The Cabin in the Woods/Fridge

Fridge Logic:

• If they only needed sacrifices from people give or take in their 20's, why did they attack Japanese school children?
  • Its implied that each culture has a different sacrifice that they make.
  • The Director says it outright in the shooting script - "Each culture has its god to appease. As long as one sleeps, they all do.
• Some more Fridge Logic: They seem awfully sure of what they're doing. Usually, I'd expect things like this to be ruled by ironclad ancient tradition and a heaping helping of overkill, since there's only one way to find out you screwed up, and it's not a good way.
  • They do give it a heaping helping of overkill: there are dozens of similar facilities all over the world, all simultaneously running similar rituals. It's just bad luck that every single one fails this time.
• Still more Fridge Logic: Why, exactly, does the facility have a very conspicuous, easily accessed button that immediately lets out all the monsters into the facility? What possible use could this have?
  • That may not have been its intended purpose. Marty has been seen before to find glitches in their machinery. And he flipped a few switches before they pushed the button. Maybe he found a "small thermal exhaust port" of sorts. For example, maybe the button was supposed to just open some feeding hatches.
  • Maybe it was installed by contractors who, for security reasons, didn't know what was going to be in the containers.
  • Death by Irony. The controllers' job was to know and manipulate horror movie tropes. They might have had this very wiki be part of their training manuals. And yet, they ignored every single trope about putting big easily accessible red self-destruct buttons in low-security areas (or anywhere at all).
  • That might be the answer: it was a self-destruct system, designed to let the monsters wipe out anyone in the complex. Not because the controllers were Genre Blind, but because they knew they'd have to cover up what they were doing if anyone other than a party of chosen sacrifices stumbled over the site. Presumably if Curt really had returned with the National Guard, they'd have walked straight into the Carnage while the facility's staff hid out in a safe room: one they didn't have time to reach when Marty pushed the button without sounding the alarms first.
• The facility has at least one intern, who is presumably there to build his resume. That resume would be a very interesting document. How do you phrase "human sacrifice" on a resume?
  • In legalese, of course. human resources aide: assisted in termination of superfluous personnel, insuring healthy continuation of everyday business.

