Cabin in the Woods: A Very Funny Dystopia Where Hope is Extinguished

I appreciate dystopian fiction; this may be another reason I’m just an overgrown adolescent. I don’t much care for “horror” films, particularly “torture porn” films like Saw, and so I watched Cabin in the Woods (2012) more because of its producer, Joss Whedon, and its good critical reception. I knew Cabin was something of a “deconstruction” of the horror genre, and I was not surprised to find it working as a metaphor for filmmaking, but I was not expecting it to be a play on dystopian fiction as well. The connection between this film and dystopia has drawn relatively little comment in online reviews, and so I want to explore it, but this requires working through the metaphor for filmmaking. In the end, I will argue (at unnecessary length, perhaps) that it fails as a dystopia because the filmmakers violate that genre’s positive aspects even as they lampoon others for cheapening the horror genre.

If you haven’t seen Cabin in the Woods and don’t want to know about the ending, stop reading now. 

AKA “SPOILER ALERT.”

There would be no plot and a lot less humor without the stuff of horror movies; specifically, the group of young people—the Good Girl, the Alpha Male, the Stoner, the Scholar, and the Whore—who head out to a remote location to be slaughtered by an unholy terror. But ultimately, The Cabin in the Woods belongs in a category with The Matrix and The Hunger Games even more than with Scream or other meta-horror fiction.

The priority of the dystopian layer over the horror layer is established in the very first scene, when a pair of apparently non-descript workers—Balding Guy and Married Guy—chat about mundane, everyday things (trying to have a baby) in a sterile building that might be a science Facility (actually the British Columbia Institute of Technology's Aerospace building). I view this as deliberate; director Drew Goddard and Whedon could have chosen the path of slowly revealing that something more organized and sinister lay beneath the “cabin in the woods,” but instead they begin in the Facility where this horrible experiment is manufactured. (Consider also that the college students’ inane discussion of leaving their books behind centers around texts on the Soviet Union).

Opening with the Facility is also a good dramatic choice, because the filmmakers tease the audience with hints about the Facility’s motives and only slowly peel back what is truly going on. The mystery created by the Facility’s outsized surveillance of five apparently ordinary college students allows the filmmakers to play the typical horror mechanisms of foreboding (creepy camera angles, an unpleasant local man known as “the Harbinger”) for laughs.

A Metaphor for Filmmaking

In short, what may at first appear to the young protagonists as a nightmare encounter with forces beyond human reckoning is in fact heavily manufactured and carefully planned. All of this is a metaphor, of course, for filmmaking; horror filmmaking in particular. The various departments mimic the various teams required to make a film. All of these departments at the Facility bet on a big white board about which monstrous force will be unleashed—what will it be this time? Zombies? Witches? Giant Snake? Clowns? Sugar Plum Fairy? Kevin? The young people who are to die make the choice themselves, through a hilariously extensive set of creepy artifacts in the cellar of the cabin in the woods. One can imagine a group of movie producers sitting around and asking one another: what horror do the young people want this year? Zombies are the new thing; oh, wait, they are passé. What’s the next zombies?

There’s a running joke about how one of the two heads of the Facility always wants to see a merman be chosen, but it never is. (And when did you last see a merman in a horror film? Me neither). Our young protagonists end up with “redneck torture zombies,” which is “a whole different species” from regular zombies and is a dig at the current “torture porn” trend in horror movies. Whedon commented: “The things that I don’t like [about the horror genre] are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances. Drew and I both felt that the pendulum had swung a little too far in that direction.” http://www.totalfilm.com/news/joss-whedon-talks-the-cabin-in-the-woods

The bad writing in horror movies appear in the film as deliberate interventions of the Facility. None of these college students is the required Whore? The chemicals in one girl’s blond hair dye slowly seep into her brain, causing her to act that way. When the Alpha Male (an appealing Chris Hemsworth, aka Marvel’s Thor) sensibly says, “From now on, we stick together,” he is gassed into confusion which prompts him to say, “No, wait, we should split up to cover more ground.”

The Audience as All-Demanding Gods?

