The Cabin in the Woods: Every Horror Reference and Monster Hiding in the Film

The Cabin in the Woods parodies and references so many horror movies that if you caught every one when it first came out, I think it's safe to say you're a horror expert. I've seen it dozens of times, read the script, scoured the wiki and gone through the Blu-ray and DVD special features, and I'm doing my best to point out every horror movie and character it pays homage to, from Pennywise to Anaconda.

I grew up in a small town with an old theater that played 1950s B horror movies every weekend, and my friends and I went to see every one of them. That nerdy horror upbringing finally pays off here.

The Cabin in the Woods took three days to write and three years to reach theaters

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard co-wrote the film. They had worked together on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and they're obviously huge fans of the genre. Whedon produced and Goddard directed, in his directorial debut. The script took only three days, but financial difficulties, including MGM filing for bankruptcy midway through, meant three years passed before audiences saw it.

The budget was around $30 million, and the film eventually grossed around $70 million. Early reviews were mixed and even a little confused, but over the years the movie took its rightful place in horror history.

The facility stages horror tropes to please the Ancient Ones

The premise is basically that the horror movies we've been seeing are real, and they're formulaic because a facility of puppet masters engineers the scenarios to please the Ancient Ones. The Ancient Ones stand in for us, the audience that enjoys seeing teenagers tortured in specific, familiar ways. Facilities around the world follow the formulas of their own countries' horror movies, and the director, played by Sigourney Weaver, lays the tropes out at the end. Goddard and Whedon said they didn't want to do the same old horror movie thing, but they wanted to honor all the same old horror movie things.

The film opens on facility workers Gary Sitterson and Steve Hadley, played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, having a mundane work conversation so the audience might wonder if they'd walked into the wrong movie. It follows that with a teenage girl dancing in her underwear, a very stereotypical horror move. The movie introduces a trope and then subverts it: Curt, played by Chris Hemsworth, is the jock, but before the chemicals kick in he's an educated women's studies student. Jules, played by Anna Hutchison, isn't actually blonde, and Dana, played by Kristen Connolly, isn't a virgin.

Five partying archetypes picked off until the final girl remains is a common trope, as is the harbinger, whose warning is pretty much a direct parody of Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th. The cabin and its low angle intro shot match The Evil Dead, which the film borrows from a lot: the cellar door slamming open, the whispering voices, the destroyed bridge and the tree. The RV is a nod to The Hills Have Eyes, and a zombie family member's head tilt on the dock references the head tilt of Michael Myers and Jason. Marty's line "We're not who we are" comes from The X-Files season 1 episode Ice, which was itself an homage to The Thing.

Japan's perfect record and the borrowed clips on the world monitors

Japan has a perfect record for the ritual, with North America second, a nod to Japanese and American horror being the most popular formulas at the time. Whedon said he loves Japanese horror, and he directed the Japan sequence himself. It's set in Kyoto, and the script describes a Japanese floating drowned girl, obviously a nod to Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge.

Whedon said they couldn't afford new material for the other monitors, so they repurposed clips from other movies. Stockholm is a clip from 1997's Dante's Peak showing a destroyed research facility in the snow, likely a nod to John Carpenter's The Thing. That was set in the Antarctic, but Kurt Russell's character keeps calling the Norwegians the Swedes, so it's a fun little joke, and that movie also ends with the station blown up.

Berlin failed with a burning estate. This could be a nod to Suspiria, since the remake was set in Berlin and the original ended with the academy burned down, or to 1922's Nosferatu, with the sacrifices escaping by setting the vampire's home on fire. Rangoon, Myanmar, shows a helicopter over a village, actually a clip from 1998's Godzilla; my best guess is a Predator style situation, since that movie ends with a military helicopter flying away. Buenos Aires shows a horned figure in the same fallen pose as King Kong, and Madrid shows a burning castle. I've seen theories online that it's a vampire homage, so it could be something like the Spanish language Dracula from 1931.

