131 replies to this topic

[Ryan H.]

Nathaniel, on 19 April 2012 - 12:42 PM, said:

For one, the movies that Goddard and Whedon poke fun at are not movies I typically enjoy, and their modus operandi (gore shots, shock cuts, loads of exposition) does not vary widely from those movies.

I share these same problem. I found myself laughing at a lot of the control room stuff, but I found the stuff with the kids that just reproduced the basic slasher-flick tropes to be considerably less amusing and engaging.

In fact, my big problem with the film entirely is that I don't really care for any of the characters in this film. I have no invested interest in how the story turns out. This is different than in films like SHAUN OF THE DEAD or HOT FUZZ, where Edgar Wright and company is able to invest me in the preposterous story, even when things take a turn for the absurd. As such, I think it's a pretty hollow movie-watching experience, even if it is occasionally pretty funny.

Edited by Ryan H., 19 April 2012 - 01:17 PM.

[kenmorefield]

Nathaniel, on 19 April 2012 - 12:42 PM, said:

That said, I didn't really enjoy the film very much, and there could be several reasons why. For one, the movies that Goddard and Whedon poke fun at are not movies I typically enjoy, and their modus operandi (gore shots, shock cuts, loads of exposition) does not vary widely from those movies. ).

Yeah. This. That's why I walked out after the first hour. Neal Postman once famously opined that religion never plays well on broadcasts because it's impossible to sanctify a television set. We can throw all the fancy words we want at it--deconstruction, irony, undercutting--but there's a fine line between deconstructing, critiquing, and/or parodying a genre and revitalizing it.

It didn't help, either, that I saw this the same day I saw The Hunger Games, whose rather superficial indictment of reality television and violence as performance/religion was close enough to this to make me feel that The Cabin in the Woods was equally superficial, just with a better pedigree. (I'm sure someone has undoubtedly made that comparison in this thread already, so I apologize if it's a repeat. I was told to assiduously avoid all discussions if I hate spoilers, and I do.)

Still, matters of taste, matters of quality. I'm sure as horror films go, it is a good one. But based on the rapturous buzz out of SXSW, I was expecting about three times more clever and maybe 1/2 the gore.

Edited by kenmorefield, 19 April 2012 - 01:21 PM.

[Nathaniel]

For me, the gold standard for this sort of thing remains Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, which creates a convincing fairy-tale atmosphere on which to build its comic situations, and The Shadow of the Vampire, which is essentially an egghead/film geek fantasy, although several degrees more literate and elegant than the rest.

I also feel it's a shame that a movie like Intruders, which toyed interestingly with genre expectations, opened and closed in the blink of an eye while The Cabin in the Woods, though hardly making box office history, receives the lion's share of publicity.

Edited by Nathaniel, 19 April 2012 - 01:49 PM.

[Ryan H.]

Nathaniel, on 19 April 2012 - 01:35 PM, said:

For me, the gold standard for this sort of thing remains Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, which creates a convincing fairy-tale atmosphere on which to build its comic situations, and The Shadow of the Vampire, which is essentially an egghead/film geek fantasy, although several cuts more literate and elegant than the rest.

I have tried and tried to like THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, which I feel as though I should admire (after all, I do love both Polanski and Hammer), but I can't. I find it terribly unfunny.

[Nathaniel]

Ryan H., on 19 April 2012 - 01:43 PM, said:

I have tried and tried to like THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, which I feel as though I should admire (after all, I do love both Polanski and Hammer), but I can't. I find it terribly unfunny.

But whether or not it tickles your funny bone, I'm sure you can at least agree that it has visual sophistication, formal beauty, and a disciplined understanding of the genre. There is a scene in which Ferdy Mayne's vampire count descends through a skylight onto the bathing Sharon Tate that surpasses anything in most "straight" horror films.

[Ryan H.]

Nathaniel, on 19 April 2012 - 01:59 PM, said:

But whether or not it tickles your funny bone, I'm sure you can at least agree that it has visual sophistication, formal beauty, and a disciplined understanding of the genre.

Indeed I can.

[Attica]

Nathaniel, on 19 April 2012 - 01:59 PM, said:

Ryan H., on 19 April 2012 - 01:43 PM, said:

I have tried and tried to like THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, which I feel as though I should admire (after all, I do love both Polanski and Hammer), but I can't. I find it terribly unfunny.

