Why The Cabin in the Woods Still Works When You Know the Twist

The cabin is not the trap. The lab is.

Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.

Five Students, One Cellar, and a Bet on Dana Polk

The Cabin in the Woods puts five college students in a remote cabin and then shows you the men running the lights. Dana Polk, Jules Louden, Curt Vaughn, Holden McCrea and Marty Mikalski head out for a weekend at Curt’s cousin’s place. In an underground laboratory, engineers Gary Sitterson and Steve Hadley talk over preparations for a ritual. The Stockholm operation has already failed. Only their facility and one in Japan are left to undertake the process, and the site in Japan holds a perfect record. That is the whole engine of the film, and Drew Goddard, in his directorial debut, turns it on in the first minutes.

The students are not innocent of the setup, only unaware of it. Sitterson and Hadley control the cabin from the lab and steer the group with mind-altering drugs. The cellar is the hinge: it holds an assortment of bizarre objects, and Dana finds the diary of Patience Buckner, a cabin resident abused by her sadistic family. She recites incantations from the diary and wakes the whole Buckner family as zombies. Hadley releases pheromones to push Curt and Jules into sex outside. The Buckners kill Jules. Curt runs.

Marty Mikalski Finds the Cameras

Marty is the one who sees the wires. He discovers concealed surveillance equipment in his room before a zombie stabs him and drags him off. The lab workers then learn that the site in Japan has failed too, which makes the American site “humanity’s last hope.” Curt, Holden and Dana try to leave in the RV. Sitterson triggers a tunnel collapse to block them.

Curt tries to jump a ravine on his motorcycle to get help on the other side, hits a force field and falls to his death. That is the moment Dana understands their experience is staged and controlled. Holden dies at the wheel of the RV, which crashes into the lake. Dana swims to the dock. A zombie corners her and attacks her. The lab employees celebrate, believing Dana is the last survivor.

The film runs 95 minutes. It was written by Joss Whedon and Goddard, who had worked together on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and they wrote the screenplay in three days. They called it an attempt to “revitalize” the slasher film and a critical satire on torture porn. AFX Studio handled the special effects, monster costumes, special makeup and prosthetic makeup. Shooting ran in Vancouver, British Columbia, from March to May 2009 on an estimated budget of $30 million.

A Release Date That Slipped Twice

Wikipedia identifies The Cabin in the Woods as a 2011 film, and that is the year it premiered at Butt-Numb-A-Thon in Austin, Texas. The film was first slated for October 23, 2009, then moved to February 5, 2010, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and United Artists. Financial difficulties shelved it indefinitely. Lionsgate Films picked up distribution in 2011. It opened in the United States on April 13, 2012. It grossed $66.5 million worldwide.

Key facts
– Runtime: 95 minutes
– Budget: $30 million (estimated)
– Worldwide gross: $66.5 million
– Screenplay written in: three days
– Filming: March–May 2009, Vancouver
– U.S. release: April 13, 2012
– Metacritic: 72/100
– Published critical score: 7.2/10

Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford Run the Room

The best decision in The Cabin in the Woods is casting Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford as Sitterson and Hadley. They are middle managers at the end of the world, and they talk like it. They take the perfect record held by the site in Japan as a professional grievance. They celebrate a rite that depends on a college student dying badly.

In this reviewer’s reading, the film’s comedy lives in that office, not in the cabin, and the shift between the two spaces is the trick the film is built around. Amy Acker plays Wendy Lin, Brian J. White plays Daniel Truman, and Tom Lenk plays Ronald the Intern. Sigourney Weaver is The Director. Tim DeZarn is Mordecai.

The cast in the cabin is doing harder work than the script sometimes admits. Kristen Connolly carries Dana from a student who reads a diary out loud to a woman who understands she is inside a machine, and the film asks her to hold both. Fran Kranz gets Marty, the stoner who is right about everything and believed by no one, and he makes the paranoia funny before it turns useful. Chris Hemsworth, as Curt, is the athlete who dies proving the cage is real. Jesse Williams and Anna Hutchison have the least room to move, because Jules and Holden exist to be killed on schedule.

The Cellar Is the Whole Argument

Here is what The Cabin in the Woods gets right that most horror films of its decade did not: it tells you the rules and then makes the rules the horror. The cellar objects are a menu. The Buckner diary is a choice. Dana picks it, and the film never pretends she did not. The zombies are not a punishment for sex or drugs, the usual slasher ledger. They are a selection from a catalog, and the lab is watching to see which item gets taken. Sitterson and Hadley do not care which monster comes. They care that one does.

That is a sharper idea than the film fully cashes. The satire on torture porn lands, but it lands early. Once the force field stops Curt’s motorcycle, the movie has shown you its biggest card, and the last act is mostly execution: the RV crash, the lake, the dock, the zombie on top of Dana. The underground facility stays interesting because Jenkins and Whitford keep finding new ways to be petty about an apocalypse. The cabin stops being interesting the moment it stops surprising us.

A Monster Menu With One Real Course

The monsters themselves are a collection, not a set of characters. That is the point, and it is also the limitation. AFX Studio built a menagerie, and the film treats each creature as an entry rather than a threat with a history. The Buckners dominate the back half because Dana chose them, not because they are the most frightening option on the shelf. A film this clever about systems is oddly indifferent to the things inside them.

What holds up is the structure. The Cabin in the Woods is a 95-minute machine with two floors, and it never lets you forget the lower one. The early scenes in the lab undercut every scare upstairs, which should kill the tension and instead replaces it with dread of a different kind. You are not waiting to see who dies. You are waiting to see who is keeping score.

Where the Film Sits Against Its Own Pitch

Goddard and Whedon said they wanted to revitalize the slasher and satirize torture porn. The satire is the part that aged well. The revitalization is the part that did not, because the film’s answer to a tired genre is to explain the genre rather than to scare you inside it. That is an intelligent move and a slightly cold one.

The Cabin in the Woods is more fun to think about than to sit through, and the three-day screenplay shows in the best and worst ways: the premise is airtight, the middle sags, and the ending arrives as a premise rather than a payoff.

The release history is its own small story. MGM and United Artists pushed the film twice and then shelved it, and Lionsgate finally put it out in April 2012. It grossed $66.5 million worldwide against an estimated $30 million budget, a return this paper reads as a success. It premiered at Butt-Numb-A-Thon in Austin in December 2011, a festival audience built for exactly this kind of film, and that is probably the right room for it.

The Cabin in the Woods earns its reputation as a smart genre film and not quite its reputation as a great one. The lab is the reason to watch it. The cabin is the reason it ends.

Published critical score: 7.2/10 (Metacritic 72/100)

Drew Goddard · horror movies · Joss Whedon · movie review · slasher films · The Cabin in the Woods