let monsters come for them
the cabin in the woods has stuck in my mind for years, for reasons i was long unsure of. it's not my favourite horror movie. it's not my favourite satire, if that can be called a genre.
it's a horror movie poking fun at horror movies while also poking fun at audiences and their needs, alongside being an earnest horror movie in its own right. i don't much want to sit and wax lyrical about how the movie is 'calling audiences out', paralleling their perverse desires for blood and breasts with that of ancient, ritualistic gods who must be sated to stave off the apocalypse. that fruit is low hanging. as is that of the characters being tropes reductive as whores and virgins, even to the 'twist' of each female victim not being the archetype they are expected to be. wow, the girl chosen to be the whore is actually the virgin. très drôle. that's the whedon special. let alone the absolute surface-level reductive racism of what he seems to think japanese horror is: schoolgirls singing and dancing to defeat a sadako standin.
honestly, i think the satire aspect of the movie doesn't work too well, as it seems intent on having its cake and eating it: you can't point at how corrupt and perverse audiences are for needing sex and death while also uncritically featuring it yourself. it, unfortunately, is a similar issue to obsession, a movie that tries to make its horror about women lacking autonomy while also being unbelievably misogynistic due to its director not recognising his own latent misogyny and having its female characters not be people with autonomy in the first place. you can't just have both.
what is much simpler than the movie's attempt at a satire and meta story is its climax. after discovering that their own horror movie-esque experience has been set up and controlled by a government agency, the fool, marty, and the whore, dana, descend into a facility housing monsters from tales, films and nightmares across countries and cultures. werewolves, not-cenobites, mermen, and zombies (separate to redneck torture family zombies, to be clear), all locked up in identical cubes. only one is supposed to be inflicted on a group of victims at a time, depending on the doom they unknowingly choose for themselves, but you can't have an establishing shot of all these horrors without paying it off by letting them all loose at once.
and so, dana hits the big red 'system purge' button, following an encouraging nod from marty, both inferring there could be only one function for a button so dangerous and appealing. now is the time of monsters. nightmares unleashed from their holding cells with a bright elevator 'ding!', mutilating the faceless soldiers employed to, somehow, keep them in check. blood and viscera paints the facility's stark white walls, the camera cutting quickly between various horrific fates; eaten alive by a giant snake, face melted by acidic vomit, a simple bullet to take the easy way out. it's a beautiful massacre, and it's exactly the kind of excessive flesh and fluid that the movie attempts to question audiences for enjoying so much, while also revelling in it itself.
either way, the deaths of the many, many disposable soldiers and scientists isn't what has stayed with me. it's the retribution graned to those who inflicted all of this suffering in the first place. the lead engineers, sitterson and hadley, have been orchestrating the teens' pain and murder this whole time. they try to play it off to a confused, concerned rookie as just 'part of the job' to stave off the apocalypse, handing off their misogynistic voyeurism and gleeful murder to the unseen ancient ones, but take a visible joy in watching jules shake her tits as much as watching a zombie decapitate her. once the ritual is seemingly complete, hadley gets a few words into saying he 'was kinda rooting for her', until the offer of tequila takes his mind off of the innocent life he's taking. deep down, they enjoy their work. how else could they possibly do what they do?
the bell tolls. the monsters of the old world eventually reach the engineers' control room. the rookie sacrifices himself via grenade to take out a few zombies. sitterson just about manages to escape through a hatch leading 'downstairs'. hadley is left to an ironic fate, consumed by the very merman he so desperately wished one of the lambs would have just chosen already. despite his escape, sitterson is quickly stabbed by dana, his last words begging her to kill marty and complete the ritual. hell, marty hands her a gun to do it, encouraging her that "it's easier with this." and finally, the director: making her appearance in one last attempt to convince these two innocents to do what's right for the world, to kill one another to save it. she insists it's the only way. some innocents simply must die. the fool and the final girl refuse, and the director, the root of all this, is pushed into the swirling pit of something older in their place.
there is no ambiguity in what follows. dana and marty share a joint and a fleeting moment together before a gargantuan, molten hand rises from the earth to bring about the apocalypse.
if not implied so far, i realised that what stuck about in my head for so long was a sense of consequence. these rituals have been going on seemingly since the beginning of time, innocents sentenced to death for no reason other than it being convenient, to satiate the bloodlust of those above them, above everything. this has gone on, unbroken, for millennia. something has to change.
i am tired of watching innocent people die at the whims of those in power, innocents designated an acceptable sacrifice, a thin veneer barely hiding the joy that they take in premeditated, horrifically detailed suffering and murder. i am tired of these people facing absolutely no consequence for what they relentlessly inflict on those who did nothing to deserve it. i am tired of fascists smiling as they pull the trigger, knowing they will see no retribution.
the cabin in the woods is a cathartic film, whether it intends to be or not. i take great glee in the fiction of watching murderers 'just doing their job' get what's coming to them; screams, blood and viscera included. more than anything, i want them to suffer as much, more, than they make us suffer. i want them to die before my loved ones. i want them to get what they fucking deserve.