Stop Me if You've Heard This One
BEWARE SPOILERS
We go into every post assuming you’ve already watched the film being discussed.
If you’re reading this in the United States around April 11, 2021, The Cabin in the Woods is available on Hulu.
ONE OTHER THING
Though this essay praises a lot of the narrative and filmic work that The Cabin in the Woods accomplishes, it would be negligent to not address the numerous repugnant allegations that have come out about Joss Whedon in recent years, considering his heavy involvement with the film’s creation. In discussing, criticizing, and analyzing a film in which Whedon played an important part, we’re in no way excusing or intending to be dismissive of any alleged behavior or transgressions.
Artistic and expressive merits go beyond the efforts of one person in film and television. They are the product of the hard work, dedication, and creativity of a team. The Cabin in the Woods is no different, so we hope to recognize the accomplishments of the team that made it.
Born out of a single weekend in 2009, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard locked themselves in a hotel room and churned out the screenplay that would become The Cabin in the Woods. In an interview with Total Film, Whedon describes the film as a “very loving hate letter” towards horror movies.
By the time they took on this writing challenge, the horror industry had become saturated with remakes ranging in quality, sequels upon sequels, and soulless knockoffs of earlier films. According to The Numbers, the top three highest grossing horror movies in 2009 were:
Paranormal Activity (which was about to explode into an annually misguided franchise)
The Final Destination (the fourth film in the series but not the final one)
Friday the 13th (the twelfth film in the series and a failed reboot)
The ranked list continues in much the same way, including more remakes and even a couple “torture porn” entries, an unfortunate subgenre that was in vogue at the time. The past becomes the present. The present repeats ad infinitum.
And yet the circle must be broken. Thinking about Cabin as a “love/hate letter,” we can begin to understand the critical argument at the core of the film. Rallying against many clichés that seemed built into the slasher genre at the time, Cabin was intended not only as a rebuke of what horror was, but also a celebration of what horror could become.
Which is why Cabin isn’t just a quippy teen slasher movie brimming with meta-humor. Cabin is a teen slasher about making teen slashers. Leaning into filmmaking allegory and harmful industry clichés, Cabin argues that the model of moviemaking at the time was unsustainable, that we needed something new to rise from the ashes of the old ways.
We Haven’t Had A Glitch Since ‘98
The film opens, not with our doomed college kids, but with a couple of elderly engineers, Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford). Though their global affiliation is unclear, these two men, along with scientists, technicians, and at least one intern, work for a global cabal that engineers the suffering of teens and children.
As the movie progresses, the intent of the engineers becomes clearer: to appease “the Ancient Ones” through annual ritualistic sacrifice. This organization (and its international chapters) has been at work for some time, returning year after year to the titular cabin to make another sacrifice and prevent the return of their fearsome gods; to host a betting pool on which evil threat will plague the cabin; and to watch the dehumanized victims make awful decisions, picking them off, one by one.
But another way to think of the organization is that they’re not only killing off misguided teens but are a kind of film crew, hard at work on their next project? After all, with all their technicians, programmers, and actors all collaborating to kill off Dana (Kristen Connolly) and company, why shouldn’t we look at Sitterson, Hadley, and Sigourney Weaver’s cameo as The Director, as stand-ins for actual film Directors and producers?
In this role, Sitterson and Hadley intervene several times throughout to influence and direct the actions of the teenagers, controlling their hormones with pheromone mists, watching them on security cameras, and blockading the cabin’s exits. The two villains have nearly direct control over how the situation plays out. Sitterson and Hadley have written the screenplay, and now are giving direction to guide their actors towards their desired performance.
We Are Not Who We Are
To blow up the industry it both mocks and loves, Cabin calls upon the clichés and archetypes, which also happen to be stereotypes, to round out its cast. I don’t mean the actors themselves, but the teenage characters as actors—as characters playing characters in a horror movie created by Sitterson, Hadley, and the cabal. For their performances to be convincing, for them to fit into the molds required for the sacrifice, who they were in their everyday lives must be erased.
