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15 Famous Cabins in the Woods

These shacks have giddily opened their doors to audiences through the years.

Cabin in the Woods
Photo: Lionsgate

This weekend sees the release of Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods, the most anticipated and buzzed-about horror film in some time. The setup is indeed the same one you’ve experienced over and over: a group of partying, young-adult archetypes head to a remote getaway, only to find terrifying carnage. But the guys behind Cabin delve far deeper into the geek abyss than many viewers will expect, emerging with a gonzo, convoluted send-up that stirs the pot even as it flies off the rails (no spoilers here, kids). The titular locale is but a dilapidated entry point, and we’ve got 15 more shacks that have opened their doors for audiences through the years.


Antichrist

Antichrist (2009)

Leave it to Lars von Trier to slap the name “Eden” on a fog-swathed, odious-looking torture chamber. In the provocateur’s brilliant upheaval of the biblical creation story, he sends grief-stricken Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg off to a secluded summer haunt, where the goal to lick their parental wounds is also turned on its head. There are quite a few indelible happenings in this Melancholia precursor, but the most disturbing, from an attic-set revelation to a much-ballyhooed female circumcision, take place at home base.


Wet Hot American Summer

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

David Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer offers a selection of cabins in the woods, as the taboo happenings at Jewish getaway Camp Firewood spread across the retreat’s whole landscape. One could pal around with Janeane Garofalo and her Chicken Little-like love interest (David Hyde Pierce), who wants to save the campers from falling spacecraft. Or, one could certainly flip burgers in the mess hall with Christopher Meloni’s chef, a shell-shocked Vietnam vet. But we’d prefer to spy on Michael Ian Black and Bradley Cooper, who, hidden away in the sports shed, make it a summer they’ll never forget.


Misery

Misery (1990)

In the film that did for bound ankles what Psycho did for showers, outwardly chipper homemaker Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) has quite the dirty secret: she’s in fact an ostracized child murderer with a hankering for the prose of author Paul Sheldon (James Caan), whom she has locked up in her spacious, snow-covered cottage. The movie version of what’s surely Stephen King’s ultimate nightmare, Misery sees its climax play out inside the house, with Annie being bloodied, fed Sheldon’s burnt manuscript, and bludgeoned with both a typewriter and a pig statuette. Perhaps Bates has the latter resting beside her Oscar.


Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

A quaint dwelling that’s currently seeing multiple live-action updates, the home of Disney’s seven dwarfs is surely one of pop culture’s most famous cabins, a great place to unwind after sweating with the boys in the diamond mines and whistling your way home. Oh, stop. These wee pals are manly men. After all, it isn’t until Snow White shows up that the place gets an extreme makeover.

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Jurassic Park III

Jurassic Park III (2001)

Get it? A “cabin” in the woods! In this unnecessary sequel to Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur opus, Téa Leoni, Sam Neill, and company go searching for a lost boy, and their private jet crash lands in the jungle. It isn’t long before the mega-snouted Spinosaurus sniffs out the survivors, wedging his nose—and teeth—into the mangled plane cabin where everyone huddles, screaming. Crunch! Stomp! Roll! The wreckage and its inhabitants take a beating—until the T-Rex shows up to lock jaws with its nosy nemesis.


On Golden Pond

On Golden Pond (1981)

In their summer cottage on the titular lake, old lovebirds Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda see their annual escape interrupted by the arrival of daughter Jane Fonda, who drops off her son to hang with the grandparents. Strife between the Fondas mirrored their characters’ head-butting, a fact that prompted Jane to nab the rights to Ernest Thompson’s play, and thus craft a star vehicle for her pops. The sweet turns from Henry and Hepbrun netted Oscars for both legends, the former pocketing the trophy for his final movie role.


The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

After escaping the clutches—and curveballs—of a few very disgruntled trees, Dorothy (Judy Garland) and her pals cross paths with the ever-wretched Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton), who parks her broom atop a moss-covered cabin just an apple’s throw from that unwelcoming orchard. The sorry foursome can’t get a break: their green-skinned foe starts hurling things their way too, preferring fireballs and thus igniting the poor Scarecrow (Ray Bolger). That’s a shame and all, but how about those Oz residents? They were on the ball with green roofs long before the rest of us.


