This Was The Most Difficult Scene To Film In The Cabin In The Woods
2012's "The Cabin in the Woods" was a film that revitalized the horror genre. What starts out as your run-of-the-mill horror movie – teenagers in a scary cabin in the woods – turns into a meta plot that is masterminded by The Organization, which is (you guessed it) an organization in charge of every kind of nightmare-fueled entity and running a ritual for The Ancient Ones. The Organization's protocol is thrown out the window when Dana (Kristen Connolly) and Marty (Fran Kanz) discover the truth and prevent the ritual from taking place. The sabotage sets off an avalanche of circumstances, and The Ancient Ones don't receive their annual sacrifice. The film ends right before what is presumed to be the end of the Western world, as hundreds of supernatural phenomena are set loose on an unassuming population.
The satirical flick featured scenes rich in horror lore. The cabin's basement, for example, held an artifact for every creature that appeared later during the system purge. Director Drew Goddard discussed what he called the most difficult scene to shoot for "The Cabin In The Woods" in an interview following the film's release. Here's what he had to say.
Filming the control room scene was 'a nightmare'
While the workers of The Facility attempt to regain control after the purge, we see their control center, which monitors every creature caged inside the facility. In groups, the creatures are released and wreak havoc. For what is relatively a short while, each of the monitors inside the control room shows the monsters in action.
Goddard described filming the scene to Slash Film, explaining, "The control room was a nightmare, where there's a scene going on in the room while a killing is happening at the same time on the security monitors. We had eighty screens that needed to be synced. In a big budget film you'd just blue screen all those screens, but we had to have a guy at a computer syncing all of those screens. I had particular ideas about what I wanted on those screens, and the beats in that were happening as we were doing dialogue ... When it came together it was the best moment of the shoot."
Incredibly, as shared on Reddit, the script described the scene with a simple sentence: "There is chaos on every screen." That chaos resulted in filming every monster in action, including but not limited to: The Sugarplum Fairy, Deadites, rabid dogs, Reptilius, Sasquatch, and evil twins.
The attention to detail was purposeful by co-writers Goddard and Joss Whedon. Goddard also told Slash Film, "I like movies that get better the more you watch them." He certainly achieved that with his directorial debut "The Cabin In The Woods."