The Cabin in the Woods/Headscratchers


 * How did the Japan scenario fulfill the requirements with a room full of nine-year olds? The Scholar, the Athlete, and the Virgin, sure - but the Fool and the Whore?
 * The director says that the ritual varies across cultures. They didn't need to fulfill the same archetypes for theirs to go properly.
 * Which, conveniently, means that this film not only explains away hundreds of formulaic American schlock horror-film plots, but also equally-trite plots used in countries that favor a different formula!
 * How did Marty survive getting stabbed in the back with a knife? They had medical readouts for each of the sacrifices, why didn't someone notice he's still around?
 * Possibly their clothes had been laced with sensors that monitored their vital signs. In Marty's case, being stabbed might have inadvertently disconnected the sensor, creating a false impression on the readouts that his heart had stopped.
 * Also, the stab probably wasn't placed in a fatal area. As long as the knife doesn't hit anything vital (heart, lung, spine), and because we're running on horror movie logic, he would be able to shrug it off.
 * I think it was actually a trowel, based on Marty's later comments. So it's probably a little harder to do damage with a trowel than a knife. Maybe it never went past his ribs, or glanced off a shoulderblade.
 * As for the medical readouts, Marty messed with their wiring. That's why the tunnel hadn't been blown in time. So maybe he managed to cut off his own medical read-out.
 * The one that gets me is the bear-trap-to-the-back thing. Even by horror movie logic, how is that not a fatal wound? Shouldn't that like shatter your ribs or something?
 * If I recall correctly, it wasn't a whole bear trap, it was only one half of the jaws.
 * Probably depends on what condition the bear trap is in. A hundred years is enough time for most machinery to stop working right.
 * Physics, mostly. Bear traps are effective by way of speed and sharp teeth. You spring the trap and it snaps shut on typically something limb-like. The teeth bite in deep and the shearing force sometimes breaks bone. But when it hits a broad surface, the travel distance on the jaws of the trap isn't very far so it doesn't get a chance to build up a lot of speed. The contact surface is the whole arc of teeth, so the force is distributed. The teeth themselves aren't going to go in very deep, but they are penetrating skin and muscle. The tension trying to force the jaws together will keep it from being pulled out easily. In theory, of course.
 * The Buckners were into Torture Porn, and the bear-trap was intended as a capture implement. Pa Buckner may have deliberately weakened its springs and dulled its teeth so it'd snag without killing, because you can't torture a corpse.
 * Posted this in Fridge Logic already, but...what the hell were the controllers thinking when they installed that big red button? I can't think of a single logical reason they would have such a thing. And if they did, it would have about four or five failsafes in place to make sure it wasn't pressed by accident, or by, say, a couple of people who managed to just find their way into the complex.
 * Didn't Dana go through a series of switches before pressing the big red button? (but then again, she did figure out the control panel rather quickly...)
 * It's possible it was intentional, to mock the concept of a Big Red Button.
 * What kind of mad scientists would they be if they didn't?
 * Those two explanations don't really work--the movie is about deconstructing movie cliches, not playing into them. The puppeteers are not only Genre Savvy, they essentially wrote the rules of the genre. They wouldn't follow an obviously dangerous trope just because--they know better than that.
 * The novel adaption contains a line from mission control frantically demanding where the gas is while the monsters are running haywire. Presumably Dana missed several steps, and the actual function of the 'purge' was to clean out the facility and transport the horrors to a new location after they'd been drugged.
 * That makes some sense. But there should still be a failsafe in place in case the monsters haven't been gassed and the button gets hit anyway. The controllers sort of handled everything as badly as possible after Marty and Dana got into the facility.
 * I assumed that the function of the "purge" was to destroy a creature that was too troublesome for them. Presumably, under controlled circumstances, they would ready whatever is necessary for the destruction of a creature in the corridor, then someone in the control booth flips the switch for the elevator that will bring in the troublesome creature. The purge button releases it and the team destroys it. However, in this particular circumstance, Dana flipped all of the switches before hitting the purge button, and then they left the purge active, releasing everything.
 * What would have happened if they activated multiple devices for summoning evil creatures? (ie blow the conch shell, and then read from the journal)
 * Presumably, Mission Control would make the call based on whatever had creeped the victims out the most.
 * Alternatively, they might be crazy enough to send out every creature type summoned to multiply the fun, or determine which activation was completed first and then send out THAT creature.
