If you go down to see The Cabin In The Woods today, you're sure of a big surprise – but if you want to keep it that way, stop reading. Now. Drew Goddard's new movie has its cake and eats it, on the one hand hovering above the fray of mainstream horror movies with its grand meta idea, on the other, serving up everything fans would want. It's fresh, ingenious and great fun.

But The Cabin In The Woods has its cake and eats it in another way. It's not a great stretch to see parallels between the movie's set-up and the film industry in 2012: disposable teens are manipulated into behaving in certain ways, before being degraded and dispatched, all the while being remotely observed by middle-aged men, gambling on their fates.

As it happens, another current movie, The Hunger Games, has already found spectacular success dealing with very similar themes. Here, too, adolescents are routinely sacrificed at the behest of a ruling elite, all the while maintaining their wrinkly grip on the levers of power.

These movies could be seen as raging against the Hollywood machine, but they also challenge the rule of the oldies in general, like good youth movies should. Marlon Brando was happy to rebel against whatever was going back in the The Wild One – the grandaddy of youth rebellion movies – but for today's kids, there are plenty of options: unemployment, huge national debts, climate change – you name it. All the while, the previous generation shuffles off with fat pensions, leaving the young to deal with its mess.

The Cabin In The Woods and The Hunger Games bring this all up to date perfectly. On the one hand, they speak to that teenage sense of disempowerment, but crucially, they also reassure viewers that somebody's watching. You can suffer in silence and be the star of your own reality show. You can have your cake and eat it! But who's really watching? In The Cabin In The Woods, the ritual of carnage is enacted to appease unseen gods. With The Hunger Games, the dystopian Survivor show exists to appease the decadent, pampered ruling classes.

Pick the metaphors apart and who do these merciless end-consumers really represent? The teen audiences themselves, of course. They are the hungry gods the entertainment industry is really out to appease. But are these fantasies of teen rebellion anything more than a closed loop? The youth are the cake, and they're the ones eating it. While the oldies carry on running the show, pocketing the cash for their pension funds, tweaking the levers with wrinkly hands.