The Cabin in the Woods
★★Skip itIs The Cabin in the Woods worth watching? (No spoilers)
It promises to flip the cabin-slasher genre upside down, but it gives away its twist in the first few scenes and then mostly plays out exactly like the movies it's mocking. The performances are fun. Skip it.
⚠️ Spoiler warning: everything below the quick take, including the full review and ending explained, contains spoilers.
The Cabin in the Woods review
The Cabin in the Woods promises to subvert everything you know about the classic college cabin slasher.
And it fails to deliver on that promise in every way imaginable. The "twist" on the story is revealed within the first few scenes. With the only true wow moment being at the end, when you realized that was it.
Even with that, it continues on the be everything you would expect. It is quite literally the classic slasher, but so homogenized that it's lacking any true interest.
The only saving grace is the enjoyable performances, especially from the fool and the two main office workers.
Is The Cabin in the Woods scary?
Scare level: 2/5
Mildly. It's more of a horror comedy: gory and violent in places, with a wild monster-filled finale, but it's played more for laughs and cleverness than real fear.
The Cabin in the Woods ending explained
Dana and Marty discover the cabin is controlled by a secret organization that stages horror-movie deaths. Each year, five young people fitting archetypes (the whore, the athlete, the scholar, the fool, and the virgin) must die as a ritual sacrifice to appease the Ancient Ones, gods sleeping beneath the Earth. If the ritual fails, the gods rise and destroy humanity.
The two survivors release every monster in the facility, which slaughters the staff. The Director (Sigourney Weaver) tells them that Marty, the fool, must die for the ritual to work. Dana nearly shoots him, but in the end they refuse. They share a joint as the floor cracks open, and a giant hand bursts out of the ground, signaling the end of the world.
It's a commentary on horror movies themselves: audiences (the gods) demand the same formula and deaths over and over, and the people behind the scenes (filmmakers) keep feeding them.
My take: the only real wow moment is the very end, when you realize that was it. What a disappointment.
Does The Cabin in the Woods have a post-credits scene?
No. The Cabin in the Woods has no mid-credits or post-credits scene.
Movies like The Cabin in the Woods
- Scream (1996) – the original genre-aware slasher
- Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) – a cabin-horror parody
- The Evil Dead (1981) – the cabin horror classic it's riffing on
- Ready or Not (2019) – a horror-comedy about a deadly ritual