But whether or not it tickles your funny bone, I'm sure you can at least agree that it has visual sophistication, formal beauty, and a disciplined understanding of the genre. There is a scene in which Ferdy Mayne's vampire count descends through a skylight onto the bathing Sharon Tate that surpasses anything in most "straight" horror films.

I agree with both of these sentiments. I didn't find the film to be particularily funny, but I certainly did appreciate some of the "horror craftmanship" in it.

Nathaniel, on 19 April 2012 - 01:35 PM, said:

I also feel it's a shame that a movie like Intruders, which toyed interestingly with genre expectations, opened and closed in the blink of an eye while The Cabin in the Woods, though hardly making box office history, receives the lion's share of publicity.

I never even heard of Intruders.

Edited by Attica, 19 April 2012 - 04:09 PM.

[Overstreet]

kenmorefield, on 19 April 2012 - 01:16 PM, said:

Yeah. This. That's why I walked out after the first hour.

Oh... oh, ouch.

I wouldn't have had a very high opinion of this film either if I'd walked out after the first hour. It's the finale that puts this one from "meh" to "unforgettable" for me. I can agree that this film isn't a great aesthetic achievement (and I would even argue that it would have been very strange if it *had* been). But as an elaborate achievement in Funny or Die! kind of spoof/deconstruction, the inspired madness of the last act is kind of incredible.

I'm trying to think of a parallel. Kind of like... seeing only the first 40 minutes of Being John Malkovich and thus missing just how far the filmmakers are willing to go with the concept. (Okay, not a very good comparison. Trying to think of a better one.)

Edited by Overstreet, 19 April 2012 - 02:40 PM.

[kenmorefield]

Overstreet, on 19 April 2012 - 02:38 PM, said:

I'm trying to think of a parallel. Kind of like... seeing only the first 40 minutes of Being John Malkovich and thus missing just how far the filmmakers are willing to go with the concept. (Okay, not a very good comparison. Trying to think of a better one.)

Jeff, having spoken to some friends with different tastes about how the movie ends (in some detail), I can't say that I regret leaving.

But I digress...as to your parallel, the film I thought about was Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of A Murderer, Both films have last acts that, to their admirers (which, I concede, are many) elevate them to something more/greater than the the rather conventional films that I experienced. Also, both are by respected filmmakers who have made other works of art that I admire which could (perhaps, if one cares to psychoanalyze me rather than analyze the movies) have contributed to my expectations and disappointment. (In other words, Perfume is not a film I would have been in had it not been Tykwer; Cabin is not a film I would have been seeing in the first place if it was not by Whedon).

Edited by kenmorefield, 19 April 2012 - 03:14 PM.

[Nick Alexander]

Overstreet, on 19 April 2012 - 02:38 PM, said:

I'm trying to think of a parallel. Kind of like... seeing only the first 40 minutes of Being John Malkovich and thus missing just how far the filmmakers are willing to go with the concept. (Okay, not a very good comparison. Trying to think of a better one.)

I know somebody who had purchased a bootlegged copy of The Sixth Sense, which ended directly before the very last scene...

[Attica]

Nick Alexander, on 19 April 2012 - 03:24 PM, said:

Overstreet, on 19 April 2012 - 02:38 PM, said:

I'm trying to think of a parallel. Kind of like... seeing only the first 40 minutes of Being John Malkovich and thus missing just how far the filmmakers are willing to go with the concept. (Okay, not a very good comparison. Trying to think of a better one.)

I know somebody who had purchased a bootlegged copy of The Sixth Sense, which ended directly before the very last scene...

Wow. bummer.

[J.A.A. Purves]

Ok, first of all two things no here seems to have asked:
1 - Did anyone else catch Marty's last line? It seemed strangely appropriate for the voyeuristic theme. - "Giant evil gods ... I would have liked to have seen them."
2 - Is it a coincidence that Stockholm is mentioned as having failed during the beginning? The first thing I thought of remembering the word afterwards was Stockholm Syndrome, which, according to wikipedia "is an apparently paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness."
3 - Not much discussion of how the film handles the concept of free will on this thread. It seemed to be a fairly major theme in the film. Richard Jenkins character insists that the five have free will. Marty insists that he's the boss of his own brain, is not a puppet and then still succumbs to the outside forces around him.

And now, catching up on a few things ...

