The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

directed by Drew Goddard

Meggie Gates

I see The Cabin in the Woods at Galaxy cinema on a whim my senior year of high school. With my three guy friends, all J names, we pile into a car and drive to the theater, passing around a joint as we cruise down Collins. I don’t like scary movies but feel I have no right to say so. As the resident female to my guy friends, I wear whatever hat is expected of me. “Best Friend” when they confide in me things they “can’t tell the guys.” “Romantic” when we casually flirt and not talk about it. “Cool Girl” when I subtly hint at girls I’m attracted to and “One of the Guys” when that unknowingly plays into their fetishes.

Sitting between three guys in a horror film, I am always aware of my presence. I feel violated when Jules (Anna Hutchinson) takes her shirt off and helpless when Dana (Kristen Connolly) is defenseless. It’s discouraging to watch what they are reduced to and I emphasize this when we walk out of the theater. My guy friends know I would never take off my shirt (scary)! And I argue about why I am not Dana. She’s too helpless, I’m not like that, right? I ask, unsure what the guys will say. “You can be the fool, Meggie,” J one regards me with an eye roll. “You can be the fool.”

Cabin in the Woods is a 2012 horror movie that isn’t necessarily a horror movie. Following the path of Wes Craven’s meta-commentary Scream, Cabin in the Woods is a hyper-critical horror that pokes fun at common tropes in the genre. Manipulated into a situation beyond their control, a group of college students take a vacation to Curt Vaughan’s (Chris Hemsworth) cousin’s cabin for a weekend getaway and things go awry. They have fun, most get killed, and some survive. You know.

Unlike the Scary Movie franchise, Cabin in the Woods plays within the framework of its genre. Where Scary Movie becomes a spoof of itself, Cabin in the Woods manages to build a world that has very little gag tricks. It plunges the viewer right into the middle of your typical formula. “The Virgin,” “Fool,” “Athlete,” “Whore,” and “Scholar,” are the five archetypes this movie, like every scary movie, centers itself around. Though the characters in Cabin in the Woods are grounded, they share similarities with Scary Movie. They are deliberately subtle in their roles, creating humor for those familiar with horror, but lean more on satire and farce. With this movie, you have it all. Reality and caricatures. Not just one or the other.

Like every slasher film, slip-ups happen. Orchestrated by the white collar workers downstairs, we are fed entertainment by two people devoid of emotion. Steve Hadely (Bradley Whitford) and Gary Sitterson’s (Richard Jenkins) only job is to make sure everything goes smoothly. They manipulate the game and pick the players, casting them in whatever role they choose. The five must then choose to ignore signs like the old scary gas attendant Mordecai, played by Tim De Zarn, if they want to live. They decide how they die by going in the cellar to play with trinkets that will lead to their death. The power to choose is in the characters’ hands and Cabin in the Woods emphasizes that we are our own worst enemies. “They have to make the choice of their own free will,” says Sitterson, “otherwise the system doesn’t work.”

The five fit in to their roles like glue. Jules plays the easy to kill dumb blonde who unavoidably dies at the beginning. She is Curt’s girlfriend and the two ooze “Homecoming couple you love to hate” vibes. Dana, Jules’s best friend, is the all-American good girl the audience roots for. It is hard to feel anything but sympathy for her since she is the “virgin” offered up to Curt’s college friend Holden (Jesse Williams). Embodying the respectful boy next door who is respectful, Holden acts as a set up to get over the college professor she was sleeping with. Though each have no say over who they will be, they feed in to their roles as time goes on.

By far my favorite of the bunch is Marty Mikalski (Fran Kranz), the pothead with a sharp tongue and surprising wit. Kranz has a stand out performance playing the eccentric, weed-obsessed comedian. He serves as the conduit between what is seen and what is unseen. “Puppeteers,” he tells Dana as he hears voices all around him. Filled to the brim with pot, he sees the situation they are in for what it is, one he believes is a reality TV show. In the cellar when everyone is playing with toys, he advises Dana not to read the Latin. “I’m drawing a line in the fucking sand here, do not read the Latin.” Of course, she does and of course, a family of backwoods zombies rises from the dead.

What’s so intriguing about Cabin in the Woods is it falls into categories where it doesn’t fit. While it exists outside the world Not Another Teen Movie and Scary Movie occupy, it still skews clichés into comedy. It’s too self-aware to be considered a slasher. Cabin in the Woods is a wanderer, a one-of-a-kind. It provides twists so unexpected, the audience in Galaxy cinema cheered the first time Marty came back. The end is unpredictable, unlike most horror films, and it is deeply satisfying. When you know what’s coming, you look for jump scares, but here, you can never be sure. Cabin in the Woods creates its own genre by working through others. It makes up the rules as it goes.

