Is The Cabin in the Woods Meta?

SPOILER ALERT:  This blog discusses the current movie The Cabin in the Woods and may contain some spoilers about the movie.

I’ll preface this blog by saying that I don’t like horror movies.  I get too scared so I don’t watch them. However, I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon (co-writer and director), and there has been so much buzz about The Cabin in the Woods that I had to wiki it to read what happens.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_in_the_woods

The reviews I’ve read for this movie have called it a “next-level genre masterpiece”.  “Film critic Roger Ebert commented ‘The Cabin in the Woods has been constructed almost as a puzzle for horror fans to solve. Which conventions are being toyed with? Which authors and films are being referred to? Is the film itself an act of criticism?’” Roger Ebert’s evaluation immediately made me think of Mitchell’s article “Metapictures”.  Mitchell looked at certain pictures as being able to “refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is” (35).  It seems that this movie is aware of the horror movie conventions and then pushes the limits or defies the limits of its own genre conventions. In the movie there is a group of college kids who stay at a cabin.  They don’t know that there are people (technicians or puppeteers) watching them and releasing certain horror elements for these people to deal with.  These technicians have a slew of monsters (zombies, werewolves, vampires, etc) locked up and will release them based on the actions of the college kids.  The college kids find a bunch of artifacts that are usually typical catalysts of horror movies (aka pendants, a diary of spells, Pandora ’s Box, etc). Certain monsters will be released depending on which artifact a person chooses.   The technicians have fun within the limits betting on who will choose which artifact.  The technicians are also very aware of the fact that each college student represents a different type (aka the whore, the athlete, the virgin, etc).  The film has an awareness of itself through the technicians who are producing all the action and through one of the college students who is aware that something horror-like is happening.  The film also references other horror films through the artifacts that are typically used in this genre of film. 

Mitchell’s article looked at Valasquez’s Las Meninas as the prime example of a metapicture.  Mitchell says that “the formal structure of Las Meninas is an encyclopedic labyrinth of pictorial self-reference, representing the interplay between the beholder, the producer, and the object or model of representation” (58).  Roger Ebert has also commented that The Cabin in the Woods is a “puzzle”.  I can see just from the description on Wikipedia that there are complex levels to the movie.  There ae levels of the college students, the technicians, the director who is in charge of the technicians, and the ancient ones (which is the reason that the technicians are toying with the college students).  The writers of The Cabin in the Woods understand and mastered the horror genre in order to be able to break the frame and play with the idea of an agent (the technicians) knowingly acting in the name of the horror genre.