Age has taught me that comparison is the thief of joy. When a creative makes a choice that I wouldn’t have made, instead of being let down, I just take the pieces I like and make something better in my head. I’ll never see those movies or shows on screen, but I sometimes use them for inspiration in my figure photography. With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to take a little trip to one of my favourite horror concepts of all time: The Cabin in the Woods!
The Cabin in the Woods is a love letter/critique of the horror genre. It calls out horror tropes by name, similar to the way Scream did, only this time those tropes are being manipulated by a corporation devoted to saving mankind from The Ancient One —a hand that lives in the basement, with the power to bring on humanity’s extinction.
It’s a fun ride getting to that resolution, but I was a little disappointed with the ultimate outcome of destroying the world. Selfishly, I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of the Cabin, the facility that lies beneath and the world in which sacrifices must be made by a dark organization to appease a mysterious deity.
I was a big fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books. You reach a fork in the road and are presented with a set of options to choose from. The branching story structure captured my imagination and kept me reading for hours. That’s one of my favourite elements of TCITW. The scene where they’re in the cellar filled with items they most definitely shouldn’t be messing with is perfection. I love Easter eggs! Give me an anthology series of every item down there, how it works and the bad shit that happens when someone triggers it.
The scenes where we get to see the holding cells that house all the monsters are another treasure trove of possibilities. Here’s the answer to one of my previously asked questions about the items in the cellar. For every object, there’s a horror that awaits, and here we get to see them in containment. How did they get here? Is this what happens to the creatures that Hellboy and the BPRD capture? Do the Ghostbusters outsource containment unit space when they run out of room? Does that mean Dana Barrett is the Director?
The variety of horrors is incredible. Ghosts, goblins, giant snakes, werewolves, slashers and definitely not Pinhead. They’ve been trying to build a Universal Monsters cinematic universe for ages. Just put the monsters in cages and turn them loose on humanity. Tell the story about how they got in the cages some other time. If I had gotten Gillman instead of the Merman at the end, I would have died of joy. Any studio that has an abundance of horror properties should take inspiration from TCITW and stock the holding cells with all of their horror icons, only to unleash them in a bloody onslaught.
If one location isn’t enough for you, we also get brief glimpses of other compounds around the globe. Japan has a classroom being tormented by something that looks eerily similar to Sadako from Ringu. Argentina has what appears to be a horned gorilla Kaiju. Other locations referenced on the whiteboard include Sweden, Spain, Germany and Burma. All these Facilities with boxes upon boxes of beasties to discover? Sign me up!
The Cabin in the Woods still holds up. It’s fun. It’s clever. It rewards you for multiple rewatches (assuming you haven’t already freeze-framed scenes to admire everything they managed to cram on screen). It’s certainly not a perfect film, but I’m a bit of a dreamer. I can spend hours with a movie like this, creating “What if?” scenarios and choosing my own adventures. The journey is often better than the destination. The Cabin in the Woods is a perfect example of this, in my opinion.
