This week’s episode of Hard Ticket featured a clash between quasi-horror classics Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and The Cabin in the Woods. Also, Jeff did a Shaggy impression. Zoinks, Scoob! Like, don’t fact check my claim that the episode came out this week!
2010’s Tucker & Dale vs. Evil served as a badly needed PSA about the danger of wood-chippers. Lovable hillbillies Tucker and Dale attempt to fix up their cabin as a group of WASP-coded young people gas each other up with close-mindedness and paranoia. This is how democracy dies. One of these future Young Republicans, Alison, is saved from drowning by Tucker and Dale, but is assumed to be kidnapped by her friends. Chuck, another of these clearly non-WVU students, enlists the help of the local sheriff, because if there’s one thing white people love, it’s state-sanctioned violence. The film climaxes harder than Bill Clinton’s hog in Trump’s mouth, with the revelation that the leader of Tucker and Dale’s assailants is, indeed, half-hillbilly. With his illusions of a pure bloodline shattered, the phrenology major loses control of the kidnapped Allison, taking an allergy-induced fall to his assumed death. The movie concludes with Dale and Allison sharing a tender moment in a bowling alley. The subtextual references to fingering linger heavily.
The Cabin in the Woods is arguably 2011’s most significant cabin-centered examination of horror tropes starting Chris Hemsworth. In an effort to stave off the destruction of Earth by esoteric gods, a mysterious organization attempts to carry out the sacrifice of a group of college students. As the young people fall victim to pheromones and stereotypes, they are attacked by a family of zombies. Final survivors Dana and Marty manage to escape the horrific onslaught and find themselves in a sprawling underground complex housing the contents of H.P. Lovecraft’s spank bank. Freeing the monsters in a fit of desperation, Dana and Marty thoroughly fuck the whole operation, which they learn is part of a bargain with cruel, subterranean deities. Dana and Marty decide that humanity is not worth saving and opt not to complete the ritual. The upside to this is that the Apartheid government of Israel was presumably dismantled in ways no human rights organization could ever dream of.
The underlying theme of this match-up was the subversion of classic horror tropes. It’s a genre built on stereotypes, like a fun version of white nationalist propaganda. The Cabin in the Woods takes this very literally, incorporating character archetypes as necessary roles for the film’s ritualistic sacrifice. The cabin itself is a clear homage to Evil Dead 2, a film which I really hope Hard Ticket discusses someday, but which I don’t know will happen because I’m writing this review when the episode in question came out, and not over a month later because I got caught up in goddamn studying and sleep deprivation.
Tucker & Dale is a clear spoof of horror classic Hillbilly Elegy, in which an ambitious Appalachian native betrays everything and everyone that ever helped him and works to usher in a Curtis Yarvin-inspired technofascist ethnostate. Tucker and Dale would never do anything of the sort, and serve to undermine the stereotype that all Appalachian people are either politicians taking record-setting amount of money from Peter Thiel or opioid addicts, as implied by Hillbilly Elegy. Some of the people from this wild and wonderful part of the world are, in fact, charming and decent people. And like all decent people, they long for the day that JD Vance dives cunt-first into a wood-chipper.
Hard Flickit 
We are so back.
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