Architects of Design: Deconstructing The Cabin in the Woods
- Eris Grey
- Jul 16
- 8 min read
Deep Dive Review: The Cabin In The Woods (2011)
Director: Drew Goddard
Writers: Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard
Cast: Kristen Connolly: Dana, Chris Hemsworth: Curt, Anna Hutcheson: Jules, Fran Kranz: Marty, Jesse Williams: Holden, Richard Jenkins: Sitterson, Bradley Whitford: Hadley, Amy Acker: Lin
Featuring: Sigourney Weaver: The Director, Jodelle Ferland: Redneck Zombie Girl, AKA Anna Patience Buckner
——
“We haven’t had a glitch since ’98."
Welcome to an underground facility, the camera is on two men: Sitterson & Hadley. They're bantering - but not in an argumentative way, more like the way two friends who have known each other for decades would. They're full of sass, and it's being pointed towards a woman, Lin, about a glitch in her department that happened a decade earlier. She's frantic, but they're calm. There's talk of a betting pool; she's flabbergasted by it, and we don't have any idea who these people are or what is going on.
It feels almost as if we had sat down for the wrong film.
Who are these people, and where are the conventionally sexy 20-something-year-olds headed to the cabin for the weekend?
There's very little context given in the trailer on what will unfold in the movie. It feels pretty standard for a film about a horrific experience at a cabin. Here's your standard group of friends, sexual innuendos, glimpses of technology and manipulation. The trailer makes it look like a high-tech 'Evil Dead', right down to the isolated cabin in the woods.
The Cabin in the Woods contains multitudes. A horror movie designed as a ritual, intentionally deliberate and just calculated enough to immerse us into the atmosphere of seeing something haunted while satisfying our need for bloodlust. There will be no hand-holding while it drags us through the morality of institutions that are designed for humanity to contentedly work on something horrific for the supposed greater good.
The facility in the cold open and throughout the film is based on The Los Alamos: The home of the Manhattan Project. The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was the primary research complex where scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, developed nuclear weapons.
This is where the first atomic bombs, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” were created.
The bombs caused destruction and devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, leading to a death toll of around 210,000 people, and upwards of 300,000 if you include radiation sickness, cancers and long-term health complications that existed after the nuclear explosions.
A horrific event that took thousands of lives and changed the course of history.
I adore The Cabin in the Woods, but there's something unsettling about a narrative using a piece of horrific human history as a plot device that leads into a bunch of attractive students being brutally murdered. It comes off as deeply insensitive to use that as the basis of the film, but considering what the Government and their affiliations do, and what they have done, it's a fitting tone.
More facilities are echoed in this film: Mount Weather Emergency Operations is a classified underground bunker meant to house officials in case of societal collapse. Cheyanne Mountain Complex is a military base located inside of mountain, and is staffed with experts in surveillance and self-sufficient systems.
The implication that there would be a secret, underground facility that is designed to create monsters in the series to prevent the end of the world is not unsubstantiated.
It makes perfect sense.
The Cabin in the Woods is a deconstruction of horror films that came out within 40+ years before 2011. It respectfully pays a clear homage to them, but it also relentlessly mocks them and holds lazy writing and tropes accountable by weaving them into its narrative. It takes the classic tropes and archetypes and achieves something that few horror films have the audacity to do: turn the audience into the villains. It allowed us to demand blood, let us revel in each kill, let us cling onto the notion of a world where a collective of different monsters exists, but also explore the idea of them all existing in the same universe.
The Organization unveils a chart of monsters that exist in the Western Culture, and then takes a step further to explain that there are different creatures and different entities throughout the world that are based on different cultures, mythology and lore.
The Engineers are doing something simple: they place the students in the cabin to manipulate them and kill them. They exploit the ecosystem, put pheromones in the air, and even change the structure of Jule's hair dye to turn her into a quintessential dumb blonde. There was no limit to the immortality that the Organization was willing to exhibit or do to complete each kill. They did not care about the loss of these lives; this was done for something greater than them, and so they celebrated them. They made wagers, rigged the game, and now it was time to spring the cellar door.
Cue the creepiest cellar of all time, riddled with treasures of a certain…antiquity.
“Dana, I dare you.”
The camera pans around the cellar, and much is revealed to us as they explore the basement. An old organ, a dollhouse, porcelain dolls and a family portrait.
Marty does not think it's awesome to be down there, and he's right.
Jules has a beautiful amulet.
Curt plays with a conch. (Merman!) and then a Hellraiser cube.
Holden finds a ballerina music box.
Marty is checking out old reels.
But it's Dana, the 'final' girl, who discovers the old diary of Anan Patience Buckner and starts reading it.
There's Latin. Marty tells her never read the Latin. For the love of god, Dana, listen to the fool. Never, ever read Latin out loud.