Fridge Brilliance

• Did anyone else wonder if Sigourney Weaver's character had ever been the Virgin?
  • What if all the women who work there had been the Virgin in their groups? Because, you know, they did those sacrifices every year...
  • Nah, just Sigourney would be better, because it'd mean that The Virgin was the last member of the controllers to die. Gotta love irony...
• Why did the Japanese ritual, known to have a perfect record, ultimately fail? It's because in this year's scenario, they attacked nine year olds. They forgot about Infant Immortality!
• When Marty "dies", the whole operation is interrupted by an earthquake, which Sitterson attributes to the enjoyment of someone "downstairs." However, it never happens when anyone else is killed because they're NOT actually happy. The earthquake comes after Hadley tells the Eldritch Abomination that "the fool" is dead when he had really survived.
• The song playing while Dana is brutally almost-killed in the background is "Roll With the Changes" by REO Speedwagon. Lyrics include "so when you're tired of the same old story/ oh, turn some pages/ I will be here when you're ready to roll with the changes." Very sneaky, Joss.
• Why did Patience pass Dana instead of killing her? The monsters still follow the "rules" of the ritual; in the beginning, the others only attacked Kurt when he tried to protect Jules, who was supposed to die first. Since Marty, the Fool, was still alive, Patience went after and tried to kill him instead of attacking the Virgin.
  • Also, because in the horror film narrative that the Redneck Zombie Torture Family would be following, if their story was a movie, Patience would have shown up towards the end to help Dana, the Final Girl, figure out how to lay the Buckners to rest. Because the usual flow of narrative (the way the ritual must unfold, as well as the plot of the Buckner's "movie") has been disrupted, Patience is irrelevant and never fulfills her role.
• Why a unicorn? Because it doesn't have to be specially trained to leave The Virgin unharmed/for last!
  • And it's probably a reference to Attack of the Killer Whatever films like Leprechaun, Night of the Lepus or MonSturd.
    • Also recent "evil fairy" movies that play it straight, like Pan's Labyrinth or Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.
  • There are also myths about man-eating unicorns...
  • Because it's FUCKING AWESOME
• In the opening scene, Hadley complains to Sitterson that his wife is over-preparing for their planned pregnancy, which has yet to occur. He says that the more prepared you are to have a child, the less likely you are to have one. Which means the only way to balance out his Crazy Prepared wife would, of course, be the end of the world.
  • In addition, it foreshadows how being Crazy Prepared will make you vulnerable to the tiniest deviations that slip through all your perfectly-crafted plans. The agency prepared for everything --except for the "ineffectual comic relief" just barely escaping what, a few inches to the side, would have been a fatal wound, which snowballed into worse and worse consequences later on.
• Why didn't the monsters attack each other in the third act? Because they could see each other in their cells and knew who wasn't human. Kind of ironic, since the reason the cells move is (probably) supposed to keep the creatures unfamiliar with their neighbors.
  • That, and the very people they're attacking have been training them to Kill All Humans for the whole of their incarceration. Even if they were natural enemies once, they're too conditioned to kill everyone in sight who'd not The Virgin to stop and fight one another.
• The entire movie revolves around a bunch of people watching a small group of designated victims die in quite horrific manners -- and doing so without the slightest hint of remorse. They even seem to enjoy manipulating the victims into dying. In essence, the film works as a critique on the morality of horror fans and horror films in general (and, on a more specific level, the morality of Torture Porn).
• The one thing I got out of the movie was, surprisingly, Humans Are Warriors. Think about it. The bad guys don't just need people to be weak--they FORCE you to be weak just to enact their scenarios. They are themselves terrified of some higher power and take it out on youngsters so they won't have to take the heat. But! In every scenario around the world, the rituals are failing. The victims are fighting back and winning. A class of nine-year-olds take down frickin' Sadako by singing! If so many people forced into a position of weakness come out strong, then the whole world being attacked by elder gods may not be quite as helpless as the conspirators believe. They'll be severely fucked up, to be sure, and I'd be surprised if there weren't zillions of casualties on humanity's side, but there IS going to be an After the End, and maybe even a World Half Full. Besides, the elder gods got sealed up in the past, SOMEHOW...
• The tunnel fails to collapse, and the demolitions expert claim it was "a power glitch from upstairs." It's easy to assume they're referring to the unseen directors, considering the controller's references to "upstairs" meaning management and "downstairs" meaning The Ancient Ones, but what it really was is Marty, who survived the zombie, found the maintainence panel, and had since been fooling around with the wires from literally upstairs!

Fridge Horror:

