Our last week brings everything we’ve learned in this semester so far into focus, stepping outside the characteristics of a single genre and instead looking at films that play with genre itself.

This is a nice full-circle connection to my first post for Exploding Genre, in which I analysed A Mighty Wind (2003) as an example of a metatextual film. Such films simultaneously adhere to and deconstruct genre tropes and conventions, laying bare the underlying structure of a genre while also acting as a successful expression of it. It’s remarkable when it’s done well, such as in A Mighty Wind, the television show Community, or this week’s screening, The Cabin in the Woods (2012). That film was a revelation to me when I first saw it, so sophisticated in playing with the inherent absurdity of so many horror conventions but still reverent of those conventions. And actually scary! Even the cheap jump scares that are present in The Cabin in the Woods are handled in such a way that even though you expect them to come, and you know exactly what the filmmakers are trying to do, they’re still scary.

Jackson (2013)¹ contends that audiences of such metanarratives sit in an “in-between space” that lies between the reality of the film and reality reality, which adds a completely new layer of experience to the film. The five main characters in The Cabin in the Woods are manipulated by technicians aware of horror cliches, and those cliches are made “real” in the story world, but it falls upon the audience to try to figure out what’s just “real” and what’s actually real. So the act of watching the film really hits audiences on three levels: the basic narrative and its fictional/visceral/corporeal response, the meta acknowledgement and manipulation of horror tropes, and then the “in-between space” that blurs both of the above into a third level of reality. It’s all quite sophisticated and I’ve developed an even deeper respect for Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon (and Edgar Wright, whose films operate in much the same way).

It’s a shame I didn’t get to experiment with intertextuality in my own work this semester, but I feel that homage and hybridity is advanced level filmmaking and I’m not quite at the stage where I would be able to pull it off successfully. Maybe next year.