October, for many of us, means horror movie marathons. But did you know there’s an underrated classic waiting for you out there that rewards your years of service toiling away in the scary movie mines?
It’s true. And it’s called “The Cabin in the Woods.”
Every frame of this movie is chock-full of jokes, Easter eggs, and references to the horror classics that any self-respecting horror fan would get.
But if you’re not interested in watching your Halloween faves with a magnifying glass and a tab on your computer opened to Fangoria, we’ve got you covered.
Here are our favorite little details in “The Cabin in the Woods.”
“The Cabin in the Woods” was released on April 13, 2012. If you need a quick refresher on the plot, keep reading …
To get away for the weekend, five college students (Dana, Curt, Holden, Jules, and Marty) travel to Curt’s family cabin. Things start getting … weird … after Dana reads Latin incantations from an old diary in the basement. Specifically, zombies start attacking them.
Simultaneously, two engineers, Sitterson and Hadley, have been orchestrating these horrifying events on behalf of a shadowy organization at a site known only as the Facility, led by the Director.
Over the course of the film, it’s revealed that the Facility sacrifices five classic slasher-movie archetypes (the virgin, scholar, fool, jock, and the promiscuous one) annually to keep a group of ancient monsters, the Ancient Ones, from destroying the Earth.
Spoiler: Instead of killing her friend Marty, Dana (the “virgin”) decides to let the world end, because humanity’s not worth saving.
The Easter eggs start right at the beginning. The film’s jump-scare title-card drop is just like the one in the horror classic “Funny Games.”
In “Funny Games,” the title card comes on screen, accompanied by screaming heavy metal, right after a seemingly very normal scene of a family taking a road trip.
“Cabin’s” title card is almost the same, down to the bright-red font. It appears (along with some screams) after a mundane conversation between two Facility employees.
The movie’s title itself is a reference to the horror classic “The Evil Dead,” which follows a group of friends staying at a cabin in the woods.
In addition to the name and setting, a later reference on a whiteboard pays homage to a rather infamous scene in “Evil Dead” in which one of the five main characters is sexually assaulted by a tree.
The characters also inadvertently summon the zombies using a diary filled with Latin phrases, eerily similar to “Evil Dead’s” Necronomicon.
While most of the monsters in the film are famous mythological figures or pop-culture staples, you can see a shot of some real-life monsters, the KKK, in one of the cells.
The Facility is populated by plenty of classic monsters — you’ll learn more about them later — but in a brief shot, you can see a crew of people wearing white hoods, an obvious nod to monsters that exist in the real world: the Ku Klux Klan.
You can also see some zombies from the popular “Left 4 Dead” video game series.
“Left 4 Dead” and “Left 4 Dead 2” are popular zombie video games that were released in 2008 and 2009. It might be hard to tell in this photo, but an eagle-eyed Redditor found at least three zombies from the games in the cells of the Facility, including Boomer, the Witch, and Tank.
Director Drew Goddard shared in a Reddit thread that there were plans for a “Cabin in the Woods” downloadable level for “Left 4 Dead 2,” but money issues held up the collab.
“We were actually going to do a downloadable ‘L4D2’ pack, where you’d fight in the ‘Cabin’ world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it,” Goddard wrote. “But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background.”
The film was written by Joss Whedon, so, predictably, he threw a few nods to his work in the film, like a Reaver from his sci-fi cult classic series “Firefly.”
Whedon, the now-controversial screenwriter and director, cowrote “Cabin” with director Drew Goddard.
As a former patron saint for nerds everywhere, Whedon threw in a reference to “Firefly,” his space Western TV series. In “Firefly,” Reavers were a group of cannibalistic humans who traveled throughout space and antagonized the main characters.
A Reaver can be spotted wandering the halls of the Facility, as one Redditor pointed out.
Two of Whedon’s frequent collaborators, Amy Acker and Tom Lenk, also have small roles, while another Whedon favorite, Fran Kranz, stars.
Kranz has the biggest role of the three, as he plays one of the five college students who is targeted by the Facility. He also starred in Whedon’s series “Dollhouse” as Topher Brink.
Acker played Fred in four seasons of the “Buffy” spin-off, “Angel,” from 2001 to 2004. She also recurred on “Dollhouse,” playing Dr. Claire Saunders. In “Cabin,” she plays Wendy, a technician inside the Facility. After “Cabin,” she worked with Whedon and his brother on their series “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
Lastly, Lenk has a small (but funny) role as an intern at the Facility in “Cabin.” But fans know him best as Andrew Wells from across the “Buffy”-verse, in both “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel.”
Acker, Kranz, and Lenk also appeared in Whedon’s 2013 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
A shot of an elevator bay covered in blood is a nod to an iconic scene from “The Shining.”
The trailer for the 1980 horror classic “The Shining” is simply a long shot of an elevator opening and dousing the lobby in blood. The scene later appears in the film, too, in a shorter version.
This shot of a bay of elevators covered in blood is an obvious nod to the iconic scene.
You can also spot a pair of creepy twins holding hands, just like in “The Shining.”
One of the creepiest aspects of “The Shining” is the twins who beckon young Danny Torrance to come play with them.
Those twins are just one of the many monsters, ghosts, and ghouls held beneath the surface.
Pausing the screen during the scene with the whiteboard lets you see just how many horror Easter eggs are crammed into this movie.
We could list everything, but there are a few that we think are worth singling out.
“Deadites” is an unmistakable reference to “The Evil Dead,” Sam Raimi’s 1981 zombie classic that “Cabin” shares a very similar plot with. Deadites are the term for zombies in that franchise.