 * The very first one triggered wins. Immediately after Dana reads the Latin, the control room erupts with reactions, as that action determined the monster. Presumably, if she hadn't finished the Latin before Curt blew the conch shell, or before Holden opened the puzzle sphere, whichever of those happened first would have been selected instead.
 * The real question is, what would the controllers have done if, instead of playing with them, the group had taken one look at that stuff, cried "Hey, antiques! Bye-bye, student loans!", and started indiscriminately shoving things into their camper to sell on eBay?
 * The controllers do mention that the sacrifice needs to be set up in such a way as to allow the victims to back out, hence the creepy fuel station attendant. If they didn't play along in the basement then the ritual would fail there and then.
 * Mission Control might have decided to interpret the "make out with the wolf" scene as a punishable transgression, given that circumstances were dire. She invited it in, so cue the werewolves.
 * Plus, "steal this" is bound the activation for at least one of the objects. Stealing the cursed antique is a classic horror movie transgression to punish.
 * Considering the treatment the movie gives Jules almost putting on the necklace in comparison with the other artifacts, I'd say that if they stole stuff, that'd be what'd come out.
 * They would have had to split the pool multiple ways.
 * Most of the creatures in the facility are supernatural, or supernatural enough to merit a spot in the collection. But the Dollface Strangers are human, no? How did they qualify for containment in the facility as opposed to, say, being labeled ordinary serial killers and thrown in jail?
 * One assumes that even the human-looking specimens are more "boogeyman in human form" than "actual human." Besides, we never see them without their masks -- maybe they're not even human under there at all.
 * The clown looked human too, but he was apparently immune to bullets so there's clearly some kind of supernatural thing going on here.
 * The clown is clearly a ref to Pennywise from IT, though, so he's supernatural by, er, nature. The Strangers were just sadistic serial killers.
 * Creepy figures in masks were a staple of horror long before The Strangers. Perhaps the ones in the facility are similar to a more supernatural version, even if their appearance is a Shout-Out to that film.
 * If the facility's backers are as politically-powerful as is implied, they may well have recruited some of their less-magical creatures from jail. The Dollfaces, if they're human, are probably on record as having died in some maxiumum-security prison or an asylum for the criminally insane.
 * So no one who designed this facility ever took a moment to think "Say....we have this giant invisible hypertech forcefield that keeps all of our monsters trapped in the vicinity of our base, right? Even things that can tear through reinforced steel doors and phase through matter (e.g. ghosts). Hey, maybe while we're spending billions on this thing to keep the monsters from getting out we should apply a little of that tech around our offices and nerve centers to keep them from getting IN."
 * Best guess? The puppeteers are extremely Genre Savvy, but they're also really damn arrogant. Look at how they handle the whole scenario: they barely take their work seriously and only narrowly avert disaster with the uncollapsed tunnel because they weren't paying attention. It's likely that while they were constructing the facility, it never occurred to them to set up redundant defenses against the monsters because, come on, how can that possibly happen?
 * Some of the other switches Marty and Dana were flipping may have deactivated the facility's internal defense systems, and Marty's ripping out some of the wiring couldn't have helped.
 * After spending all that effort to keep the monsters in, there's no need to redundantly spend effort to keep them out.
 * If every year the kids select their demise, prompting an elevator to call their monster from its cell, how are they put back into their cell after the event finishes? If there are experts who put them back, where were they at the end? How do they harness the insubstatial or incredibly powerful ones, if all they seem to have as a defense against the monsters is More Dakka?
 * They may have crates of silver bullets. barrels of holy water, and knives inscribed with the Runes of Dissolution. But all that stuff hinges on knowing what specific hazard you're dealing with; when the hazard is "everything at once" they mostly wind up throwing holy water at mermen and shooting the Sugarplum Fairy with silver bullets only to find out that neither of them minds.
 * I got the sense that there was some sort of higher intelligence or mental conditioning guiding the monsters. Remember, for the ritual to work the Whore has to die first (but only after being "corrupted"), and the Virgin has to be the last to die. I doubt it's a coincidence that the Buckners attacked the main characters in exactly the right sequence, and since the control room guys weren't shown guiding the zombie family's actions, we can assume something else was controlling their behavior. My guess is that the monsters are conditioned to go on a killing spree once released from their cages (with some guidelines about what order certain people should be attacked in), but will automatically return to their cages once there's no one left to kill.
 * The whiteboard lists a department called "Zoology". My guess is that they take car of this sort of thing - presumably they have tech more dealing with specific monster types (otherwise how would they contain ghosts and such?) but were overwhelmed/surprised by the purge.
