Be Excellent To Each Other

The “ancient gods” are the audience. The international house locations are the various countries that have been submitting regularly to the horror genre in the last decade or so. Granted, Sweden and France probably should have had a bit more of a nod, but the reference makes much more sense in context.

And the whole “eight minutes until sunrise” bit…? Guess what happens eight minutes later? Yup, lights up in the theater. The movie, and the world within it are over…everyone is effectively dead.

This is precisely what I thought as well. The old gods were indeed we the audience. The monsters that were kept in storage were cinematic echoes of horror movies and not myths or legends. I mean, hellraiser and IT were among the potential killing tools. I was fully expecting at some point the names of Stephen King and Clive Barker to be dropped as former or current employees of the concern that perpetuates the ritual sacrifices working in the “R & D” department.

Here’s my take:

The “version of Earth” the movie inhabits is actually an allegory for the horror movie industry. The two “writers” guiding the process don’t succeed (setting up a rote premise, but failing the formula), and they unleash the wrath of the legacy of the genre (all of the “famous monsters”) on themselves and the crew, the “director” tries to save things at the last minute by interfering with the story (inside the literal setting of a type of deus ex machina), but she too fails and the entire enterprise is destroyed by the “ancient ones,” the part of the audience’s psyche whose taste for blood must be sated every couple of months by horror films. It casts horror movies as the latest installment in the long-running parade of bloody human morality plays, designed to control behavior by instilling strong notions of a mortal price for deviating from accepted social behavior (sexual promiscuity, ego and hubris as driven by athletic and intellectual prowess, decadent partaking in drugs or alcohol). In short, horror movies and stories appeal to a crowd that believes itself to be deviant but are actually the hatchet men for the socially conservative establishment in a sense, unleashing the worst, pent-up aspects of animalistic human id on those who don’t follow society’s rules. Those who don’t find “religion” in churches get it disguised as carnage in horror entertainment, to the same ends. Religion and Horror both keep adherents in line from different directions, manipulating according to the self-image. The movie’s puns on free will drive this home.

I saw this film at the urging of my wife (a horror movie fan, which I am not) last night and woke up a few times overnight with its themes reverberating in my head and expanding. That’s a remarkable feat, and for that this movie gets a very high score from me. The people sitting around us in the theater complained out loud the entire time and left voicing their wish to get their money back, saying it was dumb and the worst thing they’ve ever seen… they are the figurative “arm of the Gods” that crushes the cabin and movie world at the end.

Knowing it to be Whedon I was struck between the similarities of the endgame and the episode of Angel, Habeas Corpses. Powerful and high-tech otherworld-controlling organisation overwhelmed by its own wares.

The other good thing is that Whedon also rolls out lots of old actors from his previous series, which is nice as many of them have, at least to me, toiled in obscurity since I last saw them in his older stuff.

I also saw stylistic (albeit obvious) links between the facility and both Dollhouse and the Initiative in Buffy.

Was there quite a lot of laughter in your cinema? There was much mirth thoughout in mine. At the unicorn part also, which reminded me of things like that.

Had absolutely no idea what I was about to watch, and I think that's definitely the way to watch it.

the FuckUnicorn.

The sliding arrangement of rooms was a massive nod to Cube, too

The whiteboard with all the monsters on lists "Witches" and then, elsewhere, "Sexy Witches", which is pretty awesome.