Looking for fan theories for The Cabin in the Woods:
When Sitterson and Hadley are desperately waiting to see if Jules will take off her shirt, Truman the security guard says, “Does it really matter if…?” Hadley interrupts him to to say, “We’re not the only ones watching, kid.” Sitterson adds, “Got to keep the customers satisfied,” before turning to look at Truman and confirm, “You understand what’s a stake here?”
My question is: Who do you think the (diegetic) “other ones” watching are? Is it other control rooms? Why would they care? Is the Old Ones? Really? They have TVs in their sleeping chambers? Who else might it be?
It’s definitely the Old Ones. It’s not just the deaths which fulfill the ritual script which keeps them sleeping. There are other elements, too, though we don’t get told the full list. (Ignoring the warning from Mordecai looks to be one of them.)
Recall that we also get Curt, the Athlete, acting so uncharacteristically jock-ish that Marty remarks on it. I took that as a manifestation of how each of the roles requires symbolic actions identifying the people as associated with that role. Presumably a striptease is one of the things which marks a person as the Whore for the ritual.
I certainly buy the need for certain actions as part of the ritual. But are the Old Ones asleep and watching at the same time? I guess yes, if they’re not “watching” in the traditional sense.
I didn’t have the assumption that the Old Ones and the ‘customers’ were necessarily the same group. The ritual was to appease the Old Ones and keep them from rising, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make a ton of money by selling ‘live-action snuff video’ to ‘customers’. The Customers may be using the energies generated at the time to perform their own rituals. So they watch to know proper timing.
I think it was kept ambiguous just so it could be later explored. A pre-quel of sorts, since, well, we assume the world ended…
I do like the notion of it being something other than the Old Ones, but there’s a risk. If it’s the general population at large, you run the risk of alerting potential future victims to the possibility, and risk their resistance. Can’t afford that. So it would have to be some other, subset of the population at large. Such a group is not otherwise hinted at in the movie. If we Occam’s Razor that thing, it has to be the Old Ones, right?
I looove Jonathan’s explanation, but my first thought was closer to Kevin’s. …except that I envisioned that this movie was a meta-story about where horror movies come from. This is the process behind the scenes, and what we think is special effects in the movies is actually real. They’ve simply found a way to reap current-world profits from a ritualized system that’s existed since the dawn of man. That’s capitalism at work! 🙂