 * There is a different department called 'Wranglers' who would be in charge of herding the monsters back to their cell.
 * There is supposed to be "gas" controlling the monsters in the case they escape, but it doesn't happen. Perhaps because Marty messed with wiring. We know that he managed to (intentionally or not) cut the signal to Demolition for the tunnel collapse. Perhaps he also cut the signal to the gas. Or perhaps Chem fucked up yet again.
 * If the Main Characters hadn't chosen "Zombie Redneck Torture Family", would the room beneath the cabin still be full of 19th century torture equipment, or would the control room have somehow switched it with stuff relevant to the monster they were facing?
 * It would probably still be there, just inexplicable. Rather like the one way mirror, which doesn't make a lot of sense in a redneck zombie-based horror movie, but could have been used to good effect in something with vampires, say. If the sacrifices can make it connect to the horror attacking them, that's well and good, but if not it'll just be dismissed as "Man, some weirdos owned this cabin before," which is good enough for most horror audiences. I'm sure there's a bunch of weird hidden rooms and caves and caches around the area of the cabin waiting to be stumbled across.
 * As said, a torture room is good for ambiance, regardless of the scenario. Also possible is, yes, a switch-out depending on the monster. Those monsters were kept in pre-built rooms capable of moving on any axis. It's possible there were pre-built "creepy rooms" tailor-made to work with each monster, and capable of being locked in underneath the bedroom with the trapdoor. If they had picked the deranged robot, it could have been a lab with security footage of said robot killing its creator/s. If they had picked the unicorn...,
 * For unicorns maybe it would become a hidden stable where the owner of the cabin was capturing unicorns and abusing them or killing them, and now they are hostile to humans.
 * There was an elevator going to that room, which was probably intended for use by "stagehands" to customize the room at the last minute, in cases where that room is relevant to the scenario at all. For mermen, it would probably stay locked.
 * Going off what the editor two above me, there's also the painting of something being hunted/torn apart. The painting didn't have too much significance with the monster they chose, but if it had been a werewolf, or any of the other through-and-through creatures, then said painting would have been a lot more relevant.
 * Probably the painting had more to do with priming the This-Place-Creeps-Me-Out pump than Foreshadowing any particular monster. The one-way mirror was likewise a way to stir up feelings of lust (to get the Whore "corrupted") and/or suspicion within the group (to facilitate splitting the party).
 * Ignoring the ending, how would the concept of a "sequel" be handled? The film itself has been said to be a metaphor of horror films and their audiences so how would this business go around preparing a "sequel" should a previous survivor return to the area days, months or years later?
 * Anyone up for a Deconstructive Parody of Kaiju movies?
 * Possibly the Ancient Ones don't destroy everybody all at once, but rather, condemn all humans to play out the same sorts of rituals, one scenario after another after another. This continues non-stop until A) one of the sacrifices finds a way to go back in time and kill Marty before dawn, B) their bloodlust is so slaked by oceans of gore that they finally go back to sleep, or C) they run out of humans. Or, since it's a deconstruction, until one of the intended sacrifices calls them out on how lame it is to watch innocent people suffering for kicks.
 * How do we know that the Ancient Ones will rise if not sated, and if they rise, they will "destroy" the world? Presumably, because it happened before. Since we are here, then, it's not like total world destruction. After all, SkyNet is never able to totally destroy all organic life. Not even humans. But they do manage to pretty much "destroy" the world.
 * For all we know, it'd happened before to a species that preceded humans, and we only inherited the Earth because our Precursors blew it with their rituals. We know very little about the Verse in which this film is set, aside from the existence of a fairly diverse assortment of monsters and some grumpy horror-addicted Ancient Ones.
 * How about a war against the Titans? Maybe we find out that they were unstoppable in 1850, but go down to sufficient quantities of modern anti-armor rounds. Then they're gone, but some of their power lingers, and we get an Urban Fantasy setting?
 * Perhaps a similar scenario, except with Action Movie tropes? Lots of cannon fodder dying, big explosions, so on so forth, with the idea that mankind is effectively making a deal with a different set of Audience Surrogate Eldritch Horrors, which may be WORSE due to the differences in scope between formulaic Horror movies and formulaic Action movies. The ones representing the Horror audience are satisfied with 5 deaths... The ones representing the Action-Adventure audience wreck cities.