As the movie unfolds, we learn that the secret behind this elaborate “experiment” is actually a modern, high-tech version of the traditional virgin sacrifice. (Nevermind that the “good girl,” Dana, isn’t really a virgin. “We make do with what we have,” someone from the Facility explains). The ancient gods demand this elaborate ritual or they will destroy the earth, and the Facility is just there to appease them. If the horror is carefully orchestrated, then underneath it is an uncontrollable chaos threatened to be set loose. These “Ancient Ones,” as they are called in the film, are a callback to one of the progenitors of modern horror, H.P. Lovecraft.

As blogger Jason Colavito observes, “It takes little imagination to see in this the Old Ones of Lovecraft, who wait beneath the earth for the stars to come right again, though in their August Derleth-derived form as emissaries of evil. Nor is this the first time that Whedon has used this trope; in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer the Old Ones were the progenitors of the first vampires and also waited beneath the earth for the time when they could reign again, etc. http://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2012/04/on-josh-whedons-cabin-in-the-woods-h-p-lovecraft.html

The fact that these Ancient Ones have such a demanding specification for how the ritual sacrifice is performed—the other four college students must be killed before the virgin, who is allowed to survive so long as she has suffered—has led many to rightly observe that the Ancient Ones are a metaphor for the horror genre audience. (A particularly clear explication of this comes from a blogger named Nordling at http://www.aintitcool.com/node/54997) In this reading, the individuals in the Facility are the filmmakers, and their cynical manipulation of the events in the woods is an obsequious kowtowing to what they think the audience expects—the arbitrary and often ridiculous strictures of a genre.

In the final act, the ridiculousness of those strictures are amplified. Stoner and Good Girl descend into the lab, where they find that all of the supernatural creatures that appeared earlier on the big white board are trapped in glass elevators. They find a way to release these creatures, and the various evil beings tear through the Facility killing everyone in sight. And yet, despite all this bloodletting, the gods are not appeased. It has to be the Stoner who dies.

This is also brilliant as metafiction. The characters, disgusted at how they have been treated by the filmmakers, turn on them. Artistic death comes to filmmakers when the creations of imagination—the ghouls that they cynically employ to obtain their success—turn on them and devour them. For instance, it’s the merman himself who kills Married Man. The final killing of “the Director” comes from one of the “redneck torture zombies,” who personifies those worst trends in horror filmmaking.

Cabin in the Woods can be interpreted on this level as a peon for horror filmmakers and artists more generally to “free” their audience (represented by the gods) by not sacrificing their stories, characters, and ultimately their own creativity to meet a perceived market demand and instead to risk what will happen if they simply do what they (the artists) think is right. In fact, the film itself can be seen as such a “releasing” by refusing to follow genre conventions; and despite its flouting of convention, it was a critical and financial success. At the very least, it iss a criticism of the flippancy with which artists use scary and disturbing images to make money with little regard for their human value; there is an indelible scene where the Good Girl is in mortal danger on the screen, but the crowd in the Facility is too busy partying to an inane pop song to pay proper respect to the horror of what is happening.

While much of this interpretation of audience is warranted (how could this film not be a metaphor for moviemaking when the Married Man is congratulated for orchestrating a “classic denouement”), it would have been less ambiguous if the film had ended as I began to expect; that the Ancient Ones would be satisfied without the carefully prescribed ritual, or that some other way of defusing their threat would have presented itself. When the Bald Guy’s dying words were “Kill it,” I thought that there would be a way to kill the Ancient One. Or the Ancient One could have expressed pleasure with the Stoner and Good Girl’s actions, somehow. After all, who is this supposed audience that has to see the Stoner die? Plenty of horror movies have more than one survivor, even in the slasher category, do they not? Why was the Facility so surprised when the Stoner’s apparent death turned out to be an error—I’ve seen few horror films, but even I knew to expect the sudden reappearance of someone thought to be dead.

I expected them to either kill the Ancient One or satisfy it another way because I am accustomed to the belief, expressed often in fiction, that ultimately many of the ways we sacrifice our morality are unnecessary. Call it the “A Few Good Men” hypothesis. Instead, the final scene of the movies shows one of the Ancient Ones rising up. The implication is that the world as we know it will be destroyed. It seems that, perhaps, the Bald Man and the Married Man were right. Perhaps there is a grave danger if we were to refuse the ritual sacrifice found in horror films.

