Don't Go Back Into The House!

Alyssa Zelman

April 13^th, 2014

MDIA 1020

Section #4

Don’t’ Go Back Into The House!

            Cabin In The Woods is one of many horror movies, such as the Scream series, that tries to put a new spin on classic horror tropes. Cabin is unique because it doesn’t merely question the foolish behaviors exhibited by most protagonists in horror movies. It attempts to explain them. At the very start of the film, the audience is shown that the scenario we are about to witness is an elaborate set-up by a mysterious group of people. They are mysterious not because we as the audience do not get to peer into their lives, but because we are not immediately told the reason behind their actions. The protagonists behave as they do because they are being manipulated, not because their actions represent their true personalities.

            There are five main characters who are forced to embody five typical horror protagonist roles: the slut, the jock, the scholar, the fool and the virgin. Jules is cast as the Slut, Dana the Virgin, Marty the Fool, Curt the Athlete, and Holden the Scholar. The technicians failed at properly casting the roles. Before the five friends begin their journey to the cabin, we are given glimpses of their unaltered personalities. We are told that Dana is having sex with one of her professors, which, were she cast properly, would make her the Slut and not the Virgin. Later in the movie, we are told that Marty had an unrequited crush on Jules, which might make him the Virgin. By the end of the film, he also proves himself to be much savvier than we would expect, despite being a stoner. He might be better suited to the role of the Hero. Holden and Curt seem as though they were forced into opposite rolls, and if they had switched, the ritual might have gone as planned.

            The controllers manipulate the personalities of the characters through the use of drugs. They spray pheromone mists into the air that are designed to inhibit common sense, spike Marty’s weed (though they miss the stash that he actually takes with him on the trip to the cabin) and poison Jules’ hair dye. This is the explanation for why the characters tend to fail at the basic “fight or flight” response. The hypnotic drugs, combined with voices whispering subliminal messages to them, keep them from making wise decisions. A voice tells Marty to take a walk outside. Marty is immune to the drugs because he uses marijuana, but in his attempt to thwart the voice, he obeys it. He is aware that his friends aren’t behaving true to their personalities, but is dismissed for being high and paranoid.

            Human nature it tampered with almost immediately. The friends stop at a gas station where a creepy old man warns them about the cabin. The controllers comment something along the line of “he practically screams death, but they chose to go to the cabin anyway, it’s not our fault.” It clearly is their fault since the friends have had their inhibitions lowered by the drugs. One way or another, the controllers would have forced the friends to go to the cabin or some other horror location. Once they arrived at the cabin, common sense would tell them to explore every room to be sure nobody was occupying it. After all, even if a house isn’t haunted, some threatening person or animal could have taken residence in it while it was left alone. Common sense also should have told the friends to make sure that the place they were going had wifi so that they wouldn’t be cut off from society in case anything went wrong. I don’t believe most college students would be foolhardy enough to go to a mysterious cabin alone in the first place, at least without telling somebody where they would be in case of emergency. The characters attempt to behave realistically, such as when Curt tells them that they shouldn’t split up under any circumstances, however puff of drugged mist gets him to change his mind. Marty even comments on how dumb this seems.

            Were I one of the protagonists, I wish I could say that I would make better decisions. However, being as their decisions are being forced upon them with fixed events and drugs, I can’t believe that I would fare much better than they did. They controllers were able to convince Curt that he had a cousin that didn’t actually exist, and almost completely alter his personality from and intelligent, goofy, loveable jock, to an alpha-male jerk. But let’s pretend that the controllers didn’t exist and Cabin was a run-of-the-mill horror movie. I don’t drink or smoke, so even without the drugs of the controllers, I would have little reason for not using common sense. I am naturally paranoid so if I were say, Jules, and wanted to make out with Curt in the woods, I would probably bring keys or some other sort of weapon do defend myself with just in case. There’s no way I would let my group of friends split up, as I don’t even like walking around campus alone at night. Knowing we would be in an isolated cabin, I would ask somebody to bring flares and some other way to contact the outside world. There are dozens of precautions I could recommend the protagonists take,  but the point of Cabin is that horror movies are an elaborate ruse meant to appease dark gods, and the protagonists have very little free will, so unless I was a member of the controllers, I would be helpless.

            Cabin is a commentary on the repetitiveness of horror movies. The Ancient Ones serve as a metaphor for the audience. They delight in seeing young people die in gruesome ways, even if it means sacrificing well-developed, realistic characters and complex plot-lines, as we can see with the manipulation of the main five’s personalities. Members of the organization of controllers are stand-ins for Hollywood writers. Most of them are just doing their jobs, taking little pleasure in attempting to force the same plotlines over and over again to appease their “audience”. The controllers have no choice but to enforce horror movie tropes and make their victims make bad decisions. If anything, Jules, Curt and Holden go through a sort of reverse character development, forced into one-dimensional personalities. As great a job as Cabin did at exploring and explaining the dumb actions of horror movie protagonists, I’d really love to see a horror movie in which the protagonists aren’t manipulated into behaving foolishly, and respond as realistically as possible.