 * A sequel to this film would need to be a prequel. For a standard horror film set in The Cabin? That does not seem to have come up much, with their high clearance rate, although the surviving Virgins could be problamtic. Evil Dead 2 style? You'll need someone to repeat the same mistake or set off a plausibly related monster. Alternately, it wouldn't need to make any sense; as long as the cast dies, The Ancient Ones are happy. Drug the survivor, drop him/her off, and add enough newcomers to make sure someone sets off the monsters. Drug her for a bit longer so that they can activate something in the basement before last year's Virgin wakes up, then is treated as a maniac for thinking a conch shell somehow summons monsters?
 * "This is the only formula we've found that works." How do they know that? Presumably, they've done a lot of trial and error before arriving at this specific scenario. But if a formula didn't work, the Ancient Ones would come back and wipe out humanity. Obviously that hasn't happened yet, so how did they know to try something else?
 * Possibly each nation's facility takes a turn trying some sort of variant on their culture's usual ritual, while the rest stick to what's tried-and-true. If the variant leads to a grumpy Ancient One who doesn't stop shaking the ground until one of the other nations' rites is completed properly, they know that version is ineffective.
 * Since they are wholly dedicated to satiating a group of beings known as "The Ancient Ones", they have been doing this for a long time. Since, you know, ancient times.
 * Or perhaps The Ancient Ones ™ told them.
 * Yeah, which feels like a poor excuse to justify the actions of Mission Control and all those people who worked there. Let's be blunt; these assholes are killing innocent people and warping their minds to fit inhuman archetypes. Even if the threat was really that bad, there is still a person's base humanity to consider the fact that most of them should have had some crisis of faith to show that these people are more than just a organization based on being a Complete Monster in a labcoat. In many ways, they should have been more villainous.
 * Most of the controllers have been there for years, they've had plenty of time to become desensitised to what they're doing and justify it as necessary to prevent a much worse fate. The one new guy did show that he had some problems with what was going on, but he was just a low-level employee who never directly caused anything to happen and even he wasn't going in unprepared - he had had the operation and its purpose explained to him beforehand, and had probably undergone a very careful screening process.
 * Considering how their complacency is a big part of why, it's actually quite believable that the controllers seem so jaded about it. If they'd cared more, they might have paid more attention and not made so many mistakes, meaning the scenario would have wrapped up normally and we'd have only had a routine movie about zombie rednecks attacking vacationers, never glimpsing what was happening behind the scenes.
 * It's mentioned that the American facility has only failed to complete its ritual once before, in 1998, due to a screw-up by the Chem Department. Was that date chosen at random, or was a movie released that year that Joss Whedon thought was exceptionally-lame, even for schlock horror?
 * The American remake of the Ring was released that year, so maybe a commentary about ripping off other cultures' horror?
 * No it wasn't. Verbinski's The Ring dates from 2002 (you're thinking of the original Ring by Hideo Nakata, which WAS released in 1998 in Japan.) However, there IS a plethora of American horror movies from 1998 which received widely varied criticism, so pinpointing one as the subject of the Take That is going to be difficult at best.
 * Ringu may very well have been the succesful ritual for that year in-'Verse. Remember the Japanese had a flawless record up to this point.
 * Which could explain the 1998 reference. Everybody failed except for Japan, explaining the explosion of Japanese remakes that we started to see in the US (The Ring, The Grudge, The Eye, One Missed Call, etc). After the US's formula failed they started trying what worked for the other guys. And it could also be a joke about how coming so close to disaster in 1998 lead Japan to start clinging to the "scary ghost girl" trope to guarantee that they'd never fail again.
 * The Truman Show came out in 1998.
 * Scoping a list of 1998 horror films, the only one that sticks out is The Faculty. There isn't a single fatality within the main cast of students (save for the "Virgin" who is ultimately revealed as the monster). And to make matters worse the monster's undoing turns out to be the stoner's custom mix. Damn chem department indeed...
 * I don't get it; many, many people died in the movie, many more than the four/five that were supposed to, yet the Ancient Douches don't enjoy it and instead decide that the world ends? How dumb are they?
 * Sitterson says early on that the sacrifices have to enter the sacrificial space with the knowledge that others who have gone before them have died. The sacrifices must inadvertently (or purposely) volunteer to die horrible deaths. The employees who work in the facility went there to do their jobs and save the world, not be the sacrifices necessary to do so.
 * It's got nothing to do with the number of deaths. The Ancient Ones just want to see the story play out exactly the way that they want it, every single time. Dipping into the metaphor, think of how many people left the movie complaining that it was 'weird', who would have been perfectly happy if it'd been just another horror movie where cardboard cut-outs got killed in a precise order. All that blood and death meant nothing to them, because it's not the story they were expecting.
