‘The Cabin in the Woods’: An Inimitable Rollercoaster that Defies Film History
Revisiting the horror masterpiece ten years later.
I take no responsibility for not seeing The Cabin in the Woods until 2020. It is not my fault that Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard named their 2011 horror film The Cabin in the Woods — a title so generic that I legitimately confused it for Wrong Turn 2: A Dead End, What Still Remains, and a slew of other D-list horror films for many years. It’s not my fault they made a movie with so many spoilable moments, that the only way for people to talk about it is by repeating the premise it shares with just about every other horror movie: five friends go off to a cabin in the woods for a weekend, and as tends to happen in these films, a slasher slashes them. “But this one is so different,” people told me. “It’s so good! I can’t tell you any more about it!” Yeah, I get it. I don’t want to talk about the Wrong Turn franchise either.
But here’s the thing. I hadn’t seen The Cabin in the Woods. I’d seen dozens, if not hundreds, of movies about a cabin in the woods. Some of my all time favorites are about cabins in the woods: Get Out, The Blair Witch Project, Misery. But those movies are very notably not The Cabin in the Woods — a fact that I became startlingly aware of when I started watching the movie for the first time and found myself in the middle of a workplace comedy.
For unsuspecting and stubborn audiences like me, who were sure they knew The Cabin in the Woods’ gimmick, the opening of the film is a curveball. The film opens with Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford in a sterilized office kitchen. Steve (Bradley Whitford) is bemoaning his pregnant wife’s baby-proofing of their home with the comedic wit that made Whitford the apple of America’s eye in his West Wing days. Gary (Richard Jenkins) nods affirmingly as he stirs his coffee. They make their way out into the white, LED-lit halls, and are quickly approached by another coworker talking about foreign markets, logistical oversights, and a vague, but corporate-sounding big event on the horizon. It was jarring enough for me to pause the movie and verify I had actually clicked on the correct film. Netflix said I had. I pressed “resume.” Steve and Gary mount a small motorized cart, nonchalantly shrugging off their fretting coworker by speeding down another white corridor. Steve continues his complaining while Gary, inattentive, toys with his coffee cup lid. “Are you even listening to me?” Steve turns and asks. Then boom. An orchestral note is struck, a blood curdling scream rings out, and in massive red block letters the words THE CABIN IN THE WOODS are plastered across the faces of Whitford and Jenkins — this jump scare the earliest indication that this horror movie was more than the title suggested.
Shaken alert, I watched as the film introduced its cast — a group of five college friends who we understand not to get too attached to, as they aren’t just our protagonists, but the likely victims as well. There’s Dana (Kristen Connolly), the shy and studious virgin; Jules (Anna Hutchison), Dana’s flirty and blonde best friend; Curt (Chris Hemsworth), the jock with impeccable looks and a hard-on for his girlfriend, Jules; Holden (Jesse Williams), the nerdy athlete who recently transferred to the local university and is conveniently single; and Marty (Fran Kranz), the stoned comedic relief, who drives around with a Thermos-shaped bong and speaks of knowing “ancient wisdoms.” They’re played to a tee by their respective actors, but they’re also archetypes audiences have seen in horror movies for decades. (Scream, rather famously, has these same five prototypical characters.) And they do what characters tend to do in horror movies — go out to a cousin’s place for a weekend, somewhere off the grid, totally remote. The perfect killing grounds.
The college clique follows the clichéd horror movie blueprint as they make their way to the titular cabin in the woods. First, there’s the backwoods gas-station attendant, an inbred man straight out of Deliverance, who fears God’s will and curses at the young protagonists. Upon their arrival at the cabin, they discover a creepy two-way mirror behind a grotesque painting of an animal being slaughtered. Then, during a drunken game of truth or dare, the students are shocked when the cellar doors burst open behind them. “The wind must’ve blown it open,” Curt says confidently. Clearly these kids have never seen a horror movie.
But unbeknownst to this friend group, the gas-station attendant, the mirror, the cellar doors, even themselves are pawns under the control of Steve and Gary, who sit in a large control room, with monitors lining the walls. They have a vested interest in this college vacation, but their motives remain entirely unclear. All we know is that Steve and Gary are watching them just as we are.