Peter T Chattaway, on 17 April 2012 - 02:23 AM, said:

Side note: Why include a one-way mirror in the plot if you're not going to actually, like, do anything with it?

To play with the expectations of the theater audience and, as mentioned earlier, to contrast the choice Holden makes with the attitudes of the white lab-coats and theater audience. Audience expectations are what make this film into what it is. Our expectations are granted and denied, at different points in the film, and there always seems to be a reason why.

Nick Alexander, on 17 April 2012 - 08:52 AM, said:

And one of the deaths was completely nonsensical--so an RV is driven how many miles before any of them know that there's a stranger aboard? Jump scares aren't scary if the kills are random, without any semblence of logic.

Thus the reason why a vast majority of Hollywood horror films are incredibly and relentlessly dull. Semblences of logic in the plot are not frequent occurances in your average horror film. So I have a hard time understanding all the critiques of the bad logic in this film. Bad logic is one of the primary problems with the majority of horror films today. It's one of the reasons they suck so bad. So, in order to satirize this, The Cabin in the Woods has illogical cliched events happen, on purpose, precisely because the main characters are trapped in a predetermined version of these stupid cliches. Speaking of audience expectations again, it's the expectations of the horror film audience that kills the characters.

Attica, on 17 April 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

Tyler, on 17 April 2012 - 09:40 AM, said:

Nick Alexander, on 17 April 2012 - 09:23 AM, said:

So... the Egyptian gods are bound by imaginary lines in the sand demarking the separation of countries? How could they be "gods", then?

Did it call them gods? I got the impression they were more like demons or figures from mythology and nightmares.

I viewed them as demi-gods. Demi-gods in ancient mythology have all sorts of rules and limitations.

Marty actually calls them "giant evil gods."

Peter T Chattaway, on 17 April 2012 - 11:56 AM, said:

... it's basically a movie about a horror-movie cabin built on top of a science lab which offers sacrifices to ancient gods. But does that make any sense? How does one of these things relate to the other?

Marilynne Robinson would object to this question. The divisions and contradictions between science and religion are more apparent than actual, particularly so in a "horror movie" film. I seem to remember science used to serve spiritual purposes in both The Exorcism of Emily Rose and in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. The one relates to the other even more when you think in terms of the free will/determinism debate. One of the questions in this film is how much free will the five main characters really possess. There are both religious and scientific arguments for how the choices of man are not really choices at all, but are really just pre-determined. In this film, both the scientists and the "giant evil gods" seem to be violating free will.

Nick Alexander, on 17 April 2012 - 02:35 PM, said:

How many A&F Top [25] horror films did they reference? I'm willing to wager less than 10%, if any.

Well, given that the film is lambasting bad horror films, it's referencing of 0 of our 25 films would be just fine by me. It's not a problem if you think of the film as a satire rather than as a homage. It is critiquing and making fun of the more stupid and abhorrent aspects of modern day horror movies. No good reason to parody Vampyr or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Let Me In for such purposes.

Edited by Persiflage, 22 April 2012 - 01:57 AM.

[Nick Alexander]

Persilage...

I said it before, I'll say it again: if what they are referencing are predominantly the horror films of the last thirty years, then it is ridiculous to say that this sacrifice has been required by the "gods" from ALL TIME.

Secondly, to make an illogical leap does not make the satire/criticism more valid; it makes the movie worse.

I did a cursory run-through of the A&F 25, and excepting "I Walk W a Zombie" (zombie movies were different pre-1968), I caught two references: there are twin girl ghosts as one of the myriad of choices (The Shining), and the surprise cameo of the star of the other movie (revealing star and title is a spoiler I'll keep), whose sole horror work is limited to that single title (and subsequent sequels). Until now, that is.

I read an interview w the director on aintitcool.com. He referenced the Spinal Tap line "There's a fine line between clever and stupid." It's obvious that this movie exists and revels on that line.

[Ryan H.]

Nick Alexander, on 22 April 2012 - 06:25 AM, said:

Persilage...

I said it before, I'll say it again: if what they are referencing are predominantly the horror films of the last thirty years, then it is ridiculous to say that this sacrifice has been required by the "gods" from ALL TIME.

The whole idea there is something a joke. Comedy and logic do not always go hand in hand. At any rate, you can get around that hurdle two ways: one, by the film's statement that the ritual has "evolved" over the years, and, two, by theorizing that the ritual may have existed beforehand but was not ensconsced in cinema culture until relatively recent times.

