M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film Knock at the Cabin is based on the book Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. Though the film makes some major changes, particularly in the last half, both works deal with the question of sacrifice in a religious context. They both ask a version of the question: Would you kill someone you loved if the world depended on it? Or volunteer to be killed by your loved one to keep the world turning?
We meet Eric, Andrew, and their seven-year-old daughter Wen, who have escaped to a remote cabin for a vacation. Four strangers, led by the hulking but seemingly kind Leonard, arrive and take them captive. The strangers insist that the world is about to end, and the apocalypse can only be prevented if their three captives make the choice to kill one of themselves, sacrificing a family member for the sake of the world. The set-up is a fascinating blend of two horror sub-genres that don’t usually get within shouting distance of each other: home invasion (think The Strangers), and apocalyptic (like The Walking Dead).
Tremblay told us that the home invasion story came before the apocalypse:
The earliest kernel of the story was the question of how would I do a home invasion story? We’d already seen invaders killing/torturing the family a zillion times, and we’d seen the family turn the tables on the invaders often, so I thought, what if the people who broke in didn’t hurt the family but started killing each other instead. That would be weird. How and why could that happen?
His answer was to set the invasion at the end of the world. Maybe. Tremblay’s book is noteworthy for its ambiguity—even at the end, we’re not sure whether the world is actually ending or not. (In his story “Notes from the Dog Walker,” Tremblay makes joking references to one of the characters as “Mr. Ambiguous Horror”—clearly a joke at his own expense!) Instead of giving us answers about what is “really” happening in the outside world, Tremblay forces us to focus entirely on the characters in the story, on their response to the question of sacrifice.
Both the film and the book use apocalypse to interrogate contemporary notions of sacrifice. The word apocalypse comes to us from Greek—it means ‘unveiling’ or ‘revelation.’ So what, exactly, do these stories show us about our fixation on sacrifice?
[Please note that there will be spoilers for both the book and the movie in the last section of the article.]
Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Systems
In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the first sacrifice happens near the very beginning of the human story. Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden, then give birth to Cain and Abel. The first story we hear of Cain and Abel involves sacrifice; we don’t see this being commanded by God, or learn of any instructions they received. Somehow, they just knew how to do it. (Though we’ve got to imagine that Cain wished he had received more instructions, since God didn’t like his sacrifice—for reasons that have remained obscure for millennia.) Sacrifice as an act of worship is just assumed.
The word ‘sacrifice’ points to the religious practice of destroying something—burning a grain, pouring out a liquid, or butchering and burning an animal—as a means of communing with the divine. But how, exactly, does burning a grain or an animal connect us to the divine?
In the religious imaginations of ancient peoples, the sacrifice was a shared meal with their god(s). Aristophanes, for instance, criticizes waning religiosity in his day by depicting the gods gathered on Olympus, complaining of hunger due to lack of sacrificial offerings. So too the Hebrew sacrificial system imaginatively invited the supplicant to God’s table. An acceptable sacrifice made one a welcome guest at God’s meal.
That the gods participate in some literal way with human sacrifice—eating the smoke of the burnt offerings or whatever—opened up some scandalous possibilities that ancient theologians were quick to reject. Aristophanes’ depiction of starving gods is satirical. The Hebrew prophets, for their part, pointed out repeatedly that the Hebrew god didn’t require sustenance from humans, so such cultic activity apart from the maintenance of a just society was pointless.
This is perhaps most evident in Psalm 50, where the psalmist, writing as God, announces:
Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you; your burnt offerings are continually before me. I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine. “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?”
Despite these critiques, sacrifice as means to appease or influence gods was widespread in the ancient world. The most heinous (from our contemporary perspective) is doubtless the widespread (though rarely employed) practice of child sacrifice: consider Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his younger son at God’s command in Genesis 22, King Manassah of Judah (2 Kings 21), or King Mesha of Moab (2 Kings 3). Whether these last two examples are accurate descriptions of historical events or polemics against kings that the biblical authors didn’t like is unclear. But in either case, it demonstrates that the practice of child sacrifice was in the air of the biblical world.
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Within the Christian tradition, the most prominent sacrifice is the crucifixion of Jesus. Some theologians interpret Jesus’ crucifixion through the lens of sacrifice, one demanded by God due to the sins of humanity. Such an interpretation is a double-edged sword; for many Christians, the understanding that humanity has been forgiven by God once and for all is a profound affirmation of our existence. But it also requires a God who was willing to require the sacrifice of God’s own Son to offer this forgiveness.
Other theologians reject this image of divine child sacrifice, pointing instead to the mystery of the Trinity. On the cross, we don’t see God sacrificing God’s child to appease God’s wrath, but God offering God’s own life for the sake of humanity—an act of divine hospitality.
