Saw The Cabin In The Woods today. All the reviews I read were all “I can’t think of anything at all to say about this plot without running afoul of my weird and pathetic 2000s spoilerphobia.”

Which is odd - to the extent it’s different from any other horror film, the novelty is deliberately put in front of your eyes from the very first scene.

But if they were going to be like that anyway, here’s what they should have said - you know how all horror movies are all basically the same story, only with different, colorful antagonists? Cabin is a horror movie where the antagonist is “horror movies”.

I dunno, Joss’ writing has always been aware, but between this and Dollhouse, he’s lately been hella meta. (Scream was aware horror.)

More meta, in fact, than anything I can recall since Sandman, where storyteller Neil Gaiman used the story of Storytelling incarnate as a frame story for stories about storytellers from famous stories. They should have a meta-off.

Actually, people’ve been trying to put a Sandman movie together since forever, I wouldn’t be surprised if Joss ends up doing it. Maybe that would be the meta-off.

With a script co-written by Charlie Kaufman.

Bam.

(And then the making of the film would be included as an episode in both of two parallel series from Alan Moore and Grant Morrison about the British Invasion authors, which would eventually conclude with each telling the story of the other telling the story of itself.)

BAM.