• One of the sacrifices has to be designated as "The Whore", and the conspiracy is willing to drug people to make them fit their archetype better. So which nine-year-old was singled out for that part?
  • Horror has always been a moralistic genre. Most horror films are content not to stray too far from the basic formula: people do something wrong and are punished for it. Different cultures, different morals. While it's logical that the American ritual should follow the tropes and morals of a slasher movie, that just wouldn't make any sense in Japan. Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl movies always have a similar theme of karmic justice, but it's a different sort of justice. What were the schoolkids being punished for? Abandonment? Bullying? We just don't see enough of the ritual to know, and whatever it was, it probably didn't even happen. But speaking of fridge horror -- those poor schoolgirls!
    • Probably none of the girls was "The Whore." In horror starring children, The Whore is usually changed to Alpha Bitch.
  • To be fair, it was brought up that the tropes and sacrifices needed change with culture; Japanese culture might value the youth of children more so than the youth of 20somethings.
    • Japanese horror tropes don't require the US horror archetypes described by this film, nor does it always need to "punish" transgressors. All it needs, more often than not, is for someone to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to find an Artifact of Doom by complete chance. The victims in The Ring, One Missed Call and The Grudge were guilty of nothing except of finding a Cursed Tape, receiving a call from the future, or walking into a house. It's a staple of J-horror that bad things WILL happen to ordinary people who don't deserve it. More than likely, the girls in the Japanese scenario were innocents, and it's the plain act of killing them horribly that would have satisfied the audience. The Fridge Brilliance lies in that the Japanese branch had a perfect record up until that point, because J-horror typically victimizes teens and adults, and it always ends badly. Having a cast composed entirely of innocent children is the reason why the ghost succumbed to the Power of Friendship and the scenario jumped genres from Horror to PG-rated Ghost Story and failed.
  • Right, but why exactly does it vary with culture? It's the same gods that have to be appeased by, apparently, only at least one of many countries/cultures trying to do the ritual. Why would they care that the ritual of each nation has to match its own views on morality? Why isn't there a constant standard? Do we need a new trope, Moral Relativist Cthulu?
    • Think of it like this: When you're hungry, you need something to eat. What it is may differ with where you are and what the chef cooks. But the Kung Pao Chicken from the Chinese restaurant has different ingredient requirements, is cooked in different ways from the American hamburger or the burrito from the Mexican food place, but they all still satiate your hunger.
      • Hmm, and if they put soy sauce on the burrito, you find it trendy and tacky. You want authentic ethnic food. So we're dealing with the hipsters of the underworld.
  • Perhaps "culture" could also be a play on "pop culture," or just modern culture in general. America likes its reality tv show-style attractive airheads; Japan likes its innocent Lolicon bait.
  • It seems to be an ancient pact. The ancient gods are referred to collectively (one gets the impression that if the Americans are appeasing a specific god with their slasher-ritual, they don't even know which one it is) and so perhaps the pact is a collective one with humanity. Or perhaps the ritual takes on the requirements that those doing the ritual think it should have (hence the virgin not needing to actually be a virgin.) Regardless, the fact that it varies with culture points to the idea that the requirements themselves are not inherently important so long as they are adhered to. Which then takes the whole scenario into a string of multiple redundant rituals, performed to ensure that the ancient gods are either fed or overfed and humanity is secure for another year.
    • The requirements themselves aren't important as long as they are adhered to? Kinda defeats the purpose of having a requirement, doesn't it?
      • I got the impression that the "requirements" were more like character archetypes than accurate descriptions of the people involved. The Virgin doesn't need to be an actual virgin but she plays the part of one for the ritual, in the same way that an actor need not share traits with the characters they play.
    • Why would that defeat the purpose? Unless Team Humanity is receiving messages from the earth or twitter updates from #Ancient Gods, the changes in the requirements seem to reflect cultural shifts. The sacrifices of old (virgin sacrifice, etc) are replaced with elaborate customs, with defined roles and even restrictions on who can die in what order. If they couldn't change the requirements over time, they might still be removing the heart and cutting off the head a la the Mayans. So if the nature of the requirement isn't set in stone, then it doesn't matter what the requirement is exactly so long as it is followed.
    • I thought we were assuming that it was the gods who imposed the requirements in the first place. If so, for them to have such a vague requirement as "kill people in some ritualistic way, we don't care which, but fuck it up and we'll destroy earth, even if you manage to kill plenty of people anyway" is a strange one indeed. If they are unchanging gods, you'd think they'd have unchanging standards. And if that's what they do, why wouldn't humanity stick to the simplest ritual possible, to ensure the continued existence of our species. And I find it hard to imagine in this world that there *wouldn't* be some sort of regular communication between humanity and the gods. Otherwise, how would we even know that the gods gave a rat's ass that we stuck to the rituals of our own culture?
