You Think You Know the Story: Novelty, Repetition, and Lovecraft in Whedon and Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods

Abstract

Adaptation studies has frequently been hamstrung by its own habituated drama of fidelity, where evaluation of each adaptation becomes a game in which the adaptation must be shown to be an insufficiently faithful and thus inevitably inferior copy of a sanctified original. (Puckishly declaring the adaptation to be superior to the original is, alas, only the champions’ tier of this sport.) Recent developments in adaptation theory, however, have begun to move beyond this impasse, turning to texts that have no clear and privileged source material — either too many or too few — and inviting us to consider them as adaptations anyway. Such works push us past the bad conscience of fidelity and infidelity towards a new notion of transtextual exchange that networks varied narratives, genres, and media, reframing adaptation not as some marginal practice of quasi-legitimate textual banditry but as a central component of any creative act.