3. The Whiteboard - The Cabin in the Woods
The Cabin in the Woods was absolutely not what we expected, though Joss Whedon's involvement suggested it would be anything but a generic horror film. Superbly subverting the genre by cutting between a familiar cabin slasher scenario and the goings on of a laboratory of some kind, we slowly come to learn that the events at the cabin have far more insidious, sinister implications, and that it's all part of a ritual human sacrifice to appease the Gods that watch over our world. When the nature reserve of monsters are revealed in the film's third act, that in itself would make for a much-paused moment, but the film goes one step further by briefly showing us a whiteboard that one of the administrators of the "game" (Richard Jenkins) briefly stands in front us. The various departments involved with putting the ritual together bet on which monsters the gang of teens will unlock, and a close inspection of this board reveals some hilarious easter-eggs, such as The Evil Dead's brilliant "Angry Molesting Tree". One fondly recalls how many people were avidly waiting for a screen-grab of this shot when the film came out, to savour every geeky little reference that this devilishly clever horror film presented.