If you have NOT seen Cabin in the Woods, DON’T read any further — it’s one of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen, and you’ll ruin the experience if you know much about it.
It’s a movie that any Lovecraft fan will absolutely love. So stop reading this, go see the movie, then come back here to discuss.
Seriously. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading. This is NOT a spoiler-free thread!
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DUDE. Really. Stop reading this if you have not seen the movie!
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OK, you’ve been warned!
If you HAVE seen Cabin in the Woods, then you know just how Lovecraftian it is. Lovecraft eZine readers kept emailing me to tell me that I needed to see it, so I went yesterday.
Well, I haven’t been this happy with a horror movie in years. After seeing the sacrifice pictures in the opening credits, and then the first scene with the bureaucrats, I had some idea of what was coming. So at that point I kept thinking, “I hope they do this right!”, and man, did they ever.
I’ll have more to say, but the bottom line is that this was a Lovecraftian movie, through and through, and DAMN, did they ever do it right. I loved how the world ended because the “nerd” didn’t feel that humanity was worth saving.
I’ll have more to say, but first, tell me what you thought of the movie. Comment below!
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Ha ha. I just saw it last night and I couldn’t agree more! I just can’t wait for the (never to happen) sequel of us all living as slaves/food for the ones below!
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The “merman” was FOR SURE a Deep One!
I was hoping it’d be Cthulhu at the end, too.
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Sawhead: pinhead with SAWs in his head. great tribute
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What is implied, is that the ancient ones thrived on the psychic energy of fear released by the victims as well as their demise, and that the gods enjoyed slumbering while having nightmares WITHIN nightmares.
Another premise of this movie, is that if we all too often fit stereotypical molds, it would raise our odds of being sacrificial fodder for mass consumption.
Another view of the movie could be that society, especially now, participates in mechanical sacrifices of lives (war, etc..) in order to “maintain our way of life as we know it.” So mechanical and contrived, that it seems ritualistic.
Also, if we are driven by fear induced by outside forces that show us “what nightmares are made of” we eventually get on the conveyor belt of worldly doom faster than anyone else. And if we look beyond the artificially induced fear that society constantly shows us, if we transcend that knee-jerk reaction of fear through “thinking outside the box” or being counter culture (as represented by pot and the pothead immune to outside manipulation, we might stand a chance. Awesome movie. Lovecraftian.
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I followed the advice to know as little as possible about this movie before going to see it. I avoided reviews (except to see that the consensus was positive) and wouldn’t even read articles about it that promised “no spoilers.” And what did I get in return? One of the most enjoyable, surprising, and yes, Lovecraftian experiences a moviegoer could have. Just A+ on everything with this movie. I also thought a tentacle would have been better at the end, but actually, that might have been too specific — the hand stood in for any (or all) of the Old Ones, and got the Lovecraftian point across perfectly.
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At the end when Sigourney Weaver’s character falls in the pit I thought that she would’ve replaced the “fool” to be sacrificed, and that the ending would’ve shown the last 2 survivors realizing that they didn’t want the world to end and somehow continuing the rituals a year later. Or somehow that the film would’ve gone ultra-meta. Could’ve left room for a sequel.
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Does anyone know what the symbol on the floor of the platform in the Ancient Ones crypt was? Was it an original made-up symbol, or does it actually exist? I feel like I have seen it before, but can’t quite place my finger on it.
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does anyone know the song that’s played when marty rolls up in his car smoking weed?
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I think the reason they went with a hand at the end instead of a tentacle was to recapitulate the zombie hands that came up out of the ground earlier. Sort of a visual callback gag. Also a subtle put-down of horror movie tropes and cliches — “This is seriously the most original thing we could think of for the end of the world: giant zombies!”
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Saw it last night. Loved it. Going again with more friends tonight. The only criticism I have has already been stated by several others….would have loved a tentacle instead of a hand at the end!
Thought Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford were spot-on.
“Cleanse them. Cleanse the world of their ignorance and sin. Bathe them in the crimson of – Am I on speakerphone?”
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Hubby & I just came back from seeing it. I almost knew the outcome but NOT from the Lovecraft– from the Whedon. For my birthday last fall, I got the DVD sets of Buffy & Angel. Which I watched, pretty much back-to-back, after getting ill over the winter. The Lovecraft is pretty much all over those series– from the high-school swim team turning into fishmen to the reanimated jocks to the Old Ones waiting to awaken and take back the world from the human scourge. Amy Acker actually played an awakened Old One in the final season of Angel– after her character was “absorbed”. Those ideas aside, many of the Whedon themes from those shows– the ones that stood out were certainly inspired by Lovecraft. Those were the backbone of this movie. And, honestly, who would NOT like a movie with a collapsible, coffee-mug bong? I’ll have to write something up more formally & send it in. ~Jessie
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I’m actually alright with the hand of the god at the end, as opposed to some other appendage. Tentacles do not necessarily make a Lovecraftian film, although they do help! But maybe they’ve been overused in horror films recently (Hellboy, The Mist, etc) and we must also take into account that all things HP-helLish are more present in the popular culture.
For this reason, I’m thinking that Whedon and Goddard made a conscious choice for the Hand v. the Tentacle in this case, in order to throw off nay-sayers who’d lazy-critique with “meh, it’s just a crap Lovecraft film again” and also to pay homage to the Crawling Chaos (so brilliantly invoked in its Million Forms during the 3rd act prison break scene): Nyarlathotep smiles upon ‘The Cabin In The Woods’ and gives it a glorious high-5 in the final seconds before the credits roll! That’s His hand, of this I am reasonably sure.
Anyhoo, I’ve got a review coming up here on the eZine, once Mike approves it. More of my drivel on there!
