In the realm of David Lynch films that weren’t made by David Lynch, Lake Mungo is the preeminent. Now, I’m not saying it’s “Lynchian” in the modern internet vernacular (see: a lazy, anti-intellectual label people slap onto anything with strange visuals and uncanny characters). I’m saying that Joel Anderson’s 2008 feature film gets to the core of what makes Lynch’s stories, and the philosophy of Lynch’s mysteries, so incredibly compelling.

The existential grip of mystery, the hold confusion has over us, is at the heart of Lake Mungo. An all-time great horror drama, it awaits all those who haven’t seen it with a story of finding paradoxical peace in the unexplainable and immense suffering in those aspects of life that we can understand.

Lake Mungo: A Mockumentary About Death and Life

Following the tragic death by drowning of their daughter Alice, the Palmer family is in ruins. The already cracked foundation her parents June and Russell stood on has turned to dust. Their relationship with their son Matthew is barely better. But after mysterious bruises manifest on Matthew’s body in the night, the family begins to wonder if Alice’s spirit is trying to contact them.

Presented as a documentary, the Palmer family films their experience trying to uncover the mystery of Alice’s death, and then the even bigger mystery of her life. As a single thread is pulled by supernatural encounters, soon the whole shocking tapestry of what happened to Alice is unraveled, leaving the Palmer’s to confront the ugly truth.

When the Answer Hurts More Than the Question

It’s hard to discuss this Lake Mungo’s plot any more than the synopsis I just gave without spoiling the fundamental beauty of its narrative. There are a number of different readings you can have of the film, but every single one that I’ve seen tends to agree on one thing: it’s a film about running from the answers you have in search of answers that hurt less.

The story of the Palmer family is an emotional vampire of a film from start to finish. And that drain is in part due to that subconscious awareness you have as an audience member. You know that no matter what is uncovered, nothing can change what happened to Alice, and the desperate search for something less painful only makes what we know more agonizing. The more clear things become, the more frightening and grotesque the questions they prompt feel. And the muddier the details are, the closer things feel they are to the truth.

A Perfect Melding of Narrative and Medium

There’s a beautiful relationship that Lake Mungo plays in with its found footage framing, a play between the narrative and the medium it’s presented in. There’s an inverse relationship between the clarity of footage and the difficulty of the truth that makes the film so purposeful in its presentation.

As the quality of the found footage deteriorates, things become clearer and feel more real. With the polished footage we get in the documentary, the thicker this air of doubt is in every character and every twist of the plot. There’s tension present in the very way we’re seeing what’s happening, tension baked into the footage. It’s a masterclass in melding narrative and medium, with the two inextricably linked and made stronger by that fusion.

The intricacies of Lake Mungo’s cast and how they react to interview questions, new information, and the most horrifying moments of the film are unrivaled. On a recent rewatch, the realism, the downright verisimilitude of it, was a breath of fresh air. Having sat through hours of unconvincing and clammy dialogue on film this year, I couldn’t have asked for more. The cast of lesser known actors really do stand out as one of the strongest to ever grace a horror film.

The Heartbreaking Spirit of Lake Mungo

In the past I’ve used an analogy to describe David Lynch’s work, but it’s even more appropriate as an analogy for what director Joel Anderson does with Lake Mungo. This movie is the equivalent of being in a forest and seeing a tree root going into the ground. That feeling of becoming suddenly aware that you’re standing on miles and miles of interconnected life. And moreover, becoming aware that you can’t fully see and can’t fully grasp the intricacies of that living, breathing connection.

Lake Mungo doesn’t just play in visual oddities and torrid secrets. It understands what makes that mystery not just compelling, but truly heartbreaking and horrifying. What Anderson achieves in the film’s 88-minute runtime is the greatest ghost film of all time, and arguably the best found footage film of all time. But beyond that, it’s a mystery that eats at the soul and begs for answers from the audience as much as it does from its characters.

Not to sound too old, but movies just aren’t what they used to be. The output of “budgeted” genre films has become nothing more than slop. It’s like studios are the lunch lady from Billy Madison shoveling ground meat onto our proverbial buns, “I know how you kids like them sloppy!” Besides standout studio releases here and there, and of course independent/festival films, I can’t remember the last genuinely, capital G, great studio, non-independent film I’ve seen in theaters. Rewatching The Cabin in the Woods for the first time in, maybe, a decade opened my eyes to what the genre needs: a great reset.

