The Cabin in the Woods

I feel way worse today. The throat seems to be doing okay, but I'm congested as all get out. My nose has been running like mad, and directly under my nose I've got the whole "dry under-nose from too much nose blowing". It's basically terrible.

Okay, I promised Cabin, you're getting Cabin. Specifically, I promised SPOILERS!! Yay!

So the reviews all make it sound like the spoiler/mystery is the fact that it isn't a straight horror movie, that those lab coated dudes that, again, these reviews have mentioned, are manipulating a horror movie style scenario into existence for the sake of SCIENCE!

However it's alluded to very early in the film (wait, was there a painting at the beginning beginning with a picture of some ritualistic slaughter?) that the process is a modern day sacrifice. The line "remember when you could just throw a virgin into a volcano?" connects the dots for us pretty quickly.

Possibly supposed to surprise us is the idea that if these sacrifices don't go off (and there are several compounds around the world conducting similar culture specific sacrifices for the sake of making sure that at least one does work) the world ends.

Or rather, some old gods under the Earth will grow unsatisfied and rise from their slumber, wiping out all of mankind in the process.

Again, if you've ever watched any Buffy or Angel, any Whedon style supernatural story, the end of the world as a possibility comes up quite often.

So it's supposed to be shocking that, in this movie, the heroes winning (i.e. staying alive) means the end of the world, and that's what happens.

But as a cool allegory for the horror film industry I find it way more interesting. The gorey McMurder stuff is the standard Hollywood horror movie, the scientists are the writers and directors creating this stuff to appease the "old gods", and the old gods are the audience, and when no horror movies grab onto our imagination, when they all fail, that's the end of the world. The Hollywood Horror machine grinds to a halt. In that case the ending is a wink to itself, suggesting that for any critics that disliked the film, you're making it true.

I like it even better as a meta look at just this singular movie on its own: the old gods are still us audience members, which means that regardless of whether or not the sacrifice gets successfully completed, the movie is going to end, and we'll walk away from the theatre, thus ending the world before us. Saving the world was guaranteed to fail! That means there was something about the process of the sacrifices that the scientist guys didn't know or understand- most likely the ephemeral quality of their world, a world that hadn't existed for billions of years as they thought, but only a few minutes.

I'm making the movie sound like it isn't incredibly fun and inventive- I should probably be using more exclamation marks!!!! I really did have a blast at this thing.