Monthly Archives: October 2025

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Horror Films (Revised Entry) (7) The Cabin in the Woods

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Theatrical release poster art

 

(7) THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012)

 

“On another level, it’s a serious critique of what we love and what we don’t about horror movies.”

I’m ranking The Cabin in the Woods in top tier, because it is virtually an encyclopedia of horror film genre tropes and references, the latter so congested at times you have to pause or watch frame by frame to get them all (and probably not even then).

It is a horror film that is also meta-horror – a love letter to the genre, or more precisely a love-hate letter to the genre.

“I love being scared. I love that mixture of thrill, of horror, that objectification / identification thing of wanting definitely for the people to be alright but at the same time hoping they’ll go somewhere dark and face something awful. The things that I don’t like are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into torture p0rn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances.”

That is of course from Joss Whedon as producer and co-writer of the screenplay, the latter with director Drew Goddard as the other co-writer” – and the film is definitely Whedonesque in its troperiffic and reference-heavy quality (rather than the more, ah, negative qualities that might be associated with that term from developments since that film). Indeed, it has distinct similarities with the creation that still is definitive of Whedon – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4 and the Initiative in particular.

“Five friends go to an isolated cabin in the woods for a weekend vacation.”

And that’s pretty much all you’re getting of the plot here, because any more detail spoils the premise of the film. Let’s just say the premise of the film explains why the plots of horror films often seem so contrived in a deconstruction of both the “cabin in the woods” setting and the horror genre.

Film critic Ann Hornaday summed it up nicely:

“A fiendishly clever brand of meta-level genius propels The Cabin in the Woods, a pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps. [It] comes not only to praise the slasher-, zombie- and gore-fests of yore but to critique them, elaborating on their grammatical elements and archetypal figures even while searching for ways to put them to novel use. The danger in such a loftily ironic approach is that everything in the film appears with ready-made quotation marks around it… But by then, the audience will have picked up on the infectiously goofy vibe of an enterprise that, from its first sprightly moments, clearly has no intention of taking itself too seriously”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 Fantasy Books (Special Mention: Cult & Pulp) (3) Diana Wynne Jones – The Tough Guide to Fantasyland

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The map of Fantasyland in the book and also part of the satirical deconstruction of fantasy tropes. It may also look oddly familiar

 

 

(3) DIANA WYNNE JONES –

THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND (1996)

 

Following on from Dungeons & Dragons and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, this is the third of my top three or god-tier entries that are all effectively encyclopedic reference works for the genre of fantasy, whether informally as for the rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons or formally as for the Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland leans more to the formal reference work of the latter arranged in alphabetical order, but with a twist – its meta-fictional premise that it is a tour guide to “Fantasyland” as the generic setting of pretty much all fantasy. The creators of fantasy stories are the “Management” of Fantasyland and their stories are “tours” for their audiences, so the book is in the style of a tourist guidebook, albeit a fictional parodic one – hence the title, adapted from the popular Rough Guide series of tourist guidebooks at the time.

The end result is a Devil’s Dictionary deconstructing the tropes or cliches of the fantasy genre – such as entry on elves, which has lodged itself deep in my psyche ever since such that I have never quite been able to look at the elves in The Lord of the Rings the same way again.

“Elves appear to have deteriorated generally since the coming of humans. If you meet Elves, expect to have to listen for hours while they tell you about this – many Elves are great bores on the subject – and about what glories there were in ancient days. They will intersperse their account with nostalgic ditties (songs of aching beauty) and conclude by telling you how great numbers of Elves have become so wearied with the thinning of the old golden wonders that they have all departed, departed into the West. This is correct, provided you take it with the understanding that Elves do not say anything quite straight. Many Elves have indeed gone west, to Minnesota and thence to California, and finally to Arizona, where they have great fun wearing punk clothes and riding motorbikes”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Horror Films (Revised Entry) (10) Sinners

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SInners film poster

 

 

(10) SINNERS (2025)

 

Yeah, I know, hyped but I liked it.

My favorite horror film of 2025, matching my usual criterion for wildcard tenth place as best of the current or previous year.