    • Logic of ancient abominations aside, maybe it is a twisted version of Gods Need Prayer Badly? Only instead of prayer, it's a ritualistic sacrifice that hinges on not only the death and suffering of the sacrifices, but the belief that the ritual was carried out successfully? Maybe we do it to ourselves? Impose these requirements that we feel must be adhered to, and push some sort collective subconscious panic button if we fail to fulfill those requirements? Could probably fill a WMG page with this stuff, come to think of it.
  • Turn it around. Maybe the Ancient Ones' personal preferences are what shapes a given culture's view of what "horror" is all about! The Virgin sometimes survives the American ritual, right? So maybe enough Virgins have re-joined society with tales of escaping from zombies/doombats/aliens/whatever to feed into American notions of what a "horror story" ought to be like. This pop-culture notion of "horror" then feeds back into the ritual, as the engineers stage things to meet Americans' expectations, the better to inspire dread in the sacrifices. Same goes for other countries, if their resident Ancient Ones have different individual tastes in suffering, and their rites also include a potential survivor.
    • Unfortunately, this feedback effect would tend to make potential victims more Genre Savvy, forcing the facility to use drugs and Railroading to steer them to their deaths, despite their familiarity with horror-flick conventions. This implies that The End of the World as We Know It became inevitable, once enough of the chosen victims proved savvy enough to survive in spite of the drugs. Troping doesn't just ruin your life, it literally destroys the world!
      • Marty meets Randy!
• Here's some Fridge Logic and Fridge Horror in one: Why the need to kill either of the two survivors at all? In the facility there were ample enough kills, and surely at least a few of them fit the quota. Unless the gods could have broken out at any given midnight, and just wanted to screw with humanity and give them a false sense of hope. And that could lead to either a Hope Spot (believe it or not) or just some more Fridge Horror. With the elder gods out, this could either lead to humanity being utterly screwed or something might give us a fighting chance, it's implied at least with the Japanese school children, that All Myths Are True, and not everything in both ancient and modern myth want us dead, hell some even go out of their way to help us.
  • In order to stop the rising of the Ancient Ones, at least one of the rituals has to succeed. In this case, none of them did. Which means none of the Ancient Ones involved were appeased, so none of them are on our side. That actually turns back into Fridge Brilliance, since if one of the Ancient Ones are appeased, they would likely oppose the others if they tried to rise, so it has to be a unanimous vote.
    • So there just happens to be one Ancient One per major human country, or culture? Sounds awful convenient. What if over time a new culture, with completely different mores about youth morality, springs up? Will there be a new Ancient One that demands sacrifices from *them*? However, the "Turn it Around" idea above might solve this dilemma;
  • Why try to kill the survivors? Because it's a ritual, a modern re-enactment of a myth. The story has to end properly for the ritual to succeed.
  • I seem to remember that the creepy old man at the beginning said something about an invocation. Maybe once those words are said the five victims are somehow magically/ritually locked-in; as a result, the Ancient Ones won't accept anyone other than those five.
  • Mordecai (gas station guy) is placed there as an effective barrier that people must go through to get to the cabin. This is even lampshaded in the movie; if people go on even after their conversation with him, they clearly wanted to continue on and are traveling forth of their own volition. That is also a necessary condition; they must be unknowing volunteers, so the random [read: unintended, undesired, incidental] deaths in the facility don't qualify for the ritual.
  • Plus, the ritual is a performance, not just a procedure. Would you be satisfied if a movie showed you the same characters going through hell for an hour, then suddenly switched to scenes of some anonymous extras getting killed off, without ever wrapping up the main characters' story? The intended audience doesn't like seeing plot threads left hanging.
  • And the Director explicitly says that the tributes must be young people. All of the facility's staff that we see are too old. The chemist that we see is probably the youngest of the lot, and the actress is well over thirty.
  • No one in the facility counted because they were themselves a horror movie trope the evil Mega-corp. Subverted by the fact they were trying to save the earth but that itself was the fatal flaw. As soon as the "Ancient Ones (i.e the viewer) were made aware of them they were doomed to follow their own tropes and were defeated by the heroes.
• Could The Virgin end up being male? Or The Jock be a girl?
  • What. Of course that's a possibility.
    • It depends on whether ancient evil gods have modern attitudes about gender. So NO is a distinct possibility.
      • Especially considering the carvings of each role.
  • I would have to say that subverting the tropes likely does not work. The A.O.s want specific tropes, dammit. Inversions and subversions and other trope-play do not please them. They are not fans of irony or originality. You know, like your average ^[1] horror movie watcher.
    • Like, quite unironically, many people who watched this very film, and then proceeded to hate it for not being the typical horror movie.

1. ↑ (i.e. not hipster or geeky; in other words, not like anyone here)