The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

I confess I did not really watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, let alone the movie. Only with Firefly did I become a mild fan of Joss Whedon. It made sense for him to return to writing horror, with past comrade Drew Goddard, for a bit; in other genres, he loves to kill at least one of the heroes eventually.

If the title sounds awfully generic for horror, that's deliberate. It's no spoiler to say that this movie combines dozens of classics and not-so-classics of the genre...with The Truman Show. A secret, possibly government agency is basically making a scare-by-number horror flick featuring five young adults (the only actor among them you're likely to know is Chris Hemsworth), who thought it'd be fun to camp off the grid, unaware that they're being manipulated to engineer their deaths...at first. We see plenty of scenes at HQ, where the humans (among them Bradley Whitford and Sigourney Weaver) seem like ordinary people aside from their lack of sympathy for the victims. How could they do this? Well...

Infamous (2006)

This movie was, if you will, infamously unfortunate in its timing: It came out months after Capote and had a very similar focus, so many dismissed it. It doesn't enjoy quite as high ratings from IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes. But maybe a decade of distance will help me evaluate it on its own terms.

As in Capote, Truman Capote (Toby Jones herein), already a bestselling author, gets engrossed in researching two men on death row who murdered a family after an unsuccessful burglary. Here, however, we get to see him express deeper feelings about one murderer, Perry Smith (Daniel Craig with an American accent). While partner in crime Dick Hickock (Lee Pace) is a mostly amoral motormouth, Perry is both morally and intellectually complicated -- and slow to trust anyone with his life story, tho Truman threatens to make stuff up for his new quasi-reporting style. In time, they almost develop a romance.