10 Movies You Have To Watch TWICE To Understand
7. The Cabin In The Woods
The Cabin in the Woods throws viewers quite the curveball. Its very title is a horror cliché, and the movie unabashedly embraces every other tired trope of the genre early on in its runtime. Don’t worry though, viewers. You haven’t seen anything yet.
In among the scared teens in the cabin, the knowledge that something is lurking around outside and the ‘uh oh, the lights have gone out’ sense of impending doom, something very special is brewing. The Cabin in the Woods is about to rank the rug out from under these teens’ zombie-bait feet in dramatic fashion.
The whole movie is a huge satire of all these familiar elements, opening up into pure weirdness later on. The cabin and its surroundings are contained within a forcefield, and A Buffy the Vampire-style facility awaits below (unsurprising, with Joss Whedon at the helm of this movie). There, the surviving youngsters learn the truth: they’re being used as a sacrifice to appease the vengeful ancient ones that dwell below. Instead, they decide that humankind doesn’t deserve to be saved and await their fate.
Watching again, the intercuts between the events in the cabin and the facility make much more sense, having been rather confusing and jarring before. It may be no masterpiece, but The Cabin in the Woods deserves praise for genuinely toying with conventions while still delivering all the superfluous gore that horror/comedy fans expect.