As a big horror aficionado, I really enjoyed Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods and certainly wished it had done better at the box office.
It’s truly the closest thing to an original horror film I’ve seen in God knows how long, so I felt it deserved a better shot, but now that it’s out on DVD and Blu-ray, perhaps it will have more success in expanding its original reach.
That being said, A Cabin in the Woods themed game could have definitely helped promote the film as it hit theaters, and as Game Informer notes, there was going to be a crossover downloadable content game featuring Cabin in the Woods and the zombie infested Left 4 Dead 2.
Drew Goddard, who directed Cabin, posted the following on an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit: “We actually were going to do a downloadable l4D2 expansion pack, where you’d fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it.” (MGM was originally going to release Cabin in the Woods, and their bankruptcy postponed the film’s release for several years).
Goddard said the nascent game, which was in development with Valve would have allowed fans “to play in both the upstairs Cabin in the Woods world and the downstairs ‘facility’ world with all the monsters. Believe me, I HATE all video games based on movies, they always suck, but porting Cabin into Left For Dead felt like the right fit. It pains me that it didn’t happen.”
I’m actually surprised there hasn’t been a Cabin in the Woods game yet, because if you’re familiar with the movie, it would obviously make a great premise for a horror title. There’s a lot of great traps and mazes to work your way out of, as well as a lot of danger in every corner. To put yourself in the same place as the five kids in Cabin, whether you’re familiar with the movie or not, could indeed be very frightening, and maybe if it has a second life on home video we’ll see a Cabin game sometime down the road.
