The Horror Movie Cabin: A Character of its Own

The Cabin has long been a staple of the horror movie genre. It is the place where a steady supply of human and unexpecting victims come together for a day, week, or summer of joy, fun, booze, and sexual activity. Yet, The Cabin is never a simple place for glamorous retreat. The Cabin exists as a metaphorical center of danger, despair, and heartache.

When the movie monster/villain arrives on screen, where do our characters seek refuge? The cabin, the farmhouse, the abandoned mansion located in an isolated region of the planet, only accessible by what seems like a solitary road or path that always gets destroyed.

From The Evil Dead to Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Cabin Fever, Cabin in the Woods, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Secret Window, The Haunting, to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, The Cabin exists as what should be considered the safe ground of the screen, a no man’s land where evil cannot enter and our characters can wait out the Evil storm; yet what the Cabin represents is the inevitable presence of Evil— Evil that will not politely knock on the door or wait for our characters to step outside or make a false move. The Cabin is meant to be unsafe, an unrelenting reminder that at any second one of our characters WILL die. It is meant to be an unexpected trap for our characters, a place of doom where they are unable to escape.

Thus from The Cabin, like most horror movies we as an audience come to expect certain things: the promiscuous character will be one of the first to die, characters will go alone to find help, an overconfident male will rise to leadership only to be suddenly slaughtered, and the singular virgin like female will defeat the Evil. However, The Evil Dead breaks a few expectations. First, of course, it is Ash the leader who survives. Second, our characters are not in endangered by an undeserved ominous presence and victim of unexpected circumstance or being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are victims of their own arrogance. Their fate is sealed by two lines:

“CHERYL: I feel funny about being here. What if the people who own the place come back?

ASH: They’re not going to come back. Even if they do, we’ll tell them the car broke down or something like that.” (Evil Dead The Musical).

Consequently, the ensuing actions and deaths are a result of young adult drive to break the unspoken rules of the universe: Don’t Trespass!

Perhaps calling the traditional cinematic Cabin a character of its own is too extreme, yet in Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and musical of the same name, The Cabin must be considered a central character to the plot. Without lines, The Cabin exists as the physical embodiment of the evil that exists in the woods, from it boards Evil breathes. With every moment that our characters stay inside The Cabin, the more dangers will arise. The Cabin even comes to life and takes revenge on our protagonist Ash by biting his hand off.

While the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is the source of the Evil, The Cabin is the physical hand used to enact this Evil.