So, a funny thing happened a couple of days ago. A major sci-fi website linked to my blog, and suddenly my hits jumped 400%. I had 3,417 hits on Monday. Tuesday it dropped to 1,804, which was still about 200% more than I typically get in a day. Today it’s at 919 as of 9:00 pm. I expect that by tomorrow it’ll be back to a normal level.

Now, I know perfectly well that the increased traffic was from people who wanted that screencap of the infamous whiteboard from The Cabin in the Woods. Even on a normal day, all but a handful of hits on my blog come from people doing Google image searches.

But, just in case any of you lot also read a post or two and decided to come back, I want to say “welcome.”

My name is David Thiel, and I’m a 47-year-old geek living in Champaign, Illinois. In my day job I’m the program director for WILL-TV, the local PBS station. However, this blog isn’t about that. As much as possible, I try to keep separate my work life and my life life.

I’ve been writing this particular blog for more than seven years. It started as a typically navel-gazing public diary, but in recent times has become a bit more focused on geek pop culture.

I’ve disabled comments because I don’t want the hassle of dealing with spam and trolls, but there’s a guestbook link at the top of the page, and you can always drop me a note at the address in the right menu bar.

I’m very fond of pre-’70s sci-fi, Japanese monsters and cult films. I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who since the early ’70s. (It’s no coincidence that WILL was one of the first US stations to air the Christopher Eccleston episodes.) I was twelve years old when the original Star Wars hit theaters; I saw it twelve times that year. I had a birthday cake depicting the “space slug” from The Empire Strikes Back. I love Bruce Campbell, H.P. Lovecraft and Superman. The highlight of my year in Los Angeles was the time I played a man-sized mutant insect. I’ve championed Starship Troopers, Speed Racer and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I once completely embarrassed myself while sharing an elevator with LeVar Burton. All in all, it’s been a strange life.

So, that’s me. Again, thanks for stopping by. Perhaps I’ll see you again around here sometime.

Dave General David Thiel Superstar

(Note to you first-time visitors: Welcome! I just learned that io9 posted a link to my blog thanks to the “whiteboard” image below. I went from 631 hits yesterday to 2,222-and-counting today. I just want to give credit where credit is due; I found that image on the Twitter feed of one @johnfalvey, and reposted it here just to help disseminate it. So, thanks for stopping by. Hope you enjoy what you find here.)

The first weekend gross is in for The Cabin in the Woods, and while the $14 million+ take isn’t bad, the “C” CinemaScore is terrible. It means that Cabin is very much a love-it or hate-it experience, with lots of “F” ratings balancing out the stellar reviews and fanboy raves. It’s ironic (or perhaps the opposite of ironic?) given that the film is all about what happens when “the audience” doesn’t get what it wants. And apparently the audience wanted what the title and non-spoiler description promised: five kids in a cabin being butchered, without all the meta-commentary and betting pools and system purges.

And now, some random observations…

(TOTAL SPOILERS AHEAD. STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE.)

First off, this is not my image, but I know that a lot of folks have been looking for a clear shot of the “whiteboard” and I’m here to help.

Not sure if all of these made it into the film. Both the “Deadites” and the “Angry Molesting Tree” are references to the Evil Dead films, and the “Hell Lord” may be the Hellraiser-inspired creature listed in the credits as “Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain.” Anyone want to guess what “Kevin” is?

I like that there’s a distinction between “Witches” and “Sexy Witches.” Also that no one is sure whether one monster is a Sasquatch, a Wendigo or a Yeti.

There are some on-screen creatures that didn’t make the betting pool, notably the scorpion-like killbot and the tentacled thing that grabs Amy Acker. Pretty sure that I saw a giant centipede in the “zoo” shot. (A book called The Cabin in the Woods – The Official Visual Companion is being released tomorrow. Perhaps it will give a full accounting of the menagerie.)

One thing I didn’t mention in yesterday’s review was my appreciation of the film’s moral ambivalence. From a certain point of view, the staff of the murder factory are actually the heroes of the story, trying to save the world from ancient evil. It’s the resourceful “final girl” who dooms humanity by refusing to stick to the script. And yet, how can we root for the folks who have casually manipulated so many young people into gruesome deaths?

I was initially disappointed that the final shot of the Ancient One was of a humanoid hand and not a squamous, Lovecraftian horror. In hindsight, I get it. It’s one final horror trope: the hand bursting out of the earth ala Carrie. It also supports the metaphor that the Ancient Ones demanding blood are us.