The Cabin in the Woods: Two Stories, One Fate

For those who somehow haven’t seen it, The Cabin in the Woods follows two groups of people who are set to have an unfortunate battle between life and death. College students Dana (Kristen Connolly), Curt (Chris Hemsworth), Jules (Anna Hutchison), Holden (Jesse Williams), and Marty (Fran Kranz) pack themselves in an RV camper van and head out to the woods to spend some time at a cabin that Curt’s family recently purchased. Once at the cabin, odd goings on quickly reveal that things aren’t what they seem. On the other hand, you have Gary (Richard Jenkins), Bradley (Bradley Whitford), and Lin (Amy Acker), who work in some unnamed, seemingly underground facility. The purpose of their work? Well, save humanity. The only question is, how will these two stories overlap?

Co-writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, under Goddard’s direction, penned what feels like a scathing middle finger to a genre they love so much. As a concept, The Cabin in the Woods delivers threefold; it succeeds as meta commentary, comedy, and horror. There’s an interesting mirroring of horror between horror (mainly slashers) of the late 70s and 80s and the horror of the late 90s and aughts. Horror became oversaturated with horror that became too similar and went through an identity crisis. As the 90s approached, genre creators attempted to wrangle in the genre with new and exciting ideas… This was also similarly mirrored throughout the 2010s.

Horror Tropes Exist for a Reason

Tropes are tropes for a reason. On the whole, there is nothing wrong with tropes or cliches. They work for a reason, or they wouldn’t have become tropes! But it gets to a point when every film is too by the numbers, then the genre starts to completely lose its edge. The Cabin in the Woods was exciting to a 17-year-old me because it encapsulated the issue with the films I loved so much. Time and time again, I’ve attempted to regale you with stories about watching AMC’s FearFest of SciFi’s 31 Days of Halloween.

At a young age, I realized I may have been part of the problem! I would regularly tune in for my nth viewing of House of Wax or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, time and time again. I would spend my hard-earned money renting these films from Blockbuster! Maybe I should have put my money where my mouth was if I wanted to see some change.

The Two Readings of The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods acts as an attempt to clean the slate. Whedon and Goddard pay homage to the films that many of us hold near and dear to our hearts. Calling this film a “scathing middle finger” may be a bit hyperbolic on my end, but it feels like the best phrase I can think of. There seem to be two main ways you can pick apart The Cabin in the Woods, and both are correct in their own way. Personally, I think the latter reading of it lends to the more correct reading.

The first is this: horror (slasher) audiences want their boxes checked. They want to see the virgin (final girl), the jock, the whore (their words), the scholar, and the fool (stoner). Audiences want to see these people picked off one by one in the ways they’re familiar with, in increasingly brutal ways. If these boxes aren’t checked off, then they (the ancient ones) will crush the film at the box office. The second reading is: we’ve had enough; end it all to start fresh.

Whedon, Goddard, and Complicity in Formulaic Horror

Whedon and Goddard made their immense fortunes in their increasingly formulaic monster-of-the-week series. They are not infallible, and it seems they are aware of that. Buffy was an integral part of many people’s horror indoctrination and, in turn, helped propagate many of the same-ness that would continue to plague horror films and TV throughout the aughts. The Cabin in the Woods seems to be their attempt at righting an issue that they helped create. My personal reading of this film is that these two genre creators have had enough. We’ve seen the cookie-cutter deaths over and over, and a great reset (the ancient ones) is needed. A new start is needed to get the genre back on track.

Thankfully for us all, that is exactly what happened. Now I don’t believe this was solely caused by The Cabin in the Woods. Growing up, I can remember seeing an independent (festival) horror film on the shelves of Blockbuster here and there. But they were few and far between. One of the things that I think saved horror in the ‘10s was companies like IFC and Anchor Bay, among others, who took risks on festival films. I know these companies were around before the ‘10s, but they were the real kickstarers for bringing festival goodness to mainstream audiences. And, unfortunately, so was streaming.

Why The Cabin in the Woods Still Matters

The Cabin in the Woods is an all-around fantastic film that’s as fun as it is poignant. Due to the film’s definite ending, we probably would never get a follow-up film with any of the other crazy creatures we see in the monster elevator…which is kind of a bummer. But that would also be a direct antithesis of what The Cabin in the Woods is about. Look, I’m still part of the problem! This film struck a chord with me when I first saw it, and it still ranks somewhere in the lower end of my top 20. It’s the type of accessible horror film that has an important message that’s told effectively. And it makes someone like me feel smart. Take that for what it’s worth.