Cabin In The Woods Ending Explained (In Detail)


Despite releasing over a decade ago, the depth of The Cabin in the Woods‘ horror satire and the ending are still drawing discussion. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods bends the horror genre in a way that’s rarely done well, introducing a subtle but persistent satirical subtext into what seems on the surface to be a relatively simplistic slasher. The Cabin in the Woods ending leans into the subversion of the movie while delivering one of the most crowd-pleasing horror finales of all time.




Despite starting out as a seemingly mundane slasher, The Cabin in the Woods soon establishes a more sinister premise. This is also used to offset the tension of the titular cabin with more comedic scenes in the facility below, but the film’s third act sees the two combine. As the horror is quickly amped up in anticipation of the film’s final twist, it’s easy to miss some of the more nuanced elements of The Cabin in the Woods‘ ending, especially since fans still want a Cabin in the Woods sequel.


What Happens In The Cabin In The Woods’ Ending

The Heroes Learn Why They Have Been Targeted


After witnessing the brutal murder of three of their friends, Dana and Marty escape the cabin by using an access hatch that leads to the facility below. Here they meet The Cabin in the Woods‘ many monsters, realizing that they were made to choose the creatures that stalked and murdered their friends. After setting the monsters free to wreak havoc on the facility, Dana and Marty delve deeper, finding themselves in a stone ritual chamber.

It’s here that they learn the true meaning of the night’s events: they were selected as part of an annual sacrifice to the Ancient Ones, powerful malevolent beings that threaten to reclaim the Earth if their yearly sacrifice isn’t offered. After finding out they’re the last hope for the sacrifice to be completed, Marty refuses to die to save the Earth, and through his inaction, allows the Ancient Ones to rise. This leads to the film’s final shot – a colossal inhuman hand breaking through the Earth’s crust.


The Cabin In The Woods’ Ritual Explained

The Ritual Explains Horror Clichés

After spending much of the film being stalked by The Cabin in the Woods‘ Buckner family, Dana and Marty finally uncover the nature of the ritual they’ve unwittingly become a part of. In order to appease the Ancient Ones, each year a sacrifice must be made of at least five innocents. Sigourney Weaver’s Director explains that the ritual is different all over the world, but youth is key, and that the US ritual involves teenagers of certain archetypes – the Athlete, the Whore, the Scholar, the Fool, and the Virgin – and that they must be punished for their “transgressions.”

While The Cabin in the Woods doesn’t largely explore the nature of other countries’ rituals, the monitors seen around the facility indicate that they follow slightly different cultural rules, seemingly based on other horror sub-genres (J-Horror in Japan, Kaiju in Argentina, and disaster movies in Sweden).


The ritual is shown to be at the very core of
Cabin in the Woods
‘ story, influencing the Organization to control their victims’ every move in order to ensure the Ancient Ones are appeased.

This uses the ritual as a way of connecting Cabin in the Woods to other horror movies by asserting that the rules may change, but the ritual is the reason for various common tropes. The ritual is shown to be at the very core of Cabin in the Woods‘ story, influencing the Organization to control their victims’ every move in order to ensure the Ancient Ones are appeased.

Will The Ancient Ones Destroy The Earth?

Humanity Could Live On But In A Living Hell

The Ancient One's hand coming out of the ground at the end of The Cabin in the Woods


The Ancient Ones being unleashed in the film’s final moments (as well as Dana and Marty’s comments about the need to wipe the slate clean) indicate that the failure of the ritual will ultimately mean the destruction of human society. This is something that The Cabin in the Woods foreshadows in its first few scenes, although the film’s ending leaves humanity’s ultimate fate ambiguous. While the giant hand of the emerging Ancient One seems to be a bad sign, it doesn’t necessarily mean the destruction of Earth.

Since The Cabin in the Woods 2 didn’t happen, the specifics of the film’s aftermath have yet to be explored, but the nature of the ritual itself offers some indication as to what the Ancient Ones might do. The idea that mankind has spent millennia appeasing the Ancient Ones with rituals implies that their most likely course of action would be some form of subjugation of the human race, not outright destruction.


Ritual sacrifice having played a part in their prolonged dormancy implies a connection to humanity that would most likely see humans enslaved by the Ancient Ones as opposed to exterminated, meaning that the Earth would most likely continue, albeit in a very different way.

