The Cabin in the Woods / Drew Goddard (2011)
Five all-American college kids. They're happy, friendly, attractive and planning a weekend getaway to a cabin in the woods. Whose cabin? Hmm. Don't worry about that. It's going to be so much fun. Viewers are familiar with this premise and writers Drew Goddard and Jess Whedon are aware of that fact. These kids meet the basic criteria for a slasher, but seem a little brighter. A bit kinder.
As they drive, they meet the man who runs the last gas station before they reach the cabin (a delightfully unhinged Tim DeZarn) and he gives them a dire warning. Which of course, they not only ignore but take offense to.
They pile back in their RV and continue on to the cabin, oblivious. The film is full of tropes like this one. They are stacked so heavily that a viewer might roll their eyes. Until we follow the RV through a mountain pass and watch an eagle soar overhead. Majestic, free and into a–was that a laser net? What just happened.
The film toggles back and forth from our kids at the cabin and the staff of a high security laboratory. Weirdly, we're getting comedy vibes from Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford). What's going on here?
You've seen horrible things. An army of nightmare creatures. But they are nothing compared to what came before. What lies below. It's our task to placate the Ancient Ones. As it's yours to be offered up to them. Forgive us. And let us get it over with.
The kids find a basement with a cursed item. No wait, two. Three. This basement is full of cursed items. Is that the cube from Hellraiser? What is going on here.
Spoilers below.
It's nearly impossible to talk about this film without giving up the premise, which is fun and well executed. The kids in the cabin have been selected and unknowingly prepared to be ritual sacrifices to 'the ancient ones' who demand regular blood.
The kids have been conditioned with hair dye, gas, temperature and lighting to drive their choices. The people in the lab are observing and steering, setting these kids up to choose the method of demise and satisfy the ancient ones.
The Cabin in the Woods reframes every classic horror-movie behavior: splitting up, having sex at dangerous moments, investigating strange noises. They're not simple stupidity but the result of systematic manipulation by unseen forces. In this universe, the characters are not irrational. They are being engineered to behave irrationally.
The kids are selected based on similarity to the standard horror film archetypes (The Whore, The Athlete, The Scholar, The Fool and The Virgin, whose death is optional), corresponding closely to common slasher-film character types that became codified in films such as Halloween and Friday the 13th and were later analyzed and subverted by films like Scream. They essentially fight over which cursed object they should choose. What we learn from the staff in the control room, is that any object can call a unique monstrosity. The employees there bet on what the kids will choose.
The people in the control room are typical office workers, with politics, interpersonal relationships, frustrations, traditions of their own, despite the contents of their work. The banality of their interoffice banter is an exclamation of the five kids we've met, the others around the world on this same night–and what we come to learn is a long tradition–of groups of kids being primed for ghastly murders to save the rest of the world's unknowing population. They bemoan the failures of other offices, while nine-year-olds in Japan sing joyously after defeating a stereotypical J-horror ghost.
The shift back and forth works to reveal that Goddard and Whedon understand horror and it's tropes. They cleverly use the control room and the staff to provide exposition and allow the kids to face the ordeal on their own, all but Marty–The Fool (Fran Kranz) who slowly figures out what's happening to them and works out an attempted exit. He and The Virgin, Dana (Kristen Connolly) fight their way past the zombie redneck torture family and the traps in the woods set by the employees in the control room until they find their way to an even stranger place. A stainless steel elevator room. With The Director (Sigourney Weaver) who challenges them to give up Marty for the greater good, as all of the ancient monsters of the underworld flood the center.
This film works on a literal level. And it works on a deeper level. On my second set of viewings, I convinced myself that the text of the film suggested that the hidden cameras used to track the sacrifices captured footage that was turned into actual horror films. But watching for this review, I realized the film was so well done, with the control room and the ancient ones themselves as multiple stand-ins for the audience, that it's barely even implied. The horror scenes, though developed purely for tropes to be exploited, work. And the surrounding scenes, though developed as a container for a larger universe, work as well.
Key scene
The Containment Breach. Dana and Marty make it to the control center just as the ritual collapses around them. Alarms sound. Doors unlock. Elevators rise. Every nightmare creature the facility has cataloged spills into the halls at once. Zombies, ghosts, mutants, killers and things without names descend on the people who spent the evening nudging, dosing and steering college kids toward predetermined deaths.
The scene is spectacularly messy. Years of procedure, rituals and office traditions disappear in minutes. The technicians who argued over betting pools and office politics find themselves trapped inside the very kind of horror movie they had been producing for everyone else.
For two hours the film asks who is really responsible for horror's familiar patterns. In the containment breach, the system itself gets its answer.
Own it
My Letterboxd review