The increasingly cartoonish Nightmare on Elm Street series, which Craven had bowed out of after part three (and then only as an executive producer), had concluded with 1991’s Freddy’s Dead. The wildly successful film spawned three sequels, and while the third and fourth installments were rather underwhelming, part two also featured some inspired riffs on how the rules are revised for (inevitably disappointing) sequels.Ĭraven came to Scream after his own experimentation with self-reflective horror two years earlier. In 1996, Wes Craven was handed a clever screenplay by newcomer Kevin Williamson (originally titled Scary Movie, ha ha) that asked a simple question: what if the protagonists of a horror movie were themselves connoisseurs of horror movies, and thus aware of what to do and not do? Scream raised the usual stakes - and made the audience experience exponentially more participatory - by explicitly stating the “rules that one must abide by in order to survive a horror movie,” and then tinkering with our expectations. Whedon and Goddard were far from the first filmmakers to examine the clichés of the genre within a comic construct. So we wanted to get behind the horror movie, and deconstruct it while at the same time celebrating how much fun they are.” And that’s the joy of the film (which he co-wrote with director Drew Goddard): it manages to simultaneously embrace, spoof, and analyze the tropes of the modern horror movie - and the bloodlust of cinema in general. “We also are very curious about what makes them tick. “We love horror movies,” Joss Whedon explained at this year’s SXSW festival, where Cabin made its long-awaited premiere. After the jump, some thoughts on Cabin and nine more of our favorite self-aware motion pictures. You see, Cabin is the latest example of our old friend the “meta-movie,” the films in which the act of moviemaking (and movie-watching) is part of the experience, and part of the narrative. It explores, through analysis of their denotation and meta-narrative, the ways in which films based on real stories simultaneously present and shape the meaning of events.The Cabin in the Woods, the wickedly funny and winkingly knowing horror/comedy from director Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon, hits DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow, after a long-delayed theatrical run last spring that sent cinephiles spinning with pleasure. Such double-layered narrative of films based on real stories is investigated from a semiotic perspective in this article. The denoted world of these films highlights the meaning through meta-interpretation, calling attention to the real life on its basic level. Those films have a dimension on the meta-level, in which events-the basis of the meta-narrative-are interpreted and turned into stories. The most remarkable characteristic of real-story-based films is that they form a world of denotation, which at once constructs stories and presents facts, depicting the events while interpreting their meanings at the same time. Films based on real stories have received considerable scholarly attention, which engages a wide variety of inquiries including the question of non-fictionality and fictionality and the boundary between feature films and news. Reconstructing real events in film is almost as old as filmmaking itself.
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