Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon

Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon Dr. David Lavery Fall 2014 PH 308, M 600-900

Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods • Anybody who thinks that Drew and I are not Hadley and Sitterson clearly never met us. • Joss Whedon (The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion • [hereafter CWOVC] 13) • I never thought writing it by myself. I thought, “This is something I want to do with Drew.” Drew, since he has been working for me, has been a dear friend and one of my greatest collaborators. And so Cabin was never meant to be anything other than a collaboration. And Une Film de Drew Goddard. • Joss Whedon [CWOVC 19] • Hadley: We’re not the only ones watching, kid. • Sitterson: Got to keep the customer satisfied. • The Cabin in the Woods (CWOVC 99) • Marty: Giant evil gods. • Dana: Wish I coulda seen ‘em. • Marty: I know! That would be a fun weekend. • The Cabin in the Woods (CWOVC 151) Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

The most “remarkable thing” about Whedon’s first full-fledged excursion into the horror film,” according to Clark Collis in Entertainment Weekly, “is not that it took three years to arrive on screens but that its pair of creators thought anyone would let them make it in the first place. (11). The Cabin in the Woods, a film first conceived in 2007 (Collis 11), greenlit in 2008, completed in 2009 but not released until the spring of 2012—only a month before Marvel’s The Avengers—was not, of course, the Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

first Whedon had written (or co-written) directed by another. In a way, the horror film was a throwback to the 1990s when Whedon was script-doctoring or when directors like Kuzui and Jeunet botched his screenplays, but this time he was working with a long-time collaborator and friend, and the movie they made together was a true collaboration between Hadley and SittersonWhedon and his “dear friend and one of [his] greatest collaborators” Drew Goddard. Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

Goddard had joined the writers rooms of Buffy and then Angel in their final seasons, writing or co-writing such memorable episodes as “Conversations with Dead People” (BtVSS7.7—with Jane Espenson) and “Lies My Parents Told Me” (BtVSS7.17—with David Fury) and“The Girl in Question” (AtS5.20). He would go on write/co-write some of the best episodes of Lost, including the brilliant time travel episode Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

“Flashes Before Your Eyes” (3.8, 2/14/2007—co authored by Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof) and author the screenplay of the giant-monster-destroys-New York movie Cloverfield(Matt Reeves, 2008). Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

In an invaluable dialogue “Into the Woods: Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard on the Making of the Film” in The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion we learn a great deal about the inspiration for and division of labor on the film. We learn more than ever before about Whedon’s horror film tastes. “I've loved all of the great horror films,” he recalls. Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

I watched Nosferatu many times—the original—as a child, so from the very start, and then the Universals and Jacques Tourneur [Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Night of the Demon] and Val Lewton [The Body Snatcher, Curse of the Cat People] in the Forties and the giant monsters of the Fifties. I watched everything. And of course, the really disturbing Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

films of the Seventies and early Eighties—all the greats of my youth, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, all that stuff. Then I started to not like horror right around the torture porn era. But even during that, there have been great flicks like The Descent that have restored my faith. That’s a classic horror movie. (9) • Cabin was born out of Whedon’s discontent with both the genre’s increasingly clichéd formula— Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

How many times do they have to drop the knife? How many times do they have to split up? How many times do they have to start acting like assholes? Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

and its increasing inhumanity— • Now [in most current horror films] they are just fodder—now it's always about the villain, what inventive villain can we make, because that’s the action figure, and then we'll throw some expendable teenagers at them, and they get more and more expendable and more love is put into the instruments of torture and no love at all is put into the dialogue polish. . . . I Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

absolutely can't stand movies where people don’t do what any sane person would do. That doesn't mean panic. Panic is fine; people panic. But when they make obviously idiotic decisions, then it makes me not only crazy but angry. (11) * • Intended to counter these trends,** to object to the “unseemly,” “weird,” and “really, really creepy” preoccupation, now in command of the horror genre, “with youth and sex, and at the same time this very puritanical desire to punish it” (42), the idea for the film—originally hatched by Whedon—was “exactly what the movie is, which is, you play your normal • _______________ • * It should be noted that it seems clear from their “Into the Woods” colloquy that Goddard was not as disillusioned as his mentor with the state of the genre. • *** The original 2011 posters for Cabin (eventually replaced in the “Cabin as a Rubik’s Cube” rollout) emphasize this aspect, each proclaiming one of the idiocies Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

five kids go to a cabin in the woods—and you find out that everything they’re doing is being manipulated from downstairs, and eventually they get downstairs and fuck shit up” (10). _______________ of contemporary horror: “IF YOU HEAR A STRANGER OUTSIDE . . . HAVE SEX”; “IF AN OLD MAN TELLS YOU NOT TO GO THERE . . . MAKE FUN OF HIM”; “IF SOMETHING IS CHASING YOU . . . SPLIT UP.” Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

* The original 2011 posters for Cabin (eventually replaced in the “Cabin as a Rubik’s Cube” rollout) emphasize this aspect, each proclaiming one of the idiocies of contemporary horror: “IF YOU HEAR A STRANGER OUTSIDE . . . HAVE SEX”; “IF AN OLD MAN TELLS YOU NOT TO GO THERE . . . MAKE FUN OF HIM”; “IF SOMETHING IS CHASING YOU . . . SPLIT UP.” Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