By the time the basement doors “blew open,” I’d gotten my feet back under me. I understood the film I was watching. This was a modern-day Evil Dead reboot with a little Truman Show mixed in. I got it. I knew they were going to go down into the basement and look through a collection of creepy antiques. They never just bolt the cellar doors shut and walk away, like rational people. Once in the dimly lit basement, Jules is drawn to the Victorian jewelry, Holden winds a music box, spinning a glass ballerina, and Dana flips through the pages of an ancient diary. She begins to read aloud from the journal. The others wander over, abandoning their trinkets, to hear her read tales of abuse, dismemberment, and death (much to the chagrin of a very stoned Marty). Dana pauses as she approaches a verse in Latin. “Okay, I’m drawing a line in the fucking sand here,” Marty pleads, “Do not read the Latin.”
A throwaway gag line that gets a laugh from me, even as the film drifts further down a predictable road. I know as well as Marty, she’s going to read the Latin. She does, and as the last words of the dialect leave her lips, the film cuts to a montage of zombies rising from the Earth outside. I settled in. This is the Evil Dead rip-off I knew it would be.
But then, the cheerful voice of Richard Jenkins reverberates. “We have a winner!” he announces to a room of his coworkers and subordinates, celebrating the rise of the zombies. This horror-comedy that had been chugging along for half an hour by the book had flipped the script, and once again surprised me. Steve, Gary, and their whole corporate cohort hadn’t just been monitoring and leading the way for these college students. Any notion that this was simply a game, or even a nod to The Game, were quickly dashed. Steve and Gary were trying to kill them, plain and simple. They led Dana and her friends into a cellar full of toys and trinkets, and let them pick their fate. Dana should’ve listened to Marty and stopped reading when she reached the Latin. Now, a family of zombies ready to tear the limbs from the young adults’ bodies were being unleashed by two middle-aged white men in a control room. If the opening sequence was my first clue that the film was more than the title implied, this turn confirmed, much to my delight, that I was dealing with something altogether unexpected.
But the film doesn’t immediately stray too far from the conventional path. The attacks of the zombie Buckner family play out in much the same way they would in any horror movie, just with an added meta-awareness. We, as viewers, know that Jules — the referential “whore” of the film — is going to be killed in some sort of sexually explicit way, because that’s what horror movies have taught us over the years. But to watch it play out from the point of view of Steve and Gary, two men who are working to ensure that Jules takes her top off by controlling the heat and lighting of the set, is a new perspective. “Show us the goods,” Gary mutters, mesmerized by the make-out session playing out between the young lovers on screen. When she does eventually show her breasts, the film cuts in a way we expect. A zombie farmer snatches her away and beheads her. A ceremonious death in the conventional manner. The nude girl gets butchered, just as it’s supposed to happen.
From there the group of four remaining students are picked off, one by one; Steve and Gary the puppeteers of their cruel fate. After finding a hidden camera in his room and uncovering the voyeurs’ set-up, Marty is pulled through a glass window and dragged into the woods, only to be seemingly killed in a burst of blood among the moss. Holden, Curt, and Dana try to escape in the RV, but find that a late-breaking rockslide has collapsed the only tunnel in and out of the woods. Curt, the jock so sure of his invincibility, decides to try to jump the canyon on dirtbike — a fatal decision, as he slams into an invisible, electric wall. Holden and Dana, now the last two survivors, start to drive back to the cabin. But on the drive, one of the murderous Buckners hidden in the RV slits Curt’s throat, leaving Dana as the last alive.
Steve and Gary rejoice. They explain to the bodyguard manning the office door that the virgin — Dana — is an optional death, as long as she is the last left alive. Their work is seemingly done. Coworkers flood the room, tequila is poured, a party commences. I watched on, a little perplexed with the knowledge that the film had another thirty minutes of runtime. The film had checked all the horror movie boxes (and then some), but this couldn’t be it, right? I’d seen some lengthy end credit sequences, but thirty minutes would take the cake.
