By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MARCH 06, 2015
“Society needs to crumble. We’re all just too chickenshit to let it.”
- Marty
Warning:
spoilers ahead!!
The Cabin in the Woods is a masterful horror/monster movie like no other. It starts out wearing every horror movie cliché on its shoulder and then throws them all away. Five young people travel out to a cabin in the woods for some good times. Little do they know an evil lurks within, only this time it’s in the form of a government facility over-seeing everything.
This ambitious
genre film follows these soon-to-be scared shitless college students while all
manner of horrifying debaucheries are unleashed on them. The five teenagers are made up of a lascivious,
sexually-free blonde hottie named Jules, her athlete jock of muscle boyfriend,
Curt, the goody-two-shoes virgin Dana, the smart guy that could go into
politics, Holden, and the pot-smoking nerdy conspiracy theorist, Marty. The group travel in a RV for a weekend trip
in this seemingly deserted cabin.
While there
they drink and swim as Marty gets high.
At night while in the cabin they play truth or dare when they happen
upon a cellar underneath the cabin. It wouldn’t
be a horror film if they didn’t go down there so they do. It’s naturally creepy and dark with elongating
shadows. The cellar is filled with old
objects from over a century ago, among them is the diary of Patience Buckner, a
young girl who lived in the cabin long ago and was abused by her sadistic
family.
Dana reads
from the diary and then recites, against the wishes of Marty and likely the
entire audience, incantations from the pages.
This inadvertently summons the zombified Buckner family from the depths
of the dark forest surrounding them.
Unknown to the five students, they are actually being put up as a sacrifice for the Ancient Ones via an underground government facility run by a bunch of middle-class white coat types. Sitterson and Hadley are the senior technicians at the site; they facilitate the environment for the creatures to do what they do. They intoxicate the students with psychotropic drugs that they disperse through various hidden outlets. While this is all going on they have an office bet with other staff members about the outcome of the ritual and what monster will attack the teenagers. They clearly do this to lighten the proceedings, allowing those involved to live with themselves as they serve up five people to certain death.
This facility
is among many around the world that perform similar rituals, altered only by
culture and religion. The idea is one of
these facilities must offer up five young people, many fail, but the American branch
intends on fulfilling their duty buy getting all their teenage sacrifices murdered.
After
getting sprayed with pheromones that increases their libidos, the jock and the
blonde fool around in the woods, when they are met by the marauding Buckner zombies
that cut Jules’ head off, while Curt barely escapes with his life. Curt later rides his motorcycle fast enough
to jump a ravine only to smash into a transparent wall that was obviously
constructed to keep the sacrifices within the perimeter of the cabin. Holden is then killed leaving Dana on her
own. Marty finds concealed surveillance
equipment in the walls of his room.
Before being able to tell anybody he is dragged off into the forest by
one of the Buckner zombies.
The staff in
the facility begin to celebrate, thinking everyone is dead other than the
virgin, which is apparently an acceptable loss for the Ancient Ones, Marty
shows up to save Dana from a massive Buckner zombie trying to kill her. They both end up in an elevator that takes
them down into the viscera of the facility, where they move beside a menagerie of
other creatures entombed in glass elevators as well. Dana and Marty find themselves in a control
booth cornered by a SWAT team trying to kill them. Dana hits the purge button and opens all the
elevators, releasing the monsters to slaughter the SWAT team and facility
staff.
Dana and
Marty stumble into a temple while escaping monsters and figure out that they
were sacrifices in some ritual. The
project’s Director shows up and tells them that it’s much bigger than that. She tells them that they have been offered up
to keep the Ancient Ones satisfied, these malevolent beings living beneath the
facility. These Ancient Gods are kept in
a perpetual slumber through an annual sacrifice of five young archetypes: the
whore, the athlete, the scholar, the fool, and the virgin. The virgin may survive as long as the other
four die. For a moment Dana considers
killing Marty but is attacked by a werewolf.
The Director is killed by the zombie Patience Buckner while Dana and
Marty hold on as the temple crashes down around them. They decide that humanity is not worth saving
so they smoke a joint while the beginning of the end collapses down around
them.
The
interesting thing about The Cabin in the
Woods is no one is at fault here.
Sure you can split hairs but the zombies and all the other creatures are
killers with no moral compass, like spiders and sharks, they just kill because that’s
what they do. All the members of the
facility were doing their job, albeit a morbid one, but never the less, a job
that had to be done for the betterment of mankind. Which brings us to the five teenagers, wrong
place wrong time; they were victims until the end. Dana and Marty made the choice to let it all,
literally, go to hell in a hand basket. 
The Cabin in the Woods is about the reality of mortality and
not allowing one to escape it. It’s also
about humanity itself and whether or not it’s worth saving. In order to keep shopping and keep celebrating
ourselves, the governments in this film made a deal with the devil of
sorts. They made a deal with evil by
giving it a little taste of death so the rest of us can have 500 channels, so
we can watch the world end everyday on TV shows and movies. What makes this film satisfying and unique is
Dana and Marty came to terms with the banality of it all. What are we doing to truly better ourselves
and each other on this planet? Dana and
Marty experienced an existential awakening that led them to nothingness. Maybe the film can be seen as a call to action
and wants to end the conversation about hope.
Or maybe it’s sending a message to the genre itself, stop churning out
the same shit. Maybe Dana and Marty had
to die in the end to kill off the actual clichés they represented.
