MVPs of Horror: How director Drew Goddard tried to make 'Cabin in the Woods' the bloodiest movie ever
After facing a multiyear delay from the time it was filmed (almost getting permanently shelved in the process), Drew Goddard‘s The Cabin in the Woods was finally released in 2012 and quickly became a horror sensation. The twisty thriller, which Goddard penned with a longtime collaborator, opens, by design, with as generic a premise as you can find in the genre — five party-hardy friends venture to a spooky remote outpost — before eventually spiraling into utter cinematic insanity, with those lucky enough to survive confronting a veritable army of savage supernatural killers, including demons, mutants, witches, monster unicorns, and many, many more.
To say the results were blood-soaked would be an understatement, particularly the scene in the elevator bank where Dana (Kristen Connolly) and Marty (Fran Kranz) unleash the beasts on the Facility’s swat team. “That was a very bloody movie, and by the end, when we did the elevator lobby sequence, we were trying to set the record for most movie blood ever used,” Goddard told Yahoo Entertainment (watch above). “It was hard, we couldn’t beat [Stanley] Kubrick in The Shining because he dumps oceans and oceans of it.”
As first immortalized in the trailer for Kubrick’s 1980 classic, waves of blood flood through slowly opening elevator doors and cascade toward us. (Read up on how Kubrick executed that iconic scene, as told to Yahoo by the filmmaker’s personal assistant.)
“Depending on who you believe, we may have set the record,” Goddard said. “We used an unbelievable amount of blood. At a certain point you looked around and went, ‘I can’t believe this is my life.'”
Goddard, whose long-awaited follow-up, Bad Times at the El Royale, hit theaters earlier this month, said the Facility sequence took “weeks and weeks” to shoot. And it was never not surreal.
“What was fun about it was I would sort of be doing [one thing] on one stage while I was directing other parts of the movie on another stage, and I would get a call like, ‘Uh, the goblins are ready.’ And I would run over and be like, ‘Oh, the goblins are ready. Here they are.’ And we’d do the goblins. And then I’d run back over and we’d do the emotional parts. And then I’d hear, ‘Uh, the witch is ready. Come on back.'”
Watch: Goddard reveals how he made Chris Hemsworth a slimeball in Bad Times at the El Royale:
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