The '98 glitch may point to The Faculty, though it's never been confirmed

Sitterson and Hadley tell Dr. Lin they haven't had a glitch since '98, and that time it was the chem department's fault. A popular fan theory says this nods to 1998's The Faculty, whose students were similar archetypes and used chemistry to defeat the aliens, with a kind of drugs can save you lesson. None of those archetypes died, so it would definitely have been a failed ritual. I love this theory and it definitely fits, but it's never been confirmed by Goddard or Whedon.

The whiteboard's classic monsters, from the werewolf to the clown

The creatures are archetypes, so my examples aren't exhaustive. Goddard and Whedon said that with the exception of one creature, they weren't directly parodying any one thing. Monsters show up on the whiteboard, in the glass elevator cubes and during the purge, and Goddard's rule was that anything that could be done practically would be, so there are tons of puppets, prosthetics and scale models.

The werewolf, finance's bet, appears everywhere and mauls Dana. Lon Chaney Jr. starred in The Wolf Man in 1941, but this design looks more like an homage to 1981's An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. Biomed's alien beast is described in the script as a Giger-esque alien hanging from the ceiling, after the designer of the Alien xenomorph. We see it for a split second jumping on a guard's face. Also, casting Sigourney Weaver was a stroke of genius.

Demolition's mutants, in orange suits and hazmat gloves, nod to The Hills Have Eyes and The Toxic Avenger. The wraith, the smoky ghost man, looks like something from Ghostbusters or The Fog. Chem's zombies are slow moving, like Night of the Living Dead. Reptilius is, I'm pretty sure, on a monitor during the purge and nods to Creature from the Black Lagoon and 1961's Reptilicus, which my buddy dressed up as one Halloween.

Electrical's clown is an obvious nod to Pennywise, and bullets have no effect on it. It's played, uncredited, by movement coordinator Terry Notary, who taught the creature actors how to move. Goddard and Whedon wanted every cellar object to link to a creature in act three, and the production designer made sure each prop would summon one. The fortune telling machine was the clown's, and it was so pricey to ship that they found extra money because Whedon insisted everything be linked.

Hell Lord is the one creature that's an overt homage

Operations bet on witches and archives on sexy witches. The witch looks like a typical hag, like Haggis from 1988's Pumpkinhead. I don't think we see the sexy witches, but they'd be like Practical Magic or The Witches of Eastwick. Nobody bet on demons and we don't see them; the demon looking creatures in the purge are identified in the special features as goblins.

Sitterson's Hell Lord is the creature Goddard and Whedon called the most overt nod: a Hellraiser Cenobite, Pinhead style, summoned by the puzzle box Curt plays with, just as the Lament Configuration summons the Cenobites. His real title is Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain, and I assume he has such sights to show you.

The Wranglers' tree is an obvious nod to Evil Dead, grabbing a guard in the first round of doors opening. Internal logistics' giant snake makes me think of Anaconda first. It was one of the CGI additions, because the location was bigger than expected and the team had to fill things out, and some purge creatures were built from remnants of other costumes. The story department's deadites are Evil Dead creatures, possessed, reanimated and fast, with one running down a hall.

Kevin, the mummy and the bride stay mostly offscreen

Nobody picked Kevin, and I don't think we see him. In the novelization he sounds like a normal human serial killer. I've seen theories tying him to We Need to Talk About Kevin, but both films premiered in December 2011 and Cabin was in the works for three years, so I don't know how likely that is. More likely he's a Hannibal Lecter type. There's a rumor that the film reel Marty examined would have summoned him, and a tarp covered man with a sledgehammer looks very Patrick Bateman, so it's possible that's Kevin.

Psychology's mummy was shot for the purge but cut from the theatrical release. Like the werewolf, it's a classic monster, played by Boris Karloff, and there's apparently a ceremonial dagger in the cellar to summon him, though I had a hard time spotting it. Digital analysis bet on the bride, probably a Bride of Frankenstein style monster summoned by the necklace Jules almost put on.

Scarecrows, a dragon bat and the Sugar Plum Fairy

Data archives' scarecrow folk kill Truman, who blows them up with a grenade, and their design is really cool. They remind me most of the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, and maybe the straw in the cellar summons them. Communications picked the snowman, a nod to the campy Jack Frost, which never appears as far as I can tell.

