#tucker and dale vs. evil

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[cultfaction]

Cult Faction Podcast Ep. 126: Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil

In this weeks episode we cast our eye over 2010 black comedy horror film Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. Directed by Eli Craig and written by Craig and Morgan Jurgenson. It stars Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Brandon Jay McLaren, Jesse Moss, and Chelan Simmons. https://cultfaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/episode-126-.mp3

[junkfoodcinemas]

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) dir. Eli Craig

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: comedy

[finalgirlminamurray]

yes i was thinking of saying something about that one too! but the post was long enough as it was lol

i watched tucker and dale a while back and was very pleasantly surprised by it. was trying to put my finger on what i liked about it more than most meta horror films and i think it's mostly that it ended up doing its own thing with the story instead of committing to parodying specific tropes or subgenres (though it starts out parodying rural horror/"hicksploitation" aesthetics)

“meta horror” is another subgenre that’s kind of a hard sell for me. not that i don’t like any films that could be described that way but it’s hard to do well, i think, and if your audience is people with extensive knowledge of horror then it’s going to be especially hard to do it in a way that satisfies them. (it’s me i’m that audience.)

i thought maybe sometime soon i should watch the cabin in the woods again. i’ve only seen it once now, when i was first getting into horror movies, and since then after getting much deeper into the genre and greatly expanding my knowledge of it i probably would like it a lot less. part of that is due to the culture having soured a lot on joss whedon in the years since it came out, for good reason. part of it is due to my realization that a lot of the time when a “meta” horror movie posits certain tropes as universal or at least extremely common in the genre it’s…really not accurate.

a lot of meta horror stories are parodying or referencing slashers because that’s probably the subgenre with the most clearly established tropes and cliches and formulas, but they’ll also expand into “scary movies” in general with classic jokes about characters making “dumb” decisions and the like. the go-to slasher trope is “if you have sex you die” which i’ll agree is largely accurate but it often gets paired with “if you don’t have sex you live” and things like the killer specifically targeting people who have sex, which seems to happen way more often in parodies and meta slashers than in straight examples of the form. but then these parodies sometimes seem to inform people’s wider perception of the genre, even when film series get to the point where they’re parodying themselves. (see: jason goes to hell and jason x both specifically referencing “premarital sex” as something people do at camp crystal lake, and then stuff like that “it’s cool we’re married” meme that are based on a premise of the series following a “rule” it does not have.)

cabin in the woods doesn’t really go too far with the sex = death thing but it does assert that all or at least most popular horror films have a set of archetypes that the main victim characters always fit which is definitely not true in my experience. maybe i don’t watch enough lowbrow dumb slashers but i feel like there just aren’t a lot where you can easily sort the characters into “the scholar” “the athlete” “the fool”. there is usually at least one comic relief jokester guy and you can definitely do something with the way female characters are sorted into the virgin/whore dichotomy but most of the time there’s not really a Jock and a Nerd. it seems more based on teen movie archetypes than horror tropes and you’d have a hard time sorting most slasher movie casts into these (especially if there aren’t exactly 5 main characters, although that is a common number.) might be a consequence of them trying to reference horror movies in general and not a specific subgenre because while horror is a genre, different types of horror have different rules.

(another problem i have is that the film’s subversion of those character archetypes doesn’t really go farther than “the ‘jock’ is actually smart, the ‘nerd’ is actually a jock, the ‘fool’ is actually aware of what’s going on, the ‘whore’ is actually a Good Girl and the ‘virgin’ is actually a Bad Girl.” i do like the conceit that the designated ‘whore’ is just the girl who would have more opportunity to have sex on the trip since she’s going with her boyfriend, while the designated ‘virgin’ is just the one we don’t actually see having sex, but the film doesn’t really have time to explore that further. someone on tvtropes pointed that out. there Is interesting commentary here, it just also goes for broad strokes at other times.)

whedon has said that this film is a “loving hate letter” to the horror genre, or what popular horror films were like at the time, and i can see that - this movie came out at a time when american horror was kind of stagnating, but i also think the remake era was on its last legs at this point and we were just poised on the cusp of a new era of profitable genre trends when the conjuring got big. sources list cabin in the woods’ release date as alternately 2010, 2011, and 2012, which was kind of a transitional period for horror movies. makes sense that you might think horror was just cliches and unoriginal content at that point, but there’s good films in every era if you know where to look.