The Value of Ritual Non-Sacrifice Sacrifice

What if horror filmmaking is necessary to modern society? Rick McDonald, a medieval literature professor at Utah Valley University, ties Cabin in the Woods to the theory of ritual sacrifice elaborated by Rene Girard. http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage36/McDonald.pdf He quotes from the start of Girard’s seminal work, Violence and the Sacred, ““ In many rituals the sacrificial act assumes two opposing aspects, appearing at times as a sacred obligation to be neglected at grave peril , at other times as a sort of criminal activity entailing perils of equal gravity” (1). Both of these aspects are evident in the worldview presented by Cabin in the Woods. The protagonists are right to regard the labworkers with disdain. And yet, the Facility is right about what will happen if the sacrifice is neglected—the Married Man will never have a baby, after all; no one will.

The secret to ritual violence is its substituting aspect: “society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim , the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it desires to protect” (Girard, 4). The desire for such a sacrifice is attributed to the gods by the people carrying it out, but Girard sees this as an (unknowing) projection of forces are actually latent within the society and would destroy it if unleashed.

Monsters, after all, aren’t just fanciful creations. As McDonald observes, “Culture and horror are inseparable; what exists at the border s of culture is horror and the monstrous.” Monsters at their root express our fears and personify the dangers that lurk without and within. Hence, there is a metaphorical level to the image of our monsters locked up in glass cages, let out only occasionally and in very specific situations. Modern society has pushed the habitual violence and danger of all previous societies to the periphery, or so we would like to think. For the majority of the modern population, violence has been ritualized in cultural artifacts like the horror genre, while the purveyors of these genres rarely do anything overtly violent or horrible themselves.

While Girard in his later work opined that the notion of ritual sacrifice was overcome through the non-sacrifice sacrifice of Christ on the cross, there is no hint of that in the film’s world (unlike, say Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where at least some trappings of Catholicism could fight off vampires). Instead, it is horror filmmaking itself which is the non-sacrifice sacrifice. No one actually dies in the making of horror films.We can't fully eliminate the darker portions of ourselves, but we can sublimate them through art.

If this interpretation is on target, then why all the hand-wringing about artistic integrity and characters exacting revenge on their manipulators? One possibility is the crassness of the commercial exploitation of such subject matter. Although the fear behind the Facility’s actions is very real, the flippancy with which they arrange and watch the deaths of the college students lacks a proper reverence for human life. But simple sobriety cannot be the whole story; after all, Whedon and Grossman have concocted a story in which they kill off characters amid laughter.

Rather, the problem comes when horror filmmaking (and art in general) fail by disrespecting their characters and choosing exploitation over good storytelling. When art fails to be art, it risks failing to perform its function, and there is a danger that the evil forces—represented in the film by the various monsters—will escape into the real world. In other words, unless violence is ritually contained in a culture, it spills forth.

This may seem a fantastically important role for art, especially “art” as flimsy as horror movies. And yet there are concrete examples. Consider that Cabin in the Woods touches on the fantastical horror genre—Friday the 13^th and Hellraiser and the like—but it doesn’t noticeably reference a related genre: the serial killer flick. There are real serial killers, and at least anecdotal evidence that they may be inspired by the fictional ones. While the film uses “redneck tortured zombie” as a stand-in for “torture porn” horror, real “torture porn” films (such as Saw) often feature non-fantastic protagonists and settings. 

But even serial killers (especially the “exotic” variety) are a periphery phenomenon, killing anywhere from 180 to 1800 people a year; it’s a terrible number to be sure, but nothing like the consistent danger faced in areas of war and failed states. It’s not true that art alone has contained our demons; it’s also true that the fantastic nature of our artistically expressed fears are the cultural expression of a society that has already used a measured amount of real violence to hold at bay a world of uncontrolled violence.