An admitted homage to Sam Raimi’sEvil Dead films, Cabin is also deeply (pun intended) indebted to H. P. Lovecraft. Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon Cthulhu The Cabin in the Woods

The horrors in which the kids are ensnared is part of an annual sacrifice intended to placate the ancient ones deep in the Earth. (Recall that Whedon had previously visited this Lovecraftian abyss in “A Hole in the World,” an episode he wrote for Angel’s final season.) Thus Lin corrects the superficial assumption of the new security guard Truman that the movie’s monsters are “like something from a nightmare. . . .” “No,” Lin counters, “they are something that nightmares are from. Everything in our stable is a remnant of the old world, courtesy of . . . (pointing down) . . . you know who” (91). Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

And The Director (Sigourney Weaver, making her first appearance in a Whedon film since Alien Resurrection in 1997) explains to Marty and final Final Girl Dana: Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

“The gods. The sleeping gods; the giants that live in the earth, that used to rule it. They fought for a billion years and now they sleep. In every country, for every culture, there is a god to appease. As long as one sleeps, they all do” (149). Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

Although Cabin’s path from idea to screen was slowed by MGM’s bankruptcy (a financial morass that likewise slowed much more upscale projects like The Hobbit and the new Bond film Skyfall), the $30,000,000 film was built to survive the movie business. As Collis reveals, Whedon and Goddard, “aware studio executives might be tempted to tinker with their script's unusual plot machinations,” strategically “travel[ing] as far down the development path as they could before shopping the project around.” Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

Their plan, as revealed by Goddard, was ingenious: “We did the budgets, figured out the schedule. We did all the legwork and said, ‘This is the package, take it or leave it.’ Because this is the type of movie that can easily get killed by committee. Luckily, people got it” (11). Spoilery Japanese Cabin Poster Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

Goddard and Whedon wrote by taking the few pages of the script already completed and secreting themselves away in a rented “bungalow” (Goddard upstairs, Whedon down). Unlike the “hours of gossip and chatting and personal stories” typical in a television writers room (13), they would set daily tasks and talk/think about nothing but story during their full immersion. For the most part they kept to their appointed labors, later working over each others drafts, but on at least one occasion they traded off assignments, and Goddard’s account of the exchange speaks volumes about Whedon’s imagination. “I remember one day, I was working on the cellar scene,” Goddard recalls, • but I knew that when Dana came to reading the diary itself, like I said Joss loves prairie folk, and I thought, “I bet he’s going to want to write this,” so I yelled downstairs, “Hey, do you want to write the diary?” And he goes, “Yeah, I do,” and then—I’m not kidding you—six minutes later, he ran upstairs with it, this full page, this beautifully written horror Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

diary of a prairie girl. I was like, “How did you write that that fast?” And he’s just like, “Some things I was born to do.” [laughs] He cranked that diary out faster than I’ve ever seen anyone write anything. I couldn’t write my own name repeatedly as fast as he wrote that diary. It was amazing. (17) • After several changes of mind about who should direct (19-20), Whedon, now better and wiser at delegating authority post Dollhouse, surrendered first director’s chair for the Canadian (shot in Vancouver) production to the rookie helmer but greater “horror aficionado” Goddard. He would candidly admit that, too late, he came to realize that “producing a movie is kind of like ordering celery while your date has steak” (19-20), but second unit duties were numerous, the experience of producing—which was less Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

time-freeing than he hoped (he still found himself “a little cross-eyed with exhaustion” [26]) and a bit too “adult” (“I had [to] be more of a grown-up,” Whedon recalls, “than I care to stomach” [38])—was nevertheless educational, and Whedon in the end had no real regrets. He and Goddard “never had any major disagreements. We disagreed about some things, but in general, if it was a matter of the aesthetic of a scene, Drew is extremely collaborative and he knows how much I'm invested in the story, and we're old friends. He listens” (38). In his “Afterword” to Cabin’s “visual companion,” Whedon would, with characteristic humor, have this to say about his partner in horror: Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

“Drew Goddard is one of my favorite living souls. Tall, handsome, good-hearted, he’s like the Chris Hemsworth [Curt in Cabin; Thor in Marvel’s The Avengers] of people. Untouchable. And of course therefore a villain. No one revels more in evil, in destruction, in chaos. Yet, on the sly, this guy is more decent, conflicted, self-abnegating and just plain “the Chris Hemsworth of people” Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

neurotic than, well, me. You want to make a horror movie, you call Drew Goddard. You want to make a horror movie that contains a meditation on the human condition asking questions about our darkest selves that you know going in cannot be answered. . . . You call Drew Goddard” (172). “[Y]ou know you've done something right,” Clark Collis observes, “if your film gets thumbs up from both Fangoriaand NPR.org.” As of this writing, Cabin has also grossed a respectable $58,401,848 worldwide. But in the Whedon Spring of 2012, the movie Cabin, like the cabin in the movie, was destroyed, obliterated, by an emerging giant: Joss Whedon’sThe Avengers. Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon The Cabin in the Woods

Special Topics in Film Studies: Joss Whedon