young, a friend’s mother read me a graphic novel version of Frankenstein that shook me so deeply that I had very traumatic nightmares for a long time, and I tend to avoid the kind of imagery and scenarios that would trigger those kinds of dreams again. I’m trying to get better — I did survive all of Drag Me to Hell in theaters, and I’m planning to see the Straw Dogs remake, if that counts as horror. So take everything I’m about to say here with an enormous grain of salt.

But I do wonder if there’s something about horror that’s better suited for movies than for television. It’s hard to sustain the tension of a horror action sequences (is that the right thing to call murders? Or attacks?) from week to week if you’re cliff-hangering them. It’s a genre that involves getting incredibly wound up incredibly quickly and then getting a fairly quick release. It’s hard to buy the idea of a family staying in a house of horrors for a long time before they get killed or are driven out of it, unless the terrible things that happen to them are calibrated in such a way that they’re either drawn into the darkness or don’t realize what’s going on for a while. And I also wonder if some of the social issues that horror movies bring up, like extremely violent sexual assault, or violent crime, are the kinds of things that mass American audiences can only bear to look at for a short time, and which, psychologically, we need our pop culture to provide quick resolution to. There’s a difference between watching Doctor Melfi get raped, knowing she’s alive, and watching her struggle emotionally with the consequences of that assault over a television season; watching two teenage girls get raped, tortured, and violently murdered, only to have their parents rape, torture, and murder their killers in return for two hours in a movie theater; and watching extremely violent, or extremely tense things happen over 12 to 22 hours. For certain kinds of very bad things, we tend to demand that our pop culture anesthetizes us with distance, or salves us with revenge. It’s not that you couldn’t spread out I Spit On Your Grave over a 12-episode season, but would you want to?

Obviously Buffy worked, but that was in part because the show was very funny rather than straightforwardly frightening or shocking, because it was a procedural where at least some monsters were vanquished every episode, and because the special effects were calibrated at a point where they were immersive enough to suspend disbelief but not realistic enough to be genuinely disturbing. For American Horror Story, and any successors it has, I imaging much will depend on what tone the show settles on, and how precisely it manages to stay on whatever sweet spot it finds. Given Ryan Murphy’s tonal track record, that may be difficult.

Jason Zinoman, who has a new book out about horror movies out, suggests in a series of posts for Slate that a reluctance to deal with current events might be part of the problem with today’s scary movies:

In the golden era, films went for the throat and then worked their way down. Part of the strategy was to tap into potent fears about random urban crime, war, the Manson killings, and the other topical concerns. We have our own phobias today, and if anything they’re even more deeply felt in an era when criminals and terrorists are only as far away as the nearest cable news channel, but the horror genre hasn’t caught up with the times. Why hasn’t a movie made us as petrified of the Internet as Jaws did of the ocean? Where is the great horror movie about Sept. 11? Is that in bad taste? Perhaps. But audiences don’t see horror movies for moral improvement. They go to be scared out of their wits.

I think some of that is true, though I’d be curious to see what Zinoman thinks of Drag Me to Hell, a horror movie rooted in the idea that it’s a poor idea to foreclose on a gypsy. But I think part of the problem is the juxtaposition between the common American fears of today and of the ’70s. Most of the things Zinoman listed that Americans were afraid of in the golden age of horror were things that suggested a dark side to the familiar: city streets and our own teenagers. Fears of terrorism, for example, have definitely spawned unfortunate suspicion of American Muslims, but if a group of al Qaeda-trained fighters successfully carried out an attack on an American city, nobody would be exceptionally shocked that such a thing had happened, or would have their preconditioned assumptions about al Qaeda challenged. Similarly, I don’t think anyone who uses the Internet thinks of it as an entirely benign institution, so it’s hard to think that anyone would profoundly upset if something bad happened as a result of people being online. What we need is something genuinely surprising: people who are attacked by the houses they took out adjustable-rate mortgages to purchase, or something that similarly upsets our assumptions about what’s safe and desirable.