i definitely get the positioning of the elder gods they’re being sacrificed to as representative of how people just want the same familiar stuff over and over instead of anything new or different, but it makes more sense to have them represent the studios and producers who decide what’s profitable and what isn’t, and therefore what is and isn’t allowed to get made, based on which things have already made money, right? maybe i’m too generous to blame “audiences” for the executives with the real decision-making power who are terrified of “risk” (i.e, the possibility that something might not make them a shitload of money.) and yet everyone seems to talk about the elder gods as representing Us, the Viewers. there is a literal executive committee watching over everything, but they don’t have any control over what happens, and often talk about things they wish they could see but probably won’t because the trends go towards what’s reliable, so that probably makes them the audience…

which is reinforced by the scene of them all watching the designated final girl fighting for her life on a giant screen and cheering and celebrating while she struggles. and that opens a whole other issue with a lot of meta horror in that it tries to “implicate the viewers” and question why they enjoy watching people suffer and die but here’s the thing. there’s a very easy answer to that question and it is “because it’s not real”. again there’s interesting things you can do with the concept of implicating the audience but it is awfully hard to pull off successfully for that reason. if you try to go in on in-universe characters treating the horror as entertainment, then at some point you’re not commenting on horror fiction but true crime and that’s something else entirely. like how the scream sequels have an in-universe series of slasher films based directly on the events of the actual movies, which does stretch the suspension of disbelief a bit when they’re treated just like any other fictional horror movies.

speaking of scream, the reason it works so well is because it’s primarily a good slasher first and foremost. the meta references are part of the appeal but the film would probably work just as well without them. but because it was the first good slasher film we’d gotten in a while it spawned a wave of imitators that often get called “meta slashers” even though they’re really not particularly meta, they just have other things in common with scream like their casts full of popular teen tv actors. and kevin williamson, or a passable imitation of his writing style. (i do love scream 1 and 2 but the first movie gets credited with “revitalizing the horror genre” when really it just made studios realize that horror films could be profitable as long as they were like scream. there were plenty of great 90s horror films pre-scream that just weren’t as commercially successful.)

anyway. this post was just supposed to be about meta horror in general but it turned into me musing about cabin in the woods. i really should revisit it with both a critical eye and the intent to be fair to it instead of basing my criticisms off of my own memory of watching it once. it got a ton of praise when it first came out but now i feel like most people are cooler towards it. some parts definitely hold up (the sequence when they release all the monsters in the facility is a modern classic for a reason, the office workers’ banter is fun, the cast is good all around, and there’s some legit horror in the cosmic sense of being told that your friends were murdered for a “reason” and now you have to either kill yourself or your last surviving friend to “save the world”, what are you going to do? who do you believe in that situation?) ultimately i feel like it’s a reflection of a specific moment in time for horror and movies in general, which isn’t necessarily good or bad.

i’ll see if my assessment of “meta horror for people who don’t watch a lot of horror” is accurate. (as for meta horror for people who Do watch a lot of horror? it’s more slasher-specific but; behind the mask: the rise of leslie vernon. obviously.)

[fanofspooky]

Horror movies from around the world:

CANADA

[schrutexbucks]

"I know what this is." "What?" "This is a suicide pact." "It's a what?" "These kids are coming out here and killing themselves all over the woods." "My God.... that makes so much sense."

Tucker & Dale Vs Evil Directed by Eli Craig (2010)

xx/13 days of Halloween 2024

[giftheplanet]

Katrina Bowden

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)

Dir. Eli Craig

[losthavenmine]

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)

[frankehstein]

Oh hidy-ho officer, we've had a doozy of a day. There we were minding our own business, just doing chores around the house, when kids started killing themselves all over my property!

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL (2010) dir. Eli Craig

[lonelyzarquon]

Alan Tudyk as Tucker TUCKER & DALE VS EVIL (2010) dir. Eli Craig

[junkfoodcinemas]

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: meta

[truefandemonium]

Blah blah something about I’ll love you in every universe whatever

[fanofspooky]

Scream King - Tyler Labine