Expectations and Cabin In The Woods
This is not going to be a review of the movie, though I will quickly say that the movie is awesome, wonderful fun for anybody who likes Joss Whedon’s work as well as horror films.
What this post concerns is expectations.
See, over at The Eclectic Review podcast I give a lot of movie reviews. Now, one surefire way to kill a film is to make me think I’m going to be seeing one type of movie and give me another one instead. Yet, even as I type this, I can think of quite a few films that successfully pull off this switcheroo. The key to success is in laying the proper groundwork so that when the true nature of the film is revealed, the audience is not taken by complete surprise. I should be able to look back and think, “Oh, of course. That was going on the whole time.”
In Cabin in the Woods, you might think as you’re sitting in the theater that you are in for a horror film. But really, the movie is a horror film trapped inside a science-fiction/fantasy story. Whedon handles this by not hiding it at all. The opening scenes of the movie let the audience in on the concept at large (even though the details are kept secret for some fun later). It works because I’m not really led down the wrong path, even if the view is a bit obscured.
This, of course, holds true in writing as well. It’s actually more important because the length of a novel lends itself to being easily invested in one set of thoughts for a long time. There are many ways to deal with this, but I always prefer the straight-forward method.
In The Way of the Black Beast, I approached it much as Joss Whedon does in Cabin in the Woods. The opening chapter is designed to set up the proper expectations – that this is indeed a fantasy novel with magic and a sword-wielding heroine, but that there are also blues musicians and a formerly civilized, technologically advanced society. This is crucial because much later in the book, Malja and her group are in a jeep driving around. The only way for the reader to buy into that kind of thing is to have the proper expectations laid out early on.
Of course, not all books (or films) have to approach it right from the start. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously led his audience to believe that Janet Leigh was the protagonist of Psycho, investing a lot of screen time into her character and story. But he used this to great effect by killing her halfway through the movie. It jolted and shocked the audience. At this point, when others start searching for her and Norman Bates must cover up what he’s done, the movie shifts its focus. This kind of playing with expectations works for two main reasons: 1) though the character viewpoint is shifted, the genre does not, and 2) Alfred Hitchcock is extremely talented. Not everyone could pull off the same trick using the same script and actors.
In the end, for me, expectations play a vital role in guiding an audience toward the goals the artist desires to reach. If done right, I reduce my workload later on, and the reader actually fills in all kinds of details based on those expectations. I can play with those details to reinforce the ideas or jolt the reader with the opposite of the expected. As long as it’s earned and doesn’t violate the overall story as it was set up, it should work. But if you pick up a book expecting fantasy and instead got a historical romance, that would be where the problem lies.
