A
couple nights ago, my wife and I had the pleasure of previewing an
independently produced horror film shot on location in Michigan’s northern Lower
Peninsula. Over pizza, beer and popcorn
a gathering of us discussed the making of The
Cabining with its director and screen writer, Steven Kopera. The Cabining
was completed last October, followed by a recent final editing of the
version that we previewed late last week.
If
you have ever attempted to make a feature length film, you know how arduous it
can be: developing the concept, writing
the script, obtaining financial backing, auditioning actors, dealing with camera
people and other technicians, securing the locations for shooting the film,
dealing with technical glitches, (including Michigan’s weather), and managing
all the personalities involved. Imagine
doing all this while working full time at a local university.
Though
the film begins in Los Angeles, most of the story occurs in a guesthouse on
Lake Charlevoix, near Boyne City. This a
beautiful rustic area in northern Michigan—clear, cold lakes surrounded by pine
forest. Bruce and Todd, two struggling young
screenwriters, cannot get their script for “Bloody Hell” accepted
in Hollywood.
“Bloody Hell” is apparently
an all too typical slasher flick that takes place in an isolated cabin in the woods,
(where so many annoying characters have met their demise, in countless films). In one painful scene, Bruce and Todd must endure the merciless criticism of a reviewing committee. Not only is their script shredded for being
hackneyed and unoriginal, the entire
field of horror movies is dismissed as “derivative”.
The
two are asked to rewrite their material with something more imaginative and
original. But where will they go for
inspiration? Bruce, the less restrained and reflective of the
two, proposes that they spend a week at “Shangri-La”, a lake-side vacation home
in northern Michigan. They arrive at the
place along with several other earnestly struggling artists: a musician, a
fiction writer, a painter, and a local sculptor who fashions works of art out of things he finds in the woods. All of them are staying at Shangri-La, hoping
to find creative inspiration in their respective fields. The bodies soon begin to pile up, but so do
the pages of Todd’s new draft of the screenplay.
The Cabining is an amusing send up of cabin-in-the-woods
horror movies, with outrageous characters and plentiful one-liners. My favorite character was Jasper, the local
sculptor and prime suspect, who almost never appears in any scene without a
blunt instrument in one hand and something dead in the other. Jasper gets some of the best lines, delivered
with a perfectly half-crazed, deadpan expression.
The
tone of the film is very similar to a spoof of another horror subgenre, The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu, (2009).
(See Blasphemy!) That film also features a couple
of bros who find inspiration—in this case for comic book writing—in a series of
supernatural mishaps in rustic locations.
The
makers of The Cabining seem to have
had as much fun skewering horror clichés as they do the characters in their
film. The gore is tasteful and never gratuitous or overdone—it really is not
the main point of the movie, which is satire.
The official trailer of the film is available at
An
interesting interview with the movie’s director Steven Kopera can be found at The Horror Hothouse blog, located at
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