Nobody bet on the dragon bat, but it plays a big role. The script has it smash through the control room glass and start unfurling. Goddard said they almost cut it, assuming they lacked the budget, but effects pulled it off in CGI. It kind of looks like a nod to 1990's Graveyard Shift. Distribution's vampire resembles Nosferatu more than Bela Lugosi's Dracula, and nobody bet on the dismemberment goblins, who even drive a golf cart and honestly seem like a fun time.

Nobody bet on the Sugar Plum Fairy either, even though she's terrifying. The ballerina music box Holden examined would have summoned her if its song had finished. She seems to be a mashup with a Guillermo del Toro vibe, alongside ballerina films Black Swan and Suspiria and the tooth fairy of Darkness Falls, and her design might have inspired games like Phasmophobia and Don't Be Afraid.

The merman is my favorite recurring bit

Hadley bets on the merman, summoned if Curt had blown into the conch. It was done practically, with fake blood pumped through the blowhole, and Bradley Whitford's performance as it crawls toward him is just perfection. Like Reptilius, it's Creature from the Black Lagoon inspired. Administration's reanimated nod to 1985's Re-Animator and Lovecraft's Herbert West stories.

Engineering's unicorn stabs a man with its horn and links to a tapestry in the cellar. It isn't a direct homage to anything: Whedon saw Goddard in a convention shirt showing a unicorn facing a werewolf with the words "It's on now," and knew they had to write together and include both. A tribal drum would have summoned R&D's pick, and one of the filmmakers has said he was inspired by the fear white settlers had of the Native population.

Sasquatch, Wendigo and Yeti share a line, presumably as one creature, glimpsed attacking a worker in the locker room. Kitchen staff's dolls aren't haunted dolls like Chucky; they're most similar to the masked villains of The Strangers, and I'm not sure whether a mask or the porcelain dolls summon them. Accounting's doctors give me Dr. Giggles vibes.

The Buckners win, and the twins close out the board

Maintenance and Ronald the intern win with Zombie Redneck Torture Family, the Buckners, summoned when Dana reads Patience Buckner's journal aloud, another Evil Dead nod. They're basically a zombie version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family. Patience is played by Jodelle Ferland, the girl in 2006's Silent Hill.

Security's Jack O'Lantern evokes Jack Skellington, Pumpkinhead and Sam from Trick 'r Treat, and he spits fire. I don't think Zoology's giant shows up in the released version of the film, but in the behind the scenes footage he's in one of the cubes, created by placing a tall man in a smaller cube. The twins nod to the Grady twins from The Shining, summoned by stuffed bears. The board isn't exhaustive: when a bet comes in, Sitterson says "I'm not sure we have one of those," and is told "Zoology swears we do."

The cubes hide giant bugs, Left 4 Dead monsters and many more

Goddard said in a Q&A that other facilities have their own cubes, so there are tons we never see. Giant bugs, from a tarantula to centipedes, nod to radiation fears in films like Them and Tarantula. There are rabid dogs nodding to Cujo, Klansmen nodding to how rampant racism and racist characters are in horror movies, something 1995's Tales from the Hood called out, kraken tentacles that lift Lin, and a bull skull creature I'd love to be a nod to Demon Wind.

There's a blob, a scorpion like killer robot, a popular horror trope whose example I rewatch every year is 1986's Chopping Mall, an Audrey II style plant, a giant woman like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, a Cyclops, an alligator honoring Alligator, birds from The Birds, a face peeler, leeches, a worm, a floating head belonging to lead creature creator Dave Anderson, and a troll. A planned Left 4 Dead 2 tie-in fell through when MGM went bankrupt, but its witch, boomer, hunter, charger, smoker and tank stayed in. Goddard said the suffocator, with a bag over his head, scared him most.

A Reaver from Firefly turns up during the purge

The purge adds a slow walking girl in a white dress who sings a lullaby to a terrified worker and reminds me of Regan from The Exorcist. One of my favorite blink and you'll miss it creatures is a Reaver from Whedon's Firefly, and I love that he's paying homage to his own scary works. An armored man and a bald figure in war gear pass too quickly for me to identify.

Which of these references did you catch the first time around?