The Cabin in the Woods: The Sacrifice and Learning to Survive the Inevitable

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.