Nick Alexander, on 22 April 2012 - 06:25 AM, said:

Secondly, to make an illogical leap does not make the satire/criticism more valid; it makes the movie worse.

If the film is a satire of the source, then imitating the source is well and good, wouldn't you say? Imitating the illogic of contemporary horror films in their production of "jump scares," etc. fits. And I think, again, you're supposed to knowingly laugh at the lack of logic in those moments.

I don't love this film all that much, and feel weird to be defending it, but I really don't get criticizing this film along these lines.

[J.A.A. Purves]

My review - with a little C.S. Lewis, Neil Postman and Aldous Huxley thrown in for good measure.

[Nick Olson]

Nice review, Persiflage. I like how you brought in Postman--a good move. I focused on the voyeuristic elements in my review. My only qualm had not so much to do with the world-building (I think your defense on this point is good), but with what I felt like were some muddled relational ironies. Bringing in the ancients kind of threw me off a bit. There's a sense in which you could identify the targeted voyeuer with the technicians or the gods, or you could identify the two technicians with Goddard and Whedon--and, yet, there's Sigourney Weaver playing the "director." I wish the relationships used to support the worthwhile ironies would have been more clear-cut in this sense.

That said, I really enjoyed the movie for the reasons you've outlined in your review, and I would probably consider it one of my top 3 or 4 favorites of the year so far. Thanks for sharing.

[Attica]

Persiflage, on 23 April 2012 - 05:37 PM, said:

My review - with a little C.S. Lewis, Neil Postman and Aldous Huxley thrown in for good measure.

I enjoyed your essay as well. At first I was thinking that you have a more negative view on horror films than I do, but then I realized that there is no real way for me to gauge this. I say this because I haven't really watched any of the Hollywood slasher films since a few in the 1980's so I've never seen any of the Saw's or Hostel's ect. As I've mentioned on these boards before, I do find value in good horror films. Films such as Excorcism of Emily Rose, 28 days later, Blair Witch, the Devils backbone. ect...ect...... But these films are a different breed then the slasher/mutilation films that the Cabin in the Woods is commenting on, and I've never been inclined to want to rent those in the first place (although I know enough about them to get the tropes that are found in CITW).

One thought though, is that there will always be horror films, and there always will be people watching them for various reasons. What I think we need to see is Hollywood moving away from films that concentrate on the various horrible ways that a person can be mutilated to death, to films that concentrate on ideas and concepts related to morality, and to humanities questions about it's various problems, as well as questions and fears about it's future and the unknown.

I would say that is what horror films used to be mostly about before changes in the 70's to 80's. They used to be the film world's version of spooky stories told around the campfire. Stories that had important things to say about and to our societies (even if they were often campy). If we want Hollywood to quit making horror films that we reject then I'd say we need to support the stuff that we deem has some value. I'd like to see Hollywood making more films like Cujo, or Pan's Labyrinth (Or last years Insidious). That kind of film works for me and from what I've read those are the kinds of projects that many horror filmmakers actually really want to work on.

Edited by Attica, 23 April 2012 - 08:42 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Persiflage wrote:
: 1 - Did anyone else catch Marty's last line? It seemed strangely appropriate for the voyeuristic theme. - "Giant evil gods ... I would have liked to have seen them."

Interesting connection. I'm wondering, though, if "voyeurism" can be applied to simply seeing something; for some reason I associate it with watching someone DO something. But I could be wrong about that.

: 3 - Not much discussion of how the film handles the concept of free will on this thread. It seemed to be a fairly major theme in the film.

I actually got the opposite sense, that it WASN'T really about free will. Richard Jenkins does have a line about how the characters have a moment of freedom somewhere in the middle of the process, but the beginning and the outcome are determined by he and his colleagues; and of course Jenkins and his co-workers have a betting pool etc.; but I didn't sense anything particularly deep about this.

I guess I would say that, if I had noticed the theme at all, I might have framed it as one of order vs. chaos, with the betting pool being just one of several ways that people try to impose a semblance of order on chaos. (There's a chart on the wall, and a system for placing bets, etc., but the actual thing being bet on is still utterly random.) And then the film basically ends on a note of "Chaos reigns" (to quote Antichrist), as the living beings who have been trapped within the system break free of it and bring about the system's destruction (a la the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the book version of which was quite emphatic about the role of "chaos" in all this).