Delor supervivo caro. Dolor sublimus caro. Dolor ignio aminus.
Pain outlives flesh. Pain elevated flesh. Pain ignites soul.
Cue the Zombie Redneck family, and everyone in The Organization cheers. We have a winner! The Buckners pull a w, and we get a little clue on the deeper meaning of it all.
“There is something nightmares are from. Everything is reminiscent of the old world.”
If you have not figured out by now, the college students are the representations as the archetypes that have been played in horror movies for decades.
The whore. The jock.
The scholar.
The fool.
and the virgin.
They take what they can get.
Marty, the fool, leans right into the archetype of the character: self-aware, the ability to see right through the illusion, but just dumb enough that nobody takes him seriously. He notices Jules, normally quite intelligent, is acting vapid, and Curt, a sociology major has turned into an alpha-brute male. Dana, with all her purity, sits innocently on the couch, Holden, the scholar, translates Latin, and Marty is back to being the fool, goes to his room to read books with pictures.
Each archetype is chosen with menacing precision, all a necessity to fill a slot at the end of it, but the movie does an excellent job of pointing out that all 5 of the students embody some persona that predominately existed in slasher movies over the years. Dana, Jules, Curt, Holden and Marty are the embodiment of this persona, and in honouring the systematic tropes in horror films, the whore must die first while having sex, and for a brief moment, we see some humanity in Hadley and Stitterson, but they still think they’re doing the right thing.
Heather Lagenkamp did the special effects make-up for The Cabin in the Woods—she’s also one of the most famous final girls of all time. Nancy Thompson, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dana exemplifies her. She’s a reflection of the final girl, pure and resilient, intelligent and vulnerable. She’s Nancy, Sydney, Laurie, and the cinema opposite of Jules, whose only design is for seduction, a one-dimensional woman who lacks substance and is created to die. Women who are sexual beings aren’t destined to live—but that’s another essay. She has a love for Curt, an athlete. A strong man with no delusions of intellect, who’s friends with Holden, his nose in a book with no purpose, nor anything of any importance to say, and then we have Marty, the stoner, the comic relief. The comic relief is one of the most important characters in any horror movie; they will tell you exactly what’s going on, and they’ll be correct, but the problem is that nobody listens to them.
Marty was right.
And one by one, the archetypes get killed off in the exact order they were supposed to: The Whore, The Athlete, The Scholar, The Fool and the Virgin? She always lives. She’s the final girl.
The horror genre has long been criticized for its formulaic nature, and The Cabin in the Woods brings a focal point to that and points out something that needed to be said: these characters never had agency to begin with. They think they have it, but it’s non-existent in these worlds; their fate was sealed the moment they all met at Dana’s apartment.
Marty becomes the film anomaly, he clouded his brain with enough cannabis to not have any of the chemicals they used work on him, he becomes aware of his surroundings, and the fool turns into the hero. After he saves Dana, they find their way into the facility, and the layers of control start being peeled off: they are not simply being attacked by a Redneck Zombie Family, they are the victims of a much larger conspiracy: the monsters are all around them, and they chose what would bring them their downfall.
They made them choose.
There was never any free will.
Tropes aren’t cliches; they’re manufactured outcomes. Unseen forces dictate who lives and who dies. Violence has always been justified in the name of order. The facility isn’t “evil,” and the scientists and engineers that work there aren’t “bad”, they’re just a bunch of humans leaning into the concept that they have to do something awful to stop something much worse. The only way to remedy the lack of agency, the lack of control, is to give Dana and Marty their power back. They unleash the monsters, and now we have visuals of all that has haunted us over the decades. Werewolves, a cenobite, giant bats, serial killers wearing doll masks, zombies, and even blood-thirsty unicorns. Oh, and the merman that Hadley wanted, be careful what you wish for, cleanup is a nightmare.
After the seemingly non-stop blood splatter on the main floor, Marty and Dana reach the underground temple, two are left with five caricatures on the wall, and our lord and saviour's final girl, Sigourney Weaver, comes in to tie up loose ends. They have to die; they have to suffer to appease the old gods. Maybe it’s time for something different; maybe humanity shouldn’t exist under these rules, or perhaps humanity shouldn’t exist at all. Is the world saving if it’s built on constant blood sacrifices? Dana nearly falls for this again. She points the gun at Marty. She wants to save the world, but then a werewolf attacks her. She will always be controlled by the system; she just needed one final blow to wake her up from that.
Together, they choose destruction over submission. They reject the system in its entirety; they are no longer playing their assigned roles, ready to let the Earth and all that exists within it be annihilated for the sake of continuing the cycle of ritualistic sacrifices. Soaked in blood, leaning against each other, sharing a joint. They accept their face but not as victims. They accept it as two people finally able to make their own choices.
Giant Evil Gods. That would have been a fun weekend.
Need other Meta Horror to watch? Check out our top ten list.
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