10 Things You Didn't Know About The Cabin In The Woods

5. The Film Was Sued For Plagiarism (But Not By The Makers Of Evil Dead)

A bunch of horny young people gather in a rundown remote cabin where they read from a mysterious tome and get menaced in a comedy horror fashion? Sounds a lot like another movie, doesn't it? Especially when you throw in the presence of "deadites" and an "angry molesting tree".

Of course, the seams between a parody and a rip-off can be incredibly thin, so even though most would acknowledge The Cabin In The Woods as the former, it should come as no surprise to see it the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit. It was not the makers of the Evil Dead, whose remake was beaten to the punch by Cabin, however, who chose to sue Goddard, Whedon and Lionsgate.

In fact the case was brought by novelist Peter Gallagher who claimed that Goddard and Whedon had ripped off his book The Little White Trip: A Night In The Pines. Gallagher, whose novel is also a meta-horror about a group of young people staying in a rural cabin and getting picked off one by one at the hand of unseen watchers, demanded $10 million of the movie's takings in compensation.

Ultimately, in 2015 a judge ruled against Gallagher, noting entirely accurately that "the concept of young people venturing off to such locations and being murdered by some evil force is common in horror films" and was not, therefore, protectable under copyright law; not to mention the fact that Gallagher's relatively serious book approaches the subject in a completely different style to the parodic tone of Cabin.