We Must Discuss The Ending Of ‘The Cabin In The Woods’

In 2012, writer-director Drew Goddard, the same mind behind Cloverfield and World War Z, gave us The Cabin in the Woods. A satirical homage to campy teen horror with a twist like cold water in your face, the film took festivals by storm and eventually landed on Netflix, where it lives, seemingly permanently for now, under the “Popular” subdivide. Like any great horror flick, it grips you from the start, making its famous twist all the more shocking the first time around. It’s the ending however, that resonates more completely and secures the film’s spot in the unofficial horror hall of fame. [Warning: spoilers!]

Like Goddard’s other endeavors, which include early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, and Angel, The Cabin in the Woods is difficult to label. With a script co-written by Joss Whedon, it’s not solely horror, nor is it necessarily a thriller. It’s both, mixed with dark satire that makes us laugh out loud, then turns on a dime to make us pretty squeamish. The film knows it’s making fun of teen horror flicks, but it also praises and criticizes them, analyzing the greater meaning behind their go-to clichés and themes, which is highlighted so vividly in the ending.

Since we’re only analyzing the last act of the film, we’ll get you up to speed. Dana (Kristen Connolly), the token virgin and only survivor as we know it, is fighting for her life on the docks of the lake shore against Matthew Buckner, member of killer zombie Buckner family. The zombies were released by technicians Gary (Richard Jenkins) and Steve (Bradley Whitford) to finish the job so they could celebrate another victorious year of  torturing and sacrificing innocent people so humanity can carry on. While the technicians and staff pop champagne and watch giddily as Dana is slowly beat to death, the emergency phone rings.

The technicians learn that the job has not been finished, as Marty is still alive and kicking, rescuing Dana from the Buckners. The two escape into a grave, leading to the start of the underground facility where other creatures await. This is an unconventional play on the familiar horror movie cliché of protagonists imminently trekking towards danger rather than running away. “Where else are we going to go?” Marty explicitly asks both Dana and the audience. Touché Marty: what the hell would we do if we were running from a zombie family who is orchestrated by higher powers to kill us? Probably the same thing.

What unfolds next is an element of pure genius. Having jumped in the glass cube that used to house the Buckners, Dana and Marty are now face-to-face, literally, with their worst nightmares. From another cube, a monster equipped with saws in his skull shows Dana the ominous orb she found earlier in the cabin’s basement, and it’s suddenly clear the campers chose their fate of being tortured by the Buckners from the start.

Goddard’s and Whedon’s script plays on the same voyeurism prevalent in reality TV. “We chose…” Dana whispered, “When we were playing with that shit in the basement, they made us choose.” The producers, in this case the technicians, made sure the contestants would play with an object in the cabin (Dana read from Patience Buckner’s diary, summoning the zombies) and indirectly choose how they would die. Then came their demise: the Buckners, zombie versions of when “outsiders” slept over the shore house on Jersey Shore or when random friends crash dinner parties on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills — they’re calculated into the mix to disturb the peace.

Then came the torture porn of Dana on the docks. It’s become second nature of reality TV, horror, and even forensic dramas to sexploit their subject matter in a way that’s nearly fetishized. Dana was being tossed and thrown about like a play thing by Matthew Buckner, as the technicians cheered and celebrated, comforted by the fact that she would soon be dead. Goddard and Whedon make sure this is dramatized in the fullest, just before ripping the rug out from underneath us by bringing Marty back to temporarily save the day.

Fast forwarding to the facility: Dana and Marty manage to hide from the troops sent to kill them and press the novelty big red button, which unleashes all of the nightmares at once — a purge so-to-speak. What’s so powerful about this scene isn’t the bloodshed necessarily, or the gore for gore’s sake, but the revolutionary undertones. It becomes clear the monsters contained by the facility for entertainment purposes are fed up and all humans have become enemies, not just the contestants. In more ways than one, the monsters and the contestants share the same nightmare: being used.

Though The Cabin in the Woods was criticized for falling to the same fate as the kinds of horror films it set out to parody, the last act offers us a way of looking at the film as a criticism of fetishization and victimization. In this case, the lines of evil are blurred between the monsters and tortured, but are clearly drawn when you get to the top of the food chain: those that have orchestrated the whole ordeal are the ones to blame for the world’s demise.

 

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Photos: Lionsgate/Netflix, GIFS by Jaclyn Kessel