ABSTRACT
Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s 2012 film The Cabin in the Woods has been characterized as a postmodern movie for its ironic references to clichés and tropes commonly found within the horror genre. And yet these playful ironies are braided together with extremely gory depictions of paranormal beings within a plot that offers hopeful glimmers of humanism. This chapter analyzes the film through the lens of metamodernism, a cultural sensibility that some have theorized as a possible successor to postmodernism. Unlike strictly postmodern movies such as Scream and Scary Movie, Cabin defends the notion of individual interiority, championing of the right to one’s own narrative, even in the face of the most dire situations.
