At this point you guys know exactly how I feel about The Cabin In The Woods, so it’s no surprise that I jumped at the recent opportunity to host a screening of the film in St. Louis Park, Minneapolis. The idea was to show the film to a group of Bloody-Disgusting readers (along with some other guests) and conduct a Q&A with its co-writer and director Drew Goddard.

I have to admit I was a little nervous about the how the audience would receive the film. Of course I love Cabin and everybody I know who has seen the film loves it. But that basically means a bunch of film critics in LA, I was curious how it would play to a group of horror fans in the middle of the country.

Any concerns I had were assuaged just moments in, when the crowd went bananas for the film’s opening scene. A moment that actually has nothing to even do with horror, they were just responding to the quality of the film itself (and its awesome title card). What followed was a screening that could legitimately be described as “raucous”, which is a word I usually avoid using in conjunction with anything.

The Q&A with Drew Goddard was conducted with an audience that had just seen the film and thus is too spoiler-heavy to reprint at the moment. I’ve included a few quotes here but I’ll be adding some of the best bits to the post-release interview that I already have waiting for you guys.

Head inside to check out some video reactions to the film from Bloody-Disgusting readers!“The hardest part of the job is tone. Especially for a movie like this where we’re trying to thread such a small needle. Tone is very subjective, it just comes down to my taste. It’s hard to intellectualize it.” – Drew Goddard

At one point, an audience member asked Drew if he felt the trailer gave too much away. “As a filmmaker, I don’t want to do any trailers. I don’t even want to do a poster. I don’t want to give anything away. I want the audience to come in and see it fresh and have surprises. But I also respect that you have to let an audience know that this is worth their time. That it’s not an average movie. So you have to find that balance. The nice thing is, when people think we give too much away in the trailer I can say, “you just f*cking wait!” We don’t give anything away in the trailer that we don’t give away in the first two minutes of the film. And there’s a lot more where that came from.”

The Cabin In The Woods opens everywhere on April 13th.