Joss Whedon has a taste for inventive horror, as anyone who has seen Cabin in the Woods will attest. Recently he told Entertainment Weekly what horror characters inspired him most, and he won our hearts by including heroes from the 1980s Blob remake and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. But his biggest inspiration was a 1985 Dario Argento movie called Phenomena. Whedon told EW:
That movie is so ridiculously chock-full of horror: There are terrible murders, Jennifer Connelly just happens to have control over insects, there’s a crazy person living nearby. By the time you get to the monkey with a razor blade [who saves Connelly’s life], you’re just like, Oh my God! If you look at Cabin in the Woods, you can see the influence of “Oh, you mean we can just never stop coming up with stuff?”