Of course, I had forgotten about the one box The Cabin in the Woods hadn’t checked quite yet: the inexplicable revival of a not-quite-dead character. As a bear-trap swinging zombie makes his way to finish off a bloody and battered Dana, a flash of silver suddenly appears in the air, an extra-long Thermos being wielded as a weapon. Marty had returned, clobbering the zombie and saving Dana’s life.
The party stops. Steve and Gary still have work to do. But just as they’re returning to their desks and monitors (and I, as an audience, am rejoicing at the return of the film’s best character) they lose sight of the two survivors. Marty takes Dana to a grave in the ground, a sunken patch of dirt that leads not into a burial hole, but a small, bright white room of windows. “It’s an elevator,” Marty explains to Dana. “Somebody sent those dead fucks up to get us.” Dana looks on incredulously as the magnitude of the conspiracy dawns on her. “And I think I can get it to go down,” Marty suggests.
“Do we want to go down?” Dana responds.
Marty, now more somber than stoned, “Where else are we gonna go?”
And so they descend into the darkness. The elevator goes down, stops, goes to the right, stops, and sits. Black is all that surrounds the windows of the glass elevator. It’s an eerie slowburn, an atmosphere not typically found in forest-set slashers. For the first time since its title sequence, The Cabin in the Woods has moved onto a road completely of its own paving. Then, out of the void, a werewolf snarls at the glass. The elevator shifts right again, stopping in front of another glass box, this one containing a screaming apparition. The ghost’s box shifts up and is replaced yet again. It becomes clear to the audience and characters alike that we are now in a Rubik’s cube of nightmares: werewolves, ghosts, Hellraisers, ballerinas with the faces of sand worms, an endless chain of terrors boxed away in glass cubes.
This sequence, easily the scariest and most unsettling of the film, ends with Dana and Marty’s elevator opening up to the sterile white halls the movie began in. They’ve reached horror headquarters. The text meets the meta. And they aren’t a welcome sight, met by a SWAT team, attempting to gun them down. Luckily for Dana and Marty they slip into an elevator control room with bullet proof glass. But their situation is untenable. Soon the guards will stop firing from the hallway and head to the room’s door. With nowhere to turn, Dana makes a life-changing, movie-altering, billion dollar decision. She slams a conveniently-placed red release button. “Let’s get this party started.”
The lights above the elevators brighten and a ding pierces the air. All at once the doors open, and a maelstrom of horror monsters and thriller villains descends upon the armor-clad security guarding the corporate hallways. It is a twist I will never forget, because it was in that moment that I realized I was watching something truly special.
There are certain moments indelibly etched into the history of cinema — moments so singular, so affecting, so momentous they outlive the rest of the movie and stay with audiences forever. I will never forget seeing the swing-set scene of Ikiru for the first time, for example. Nor will I forget seeing Willem Dafoe raise his arms in defiance and death in Platoon or Sally Field break down during the funeral in Steel Magnolias. These are some of films’ greatest scenes, a testament to the power of the medium. Scenes like these are irreplaceable, dare I say perfect, moments that stun audiences and construct cultural touchstones in an instant. And while The Cabin in the Woods is not Ikiru or Platoon, when the elevators open it may as well be.
What was once a conventional horror movie, with a heavy helping of self awareness, turns into a bloodbath of intellectual property and horror tropes in a matter of seconds. When the carnage is through, when the security are killed and Steve and Gary expended, the two remaining college students make their way to a shrine room, where they learn the true nature of the events that befell them. And who is there to teach them? A woman known only as the Director, a tongue-in-cheek proxy for the film’s creator, a character played in a stunning cameo by the prestigious Sigourney Weaver. The Director explains that Dana, Marty, and their friends are a ritual sacrifice to the Titans watching from the Earth’s core, and that if Marty isn’t killed before sunrise, the Titans will rise up and destroy the planet. A ludacris explanation for an audience to hear? Absolutely. But one that, in the now absurdly fantastical world of the film, requires Dana make a choice: Kill Marty or let the Titans destroy Earth.