As the teens are introduced, Jules (Anna Hutchison) makes a shocking impression on Dana (Kristen Connolly) when she shows that she’s bleached her hair blonde. We the audience don’t know Jules by any other hair style, nor generally outside of the role she’s been cast by the Directors. For their ritual, and thus the movie-within-a-movie they’re filming, they’ve chosen Jules as their blonde “Whore,” and that’s all she’ll ever be to them. Unfortunately, since we also don’t know the pre-blonde Jules, we can only ever know her as the role she performs.
What’s more, the blonde dye is actually slowing Jules’ cognition, preventing her ability to act or think as she normally would. Her actions throughout her brief life in the movie are simple-minded and hypersexual, even to her friends. In a game, Marty (Fran Kranz) dares Jules to make out with a mounted wolf head. She seduces the dead animal and tells it, “No need to huff and puff, I'll let you come in.” Her friends watch in shock and awe at the make-out sesh, applauding uncomfortably as she picks wolf hair from her mouth. That Jules is so willing to go above and beyond in this dare to kiss an animal trophy demonstrates that the Directors have rewritten her to embody the role of the “Whore.”
Jules’ boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemsworth) is similarly rewritten. Upon introduction, his physical appearance matches the stereotype of a meathead jock: he’s in serious shape, ridiculously handsome, and shows off his masculinity by tossing a football at Dana and Jules. But, in an amusing aside with Dana, we learn that there might be more to him. Holding up the textbooks Dana planned to take with her over the weekend, Curt offers some advice, saying, “Professor Bennet covers this whole book in his lecture. Read the Gurovsky; it’s way more interesting and Bennet doesn’t know it by heart, so he’ll think you’re insightful.” Clearly, Curt’s more read up on Soviet economics than his appearance first suggests, and he cares more about his education, friends, and decency as well.
As they arrive at the cabin, Sitterson and Hadley erode the charming football player we briefly knew, reducing him to the cliché they need. While Jules grows handsy and wild, Curt embraces bullying tendencies associated with the jock/athlete archetype. Before he and Jules leave the cabin to have sex in the woods, Curt rags on the others, mocking them as a nerd, a virgin, and a burnout. Once they’ve left, Marty calls out the strange behavior: “Since when does Curt pull this alpha-male bullshit? I mean, he’s a sociology major; he’s on a full academic scholarship! And now he’s calling his friend an ‘Egghead?’” Curt was far and away from the lunkhead Sitterson and Hadley needed, but their influence dehumanizes him into a role we see far too often.
If You’re Tired of the Same Old Story
Cabin really starts to subvert genre expectations (and the direction of Sitterson and Hadley) with Dana and Marty, our two teen survivors. Dana is cast as the “Virgin,” but as we learn in her first scene, she’s reeling from a breakup with one of her college professors, in a presumably sexual relationship. But in recasting her as the “Virgin,” this thread never arises in the context of Sitterson and Hadley’s film. Once Dana and her friends depart to the cabin, the film forgets about him, allowing Sitterson and Hadley to have her focus on the budding sexual tension with the “Scholar,” Holden (Jesse Williams), and maintain the virginal performance they’ve written her into.
During the Director’s monologue about the organization’s purpose and the threat they hold at bay, Dana points out the absurdity of casting her as the “Virgin”:
Dana: Me? Virgin?
The Director: We work with what we have.
This subversion suggests a number of possibilities about the “Virgin” role, ranging from a sense of arbitrariness placed upon the archetype (whether she lives or dies is also of no importance to ritual), to adding another critical voice against cultural value of “sexual purity.” For the head of the organization, literally the “Director,” to handwave the supposed importance of her prescribed archetype emphasizes how arbitrary the trope is--not to mention antiquated and harmful.
Marty reminds me of actors rumored, years after a movie debuts, to have caused trouble on or off set due to drug use. Think Robert Downey Jr. in Less Than Zero. Marty is totally Sitterson and Hadley’s RDJ.
