Walking into the theater for “Bad Times at the El Royale,” it’s obvious from the pulpy title alone that you’re about to spend a long night with a sordid bunch of low-lifes, all of whom want to tease out a little sympathy for the devil. ‘It’s a Wonderful Knife’ Review: Jane Widdop Battles a Killer Angel in This Mixed Bag of a Queer Christmas Slasher And with the clever, patient, and almost genuinely moving “ Bad Times at the El Royale,” he vivisects post-Tarantino crime sagas in order to explore how these stories allow us to look through the heavy veil of morality that tends to fall over our eyes in the clear light of day.

With “The Cabin in the Woods,” Goddard deconstructed horror tropes from the inside out in order to explore how slashers and monster movies satiate the collective bloodlust that we bring into the theater. Of the many things his rollicking second feature has in common with his previous one, the most fundamental is that both films take a genre that’s grown painfully stale, step back until we’re looking at it from a god’s-eye view, and then - however damning it might be - force us reckon with what we love about them. As he made clear in his sly and self-reflexive 2012 debut “ The Cabin in the Woods,” he likes to place his characters in a hall of mirrors that only he can see clearly, and he likes to make his audiences to shudder at their own reflections in the glass.

Cast of bad times at casino royale