Dana, swayed by Marty’s nihilism, opts to let the world burn. “It’s time to give someone else a chance,” she mutters as her dying breath. The ground shakes, the ceiling collapses, and the last image The Cabin in the Woods leaves us with is that of a giant, God-like hand reaching from the depths of the Earth and destroying the planet we all call home.
That is The Cabin in the Woods. And while that long-winded explanation of the film’s events may seem unnecessary, it’s important to chart the rather conventional, albeit twisted, tracks the film was chugging along before completely derailing itself and throwing its audience and characters into a whirlwind of world-ending destruction. Because that is anything but conventional. In fact, its ending makes The Cabin in the Woods one of the most inimitable and illogical movies of modern cinema.
For as long as there has been film, there has been franchising. Horror, above all other genres, is the oldest marker for this trend. Beginning with Universal Studios’ classic monster movies of the 1930s to ’50s, to the Shōwa-era kaiju films, such as Godzilla, to the late 20th-century blockbuster franchises like Halloween, The Exorcist, and Friday the 13th, horror has always built upon itself, scraping every last dime out of each villain and scare. Today, horror franchises play second-fiddle only to the superhero blockbusters that outspend them. Recycled franchises — like Scream and Halloween — make just as much as their newer compatriots, The Conjuring universe and Saw franchise. Even the most famous horror “stand-alones” — The Shining, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs — are anything but that. Psycho became a disowned franchise, Hannibal followed up the story of Dr. Lecter a decade later, and audiences were returned to the world of The Shining with 2019’s Dr. Sleep. The decision not to franchise a successful horror film is practically unheard of (and has been for ninety years).
While there are, of course, plenty of successful horror films that never got sequels, that The Cabin in the Woods opted not to franchise itself in 2011 is nothing short of a minor miracle. Consider the decision to cast Chris Hemsworth, Bradley Whitford, and Jesse Williams, for example. These three men are synonymous with major franchises. Two of them were at the forefront of the biggest shows in America, while the other helms the most successful franchise in the history of media. And yet, they were killed off in a swift 95-minute movie with no hopes of ever returning. Not just that, but even the other lesser-known stars, like Kristen Connolly and Fran Kranz, had no chance of reprising their roles, because in that shocking twist ending, the entire world ends. Everyone dies. There is no tomorrow. Even Thanos couldn’t do that.
Or should I say, even Thanos wouldn’t do that. Just as Dana and Marty had the ability to press the red button and blow up The Cabin in the Woods franchise, both figuratively and literally, so too do all movie studios have the power to pull the plug on any of their respective franchises. The reason Thanos wouldn’t snap his fingers twice and kill everyone in the known Marvel universe is because there’s nowhere to go from there. When Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard wrote the screenplay, when they decided that Dana would open all the elevators, let loose the very monsters that could sustain this movie franchise into eternity, they made a decision to torpedo the future of that endeavor. They pushed all their chips in on a move that has seldom been pulled off successfully — go big, then go home.
For some, The Cabin in the Woods doesn’t work. Many see it as a predictable horror movie that tips one too many dominoes and loses itself to the chaotic carnage it creates. But I, a viewer who was so sure he had seen this movie before, was blown away at the audacity of the film. The Cabin in the Woods is so sure-footed, so confident, so completely in control of itself the entire time, that regardless of how one feels about the plot itself, they have to give kudos to the filmmakers — the real life Steve and Gary’s — for pulling it off.
Never before, nor since, has a film been so successful by shooting itself in the foot. The Cabin in the Woods, like Scream, or Halloween, or Friday the 13th, or any of the other horror films it owes much of its style and substance to, could have been a billion dollar franchise. It had all the traits. It had the actors, the monsters, the humor, the gimmick. We, like the Titans at the Earth’s core, could have watched sacrificial offerings until the end of time. But instead, Goddard and Whedon took the most practical parts from the movies that came before, built the perfect horror vehicle out of them, and drove it off a cliff. And thank the Titans of old they did, because we have one less franchise, and one more moment of truly historic filmmaking.