BEST FILM OF THE YEAR!
Scott
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Didn’t need to see a tentacle to know HPL was in the house. (After all, Cthulhu is only one of many.) As both a Whedonist and a die-hard HPL fan, I got such a happy from this movie. Can’t wait to see it again to take in all the details I know got past me in a giddy rush. Stupendous fun.
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I’m wondering though, about the way things kept going wrong, like the cave-in. They sort of pointed you towards Truman, the guy who always seemed upset at what was going on as a possible sabotager, but then nothing ever came out of it. And then the weed actually immunizing Marty the stoner dude, which they never explained as well. Would have liked to see maybe Truman turn out to be one of the Masks of Nyarlathotep, but that would have taken away from Marty deciding to end the world I think.
The arm did look like Krono’s, and was actually the weakest part of the movie for me.
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I agree, I thought he was going to be the guy bringing them down from the inside.
The scariest thing for me was coming out of the movie into the Orleans casino in vegas and seeing the tragedy that is human life.
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Actually, Amy Acker’s character mentions (cery quickly, as the s&$@ is hitting the fan) that Marty is smoking from a stash they didn’t know about. The weed didn’t make him immune, he just wasn’t dipping into tainted pot.
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“Whatever he’s been smoking has been immunizing him to all our shit.” The fact that not only had Marty avoided their treated weed, but that the stash he was smoking made him resist their stuff makes me think they were destined to fail. The electrical glitch coming from “upstairs” has a whole other meaning when taken in this light.
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Oh and we did love the movie, btw. A tentacle would have been awesome too!!
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Im just wondering if the 5 archetypes shown in the movie were only for our the U.S. because if so, why were they showing a room full of little girls in Japan. And more than 5. Was one of them really a pot head fool, athlete and so on.
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The Director (Sigourney Weaver) said that the criteria was different for each culture, that the only common denominator they all shared was youth. We don’t know what Japan’s other criteria was.
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I’ll have to wait and decide if I like this better than In the Mouth of Madness or Evil Dead 2–and there’s probably some other films that rank up there as my favorite smart (and funny) horror flicks–but I loved it. It seemed a work of great affection for horror in general, but a repudiation of the ‘titillate and torture’ school of horror cinema. Loved the unicorn and the speakerphone and the other either bizarre elements or nods to other horror movies. I kept laughing all day yesterday (the wife: ‘why are you laughing?’) because I kept thinking of the first scene the stoner enters, car filled with smoke and collapsible bong stuck up to his face. If I could get one weird movie this smart each year, I’d be happy. CGI was mostly cheap looking (I hate CGI, generally) and–yeah–it should have been a tentacle. Joe moviegoer would not have understood, so they went with the hand. It’s still Lovecraftian to the core. OH, the scene when the bureaucrat is f-bombing the Japanese girls as they triumph against the Japanese viral horror possession girl. Yeah. So much to love in this movie. I’ll just stop here. 🙂
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Love the way it tweaked horror movie cliches, and the presence of ‘Ancient Ones’ was an unexpected, pleasant surprise. (http://movieink.net/2012/04/12/movie-review-the-cabin-in-the-woods/)
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Just saw it and loved it. Lots of fun shout outs to other films, a great walk on towards the end and some great, bloody fun. But it’s obvious Whedon still holds some anger towards horror fans. Still, to craft such a great film from his feelings towards horror fans is terrific. Solid work and one I’ll be adding to my collection.
And yea, it should have been a tentacle.
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Tolja. [in that other comment section] Yes, it would have been much cooler if it had been a tentacle at the end [in fact that’s what I was expecting], if for no other reason than that arm looked too much like Kronos’ from the Awful Wrath of the Titans.
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I wonder, with the arm, if we can consider the movie Lovecraftian. It would seem the arm means the ancient ones are more like the Titans of mythology than the Great Old Ones.
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It is quite lovecraftian. Lovecraft has a myriad of higher and lower gods that have human-like anatomies though gigantic..
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I leaned over to my friend and said, “just think: somewhere in there, a mer-man is pathetically suffocating on the floor.” Then the mer-man showed up.
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Simply put, I think this film is fantastic and a must-see for anyone with an appreciation for horror movies.
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It was cool to see “Deadites” as one of the options on the whiteboard.
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Yeah, hand was stupid and the CGI was iffy in spots.
I did enjoy the movie, but enjoyed watching the people in control much more than the mostly-forgettable victims and horrors. I say, mostly-forgettable, because some of the monsters were damn cool. Loved the homage to Hellraiser and the bat-creature. I was rooting for control rather than the Final Girl/Guy, but enjoyed the fact they gave you a reason to root for the “bad-guys” outside of sadism.
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I absolutely loved it (should have been a tentacle, agreed) but my wife hated it and now she’s mad at me for taking her to see it. I’m kind of surprised because she’s a horror film aficionado.
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It was just so smart-the references to the great films that came before it were fabulous- and incredibly funny. Pure meta-horror. And the hand smashing the cabin and the end. I feel bad for the next poor schmuck who tries to pull off the 5 kids in a cabin horror story. Pure brilliance.
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I agree with Reber. I loved it but… they should have had a tentacle instead of a hand!
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I loved it. BUT!!!…(it should have been a tentacle!)
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I loved it too and thought the same thing at the end. Where’s the tentacle!? Still loved it!
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Man, you said it Mike! Went to see it yesterday with my girlfriend and it was an absolute blast! The mixture of cthonic ritualism with a great sense of dark comedy and the fresh perspective on the iconic roles of the “victims” made for one heck of a good watch.
Highly recommended!
-D
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Instant classic.
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