Cabin in the Woods is no ordinary cheesy horror film. Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard created Cabin in the Woods to ultimately make fun of horror films by implementing stereotypical characters including the jock, the dumb blonde, “the virgin”, the nerd, and the junky. The audience is first introduced to “the virgin” when the camera pans to a girl dancing and packing in her pink panties up through a tree and into her window. This first stereotypical assumption is really broken when we see Dana, other wise known as the virgin, opening up a sketchpad with a drawn picture of a professor she had been sleeping with. This really helps to foreshadow the end of the film and suggests that she will not be one of the characters to die at the end of the movie and thus introduces Joss Whedon’s idea of iconoclasm- the attack of cherished beliefs. Another character the audience is introduced to is, Jules. Jules is introduced as the dumb blonde but as the audience quickly figures out is that she’s not a true blonde. She shows her insecurity for it when she asks everyone how it looks and this ultimately shows that she’s not really dumb or frivolous, which blondes tend to be in average horror films seen. Also, blondes in horror films aren’t really in tune with how they feel but it’s clearly shown that Jules is. All of this shows the audience that Jules is no longer a stereotypical icon in the film. Between these two characters, Joss Whedon shows that there is in fact a concern with female roles in horror films.

-Justine Ludwig