The filmmakers and the cast are aware that other films have had this sort of fun before, notably the “Evil Dead” franchise and last year’s wonderful, little-seen “Tucker and Dale vs Evil.” “The Cabin in the Woods” is much more ambitious than that movie and less endearingly hilarious, but it successfully skirts the self-referential smugness of the “Scream” movies. If we’re not very moved by the plight of the characters — the cast is likable but the roles are intentionally thin — we want to solve the mystery of what the hell is going on as much as they do. We just don’t have a 7-foot zombie coming at us swinging a bear trap for added incentive.

The cubicle politics back at headquarters are the movie’s ace in the hole, and Jenkins and Whitford make a delightful tag-team duo of jaded bureaucrats: Think the Francois Truffaut scenes from “Close Encounters” crossed with “Office Space.”

And at a certain point, “The Cabin in the Woods” takes a quantum leap in inspiration when some of the kids find their way into the spaces between the two worlds of creepy cabin and antiseptic command HQ. The movie balances nicely on the edge of meta-horror, with characters breaking free of their assigned roles (in more ways than one) and monkey-wrenching the very urban legend they’re dying to get out of.

There are metaphors here, if you want them, about the way creative artists use and abuse their creations and, more bitingly, how the Hollywood entertainment machine manipulates characters and audiences like so many marionettes. But “The Cabin in the Woods” glances lightly off such themes, content to break out the tatty special effects and the Red Dye #2 in a climax as inventive as it is gruesome as it is brimming with cheerful Lovecraft-ian doom.