Week 4: Cabin in the Woods (2011), directed by Drew Goddard (extra credit: 1)

 So I'd heard tons of good things about this movie before watching, and I'm glad to say that it lived up to the hype, despite me not going in blind. Sigourney Weaver making an appearance at the last minute is a really sweet cherry on top too, especially since it seemed like they had every monstrous nightmare under the sun except the xenomorph, likely due to copyright issues. But Cabin in the Woods is an amazing love letter to the horror genre. 

I was actually really pleased that we start the movie with the people running the ritual instead of the group they sacrifice, as it at first gives us a mystery of 'oh who are these people and how are they going to be involved with the college kids?' that morphs into genuine interest in both groups, as we see both of them as people in high stakes situations in conflict, rather than clear-cut villains and victims despite that being exactly their respective, technical roles.

Honestly, I was also reminded a lot of the SCP Foundation when Dana and Marty managed to breach the command center. The 'Purge System' sequence really had the feel of a 'Containment Breach' within the SCP Foundation. Which is really funny to me, because the more I think about it, the more I see similarities between Cabin in the Woods and the communal writing project of the SCP Foundation. Both deal with conflicting realities of horror and mundane corporate drone work, as well as overlayering levels of 'catastrophe' and 'for the greater good.' The whole plot of Cabin in the Woods is basically a security protocol for one of the Foundation Anomalies, which is why I find it funny. Cabin in the Woods is a movie that manages to reconcile every horror trope ever into one coherent and enjoyable film, and here I am reconciling it within the scope of an entirely different work.

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