Something I’ve been mulling: how many movies conclude with the end of the world and everyone in it? (Thus discounting post-apocalyptic stories as well as disaster flicks like When Worlds Collide and 2012 in which enough people survive to build anew.) In the Mouth of Madness comes to mind, and one could make a case for another John Carpenter film, Prince of Darkness. In the nuclear Armageddon category, there’s Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach, Beneath the Planet of the Apes* and (arguably) Miracle Mile**. I haven’t seen it, but I understand that Melancholia doesn’t pull any punches. Then there’s 1977′s cheapie End of the World, in which the Earth explodes in the final shot. You don’t get any more certain than that.

*Yes, Cornelius and Zira get away, but that’s not until Escape from the Planet of the Apes grants them a get-out-of-apocalypse pass.

**We can never be sure if anyone actually makes it to Antarctica.

Dave Movies The Cabin in the Woods, whiteboard

The Cabin in the Woods, the newly-released movie co-written by producer Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard, is frustrating in that it both demands and defies discussion. Believe me, I very much want to dissect it, but like Fight Club the first rule of The Cabin in the Woods is that you do not talk about The Cabin in the Woods. The less you know the better.

So if you’re even thinking that you might see it–and if you’re at all a fan of horror films or even the idea of horror films, you should–log off the Internet right now and just go. We’ll catch up later.

(MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

The Cabin in the Woods, from its generic title to its premise of five young people heading into the dark forest for a weekend of sin, sounds like every scary flick you’ve ever seen. Which is precisely the point.

But if you’ve seen any of its advertising you already know that there’s more going on. That’s not a spoiler. The very first scene features the office drones who are orchestrating the messy deaths of these doomed kids. That’s the what. The why is something else.

If this sounds more like the Scream franchise with its knowing winks at genre conventions, that’s closer to the truth. But not even Ghostface and friends are as “meta” as The Cabin in the Woods. This is a movie that wants to explain why those kids behave so stupidly and why we want to watch them die.

It’s worth saying that this is not all that frightening. Oh, there are jump scares and rushing torrents of blood, but as we start right off knowing that the scenario is artificial, it doesn’t grab you by the throat in the way that even the first Scream did. It’s okay, that’s not the goal.

I don’t want to oversell this as the best horror film ever. (“Apotheosis” is closer to the mark.) The characters are thin by design. The conclusions reached are not that deep. Still, it’s an experience I wholeheartedly recommend, and the sooner the better.

Okay, have you seen it yet? Good, because now I’m going to give away the whole thing. You have been warned.

(TOTAL SPOILERS AHEAD)

While there are plenty of obvious references to famous fright flicks–notably The Evil Dead and Hellraiser–The Cabin in the Woods left me thinking of other possible influences. One was an old Doctor Who storyline called “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” in which the characters performed a never-ending cavalcade of deadly acts to appease an audience of evil gods. Here the suggestion is that the show has been going on since our world began, with movies about cannibal zombie rednecks only the latest iteration of our propensity for telling tales about the butchery of the young.

The Cabin in the Woods argues that we have become too inured to this sort of thing, and that perhaps it’s time to wash off the chalkboard and start fresh. Moments after the lead office worker remarks how he’s almost rooting for the spunky “virgin” to win, he’s obliviously popping the champagne in celebration as the monitors in the background show her being relentlessly attacked by a beartrap-wielding zombie giant.

There’s a boardgame called Betrayal at the House on the Hill in which the players enter a spooky mansion and start fiddling with stuff until they set off one of a myriad of random scenarios based on horror tropes. The Cabin in the Woods called to mind what would happen if the staff of Wolfram & Hart* sat down for a game of Betrayal. Sure enough, the halls would soon run red with their own blood.

The last 20 minutes of The Cabin in the Woods, in which literally all hell breaks loose, are monstrously entertaining. I want to go again right away just to get a better look at the vast menagerie of creatures slashing and swallowing the hapless salarymen. While the money shot of the movie might be the Cube-like image of the terrible underground zoo, my favorite moment is when all of those elevator doors open and every nightmare ever emerges.

*The demonic law firm seen in Whedon’s TV series Angel. Goddard contributed a number of scripts for that show.

Dave Movies Joss Whedon, reviews, The Cabin in the Woods