21 details you may have missed in 'The Cabin in the Woods'

The cast and crew of "The Cabin In The Woods."Eric Charbonneau/WireImage/Getty Images"The Cabin in the Woods" was released in 2012, a whopping 14 years ago.The slasher satire is full of references, Easter eggs, and tributes to many horror films.Here are 21 details you might've missed in the film. Warning: spoilers ahead.October, for many of us, means horror movie marathons. But did you know there's an underrated classic waiting for you out there that rewards your years of service toiling away in the scary movie mines?It's true. And it's called "The Cabin in the Woods."Every frame of this movie is chock-full of jokes, Easter eggs, and references to the horror classics that any self-respecting horror fan would get.But if you're not interested in watching your Halloween faves with a magnifying glass and a tab on your computer opened to Fangoria, we've got you covered.Here are our favorite little details in "The Cabin in the Woods.""The Cabin in the Woods" was released on April 13, 2012. If you need a quick refresher on the plot, keep reading ..."The Cabin in the Woods."LionsgateTo get away for the weekend, five college students (Dana, Curt, Holden, Jules, and Marty) travel to Curt's family cabin. Things start getting ... weird ... after Dana reads Latin incantations from an old diary in the basement. Specifically, zombies start attacking them.Simultaneously, two engineers, Sitterson and Hadley, have been orchestrating these horrifying events on behalf of a shadowy organization at a site known only as the Facility, led by the Director.Over the course of the film, it's revealed that the Facility sacrifices five classic slasher-movie archetypes (the virgin, scholar, fool, jock, and the promiscuous one) annually to keep a group of ancient monsters, the Ancient Ones, from destroying the Earth.Spoiler: Instead of killing her friend Marty, Dana (the "virgin") decides to let the world end, because humanity's not worth saving.The Easter eggs start right at the beginning. The film's jump-scare title-card drop is just like the one in the horror classic "Funny Games.""Funny Games" and "The Cabin in the Woods."Concorde-Castle Rock/Turner; LionsgateIn "Funny Games," the title card comes on screen, accompanied by screaming heavy metal, right after a seemingly very normal scene of a family taking a road trip."Cabin's" title card is almost the same, down to the bright-red font. It appears (along with some screams) after a mundane conversation between two Facility employees.The movie's title itself is a reference to the horror classic "The Evil Dead," which follows a group of friends staying at a cabin in the woods."The Evil Dead."New Line CinemaIn addition to the name and setting, a later reference on a whiteboard pays homage to a rather infamous scene in "Evil Dead" in which one of the five main characters is sexually assaulted by a tree.The characters also inadvertently summon the zombies using a diary filled with Latin phrases, eerily similar to "Evil Dead's" Necronomicon.While most of the monsters in the film are famous mythological figures or pop-culture staples, you can see a shot of some real-life monsters, the KKK, in one of the cells."The Cabin in the Woods."LionsgateThe Facility is populated by plenty of classic monsters — you'll learn more about them later — but in a brief shot, you can see a crew of people wearing white hoods, an obvious nod to monsters that exist in the real world: the Ku Klux Klan.You can also see some zombies from the popular "Left 4 Dead" video game series."The Cabin in the Woods" and "Left 4 Dead."Lionsgate; Valve"Left 4 Dead" and "Left 4 Dead 2" are popular zombie video games that were released in 2008 and 2009. It might be hard to tell in this photo, but an eagle-eyed Redditor found at least three zombies from the games in the cells of the Facility, including Boomer, the Witch, and Tank.Director Drew Goddard shared in a Reddit thread that there were plans for a "Cabin in the Woods" downloadable level for "Left 4 Dead 2," but money issues held up the collab."We were actually going to do a downloadable 'L4D2' pack, where you'd fight in the 'Cabin' world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it," Goddard wrote. "But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background."The film was written by Joss Whedon, so, predictably, he threw a few nods to his work in the film, like a Reaver from his sci-fi cult classic series "Firefly.""The Cabin in the Woods."LionsgateWhedon, the now-controversial screenwriter and director, cowrote "Cabin" with director Drew Goddard.As a former patron saint for nerds everywhere, Whedon threw in a reference to "Firefly," his space Western TV series. In "Firefly," Reavers were a group of cannibalistic humans who traveled throughout space and antagonized the main characters.A Reaver can be spotted wandering the halls of the Facility, as one Redditor pointed out.Two of Whedon's frequent collaborators,

Read More