Every year, there are a ton of horror movies that come out, and every year, the bad far outweigh the good. Fortunately, 2012 had some reallygood horror to offset the bad. Cabin in the Woods, which finally came out after several years of agonizing wait, raised the bar for cinematic genre deconstruction. V/H/S fused found footage with the classic horror anthology motif. Sinisterwas gruesome and scary and a perfect example of a good hard-R horror film. The Possession, conversely, demonstrated how good a PG-13 horror can be. Finally, Prometheus brought the godfather of the Alien franchise back home, albeit with mixed results.
Of course, only one of these films can take home the Golden Pterodactyl. Drum roll, please…
I love meta. Meta gets me out of bed in the morning. Cabin in the Woods was the most meta thing I’ve seen in a long time. While the ‘zombie redneck torture family’ was appropriate for the cliché of the ‘cabin in the woods,’ I would’ve loved to see some of the other choices in action before the last act. However, that last act was an act of absolute brilliance on the part of Whedon and Goddard. The other nominees (see below) were all ranging from good to great, but Cabin in the Woods was the perfect deconstruction of the horror genre and its various trappings, and was well worth the wait.
