Director Drew Goddard has been waiting a long time for the release of “The Cabin in the Woods,” the giddy, mind-bending horror film he co-wrote with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon. Shot in March 2009, the film found itself a victim of the financial woes plaguing its studio, MGM. But after being rescued by new distributor Lionsgate and wowing crowds at the South by Southwest Film Festival and at preview screenings around the country, Goddard’s film is finally coming out. Just don’t tell anyone what happens in it.
So it’s been about three years since you filmed this, but you hit a bit of a delay in the release.
Yeah, you know, the studio we made the movie with went bankrupt. They got caught in the financial crisis a little worse than other studios. They had to declare bankruptcy, and it sort of slowed everything down. But it wasn’t just us — “The Hobbit” got delayed and James Bond got delayed, and when you see heavyweights like those dropping beside you, you realize, “This is a much bigger problem than any one film.”
I mentioned the film to a friend, who worried that the storyline sounds too cliched. I didn’t know what to tell her. How do you market a movie so filled with twists?
Yeah, it’s tricky because you want to tell the audience this is different, and that this is not your average, everyday horror film, but you also want to protect it. The truth about this movie is [that] the less you know about it, the better.
There is a great deal of humor in the film, especially compared to some of the torture-oriented horror films that have become popular in recent years.
There’s certainly a lot of sub-genres within the horror genre, and we wanted to be part of the fun horror movies rather than the traumatic horror movies. [Laughs] And there’s definitely been a trend in horror movies recently — not always, because there’s been some great horror movies that were made in the last 10 years, but you can feel when a director doesn’t care about his characters, and I certainly see that in a lot of movies where it just feels like they’re setting kids up to watch them get slaughtered over and over, and that’s it. And I think that we were definitely railing against that with this movie. We wanted to care about what’s going on and have something to say with this movie.
