There's not much a reporter can reveal about "The Cabin in the Woods" — except that it's not about either a pterodactyl attack or a possessed hot tub that menaces its scantily clad bathers.
The actors who were auditioning for writer-director Drew Goddard and writer-producer Joss Whedon's ultra-secret project several years ago, however, didn't go in knowing that.
"The best way I know to spoil anything is to send scripts to actors and tell them don't give this to anyone," says Goddard, a first-time director who cut his fangs writing for Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series.
"Because we need to look at hundreds and hundreds of actors we wrote up a bunch of fake scenes and the scenes were ridiculous," he says. "But it was important to see how people would react to that and how actors would roll with it.
"Somewhere we have an audition tape of [a pre-"Thor"\] Chris Hemsworth reacting to a pterodactyl attack that's priceless," he quips.
The shroud of secrecy is a big part of the mystique surrounding "The Cabin in the Woods," which opens Friday after being stuck in the hellish limbo that was MGM's bankruptcy. Goddard and Whedon tried the usual tricks of the trade during filming — red pages for the screenplay so they couldn't be photocopied or scanned — but ultimately prayed that genre geeks would police themselves.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the multiplex — a fan-base notorious for Internet spoilers has done just that — kept their traps shut.
"I think that everybody who made the movie knew a huge part of the fun is not knowing and you are kind of sabotaging yourself if you tell anybody," says Richard Jenkins, one of the few actors entrusted with a real script from the outset. "I didn't tell my wife. Really. I didn't tell my friends. I just said, 'No, you're just going to have to see it.'"
Jenkins almost divulges more during the interview, but catches himself. "I'm relying on you [to edit this], Ethan" he says.
Redacting plot spoilers, the movie is about … a cabin in the woods.
Five college students — the bookish good girl (Kristen Connolly), a surprisingly smart alpha male jock (Hemsworth), his promiscuous girlfriend (Anna Hutchison), a sensitive scholar-athlete (Jesse Williams) and the requisite stoner comic relief (Fran Kranz) — head there for a weekend getaway that the audience knows isn't going to end well. Only the periodic cuts to a computer center staffed by wise-cracking engineering types played by Jenkins and Bradley Whitford hint at a deeper mystery.
The film has drawn comparisons to "Inception" (for its onion-layer plotting), "Scream" (for its deconstruction of the genre), "Paranormal Activity" (for building buzz before its release), "Evil Dead" (for being about a cabin in the woods where evil things happen) and the works of Italian horror master Dario Argento (probably for its use of so much fake blood).
"It's taken the template of movies like 'Evil Dead' and about a gazillion slasher flicks, put it in a blender and come up with something with a completely new twist," says Tony Timpone, editor emeritus at Fangoria magazine, in about as good a description as any.
Harry Knowles, the founder of Ain't It Cool News, a site that's become an arbiter of geek tastes, scored the movie for his Butt-Numb-A-Thon film festival in Austin, Tex., in December.
"Once you get to that last act of that film, the audience was just losing their minds, screaming and cheering," he says. "Afterward, I had programmed 'Ghost Rider 2,' and boy the audience just wasn't into it after 'Cabin in the Woods.'"
It's been a long wait for fans of the genre and the filmmakers to get to the screaming and cheering stage. The movie was finished more than two years ago — Whedon wrote and directed the big-budget "The Avengers" over that time — but mothballed as MGM was mired in bankruptcy and forced to sell off projects. "I didn't take it personally," says Goddard. "We were in good company with James Bond and 'The Hobbit'."
Goddard says it was a blessing in disguise since Lionsgate picked up the movie in auction. Before the runaway success of "The Hunger Games," the studio was best known as the home of horror staples like the "Saw" and "Hostel" franchises; a company that once sent packages of raw meat to journalists to promote the carnage in "Hostel 2."
"The Cabin in the Woods" isn't meant to be the next "Inception" — just a fun romp that contains as many laughs as screams. Well, maybe with a few more screams.
"We just set out to write a love letter to the genre," says Goddard. "That was the only motivation we had in writing it."