The Cabin In The Woods’ Horror Satire Explained

The Movie Embraces And Pokes Fun At The Genre’s Overused Ideas

The film’s status as a satirical take on the horror genre is evident, but Cabin in the Woods‘ horror movie Easter Eggs take its links to the genre to impressive heights. As the film starts with a basic horror movie set-up before elaborating on it with the reveal that this has been achieved by design, it takes the most common tropes of the genre and gently dismantles them.

The Cabin in the Woods
‘ satire of the horror genre is achieved while simultaneously leaning into the same tropes


This is the film’s biggest running theme, as it dissects many of the core ideas behind slasher movies and injects them into a story with a bigger, more supernatural threat that effectively paints the teenagers’ will to live as the biggest obstacle mankind must overcome. The Cabin in the Woods‘ satire of the horror genre is achieved while simultaneously leaning into the same tropes.

The Cabin in the Woods Monster

Parody Of

Alien Beast

Alien (1979)

Clown

It (1990)

Hell Lord

Hellraiser (1987)

Deadites

The Evil Dead (1978)

Dolls

The Strangers (2008)

Zombie Redneck Torture Family

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Twins

The Shining (1980)


This makes the film’s use of various recognizable horror villains – including “The Hell Lord” (a Hellraiser reference), zombies, werewolves, and a clown strikingly similar to Tim Curry’s Pennywise – all the more transparent as clear riffing on the narrative overkill employed by many of its contemporaries. By turning its protagonists’ will to live into the real threat, The Cabin in the Woods uses its satire to flip the audiences’ expectations while posing an interesting ethical existential question.

The Real Meaning Of The Cabin In The Woods’ Ending

Joss Whedon And Drew Goddard Challenge The Limiting Nature Of The Horror Genre

A bloody Dana and Marty in The Cabin in the Woods


As the film is a clear satire of the horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods‘ Ancient Ones could be interpreted as a stand-in for the average horror movie audience. By sticking to the established tropes of the genre, the Ancient Ones/audience are kept happy, but deviation from these expectations proves to be ill-advised. By having the film end with the failure of the ritual and the rising of the Ancient Ones, The Cabin in the Woods leaves no survivors, indicating that deviation from the norm leads to a reaction which means that no one gets the preferred outcome.

On a deeper level, this appears to be an expression of the frustration that comes from the limitations of the genre. Asserting that these archetypes exist as part of some ancient order that perhaps needs to be challenged, The Cabin in the Woods’ ending protests the paradoxical nature of horror movies – audiences ultimately want to see something new that still feels like something familiar. By having The Cabin in the Woods end with a worst-case scenario, the film implies that these expectations set up both audiences and filmmakers for disappointment.


How The Cabin In The Woods Ending Was Received

The Movie Received Acclaim But Critics Were Split On The Ending

Before the era of “elevated horror movies” that has seen the genre get genuine critical praise, The Cabin in the Woods was a standout horror film that earned strong reviews. Audiences embraced the fun of the movie and were especially excited about the ending, but critics were a little more mixed on the way the story was wrapped up. Some critics felt that The Cabin in the Woods was attempting to satirize cliché horror movies while being one itself, as David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter suggested:

In order to subvert any popular form, entertainment first has to work on its own terms. Goddard and Whedon are too busy geeking out to bother with those requirements.


Other critics were on board with the film overall but felt that the unsubtle ending robbed the movie of some of its cleverness. Dana Stevens of Slate felt that The Cabin in the Woods could have left the audience with a little more to question instead of explaining so much and leaving it on such a definitive note in the final act:

I also wish the film had ended a minute earlier, allowing the audience and the protagonists to persist in a state of ambiguity as to the ultimate meaning of … well, the undisclosable things that the story is about.

However, there were also critics who defended these aspects of the movie, insisting that the way in which The Cabin in the Woods embraces the horror genre is quickly subverted at the end with commentary that poses questions directly to the audience and their role in such stories. Olivia Armstrong of The Decider offered:


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.

The Cabin in the Woods strictly follows the traditional slasher movie dynamic: a group of teens heads to a remote location for the weekend only to find themselves beset by monsters. However, what they don’t know is that the inevitable horrors they will face have all been arranged by a mysterious team watching from a facility deep underground.

Director
Drew Goddard

Release Date
April 13, 2012

Cast
Richard Jenkins , Fran Kranz , Chris Hemsworth , Bradley Whitford , Kristen Connolly

Runtime
95 minutes

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