The Cabin in the Woods (2012) dir. Drew Goddard
Can someone add the context, please? I can’t remember it word for word.
Context: In the world of the film, horror-movie style events (i.e. a bunch of teens being murdered in a cabin in the woods by zombies) are actually a form of human sacrifice set up by various secret government organizations. If at least one of these operations succeeds, the Old Gods will be sated and won’t destroy the planet. The main plot of the film deals with the American branch’s attempt, which isn’t going too well, and this scene happens after they’ve noted that the Japanese branch has apparently never failed, before showing a bunch of schoolgirls being terrorized by a Ring-style evil ghost.
Then in this scene, we see the schoolgirls managed to seal the ghost inside a frog by holding hands and singing a Shinto prayer. This apparently happened with zero fatalities, meaning that now it’s down to the American branch to pull off the ritual and kill those teenagers.
If anyone reading this hasn’t seen “The Cabin in the Woods,” go correct that. It’s a wild movie, and the whole premise is a metaphor for horror movies as a genre.
Basically it’s a takedown of how formulaic horror movies tend to be. As it goes on, you can see the shadowy agents manipulating circumstances, and even the actions of the main characters, in order to make things play out closer to the genre cliches. Near the end, a character even breaks down the structure of the ritual and how the victims all fall into various archetypes, as well as the very specific type of person the “final girl” needs to be in order to be allowed to survive the ordeal, among other things.
The Old Gods are stand-ins for the audience, who will likely reject the movie if it isn’t what they expect to see. I once heard from someone who saw it in the theater that a couple sitting near them walked out after things started going off the rails, unwittingly demonstrating the movie’s point for it.
i enjoy that their list of horror movie badguys includes ‘unicorn’ and ‘kevin’
“Sexy witches”
“Twins”