Hmmm. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I might be more open to an order-vs-chaos reading of the film than a free-will-vs-no-free-will reading is because free will -- or any sort of will, really -- requires some sort of character, and I never bought any of these people as actual CHARACTERS. The film's utter incoherence on the level of world-building etc., on the other hand, actually fits very well with an order-vs-chaos way of reading things.

: : Side note: Why include a one-way mirror in the plot if you're not going to actually, like, do anything with it?
:
: To play with the expectations of the theater audience and, as mentioned earlier, to contrast the choice Holden makes with the attitudes of the white lab-coats and theater audience.

I already answered the second part of that sentence earlier in this thread, when I underscored that my question concerned the PLOT and not the THEME of the film. But as to the first half of that sentence, I'm not sure that giving the audience a set-up and no pay-off really counts as "playing with" the audience's expectations.

: Our expectations are granted and denied, at different points in the film, and there always seems to be a reason why.

Okay, and so we're back to my question: What's the reason why? At first, you seemed to be saying that it was there just as part of a general plan to deny our expectations, but now you seem to be saying that each and every case of expectation denial has some sort of deeper reason that is unique to that expectation denial. So what IS that deeper something, in this case?

: : . . . it's basically a movie about a horror-movie cabin built on top of a science lab which offers sacrifices to ancient gods. But does that make any sense? How does one of these things relate to the other?
:
: Marilynne Robinson would object to this question. The divisions and contradictions between science and religion are more apparent than actual, particularly so in a "horror movie" film.

Not necessarily. Religion leads towards mystification, whereas science is profoundly concerned with DEmystifying things -- making them explainable as much as possible. Of course, there will always be things that we CAN'T explain, so science is inherently limited and religion is one of the ways we have of going BEYOND science; and of course, to the extent that science and religion are both ways of explaining reality, they should agree on the reality that they are explaining (which leads to interesting tensions when we try to combine, say, evolutionary theory with a notion of life before and after "the Fall"). But the problem here, with this film, is that it mashes up these genres and worldviews without really exploring any of those tensions; instead, it consistently demystifies and renders absurd these larger mysteries, turning the horror-movie tropes into silly little performances (why does the gas-station guy want to sound so menacing to a single person on the phone, but not care if everyone else in the room hears his normal voice?) and turning the gods into, well, an absurdly literalistic nihilistic joke. (Incidentally, I much, much preferred the giant-hand imagery in Wrath of the Titans, which happens to be yet another film which struggles with the demystification of ancient gods...)

: In this film, both the scientists and the "giant evil gods" seem to be violating free will.

Question: do the GODS have free will? Is there any reason they HAVE to be sated this way, or any reason they HAVE to make the threat that they have made?

[StephenM]

Hi, guys, new to the boards, here!

I liked the movie a lot, found it a blast to watch, but I'll admit it's not quite as clever or deep as it thinks it is, and a few of its points are muddled. The world-building doesn't make a whole lot of sense--How did they get all the monsters? When exactly did these systems come into place? How did all these people get hired in the first place?--All sorts of things like that can be asked.

However, what doesn't seem to have been said here (I missed it, at least) in response to those world-building objections is that the details don't matter. All those background ideas are left unexplained and undeveloped because they are not important to the points being made. It's not that they're all just a joke, that the idea of gods is just silly so they decided to throw it in--they're a metaphor.

The whole thing is pretty obviously a metaphor for the way horror movies get made today--dead teenager movies in the U.S., spooky ghost stories in Japan, disaster movies elsewhere (I didn't catch what all the other countries' movies were supposed to be). They're all being turned out on assembly lines, slaves to their own genre tropes. The corporate guys here can be seen as the studio/producers/whatever who make these movies, turning them all out over and over, confident they will sell every time because they're what the consumer wants. But the thing is, these tropes have lost their originality, their flavor, their cleverness. They no longer please like they used to. They're no longer sure things--Japan's failure is presumably a reference to the faltering of the J-Horror boom of the early 2000s, which would likely have had more punch if the film had been released a few years back, like it was supposed to be. The point is, though, that the gods they're sacrificing to are us. The Audience. We have a both a seemingly insatiable desire for more blood and gore and trashy thrills, as well as a deep need to deal with our dark fears and nightmares by bringing them into the light and looking at them from the outside in horror movies. As such, it is important to keep us satisfied--both on the basic commercial level, and the more serious level that if we don't deal with those issues, we can go kinda crazy. Not being able to understand ourselves through art can cause us to lose control, and the world to end (maybe. metaphorically anyway.). So that's why the gods are so undefined--they're our inner demons, they're our desires as an audience. When we go crazy at the end because the movie hasn't played out the way we wanted it to, it could mean two things: 1. We have finally seen the failure of the slasher genre and all it's stupid cliches, and are finally empowered as an audience to demand something newer and better for our horror fix. or 2. Without any proper distance from our horrors through the movies of the world, our inner demons are unleashed and we go crazy and pretty much destroy the world because we have nothing to vicariously get rid of these ugly impulses on.

