Last night I turned the Young People in Peril (YPIP) subgenre for my horror selection. Now this subgenre has been with us for quite a while, really taking off in 1979 with Halloween, launching this and the slasher subgenres as the dominate horror form for decades. Only the Zombie and ‘Found Footage’ subgenres have really challenged the primacy if this format.

2012 saw the release of The Cabin in the Woods, a film that both respected and subverted the YPIP format. Co-written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, minds that collective have brought to the big and small screens such properties as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Cloverfield, The Martian, and Daredevil The Cabin in the Woods reflects their sense of humor and horror.

On one level the film displays all the classic tropes of the subgenre. Five college students leave for an weekend at a distant and isolated cabin deep within the forest. They comprise the classic character types found in the films, the athlete, the scholar, the whore, the jester, and the good girl. After ignoring warning signs that things are not what they appear they accidentally awaken an evil force that methodically and remorselessly hunts them down for savage brutal murder.

As you can see this is a  well worn story line and just from that bit it would be difficult to say exactly which film I watched. It might have been Cabin Fever, or the original Evil Dead or any number of YPIP franchises. Two things make this movie stand out from the others.

First; the young people are real characters with real personalities they defy the broad strokes of their position in the plot. The Athlete is smart and well read, the relationships between the characters display true friendship and depth of emotion, making the later brutal scenes that much more horrifying.

The second element I can not truly discuss without delving into serious spoiler territory. These elements are presented from the very first scene of the movie and when the threads combine it can be read in several different ways. Drew Goddard has said that his father worked in nuclear weapons manufacturing and that part of what he wanted to explore as a theme was the stress and lives of people who are tasked with a job that truly horrific and utterly necessary.

The script has the trademarked Joss Whedon sense of humor and with his deft skill he plays that humor in the front part of the story, because once the horror starts there is little room for jokes and japes. This is what many people who try to combine comedy and horror fail to understand. You can have both, but having them in the same scenes rarely works.

The Cabin in the Woods is a brutal, bloody, and horrifying story expertly crafted and executed. I had the good fortune of seeing it in the theaters and it is one of my favorites.