‘We are not who we are’: Lovecraftian conspiracy and magical humanism in The Cabin in the Woods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s film The Cabin in the Woods (2012) conflates the two genres of slasher horror and conspiracy theory in such a way that articulates a trenchant critique of two totalizing grad narratives: religion and instrumental reason. Indeed, in the suturing of the story of a vast, technocratic conspiracy onto a Lovecraftian mythos about ancient gods demanding blood sacrifice, Cabin effectively dramatizes the central thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2002), insofar as blind adherence to rationality (manifested in the hyperadvanced technology of the conspiracy) is transformed into the madness of unreason. In marrying the supernatural and the technological, however, the film opens a space in which to articulate a humanist ethos, one best described as ‘magical humanism’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".