“13 acres over the centre of Hell”: The power of the cabin in the woods

By Sam Moore

Whenever Sex and the City comes up in conversation, people say - sometimes seriously, sometimes not so much - that New York is really the fifth character in the ensemble. This idea; that geography, a city, a specific location, can be so important that it merits being considered a character, isn’t exactly a new idea for horror. After all, haunted houses have populated the genre since it first began. But there’s something interesting and more niche that appears both in and out of the horror genre that carries this kind of power that verges on personhood: the cabin in the woods. The musical parody of Evil Dead that plays in Vegas opens with a song about it, the now-archetypal idea in horror of five college students on their way to an old abandoned cabin in the woods.

Drew Goddard’s 2011 satire takes the cabin and turns it into the film’s title character. By deconstructing the genre, everything from character types to monsters that populate it, Cabin in the Woods pulls back the curtain and illustrates exactly how these strange, cursed spaces work in horror films. It strips away much of the supernatural and instead shows an organisation working in the shadows, at the behest of some ancient gods, turning well-rounded people into horror stock characters, drawing them towards cursed artefacts, and reinforcing the narrative arc of slashers (as one character says, The Virgin doesn’t need to die: “What’s important is she, you know, suffers.”) In the basement of the eponymous Cabin, there are an assortment of items that summon up the monsters that will then terrorise these teens. It echoes the Necronomicon in Evil Dead, the idea that these places are a hotbed for dark magic, like the haunted houses that came before them.

The cinematic puzzle box that is Black Bear might not be a horror film, it’s a kind of arthouse thriller that’s also a comedy but also incredibly self aware. Trying to decode what it Black Bear is at any given moment is one of the joys of watching it but it exists in a similar place as films like Cabin in the Woods; it places a narrative and thematic importance on the isolated cabin where Alison (Aubrey Plaza) retreats to write - or potentially star in, as the narrative unfolds - a new film. She’s told by Gabe (Christopher Abbot), her host in the first part of the film, that “we’re kind of in our own little world up here,” with the emptiness surrounding the cabin, turning it into a kind of liminal place where reality appears to be in flux, and the lines between fact and fiction bleed into one another. No matter which of its acts the film is in - it’s divided into two distinct sections: The Bear in the Road, and The Bear By the Boat House - the cabin itself remains an imposing presence, around which the characters are forced to reorient themselves, and continually challenge a sense of self that seems to be decaying. In one scene, Gabe, his wife Blair (Sarah Gadon), and Alison are in the midst of a heated debate about the decay of traditional gender roles. The liminal space of the cabin causes these themes to echo in an interesting way; with the characters cut off, in their own little world, exactly what it is that’s “normal” or “traditional” seems uncertain. The cabin is even revealed to have been in Gabe’s family for generations, and that nobody can get rid of it; the idea that Gabe and those around him carry the presence and legacy of this cabin like a kind of albatross around their necks: the longer any character stays there, the more their sense of self appears to be in flux. The house is at once a sanctuary, and something different, something more sinister. In the early scenes where Alison wanders through the cabin, when she may or may not be writing the metafiction that dominates the film’s second section, the sounds from the outside world are loud and clear, but there’s nothing come from the house itself, literally cut off from the sounds of normal life. It occupies a strange space, both there and not, real and supernatural.

This idea of horror film cabins occupying a place simultaneously in and outside of the real world is one of the things that imbues the eponymous residence in Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left with so much strange, brutal power. One of the film’s  many  taglines emphasises this idea of the otherworldly in a normal home: “it rests on 13 acres, over the very centre of hell.” Almost a decade before Evil Dead, Craven took the idea of the “normal” house and made it a hotbed for evil and transformation. The murderous gang find themselves at the house of a well-to-do couple that just happen to be the parents of one of the girl’s that they’ve tortured and killed (a contrivance that the killers acknowledge in an interesting moment of self-awareness). The leader of the gang even has a nightmare about the two parents, dressed in surgical equipment, torturing him. The climax of the film sees a version of these nightmares becoming reality, as the once civilised parents find themselves descending into bloodlust and violence; the house not only becomes a lightning rod for evil, but also seems to carry that evil within it, as the confrontation causes people to become monsters. In a way, these cabins in the woods are like haunted houses; they carry with them some kind of otherworldly presence that has the ability to seep inside the inhabitants, challenging, or even completely changing their sense of self. The postmodernism of films like Black Bear and Cabin in the Woods are able to reveal just how these presences, so often imbued with ideas of history both ancient and modern, can take hold of people, and show the ways in which these houses can cause someone’s sense of self to be thrown into flux; from Alison’s uncertainty and moving in and out of a state of performance in Black Bear to the deliberately manufactured outside forces in Cabin that turn characters into archetypes. The houses are loaded with a presence, and often a kind of character in themselves - especially in a film like Cabin that pulls back the curtain on how these houses so often function in the genre - given a power and personhood that makes them vitally important into how these stories of horror and transformation are told. If anything, Sex and the City owes its endless “is New York the fifth character” discourse to films like Evil Dead and The Last House on the Left; here the geography is embodied, an engine for the story and the characters. Without these haunted buildings that horror endlessly returns to, the stories wouldn’t exist.

Sam Moore is a writer, artist, and editor. Their work has been published by the LA Review of Books, i-D, the BFI, and other places. They are one of the founding editors of Powder, a queer zine of art and literature.

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