“Hell Lord” is a nod to the antagonist of the “Hellraiser” franchise, Pinhead. More on him later.
“Zombie Redneck Torture Family” could be referring to “The Hills Have Eyes,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” or, again, “The Evil Dead.”
There’s someone simply named “Kevin,” perhaps a nod to the psychological thriller “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
“The Bride” could refer to Uma Thurman’s character in “Kill Bill” and its sequel, or to the general archetype of evil brides in the horror genre, such as the Bride of Frankenstein.
There are many more names on the board, but those are some of our favorites.
Scream queen Jodelle Ferland has a small role as Patience Buckner.
Ferland is best known for her role in the 2006 film “Silent Hill,” though it’s not her only horror credit. She’d been in “They,” “The Messengers,” “Seed,” and “Case 39,” as well as the TV film version of “Carrie” before “Cabin.” She also played Bree Tanner in “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.”
All that to say, the casting of Ferland as a creepy, zombie teen was no accident.
During the scenes depicting Japan’s attempts to complete the ritual, you can spot clear references to J-horror classics like “The Ring” and “The Grudge.”
The film explains that these sacrifices take place all around the world and are created specifically to be recognizable tropes in each region.
For Japan’s sacrifice, there’s a girl who is clearly possessed by some sort of demon. She looks an awful lot like Sadako from “The Ring,” or Kayako from “The Grudge,” both Japanese horror classics. They were remade in America in the early 2000s.
In Buenos Aires, it appeared that a giant ape, à la King Kong, was poised to complete the sacrifice, but it was killed before it could do so.
Of course, this version of King Kong appears to have devil horns. Yikes.
The Stockholm feed shows what appears to be a destroyed village or research station … just like in the 1982 sci-fi horror film “The Thing.”
In “The Thing,” an alien creature takes over an American research station in Antarctica by absorbing and imitating its surroundings, after destroying a Norwegian station.
In “Cabin,” it looks like the Swedes were trying to do something similar, but instead of the Thing taking over, the Swedes destroyed the entire station themselves.
One of the Facility’s new employees was named Truman … perhaps a nod to “The Truman Show,” which focused on a man who was unaware he was being filmed, just like the main characters.
The five friends are in a remarkably similar predicament. But instead of a giant bubble that Truman eventually sails into only to exit, Curt (Chris Hemsworth) rides his motorcycle directly into a force field and is killed.
When the teens fall into the cellar, each is called to a different item. These connect to the monsters that are eventually revealed.
Zombies are summoned by Dana reading the old diary, almost exactly like how the “deadites” are summoned in “The Evil Dead” by reading the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (the Book of the Dead).
But here’s what else is lying around the cellar: The conch shell, which corresponds to the Merman we later see; a jewelry box which summons a “Pan’s Labyrinth”-esque Sugar Plum fairy (a dancing ballerina with gaping wide mouth of teeth taking up her whole face); dolls that resemble a group of people wearing scary masks like “The Strangers”; a wedding dress that must belong to the Bride; a puzzle box that will bring out the Hell Lord; and a film strip that might be another reference to “The Ring” that brings out Kevin.
There’s also a creepy antique fortune-teller machine, kind of like Zoltar in “Big.”
Sigourney Weaver’s role as the unnamed director of the unnamed corporation behind the film’s events is a cheeky nod to the “Alien” films, in which Weaver starred as Ellen Ripley.
In “Alien,” Ellen Ripley works for an unnamed mega-corporation that’s only interested in one thing: power. Ripley, in order to keep the corporation from gaining access to the deadly Aliens (aka Xenomorphs), sacrifices everything. She keeps taking them down for years and movies to come.
Even though we eventually find out the corporation’s name in the “Alien” sequels, there’s no better choice of an actor to head up another shady company whose motives are murky at best.
Some fans believe the nods to the chemistry department messing up in 1998 are referencing the 1998 film “The Faculty.”
In the first scene of the film, it’s established that the last time there was an issue with the sacrifice was in 1998, due to a “chemistry department” mix-up.
Some horror scholars believe that’s a reference to the 1998 film “The Faculty,” in which your classic hero — the pure, naive Marybeth — is actually revealed as the killer, which is a big no-no in slasher films. The final girl is instead revealed to be the rude, sexually active Delilah. Also, besides the villain, none of the five students die, which would make the ritual a failure.
The killers wearing eerie masks are reminiscent of the killers from “The Strangers.”
In “The Strangers,” released in 2008, three masked individuals break into a house and torture its occupants simply because they happened to be home — one of the scariest scenarios due to its sheer randomness.
These masked killers on the left look quite similar to the titular strangers, and they even move in silence as the strangers do.
The Hell Lord, who is credited as Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain, looks like he could be the cousin of “Hellraiser” villain Pinhead.
The characters of the “Hellraiser” franchise are terrorized by a demonic race called the Cenobites, led by one nicknamed Pinhead, whose head is … covered in pins. The Cenobites all engaged in acts of sadomasochistic mutilation like Pinhead. They are summoned by a puzzle box called the Lament Configuration.
In “Cabin,” a character that’s aptly called Fornicus, Lord of Bondage Pain, looks suspiciously like a Cenobite, down to the saw blades in his skull and the puzzle orb he carries around.
The killer clown that’s seen running rampant is referencing the most terrifying clown of all, Pennywise from “It.”
At the time of “Cabin’s” release, the definitive version of “It” was the 1990 miniseries starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown. His version is the clear aesthetic inspiration for this killer clown, who has the same hair and similar makeup.
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