10 Twisted Facts About “The Cabin in the Woods”

Scott Beggs and Mental Floss present 10 Twisted Facts About The Cabin in the Woods.   If you haven’t seen The Cabin in the Woods, you’re in for a treat.  It is one of the most unusual horror films in recent years.  I loved how it was able to hit all of the expected genre cliches in a totally unexpected way.  With that said, here are three of my favorite Twisted Facts About The Cabin in the Woods.

1. THE OPENING SCENE WAS MEANT TO CONFUSE AUDIENCES.
“Opening the movie with this scene is one of my favorite things that we accomplished,” co-writer/producer Joss Whedon said in the DVD commentary about the early sequence where Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins chit-chat in a hallway about childproofing cabinets and an office betting pool. They purposefully wanted people to think they’d sat down for the wrong movie and had to convince the studio that people wouldn’t walk out.

5. DREW GODDARD AND JOSS WHEDON MADE IT AS A “LOVING HATE LETTER.”
The reason The Cabin in the Woods works for horror fans and non-fans alike is that it hews closely to the classic rules for the genre to deliver the scares, but also mocks them mercilessly. Whedon saw it as both an exercise in how much fun they could have (they wrote it over a single weekend) and as a serious critique of a genre they loved that had descended under a wave of needless torture and stupid characters crafted solely to be killed in terrible ways.

8. THE FULL LIST OF MONSTERS INCLUDES A NOD TO SIN CITY.

There are too many baddies to name here (so here’s a list), but among the witches, sexy witches, mermen, and unicorns, there’s Kevin. He’s a kind-seeming dude who might show you where the movie section is in Best Buy but dismembers people during his time off. It’s possible that he’s a reference to the relaxed, quietly sadistic slasher played by Elijah Wood in the movie version of Sin City.