 * Those people who thought it was weird must be really blind or dense to miss the fact that the trailer revealed that the movie isnt going to be your average horror story. Hell, even the tagline is "you think you know the story". For the analogy of "audience = ancients horrors" to work, the producers and the director would need to use fake marketing to make the people think its just another cliche horror movie so when they see this movie, they would be just as pissed off as the abominations and THEN be hit with the realization that if they are just THAT angry for a movie then they are not better than cosmic horrors themselves.
 * All of this assumes that Mission Controls word is gospel. It's not impossible that what the Japanese school girls did could work on the Ancient Ones on a different scale. After all...they were sealed in the first place...Why not something that ends them completely?
 * The "sealing away" seems to be a voluntary thing, given that they can break out if not satisfied by the rituals. The problem with fighting them is that if it fails they're pretty much guaranteed to retaliate. Maybe there could be a way to fight them with some kind of powerful magic or weponry (the people who started the ritual didn't have tanks or nuclear missiles, the balance of power could well have shifted over the millennia), but doing so would risk total annihiliation and would likely lead to heavy casualties even if they won; alternatively they have a tried and tested method which has kept the ancients at bay for thousands of years and requires relatively few deaths each year.
 * Considering who the Ancient Ones are a stand-in for it's reasonable to assume that, within the context of the film, they are omnipotent.
 * According to the script, the Ancient Ones ruled the world before humans and, after fighting for a long time, decided to sleep. Each culture has it's own god to appease and as long as one is satisfied, they'll all remain asleep. So essentially, they decided to sleep, and it's up to us to keep them that way, because it's the only way to get rid of them.
 * Nobody in the facility checked Marty's vital signs to see if he was still alive? They all just assumed he was dead when he was dragged off camera? Wow.
 * Probably the teens' clothing had been wired to track their vital signs, and when Marty got stabbed, the trowel inadvertently wrecked his monitoring device. The readout went dead, which was misinterpreted as a sign his heart had stopped.
 * Marty had just discovered a fiber-optic camera in the lamp right before he was grabbed, so he started looking for other hidden gadgets, and found his vitals tracker. The controllers didn't monitor Marty's vital signs to mark the kill, they just saw the zombie take him behind a berm and then saw blood splashing from behind it. That's when the controller pulls the second handle. Marty had some time to disable his tracker before they would have even thought to check.
 * In the final scene, Marty says something like, "I don't think Curt even has a cousin". Is that supposed to be some kind of a joke? If not, doesn't it imply Curt knew the cabin wasn't what they thought it was? And if he knew, why didn't he say anything about it?
 * It's not a joke, it just closes a dangling thread in the plot: It implies that the controllers had picked out their group and were manipulating them long before they approached the cabin. At some point, they got to Curt, and (chemically or psychologically) made him believe that he had a cousin who was lending him his house. His friends were too eager to go (or likewise manipulated) to ask questions about this mysterious cousin until it was too late. Without that line, we would have left the theater wondering all sorts of things about Curt's cousin too.
 * Er, wouldn't brainwashing someone to believe he has a cousin be much more difficult than, say, faking an email or a phone call from a relative of Curt who actually existed. That's how I thought Curt got the information about the cabin, I never thought his cousin was actually involved in the whole sacrifice thing. If the line was added to the end for the reason you suggest, I'd say it creates more confusion than it solves.
 * YMMV, I guess. I see "forging an email or phone call from a real relative" as the far more difficult ruse to maintain.
 * Could be it's an indication of how fed-up Marty is with being manipulated and deceived. After going though so many Shocking Swerve twists, he suspects that even the existence of Curt's cousin (who probably was real, just uninvolved with the sacrifice plot) may be a ruse. Marty doesn't guess right about everything ("I'm on a reality TV show!"), just more than the controllers had allowed for.
 * ...no, he was completely correct about that one too. Marty is on a Reality TV Show. Just not one being made for humans; it's explicitly stated that the Ancient Ones are watching, and everything has to happen the right way in order to please them. It's a reality show about people being killed horribly, filmed for the entertainment of Eldritch Abominations.
 * The conch shell was for mermaids, the puzzle sphere was for the Pinhead-Expy, and the book was for the Buckners. Presumably the music box was for the Sugarplum Fairy, but what critter would the necklace Jules was handling have summoned?
 * For some reason, I thought that it was associated with the ghost that Marty and Jules see almost immediately upon arrival at the facility.
 * I recall a ghostly figure wearing the dress that went with the locket. I don't remember when she turned up, but I distinctly remember putting the two together.