If It Walks Like a Dystopia

McDonald thinks that the film refers to actual violence in our actual society, not merely ritualistic cultural expressions about violence. “Being civilized may seem to have exorcised the real violence from our society, but perhaps that is merely a matter of definition.” I would add that it’s also a matter of perspective; the main portion of contemporary society is protected, but those on the periphery for whatever reason can be subject to dramatic forms of violence. For the average person, represented by the Married Man with his desire to have an uneventful ritual sacrifice and return to his wife and conceive a child, it is easy to forget those who might be “sacrificed” by our culture to obtain what we need.

It is interesting in this regard that the most enlightened character in The Cabin in the Woods is a Stoner, someone who uses an illicit substance. Not just any substance, but a “harmless” one that nevertheless accounts for hundreds of thousands of arrests each year. The Stoner does not merely pick up on the Facility’s surveillance; he espouses an anti-establishment philosophy that longs to reach a place, “the cabin in the woods,” where he will be free from “being globally positioned.”

Ironically, of course, the cabin is the most heavily monitored place on earth. The Facility might be reminiscent of the military, but the filmmakers seem to deliberately eschew such an interpretation by having the Married Man and Bald Guy explain to a new worker they are “not the military.” Instead, they seem more like a Homeland Security operation.

This presumed connection between the actual violence in our society and the film’s Facility is stronger if we consider it a dystopia. As a work of art offering a societal critique based on the premise of an all-controlling, perhaps secret organization that views the sacrifice of a few as necessary for the smooth functioning of society, I think it qualifies as such, and also because it fits in certain ways.

One of the motifs of dystopian literature is “the One,” the exceptional individual (typically a teenager these days) who can cut through the lies of the culture and somehow finds a way to bring the evils of that society down without destroying humanity in the process. (The other option, in classics like Brave New World and 1984, the exceptional individual finds it impossible to change anything). Despite the fact that those in control have all of the weapons and knowledge at their disposal, the plucky “One” finds a way to strike at the heart of the Power. The One is typically not the one who first develops knowledge of the Power’s deception, however—there has to be an Enlightened One whose societal critique precedes the One’s own awareness (think of Morpheus, Gail in Hunger Games, David/Zane in the Uglies triology).

The Stoner, Marty, presents himself from his first appearance as someone who sees through society’s structures. I guessed he wasn’t actually dead because, by uncovering the Power’s existence, he was too important to be killed off so quickly. He has just enough undisclosed technical knowledge to re-wire the elevator that leads to the menagerie of monsters. Meanwhile, the Good Girl has a preternatural amount of pluck, as Married Man observes: fending off a zombie, escaping from the underwater van, etc.  She’s the One in this dystopia.

And so, it is no surprise that inside the secret Facility there is an easy-to-access Big Red Button that unleashes all of the monsters at once, and that it is the Good Girl, not the Stoner, who pushes it. Furthermore, it is no surprise that the hell’s fury unleashed manages to kill all of the Facility’s security and workers but only mildly threaten our protagonists. They need to have the Confrontation with the Director who will explain to them “Why It Has to Be This Way,” which they will reject in order to overthrow the Power after facing a Classical Ethical Dilemma.

Hence, while Whedon and Goddard created something that drastically subverts the horror genre, it would seem that they’ve done so by plugging it more-or-less verbatim into another genre. Not entirely, of course—recent dystopian fiction tends to center on a female One with two potential romantic leads. We get this very briefly in Cabin in the Woods, but in good horror movie fashion the two guys are quickly dispatched. And the inexplicable ability of a protagonist to survive peril and reach the root of a situation is everywhere in Hollywood action films and not unique to dystopias (e.g., the Die Hard movies).

Where Cabin in the Woods throws the whole paradigm in question is the very end, as I said above. The Ancient Ones do rise, seemingly on the way to destroy the earth. Are the filmmakers on the side of smoking a joint and letting the world end, rather than perpetuating it through an immoral choice (shooting a friend)? Or, in the Stoner’s words, “letting society crumble and not being afraid of what happens.” As I mentioned above, most dystopias tend to end with the Power torn down but the possibility of real society taking its place; even in the classics, which ended badly, there is an implication that free society is possible, even if not likely. Here, though, everyone will probably die (and the filmmakers confirm that this total destruction was their intention). Our hope consists in:

Good Girl, “You were right…(dismissively) humanity…it’s time to give someone else a chance.”

