The Cabin In The Woods (2012)

Five friends take a break and go to a remote cabin in the woods, where they start noticing strange things happening. Together, they must discover the truth behind the cabin in the woods. 

The opening of the film conforms the genre of horror because the film opens with ancient tales illustrated in blood. Blood is normally linked to horror films and is very common in them, also blood   is a fear that people have so it becomes more personal to the audience. The opening becomes clear in the last minute of the film where it explains why they have done what they did to the characters. 

This film is similar to the horror film Scream. They both have one thing in common which is they have rules and certain characters. In Scream they had rules such as 'Don't have sex' and 'don't do drugs' if you broke the rules in the film then you wouldn't live to the end and you would normally die first. The Cabin in the woods included the same rule about having sex, and in both film you had the one character that broke the rule. In The Cabin in the woods this character was known as 'The Whore' and she dies first which this rule applies to most horror films. The other characters in the film all had their parts to play in the plan of sacrifice. All of the characters were 'The Whore' 'The Fool' 'The Athlete' 'The Scarlet' and 'The Virgin', all these characters had an order of dying where the whore would always die first. This order become disrupted when the character known as the 'fool' survived being attached and took the role as the hero saving the 'virgin'. The meaning behind everything that happened to the characters was explained at the very end. The Virgin was planned to survive out of all her friends because she was innocent. The plan was disrupted because the 'fool' survived but when the master mind behind the whole project was face to face with the surviving characters she gave the virgin two option 1. kill her friends and the world will survive 2. let her friend live and the whole world will die. 

The film was mostly filmed in the dark making it harder for the audience to see what is going on. Darkness is a fear that many people have, so by the film using peoples fear it makes it more scarier and the audience can relate to the film. The producers used darkness to create tension and make the audience jump. They done this by filming most of the film in the night where it was really dark and hard to see. The darkness also kept the audience at the edge of their seats because there was many scenes where it was really dark and the audience was just waiting for something to make come out, but the audience didn't know when it was going to happen. Darkness is used in many horror films because there is so much you can do with it. For example it is easier to make the audience jump in darkness then doing it in the daylight. Silence also went well with the darkness in this film because in the middle of the film where the 'fool' decides to go out of the cabin surrounding him is darkness and silence. The silence is broken by a loud sudden noise which is very unexpected and will result in the audience jumping. 

The villains in the film I thought were very cleverly thought out. The reason why I think this is because all of the villains were from bad dreams. This is a good way of making the audience feel more involved with the film because everyone has bad dreams but they never want to see them again and the film brings back the memories of the bad dreams. When the Zombies made their appearance in the film it was very dark so the character and the audience were unsure what the villains were. At the end of the film I thought the villains were unrealistic and unbelievable because they didn't really have believable traits. 

Towards the end of the film it gives the audience false hope because when the 'fool and 'virgin' are reunited the audience think everything is over and that they are going to survive. When the characters enter the last room they find illustrations of all of the characters that came to the cabin in the woods. The final scene the audience fully understand what the cabin in the woods was about and why they done what they did, and it also gives away that none of the characters are going to survive. I felt that the ending could have been better, and that they should have let both the characters survive because they did beat the villains.