 * There was something called "The Bride" on the board, and that looked an awful lot like a wedding dress...
 * Along the same lines: Marty was staring at film strips. What would they have summoned? Maybe we should move this to WMG...
 * Presumably the activation method in that case would have been to find a projector somewhere in the cellar and take a look at the pictures. They summon whatever monster is in the pictures, maybe something like Bigfoot or a lake monster - something mysterious that lives in the woods but is rarely seen.
 * How was Marty the Fool? He figured things out early, and considering that Virgin (Forgot her name) was pretty much screwed, he's pretty smart in the way he saved her. Is it something to appease the Moral Guardians- smoking pot is foolish?
 * They mean "the Fool" in the sense of, for instance, a jester, as opposed to "lacking in intelligence." That is, he is the comic relief, who makes people laugh either through his witty quips or outrageous antics. He also spends the first two acts of the movie high as a kite, making him even more prone to do or say something weird for the audience's amusement. But part of the point is that these are less characters and more people, and they all subvert their supposed role in the ritual. Once he's sobered up, Marty's actually quite intelligent and quick on the uptake.
 * It's also Fridge Brilliance. Marty turns out to be the Fool in the old 'Lord of Misrule' sense. He's someone who turns societal roles and rituals upside down. In this case, he destroys the ritual by surviving.
 * Don't forget: Marty didn't fall into his stereotype. Nobody fit their role in the beginning, and it's clearly established for each of them: Curt gives an intelligent recommendation to Dana, thus showing he's quite smart, Holden catches a football from a two story window and is said to have good hands, and thus is not a complete intellectual, Dana is introduced without pants on and recovering emotionally from an affair with her teacher, and thus is clearly not pure. Jules is shown to be smart and levelheaded, and frowns up Dana's affair with her teacher, and so is clearly not an airheaded slut. Marty perhaps fits his role the best at first, because he's shown to be making the poor decision of driving whilst smoking a bong, but he's also shown to be quick-witted and clever. The agency made half-informed decisions of which role to assign: Curt and Jules are dating, and Curt's a big guy and Jules beautiful, so make them the Athlete and the Whore. Dana is single, so she'll be the virgin. That leaves Holden and Marty for the Scholar and the Fool, so obviously the pothead will be the Fool. Marty's drugs would have probably made him much less rational and fit his role much more, but they didn't work on him. And besides, he's not shown to be a paragon of insight. If anything, he's more a Captain Obvious because he's pointing out things that only an idiot (or someone manipulated through chemicals) wouldn't notice. Obviously the wind blowing the cellar door open makes no sense, which he points out. In a dark basement full of creepy antiques that somebody else owns? Probably not a good idea to mess with him. Everything else? He's high. He's paranoid, and for once it works out for him.
 * Same troper who asked this question here. So since their archtypes werent perfect, doesnt that mean that the ritual wouldn't have been completed anyway? So in that vein, the whole "Shoot him or die" thing is pointless because she's going to die in 8 minutes anyway.
 * As the Director said, "[They] work with what [they] have." The people they chose as sacrifices didn't quite fit their predetermined archetypes, but the controllers manipulated events and the victims' minds to force them to fit. And apparently, ordinary people falling into old archetypes (in spite of themselves) is enough for the Ancient Ones' satisfaction.
 * Just like twenty-something actors playing high school kids is enough for horror-film audiences' satisfaction.
 * From the moment we found out Marty was alive, I spent the whole third act waiting for a plot twist in which Dana gets killed and the Apocalypse is averted because of it, on the grounds that none of them fit their hastily established roles, and Marty is actually the Virgin. Sadly, it never came.
 * In terms of the world is it like the SCP Foundation, only the SCPs are all monsters and the main containment procedure is keeping the Ancient Ones sated? Obviously the spirits and stuff are real since exorcism works on the spirits, but they also have Engineering which to me covers everything from the tech to actually creating the monsters.
 * Did it occur to anyone that the characters (and actors) are too young to have gotten the reference to the anti-drug PSA? It's from the 80s. Yet the characters are all college students, which puts them somewhere between about 18 and 22 -- all born in the 90s or just before.
 * Internet.
 * This. It's had a pretty strong second life on the internet. It was shown on the Nostalgia Critic, and its Youtube video has over a million views.
 * That PSA has taken on a life of its own due to how corny it is. Off the top of my head, it was a joke on Scrubs during the fifth season. There's no reason why they couldn't be coming by the reference second- to fifth-hand.