The movie is a bit vague and muddled on which of these interpretations it really wants to go for, and I wish it had done more to play them off each other and express the deeper ideas of why horror as a genre is necessary. But I think it's quite clear why a lot of the apparent inconsistencies and vagaries of the plot don't matter when faced with these larger points.

[Attica]

StephenM, on 23 April 2012 - 10:16 PM, said:

Hi, guys, new to the boards, here!

I liked the movie a lot, found it a blast to watch, but I'll admit it's not quite as clever or deep as it thinks it is, and a few of its points are muddled. The world-building doesn't make a whole lot of sense--How did they get all the monsters? When exactly did these systems come into place? How did all these people get hired in the first place?--All sorts of things like that can be asked.

However, what doesn't seem to have been said here (I missed it, at least) in response to those world-building objections is that the details don't matter. All those background ideas are left unexplained and undeveloped because they are not important to the points being made. It's not that they're all just a joke, that the idea of gods is just silly so they decided to throw it in--they're a metaphor.

The whole thing is pretty obviously a metaphor for the way horror movies get made today--dead teenager movies in the U.S., spooky ghost stories in Japan, disaster movies elsewhere (I didn't catch what all the other countries' movies were supposed to be). They're all being turned out on assembly lines, slaves to their own genre tropes. The corporate guys here can be seen as the studio/producers/whatever who make these movies, turning them all out over and over, confident they will sell every time because they're what the consumer wants. But the thing is, these tropes have lost their originality, their flavor, their cleverness. They no longer please like they used to. They're no longer sure things--Japan's failure is presumably a reference to the faltering of the J-Horror boom of the early 2000s, which would likely have had more punch if the film had been released a few years back, like it was supposed to be. The point is, though, that the gods they're sacrificing to are us. The Audience. We have a both a seemingly insatiable desire for more blood and gore and trashy thrills, as well as a deep need to deal with our dark fears and nightmares by bringing them into the light and looking at them from the outside in horror movies. As such, it is important to keep us satisfied--both on the basic commercial level, and the more serious level that if we don't deal with those issues, we can go kinda crazy. Not being able to understand ourselves through art can cause us to lose control, and the world to end (maybe. metaphorically anyway.). So that's why the gods are so undefined--they're our inner demons, they're our desires as an audience. When we go crazy at the end because the movie hasn't played out the way we wanted it to, it could mean two things: 1. We have finally seen the failure of the slasher genre and all it's stupid cliches, and are finally empowered as an audience to demand something newer and better for our horror fix. or 2. Without any proper distance from our horrors through the movies of the world, our inner demons are unleashed and we go crazy and pretty much destroy the world because we have nothing to vicariously get rid of these ugly impulses on.

The movie is a bit vague and muddled on which of these interpretations it really wants to go for, and I wish it had done more to play them off each other and express the deeper ideas of why horror as a genre is necessary. But I think it's quite clear why a lot of the apparent inconsistencies and vagaries of the plot don't matter when faced with these larger points.

Hi Stephen M. Welcome.

Those are some good thoughts, and I like your insights into the comparisons between the god's and us.

As well the background story to many movies are left unexplained and I didn't find the lack of explanation to how the monsters were gathered to be necessary for this story, as well as the explanation of some other things. As a matter of fact there could be a fairly simple explanation. When a monster made havoc (like they do in many stories) agents were sent out to contain it in various ways, and transfer it to the compound (or previous lair), where they eventually grew a large group of monsters for their use. It's simple and not outside of the possibilities found in horror films.

Edited by Attica, 24 April 2012 - 10:30 AM.