Crushing Life in the Anthropocene? Destroying Simulated "Nature" in The Cabin in the Woods

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2020.225

Keywords:

Horror Film, Anthropocene, Nature, Hyperreality, Simulation

Abstract

The Cabin in the Woods (2011) is a highly self-reflexive movie that is aware of its generic roots. In particular, the film struggles with the meaning of “the woods” in the horror genre. Cabin’s central twist in this respect is that the titular “woods” are not untamed nature, but rather a place of artifice. Cabin’s woods are not uncanny because they are far removed from “civilization,” but rather exactly because they are part of it. The film’s emphasis on the artificiality of nature suggests that the concept of “nature” is exactly that—a concept, a cultural construct, loaded with meaning. The film’s ending envisions the end of that discursive construct—but for that to happen, humankind must vanish.

Author Biography

Michael Fuchs, University of Graz

Michael Fuchs is a fixed-term assistant professor in American Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. He has co-edited six essay collections, including ConFiguring America: Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity (2013) and Intermedia Games—Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality (2019). In addition, he has authored and co-authored more than fifty published and forthcoming journal articles and book chapters on horror and adult cinema, American television, contemporary American literature, video games, and comics.

References

Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: An introduction to supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London: Verso Books.

Brophy, P. (1986). Horrality: The textuality of contemporary horror films. Screen, 27(1), 2–13.

Brown, W. (2013). Supercinema: Film-philosophy for the digital age. London: Berghahn Books.

Buell, F. (2014). Global warming as literary narrative. Philological quarterly, 93(3), 261–294.

Buell, L. (1995). The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Buell, L., Heise, Ursula K., and Thornber K. (2011). Literature and environment. Annual review of environment and resources, 36, 417–440.

Burgin, V. (1986). Between. London: Basil Blackwell.

Canavan, Gerry (2013/14). “Something nightmares are from”: Metacommentary in Joss Whedon’s The cabin in the woods. Slayage: The journal of the Whedon studies association, 10(2)/11(1). http://www.whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/canavan_slayage_10.2-11.1.pdf.

Clark, N. (1997). Panic ecology: Nature in the age of superconductivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 14(1), 77–96.

Clover, C. J. (1992). Men, women, and chain saws: Gender in the modern horror film. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Creed, B. (1993). The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Cronon, W. J. (1996). The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. Environmental history, 1(1), 7–28.

Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). House of leaves. New York: Pantheon Books.

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, J. & Roudinesco, E. (2004). For what tomorrow …: A dialogue (J. Fort, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Dika, V. (1990). Games of terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the films of the stalker cycle. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Freud, S. (2001). The “uncanny” (J. Strachey et al., Trans.). In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17: Infantile neurosis and other works (pp. 217–256). London: Vintage.

Garrard, G. (2012). Ecocriticism (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Gifford, T. (1996). The social construction of nature. Interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, 3(2), 27–35.

Goddard, D. (Director). (2011). The cabin in the woods [Film]. Lions Gate.

Gray, J. (2002). Straw dogs: Thoughts on humans and other animals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Grosz, E. (2011). Becoming undone: Darwinian reflections on life, politics, and art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hayles, N. K. (2002). Saving the subject: Remediation in House of leaves. American literature, 74(4), 779–806.

Hills, M. (2005). The pleasures of horror. London: Continuum Books.

Joshi, S. T. (1999). Introduction. In S. T. Joshi (Ed.), The call of Cthulhu and other weird stories (pp. vii–xx). New York: Penguin.

Kuhn, A. (1990). Intertexts: Introduction. In A. Kuhn (Ed.), Alien zone: Cultural theory and contemporary science fiction cinema (pp. 177–182). London: Verso Books.

Le Grice, M. (2001). Experimental cinema in the digital age. London: BFI.

Leffler, Y. (2000). Horror as pleasure: The aesthetics of horror fiction (S. Death, Trans.). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Ligotti, T. (2010). The conspiracy against the human race: A contrivance of horror. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lisboa, M. M. (2011). The end of the world: Apocalypse and its aftermath in Western culture. Oxford: Open Book Publishers.

Lotman, Y. M. (1990). Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture (A. Shukman, Trans.). London: I. B. Tauris.

Lotman, Y. M. (1977). The structure of the artistic text (G. Lenhoff and R. Vroon, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

MacCormack, P. (2016). Lovecraft’s cosmic ethics. In C. H. Sederholm & J. A. Weinstock (Eds.), The age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle edition.

Mogen, D., Sanders, S. P., and Karpinski, J. B. (1993). Introduction. In D.

Mogen, S. P. Sanders, and J. B. Karpinski (Eds.), Frontier gothic: Terror and wonder at the frontier in American literature (pp. 13–27). Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3): 6–18.

Nietzsche, F. (2000). On the genealogy of morals. In W. Kaufmann (Trans. & Ed.), Basic writings of Nietzsche (pp. 437–599). New York: Modern Library.

Ortner, S. B. (1974). Is female to male as nature is to culture? In M. Z. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere (Eds.), Woman, culture, and society (pp. 68–87). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Poliquin, R. (2012). The breathless zoo: Taxidermy and the cultures of longing. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Pugh, S. (1988). Garden—nature—language. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Rossini, M. (2014). “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I … am … a man!” Is female to male as nature is to culture? In E. Andersson Cederholm et al. (Eds.), Exploring the animal turn: Human–animal relations in science, society and culture (pp. 111–124). Lund: Pufendorfinstitutet.

Salomon, R. B. (2002). Mazes of the serpent: An anatomy of horror narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Semonin, P. (2000). American monster: How the nation’s first prehistoric creature became a symbol of national identity. New York: New York University Press.

Sharrett, C. (1996). The horror film in neoconservative culture. In B. K. Grant (Ed.), The dread of difference: Gender and the horror film (pp. 253–278). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Spooner, C. (2006). Contemporary gothic. London: Reaktion Books.

Stevick, P. (1981). Alternative pleasures: Post-realist fiction and the tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Wagner, K. A. (2013/14). Haven’t we been here before? The cabin in the woods, the horror genre, and placelessness. Slayage: The journal of the Whedon studies association 10(2)/11(1). http://www.whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/wagner_slayage_10.2-11.1.pdf.

Weinstock, J. A. (2014). Gothic and the new American republic, 1770–1800. In G. Byron & D. Townshend (Eds.), Gothic world (pp. 27–37). London: Routledge.

Wollen, P. (1976). “Ontology” and “materialism” in film. Screen, 17(1), 7–25.

Downloads

Published

2020-12-03

How to Cite

Fuchs, M. (2020). Crushing Life in the Anthropocene? Destroying Simulated "Nature" in The Cabin in the Woods. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 8(2), 62–93. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2020.225

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 2 (2020): Fall 2020

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.