Marty, the “Fool,” actually navigates around the directions of Sitterson and Hadley, turning out to be the key threat to their plan. Marty’s dialogue suggests awareness of machinations invisible to the others, as he mentions theories about “puppeteers” to his friends. Though his conspiracy theorizing reads differently in 2021 than upon release, the irony is that his paranoia is valid. Midway through the movie, one of the other engineers, Wendy Lin (Amy Acker), notices, “Whatever he's been smoking's been immunizing him to all our shit.” Despite his drugged-out “Fool” archetype, Marty’s weed consumption opens his eyes to the strange shifts in his friends’ behavior and the absurdity of their situation. Because of his unexpected awareness, the “Fool” becomes the fly in the Directors’ ointment.
Because he is able to avoid the influence of the underground Directors, Marty is able to defy his archetypal death and allow Dana to escape the thrashings of the Buckner patriarch. Together, they slay the zombie redneck. In their fight to survive, they find the underground lab/studio, just as the horror-film-industry-writ-as-global-cabal’s work begins to crumble.
Roll With The Changes
By the film’s climax, the Directors have lost control. Dana and Marty, having subverted expectations, refuse to play their parts and die, deviating from the otherwise voyeuristically safe, scripted, ritual/movie in a paradigm shift to blow it all up.
Sitterson and Hadley learn of a “glitch” upstairs just as we learn that Marty is still alive. Concurrently, the Directors also witness the failure of the other rituals around the world. Each of these failed rituals represents a type, a subgenre of a subgenre taking inspiration from, or remaking, preexisting movies. If the cabin itself evokes The Evil Dead (1981) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), the situation in Kyoto is The Ring (2002), Stockholm looks a lot like The Thing (1982), and Buenos Aires reminds me of King Kong (1933).
Each ritual-as-movie is derivative and uninspired. If we were to see more of these global scenes, I wager we’d see each human character funneled into another shallow archetype. Each ritual fails, independent of interference from Dana and Marty, making it clear that the once safe and reliable industry is failing due to self-cannibalism, a snake eating its tail.
As Dana and Marty work their way through the lab, they eventually hole up in a control room, retreating from gunfire, where they find a big, red, shiny button. This big, red, shiny button, like many of its kind, is deus ex machina--a way for our protagonists to miraculously survive their otherwise inescapable demise. And while this button does exactly the fun thing it should, releasing all the monsters caged by the organization, who then slaughter the guards and massacre the rest of the underground crew, let’s pause and consider how it’s labeled: “Purge System.” Only once Dana “get[s] the party started” and smashes that button can the lab, the sacrificial system, and the horror industry begin to be purged.
Since Cabin’s debut, I’ve noticed that many people tend to harp on the ending. Here’s a subreddit bemoaning its bleakness, complaining that the destruction of the entire world isn’t something audiences want to see in a horror movie. But if Cabin is meant to signal a shift from these tired tropes and regurgitated plots, how else could it end but by giving way to something new, far removed from the old clichés? Much of what makes the old masters of horror--John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper--so incredible is the innovation they brought to the film industry. You can’t replicate that kind of innovation by, you know, replicating it because the newness of it is gone. The films that followed on the heels of Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) repeated their plots and characters as formulas and stereotypes, missing what was so wonderful about them in the first place: attention to character and setting, and a willingness to offer social commentary. These films and their creators hold a place in film history not because they one-upped each other in gore or kill-counts, but because they demonstrated that horror can tell stories about ourselves that mean something to the real world.
If the ending is bleak, then that’s reflective of the industry in 2009. Whether it ushered in some new era of “elevated horror” or not, it’s hard to deny Cabin’s influence on horror since its release. The film’s spirit shows up in the comic horror of Jordan Peele, the meta-awareness of A24, and David Gordon Green’s emotional reinvigoration of the Halloween franchise.
Moments before the earthly cataclysm begins, Dana says, “I wish I could have seen them.” The truth is, though, we’ve all seen the Ancient Ones, the great slashers of yore. And they are great, but it’s not the types of characters or how they died or how many of them died or what random god of death did the killing that made them great. What made them great is inspired innovation, and if we have to burn down the world to get that back, that’s what Cabin wants us to do.