The Evil Dead

The Evil Dead (1981)

A certain Cabin in the Woods influence, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead establishes the formula: Five young things. One house. A whole lotta horrors. Raimi’s cabin would reappear for Evil Dead 2, as would Bruce Campbell’s cult hero, Ash, but first that Michigan State quintet had to stumble across The Book of the Dead, and play the audio cassette that’d resurrect a host of undesirables. The glut of evil turns Ash’s peers against him until he’s all that’s left (besides the promise of a killer horror franchise).

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The Great Outdoors

The Great Outdoors (1988)

A John Hughes production, this keep-up-with-the-Joneses vacation flick casts John Candy alongside Dan Aykroyd, the two of them starring as the feuding husbands of two vastly different sisters (Stephanie Faracy and Annette Bening). The misadventures of yuppies-out-of-water fast ensue, with teens hooking up, parents behaving like children, and grizzly bears making a home of the families’ shared log cabin. The action culminates with a mad rush to save Aykroyd’s character’s twins, who shouldn’t have ventured so far from the wraparound porch.


Secret Windows

Secret Window (2004)

What’s eating Johnny Depp in David Koepp’s Secret Window? Writer’s block, for one. Depp’s distressed author catches his wife (Maria Bello) cheating, then retreats to his secluded, upstate New York house to fume and clear his head. It’s too bad all his pages are clear too, and, to boot, a creepy visitor (John Turturro) is frequenting the property, accusing Depp’s character of plagiarism and demanding amendments. Another writerly psychodrama based on Stephen King material, Secret Window sees more obsession over the completion of a book, and it likewise unfolds in solitude, the only audience for the housebound horrors an endless spread of trees.


Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Built by the same developer that endowed the seven dwarfs’ cottage with such peachy charm, the glen-set hideaway to which the three good fairies retreat with baby Aurora looks cozier than a bed where one would sleep for 1,000 years. Aurora’s home until the dreaded age of 16, which instead of being sweet will mark the retaliation of chief Disney baddie Maleficent, the fairies’ cabin is only corrupted when magic gets involved, like during a birthday-party prep that turns into a regular Real Housewives cat fight. Make it pink! Make it blue! Make it fast before Miss Thing gets home!


Fear

Fear (1996)

Indeed, the primary setting of the Wahlberg-Witherspoon dating thriller Fear is no cabin—it’s a pricey mahogany manse spread across a wooded cliff that looks out onto a lake. But catch that baby from a distance, and it’s a cabin, for sure, just tricked out and spiced up for wealthy parents William Petersen and Amy Brenneman. Like most homesteads in this list, the Walker family’s sprawling home is where the climax plays out, and who can forget the dastardly acts of Mark Wahlberg’s psycho boyfriend and his goons: a dead cop, a decapitated dog, and a lot nasty treatment for resident floozy Alyssa Milano.

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Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th (1980)

A less inviting camp than the one previously seen in this list, Camp Crystal Lake is a graveyard for a whole lot of expendable teens, including Kevin Bacon, who, like Johnny Depp after him in A Nightmare on Elm Street, makes an early splash by having his blood spilled by one of cinema’s great psychos. The most indelible moment unfolds on the lake itself, when Jason emerges from the deep to deliver some shock and awe, but plenty of victims meet their ends in the camp’s cozy shacks.


Cabin Fever

Cabin Fever (2002)

Before there was Whedon and Goddard’s booby-trapped funhouse, there was Eli Roth’s similarly menacing woods-set home, which also allowed for some tsk-tsk commentary about disposable cast members sowing their wild, wicked oats. A most effective STD-prevention film, Roth’s bloody cautionary tale sees its sex-crazed inhabitants contract a vicious flesh-eating virus, which turns the modest cabin into a plasma-drenched hospital. Yuck.


The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The shaky-cam culmination of The Blair Witch Project takes off with the scary reveal of a ruined old house, a property deep in the woods where the eponymous villain presumably killed a whole lot of children years before. Heather Donahue and Michael Williams are on the hunt for Joshua Leonard, whom the witch, we can only imagine, has already dispatched. Inside the ruins, which are eerily decorated with small, dark handprints, Heather and Mike run around screaming, the footage alternating between their two cameras. A sequence that’s surprisingly arresting given its primitive nature, it cuts to black in the dreary basement, where standing in the corner is no mere time-out punishment.

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

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