On the way to Cabin in the Woods, me and the three Js discuss who would die first in a horror film. As their only female friend at the time, we decide that I would have to survive. Women, especially virgins, always survive and, as both, I’m written off without discussing logistics. The three Js discuss of those remaining, what roles would they play? Was J one the jock? J two the scholar? J three the stoner? Yes, that is how it would be. They laugh. J three would save me despite the fact that I do not need saving. I’d be dead by minute three. I’m not smart, and cannot fire a gun but I live because I must. I fit the title “woman.” 

Cabin in the Woods follows two stories: the five protagonists and the behind-the-scenes technicians. It’s hard not to love Sitterson and Hadley’s sarcasm. They break the fourth wall and call out the ritual we have come to understand, the order of who dies, when and how. Setting the mood, they manipulate cinematography for us and for the people in the movie, creating a haze in the forest enticing Curt and his girlfriend Jules (Anna Hutchinson) to have sex. Laughably called “pheromone mists,” the two technicians crank up the heat to make characters behave how they want. Hadley slaps his hand over his face when Curt says they should stick together and Sitterson releases gas that makes them split up. There’s no getting away. The outcome is rigged.

The second time I see Cabin in the Woods is with my dad. I tell him the entire plot beforehand because I am too excited, and he smiles. To this day, that is still our love language. Me ruining an entire movie for him. Him loving me so much he agrees to watch two hours of something he already knows everything about. We use it now to fill conversations that are hard. Labels that grow and expand for the little girl he once knew. We watch Game of Thrones when I trip over my tongue talking about a girl I like. I lean on Bird Box instead of discussing changes in my gender and pronouns. On the way to there, I let slip that the first time I saw this, I was high. He’s cooler than my mom and I think this will fly over well because we are friends. “We are not friends,” he still assures me, at 25. “I will always be your parent.”

At the end of the movie, Cabin in the Woods capitalizes on everything it has set up. The movie comes together in a final bloodbath scene that captures the soul of every horror film. Lifting inspiration from monsters in previous horror movies like Hellraiser, Evil Dead, and IT, Marty and Dana unleash a hoard of sinister beasts on the people underground. In unison, the elevators ding and goosebumps line my arms. The silence feels like forever before every evil emerges to kill the firing squad facing Marty and Dana.  Now their only chance is facing death by either man or monster. To come so far only to meet the end seems unfair. But then again, they chose their fate.

As Dana and Marty climb through a wall to escape a werewolf, they are confronted with surprise guest Sigourney Weaver. Weaver, the Director, explains to Dana why they must carry out their plan if they want to save the world. She says the Gods are essentially appeased by horror movie rituals and must see every archetype killed off before they can sleep another year. “It has always required youth,” says Weaver. “The whore, she’s corrupted, she dies first. The athlete. The scholar. The fool. All suffer and die at the hands of whatever horror they have raised, leaving the last to live or die, as fate decides. The virgin.” Confused, Connolly points at herself, “Me? Virgin?” Weaver shrugs, “We work with what we have.”

We wear every skin at some point in our life, the Virgin, the Whore, the Stoner. We fall in place with what is expected of us and empathize when we see ourselves on screen. Now, as an adult, trying to understand the space I occupy is lonely. I isolate because I consider myself too weird for the world (double Aquarius) and have strayed so far from the “normal” path that I’m not sure what normal is for me anymore. The transition from graduation, to gay, to non-binary, left me no skin to wear. Playing a role outside the binary never existed for me because I never existed outside the binary. If I’m not “designated woman who survives at the end of horror movie because Woman,” what am I?

We all have problems and go through the same rhythm, but each is so deeply personal that we forget we fit into a framework. We feel we are the first of our kind and struggle to connect while we grasp for labels to fit within. The popular kid, the jock, the nerd. Does my job description define me now? My passion? We get older and more individual. We struggle coming to terms with what role fits us. What skin we want to wear forever. Maybe we stay “Best Friend Cool Girl” and never become “Girlfriend” to the group of high school boys we’re trying to impress. Maybe we transition from “Parent” to “Friend” and feel alone because we are no longer needed in the same way. We shift to what is expected and when nothing is expected, we falter. Who we are is not who we were. We wander and wonder, who are we now?

The Cabin in the Woods is more niche than well known. Lionsgate finally took a chance on the filmmakers in 2012 and thank God it did. It may only be a cult classic, known and celebrated by a few, but it is something undeniably unique. It does not abide by rules because there are none. Nobody tells the movie what it is because there is no word to define Cabin in the Woods. It respects classic archetypes but rivals the norm, a beautiful monster trudging through known and unknown. It made itself from every piece of culture and stood on its own.

It worked with what it had.

Meggie Gates is a writer and comedian in Chicago, IL. They’ve had bylines in Bitch Media, the Chicago Reader, Consequence of Sound, and the Outline. They need everyone to know they’re getting really good at chess.