Abby Trainor
Paul G. Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) and its film adaptation Knock at the Cabin (2023) present a “uniquely twenty-first century” (Tremblay 157) type of horror: how physical violence can spawn from a digital/cyber space. Both novel and film feature a queer married couple and their daughter being held hostage by doomsdayers who genuinely believe that the world will end unless someone from the family kills another. Unlike Cabin at the End of the World’s ambiguity about whether the apocalypse will actually occur, the adaptation guts the original critique of religious dogma, misinformation spread by for-profit media, and how the two have combined to create the perfect conditions to foster a rising cult of people willing to resort to vigilante violence. The film’s positioning of the four invaders as heralds of the truth may seem minor, but it shifts the meaning from a critique to a narrative embrace of hate-filled ideologies.
The novel’s warning: From chatroom to horsemen
Interested in the tension between coincidence and causation, The Cabin at the End of the World posits a precarity of the apocalypse that is critical to understanding the fathers’ dilemma: whether they should believe that these natural disasters are the result of 200 years of industrialization or an act of God. Catholic-raised Eric finds himself more or less swayed by the doomsdayer invaders, while his husband Andrew scrutinizes details that seem to reveal inconsistencies and undermine the credibility of the purported facts. He cheekily notes that it seems like “the end of the world [is keeping] a tight, regimented TV Guide schedule” (145), making readers ask themselves how the invaders could have such conviction if not for divine intervention. Andrew’s conclusion: extremist indoctrination.
In the digital descent into neo-nazi ideology (a.k.a. the “alt-right pipeline”), there are three cognitive stages through which many users progress in their radicalization: normalization, acclimation, and dehumanization (Munn). In Tremblay’s novel, Adriane, Leonard, and Sabrina meet in an online message board opened by Redmond—the man who hate-crimed Andrew in the past and then lied about his identity. The other three were compelled by their “visions” to make accounts, and although Redmond “never said anything outright hateful…he had the first vision” (Tremblay 158). The message board acts as a space to “reinforce and validate [each other’s] delusions because the same thing is happening to them” (157), first normalizing their delusions and then acclimating them to the idea that all it takes to avert Armageddon is taking a cross-country plane trip, cornering an unsuspecting family in an isolated cabin, and convincing them to execute one of their own. While neither Adriane, Leonard, nor Sabrina have fully reached the cognitive stage of dehumanization, they readily align themselves with someone who has. Even if they “aren’t religious lunatics” (157) who believe that queer people “have forfeited their humanity, and thus forfeited their rights” (Munn) just by existing, they stand by and comply with the one who slips on the white hood.
Fig. 1: “Redmond” prepares for death
The movie’s mistranslation: The religious right is right
Unlike the novel’s stubborn optimism that there is a possibility for the central couple to “go on” even if “it’s all real,” which, again, the novel does not confirm (Tremblay 269), the film solidifies the apocalypse as both real and inevitable. Instead of representing the dangers of the religious right’s strategy of radicalizing unsuspecting users, the four invaders are literally the Bible’s four horsemen of the apocalypse. In Christian tradition, the horsemen—War, Pestilence, Death, and Conquest—directly precede the end of the world (Britannica). Although they ride to the cabin in a GMC pick-up truck instead of on horseback, the four each wear a horseman’s color and vaguely represent them. “They remind us of all aspects of humanity….They’re the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (Shyamalan).
Fig 2: Leonard, Sabrina, and Adriane prepare to execute Redmond while Eric sees God in the mirror
Wearing red, Redmond represents War, and his death triggers the war on humanity in the form of a giant tsunami. In black, Adriane is Pestilence and unleashes a fatal flu after her execution. Up to this point, the order of their deaths, the resulting disasters, and the plausible deniability that their deaths were the cause of each disaster perfectly align with the text. The divergence begins when, instead of Wen accidentally dying before Leonard’s sacrifice, Andrew intentionally shoots Sabrina (yellow shirt, personification of Death). This leaves Leonard—white shirt, embodying the Horseman of Conquest, which, according to some scholars, represents Christ (Britannica)—as the final seal of the apocalypse.
That Sabrina dies before Leonard is critical to the adaptation’s diversion from Tremblay’s ending. In the novel, Sabrina notes that she “doesn’t know what [she] believe[s]” (Tremblay) and commits suicide because she discovers that she can’t live with herself for participating in the group’s violence. In the film, Sabrina’s agency and doubt is stripped from her. As the embodiment of Death, she dies with unwavering faith in the cause. Leonard continues in her stead, essentially positioning Conquest as more important than Death to the group. In the pivotal moment that defines the film’s establishment of the incoming apocalypse as fact, Leonard stands in front of a Breaking News segment and speaks simultaneously with the news anchor, solidifying the fact that their visions are real: “It is hard to describe the images we are seeing. They fill us with disquietude and horror. We are witnessing a collective tragedy unfathomable only moments before” (Shyamalan).
Fig. 3: Leonard speaks in tandem with a newscaster during a live segment
By being positioned as the Conquest/Christ-figure in front of the reporter, Leonard becomes inextricably linked to truth. There is no rationalizing how he already knows what she will say: it isn’t a pre-recorded segment. Any hope that the apocalypse was a well-executed ruse to scare the fathers into choosing to kill themselves instantly vanishes. The meaning of the words themselves stretch beyond the cyber-terrorist attack with the planes; Leonard’s “heart is broken” from the start of the film because of “what [he] has to do,” and even after three major tragedies occur with mass casualties, he still finds it “hard to describe the images” of the apocalypse. He is filled with “disquietude and horror,” knowing that his death will end the world because even now he cannot convince Andrew and Eric that his visions are real. From either Christ or Conquest’s lips, the apocalyptic message is still damning.
Conclusion: Surviving or succumbing to the storm
The horror of the novel is the ability for anyone to become susceptible to extreme brainwashing, that even individuals with moderate media literacy and critical thinking skills can still waver when tested against extremist narratives. For marginalized couples, the horror rests in not knowing who around you—however normal they may appear—secretly believes that the world would be a better place without you and people like you in it. And, that they would resort to violent measures in order to maintain their delusion. The film’s insistence on the apocalypse as a real outcome essentially undermines this entire purpose. It is not possible for Eric, Andrew, and Wen to weather that final storm at the end of the world because unlike the “countless other storms” that they have been through, this one is different.
Fig. 4: Andrew looks back at the oncoming storm and plane crash
When Eric sacrifices himself, Andrew and Wen are rewarded by the universe with a feel-good father-daughter bonding moment when their song plays on the radio of Redmond’s truck. God or the universe, it seems, is thanking them for complying, for making their queer family more palpable to a conservative and religious society that genuinely believes the world is ending when they see two men holding hands. The difference in Tremblay’s novel is that the world isn’t unambiguously ending, but even if it is, Andrew and Eric’s love will see them through no matter how much time they have left.
Works Cited
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Four horsemen of the apocalypse.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Oct. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/four-horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse.
Knock at the Cabin. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, performances by Dave Bautista and Jonathan Groff, Universal Pictures, 2023.
Munn, Luke. “Alt-Right Pipeline: Individual Journeys to Extremism Online.” First Monday, Vol. 24, no. 6, June 2019. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10108/7920.
Tremblay, Paul G. The Cabin at the End of the World. HarperCollins, 2018.
Abby Trainor is currently a senior English major at Lehigh University, where she co-hosts a monthly reading series to promote a positive space for creative writers to share their works on campus. In her free time, she plays rugby and collects more books than she can feasibly fit in her room.