Sinners is a vampire horror film that essentially pulls a From Dusk till Dawn switcheroo halfway through the film, but in a 1930s Mississippi blues speakeasy rather than a 1990s Mexico strip club. Quite frankly, the vampires seem to be doing almost everyone involved in the former a favor, given life in this Mississippi Delta sharecropping town – and given that the speakeasy, run by the Smokestack gangster duo, was doomed in three different ways before the vampires showed up. The vampires just got there first – and not by much.

The Smokestack duo are Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack”, both played by Michael B. Joran – identical twins and First World War veterans who worked for Chicago Mob before making off with Mob money and Mob beer to go into business for themselves.

The film has its highlights, foremost among them its Irish vampire antagonist Remmick but also its music, which essentially becomes its own character in the film.

By the way, that comparison to From Dusk till Dawn is not out of the blue – it was a comparison made by several critics (some of whom preferred the “more grounded first half” to its “supernaturally driven” second half but those critics don’t know that everything’s better with vampires) but also by writer and director Ryan Coogler himself, who cited it as inspiration.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 Fantasy Books (Special Mention: Cult & Pulp) (2) Encyclopedia of Fantasy

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St Martin’s Press, hardcover 1997 edition – the edition I own

 

 

(2) JOHN CLUTE & JOHN GRANT –
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY

The best single reference work concerning fantasy fiction in all media – even better now that it is online, although sadly, not updated like its companion and predecessor The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

However, that it is not updated does not detract from its greatest strength as a reference work and influence on me personally, which is not so much its entries for individual authors or works, but its compilation of fantasy themes and tropes, including its classification of fantasy subgenres. Many of these are compiled as entries under an evocative or striking phrase, many of which in turn were invented by the editors – one notable example being ‘thinning’, for the gradual loss of magic or vitality from the world.

Others include the descriptive term for one of my favorite subgenres of fantasy – posthumous fantasy, a fantasy set in the afterlife. The latter is more usually styled as Bangsian fantasy, named for John Kendricks Bangs who arguably codified or pioneered it as a modern fantasy subgenre – but often leads to confusion with its more conventional use for fiction or in this case fantasy published after an author’s death when I casually use the term posthumous fantasy elsewhere.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 Fantasy Books (Special Mention: Cult & Pulp) (1) Dungeons & Dragons

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Yes – it’s the ur-text of (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons, the iconic cover of the Player’s Handbook for the first edition of the game, featuring its classic art stealing the stones from the eyes of a demonic idol (by artist D.A. Trampier), as featured in the book profile in the Forgotten Realms Wiki

 

 

(1) DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

Although I do have a special mention entry for an actual Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons remains the best de facto encyclopedic treatment of fantasy themes and tropes- which is not surprising for something that strives to systematically codify the genre of fantasy for obsessive-compulsive rules-lawyering geeks to play as a game.

Of course, the standout is its holy trinity – the three enduring core rulebooks of The Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual and The Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Dungeons and Dragons essentially kills two birds with one stone – a twenty-sided stone. As the fantasy game, it set out to codify both fantasy and games – fantasy tropes or themes for use in play, and the mechanics of role playing games to play them. And its achievement is unparalleled in both.

Firstly, it is THE tabletop role-playing game – “While Dungeons & Dragons may not have created tabletop roleplaying games, it codified many of the mechanics and tropes associated with them, is what most people picture when they think of a tabletop RPG (even if they’ve never played one), and is by far the most popular tabletop RPG of all time”.

My interest in it, however, is more for its codification of fantasy tropes or themes, reflecting my use of it more as comprehensive reference work rather than game – “Dungeons & Dragons is one of the trope codifiers of the modern era, having single-handedly mashed swords and sorcery and epic high fantasy into the fantasy genre as we know it today”

And even more so than entries from the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, I (and probably most contemporary readers of fantasy) tend to default to descriptive terms or codified tropes used by Dungeons and Dragons when I think of fantasy – its distinctive character classes, alignments, schools of magic and so on.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
(S-TIER: GOD TIER)