Gore, mayhem, and plot twists as shocking as their images explode on the screen in The Cabin in the Woods (2011), a horror film that manages to be complex and thought-provoking even as it erupts in blood, pain, and gruesome death. Joss Whedon and his fellow director wanted to satirize the horror genre and restore it from a quagmire of mindless torture porn, and they largely succeeded.
The film’s opening shot shows two professional men talking about which “facility” is most likely to “succeed”, with the Japanese likely coming first and the Americans coming second, without elaborating. The film then picks up as a seemingly “ordinary” horror movie, with five teenagers leaving for a weekend at a remote cabin in the woods. The party consists of two girls and three boys, one of whom, Marty, appears on the scene smoking pot (which is important to the subsequent plot).
The action goes back and forth between the teenagers and the facility as the film unfolds. The workers of the establishment reveal that the adolescents have been drugged by various means, without offering further details. The teenage tourists encounter a stock character, a “redneck gas station attendant”, who warns/threatens them of their impending doom. However, they continue to drive and begin a game of “truth or dare” in the cabin, while facility workers look on with great interest.
One of the girls triggers the release of a family of “peasant zombies” by reading the Latin inscription of a diary in the basement, though they do not immediately realize this. The teens also start acting strange and very lecherous, with the exception of the pot-smoking Marty, who remains his usual self. Zombies attack a couple when they start having sex in the woods, and after one teenager is killed, the others try to escape. However, they are blocked by obviously high-tech means: explosives collapsing a road tunnel, a force field, etc.
After another teenager is killed by zombies, the two survivors, Dana and Marty (who was smoking marijuana without drugs, as the facility’s agents failed to find one of their hiding places, and thus are still able to think straight) – they find an elevator to a large underground. facility full of stored monsters that are released by different “triggers” that are chosen in the booth above.
Eventually, they are confronted by a small army of guards and the two middle-aged men from the beginning, who reveal that the five were chosen as a blood sacrifice to prevent the huge and destructive Ancient Ones from returning to the world. Dana unleashes all of the monsters at once, leading to a massive festival of blood and doom as the guards are torn apart, eaten, tortured, crushed, and otherwise gory exterminated in a sea of blood, sliding entrails, and screams. . The two remaining teens decide the world isn’t worth saving at the cost of human sacrifice and share one last smoke of marijuana. As they do so, the first of the colossal Great Old Ones begins to rise catastrophically from the depths of the earth, and the film ends with the hint that the world will soon be destroyed.
The goal of the writers of The Cabin in the Woods was to create a satirical slasher film that offered a brutally honest critique of horror’s descent into mere “torture porn” territory. Whether you’re the kind of horror nerd who enjoys digging into the mental and psychological underpinnings of the genre, or just want lots of blood, surprises, and a surprisingly powerful ending, this movie will be a memorable experience.