A Pessimistic World View

The root of the difference between regular dystopia literature and Cabin in the Woods is a statement about how the world really is—on the view of the movie, those uncontrollable forces are really out there (or down there, you might say), and we can neither morally appease them nor afford not to. In the Hunger Games, there is real turmoil such as President Snow fears, but there is also real hope, at least for average people to be left alone and not have to actively participate in the evils of society. Here, though, there is no alternative.

Yet, the reference points for who those victims might be are few—marijuana users, perhaps, but surely not preppy college students, who were chosen due to the horror genre conventions and don’t seem especially connected to actual societal victims. The filmmakers could have thrown in a gay character, strengthened the ethnic identification of the characters of color, or included a Latina or otherwise tried to make a point. But perhaps the point is better made without any of these heavy-handed incursions. The point is that our society does have victims; and this we know “deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties,” that we want men like Married Man and Bald Guy in places like the Facility, and need them there, and we don’t want to know who they are sending into facilities from which those victims will never emerge or emerge broken. If that’s all the case, the filmmakers aren’t endorsing participation in that system, but they also don’t offer any other escape.

McDonald takes a more sanguine view of the ending. He traces the notion of violence from Girard to the subtler forms of violence inherent in language and attempting to understand and control the other, in Derrida and especially Levinas. For Levinas, there is a solution; stop trying to grasp the other, control them, understand them. Rather, let the other be other, and there is a chance of encounter and not merely exploitation. “The only ethical response to existence is to just “be” without violence, not unlike the behavior of the Japanese school children [who cooperated to defeat a wraith]. We must await the face of other (who is often God, for Levinas) with no hope of knowing god or subsuming her or him within our existence.” 

This is very reminiscent of the ending of the film and perhaps the message of the film; let the other, even the fictional other in our stories, be other. McDonald opins that “we, along with Marty and Dana, can determine that God will have to do his own dirty work. We can call God’s bluff. As we are waiting for the arrival of a disappointed and angry god, there is nothing precluding us from hoping that, as with Abraham , God spares us as He eventually did Isaac. (After all , we actually never see Marty and Dana die .)”

Such a positive slant would have been more possible had the filmmakers taken the advice of a Slate reviewer, who expressed the wish that “the film had ended a minute earlier, allowing the audience and the protagonists to persist in a state of ambiguity as to the ultimate meaning of” what happened. Instead, they make it pretty clear that the Ancient Ones do rise, and they do destroy our protagonists and everything else.

I don’t think Whedon and Goodard really believe they know whether, at root, humanity is a collection of powerful forces that ultimately cannot be dealt with in a moral way, or whether there is hope. Whedon has continued to explore these kinds of questions within the Marvel universe, so perhaps there is room to learn more. But within this film, for its own sake, they ought to have left the ending ambiguous; here we see the wisdom of Christopher Nolan in Inception, which simply left it to the audience to surmise the real meaning of what had happened.

Why didn’t they leave it open-ended? Perhaps it was to emphasize that, really, you should do the right thing even at the cost of the whole world, as a kind of final paper for a long-ago Ethics 101 course. But I think the real answer is simpler; the filmmakers described the film as follows: “on some level it was completely a lark.”

They didn’t give the film a morally adequate ending (or in this case, non-ending) because the ironic detachment of having an unhappy ending to such a tale of survival was too enticing to pass up. A giant hand pushing out of the earth and crushing the Cabin in the Woods is just too clever, too glib to omit from a film that is itself a condemnation of being clever and glib. And given the weight of its actual, dystopian flavored themes, it was the wrong choice. Even on the meta-level, it leaves the viewers with the message: the real problem with failed art is not its lack of respect for its own integrity, but that it just isn’t as clever as us.

I’ll only add—I don’t write too-long analyses of just any movie; this was still a fun movie to watch and to critique; they just blew it at the end. Come to think of it, if I were to ever publish a book of my thoughts on films, it could probably be titled, “The Set-up was Great, but They Blew It in the End.”