IT took just four little words to persuade Drew Goddard to sign on for his directorial debut.

They were not, as is sometimes the case in Hollywood, "percentage of the profits". With Goddard it was "cabin in the woods".

Goddard and Joss Whedon, who worked together on Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon was the creator of both television shows, Goddard a writer), had been looking for a film to do together for a while.

"Joss said, I got this idea, I call it The Cabin in the Woods. As soon as I heard that, I said I'm in," Goddard recalls. "I knew it was going to be the type of movie I grew up loving."

That type of movie is a crash bang wallop horror with a juicy vein of dark humour. Its starting point: five friends go off for a weekend in the titular cabin. Its end point? Let's just say Enid Blyton it isn't.

"We felt like this was our shot to do everything we've ever wanted to do," says Goddard.

After working on Buffy and Angel, Goddard was part of the writing team on JJ Abrams's Lost, and he scripted the Manhattan monster movie Cloverfield. It was writing for television that made it easier to make the move from laptop to director's chair.

"In TV the writers are very much in control, it's a writers' medium, so I was comfortable doing the things directors do; talking to actors, managing schedules, editing the movie. But you are never really prepared for having 300 eyes looking at you wondering what to do ... You realise the buck stops with you and that's fun, but it's also a little scary."

The hardest part of Cabin, he says, was matching the budget to their ambitions. The easiest part was getting Richard Jenkins to sign on.

Richard Jenkins, the same Richard Jenkins nominated for an Oscar for his painstakingly elegant portrayal of a college professor taking on the system in The Visitor? The very same. The part was written for him, says Goddard; the question in some minds was, would he take it?

"I remember people saying, no way, this man is an Academy Award nominated actor now, he might not want to do this crazy genre film." Believing the worst that could happen was Jenkins would say no, Goddard sent him the script on a Friday night.

"Monday morning, 6am, the phone rings, it's Richard to say I'm in. He just totally understood it."

It wasn't that surprising to those who, like Goddard, know their TV and movies back to front and side to side. Jenkins was in The Visitor, but he was also in the Coen brothers' caper Burn After Reading. If you were in the market for a funny straight man, Jenkins was the perfect choice.

Goddard, 37, still talks with the fervour of a fan about his television work. No wonder, since it was that enthusiasm that won him his break in the first place. After graduating in writing and filmmaking he got his first job as a production assistant. Five years on, he was being paid to write for Buffy, then his favourite show, having submitted a script on spec.

At the same time, on the same morning in fact, he was also asked to write for Angel. The two calls offering work came in within minutes of each other. "It was definitely one of those surreal moments."

Given the pressure for ratings on American television, working on a hit show doesn't seem like a job for the easily stressed. The most intense environment Goddard found himself in was Lost. "That one had the most scrutiny and pressure. You learn that sometimes being a giant hit isn't always the best thing, it was more fun being on the fringes of things because we could get a little more creative.

"It's high pressure but it's high fun. There's something that happens when you know you have to come up with a new episode every eight days." It gives you grey hair, he says, but there's nothing like it.

For all the breaks on television, it was a film, Cloverfield, that led directly to Cabin. With the aid of an internet marketing campaign that has become a template for others to follow, Cloverfield, made for $25 million, went on to earn $170m worldwide. The lesson: don't worry what anyone else is doing, come up with something different and the audience will come with you.

So it was on Cabin with Goddard and Whedon. "A lot of Cabin was just the two of us trying to entertain each other. That seems to work out well for us."

It's working out so well for Goddard he was chosen to write the screenplay for Robopocalypse, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the Daniel H Wilson novel about technology turning against mankind. Like the Buffy/Angel news, that arrived via a phone call, this one from Spielberg. Then there was the first meeting.

"Walking into a room to meet Steven Spielberg to talk about robots is definitely the thing you file under dreams come true."

Spielberg or no, he still has to win the approval of British audiences for Cabin. Is he expecting a big surge in bookings for cabins in the woods? "I hope so," he laughs. "I'm doing my best to help the holiday industry."

The Cabin in the Woods opens in cinemas on April 13.