This is the dangerous trajectory of religious logic: it can either orient us toward hospitality or exploitation. Sacrifice can be either a shared meal or an attempt to curry divine favor at the expense of someone more vulnerable than us. And when the goal of currying that favor is to ensure a harvest or a battlefield victory or the continuation of our group, it’s easy enough to convince everyone (including ourselves) that we had no choice but to sacrifice that vulnerable person or population.
With regard to the possibility of averting via sacrifice a potential apocalypse in The Cabin at the End of the World, Tremblay writes:
I wanted to keep [the reality of the apocalypse] vague, or try to anyway, to focus more tightly on the actions of the invaders and leave their motivations open to interpretation/guessing while exploring the seductive horror of believing you have no choice and thus abdicating personal responsibility for your actions.
This is a space of true horror: that we might sanctify the visitation of violence on vulnerable populations, abdicating our responsibility in the name of the greater good.
A World Built on Sacrifice
This assumption doesn’t operate only in religious rituals: Our systems are all built upon sacrifice. When we asked Tremblay about this idea, he offered this fascinating response:
Tales of sacrifice are told across all cultures and of course it can be a noble act and a story worth telling. However, I’ve grown tired of the type of story we read and see so often in America, where a character sacrifices themselves so that everyone else can continue living their comfortable lives without enacting some sort of change or reflection.
Sacrifice is perhaps most readily apparent in our discourse surrounding military service. Serving in the military is a poorly paid job, deeply disruptive to family structures, and carries potential risks that are barely imaginable. The only way we can justify it as a society and encourage individuals to participate is through a valorization of sacrifice. The existence of a military requires sufficient buy-in of this idea of sacrifice.
As it currently functions, our society also requires a number of sacrifices that are involuntary. In this kind of sacrificial logic, people do not volunteer to be sacrificed after buying into the ideology and assenting to the sacrifice’s importance, they simply get stuck in that role due to social circumstances, systemic racism, economic inequality, or other impersonal means of turning individuals into grist for the societal mill. Most recently, inflation has become a major problem; one of the concerns of economists is that our unemployment rate is too low, which means that prices will continue to rise to compensate for the increased wages that workers can demand in an environment of almost full employment. As economic theory, this is unremarkable; it’s how prices and wages interact with one another. But it requires a substantial amount of people—at least 4-5% of working adults—to become largely involuntary sacrifices to keep the system running. It’s as if we bracket off this moral question with the understanding that it’s just how the inanimate connection between wages and prices works. On a worldwide scale, entire countries are sacrificed to the system of international capitalism, reduced to raw resources that can be extracted for the benefit of global powers, while the majority of their population struggles to survive. As Tremblay puts it:
To keep any society of a large size going it’s inevitable that people will be grinded in the gears for the benefit of everyone else. That’s the kind of sacrifice I’m not so hot on celebrating. Maybe more contemporary stories should focus on that human cost and ask that very difficult question…how do we know if a sacrifice is worth making?
Knock at the Cabin (film) and Cabin at the End of the World (book) question this sacrificial economy, and ask whether the most moral choice is to refuse to participate in an immoral system. In essence, the question animating both stories is one of two conflicting systems of ethics.
In utilitarian ethics, often most closely associated with the writings of the British philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the goal should be to seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Outcomes are more important than process, and if some bad things have to happen along the way—well, that’s just how choices work in the real world. We don’t dwell on them too much, because we know the overall outcome was good.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) articulates a competing ethical worldview known as deontology (from the Greek “deon,” meaning “duty). In Kant’s ethical vision, actions have intrinsic value in and of themselves, and we should always act as if the world would benefit from our actions becoming a universal maxim. Kant is not concerned with outcomes, but only with whether an action is right in and of itself.
[Again, please note that the rest of this article contains major spoilers for the end of both Cabin at the End of the World and Knock at the Cabin…]
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In Cabin at the End of the World, Andrew and Eric choose not to sacrifice anyone. According to Tremblay:
In my book, Andrew and Eric decide that even if something cosmic was happening, it was wrong. What they experienced in the cabin and the sacrifice choice they’re presented with were cruel and patently immoral. So, they rejected it all, as I believe we should too.
The perspective Tremblay provides above is a highly deontological one—Andrew and Eric make the choice they know to be right, for the intrinsic value of the choice itself, not necessarily based on the outcome a choice will produce. It’s a framework in stark contrast to utilitarian ethics, which prioritizes the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Within a system of utilitarian ethics, capitalism is a perfectly valid choice. After all, it produces wealth and happiness for much of the world’s population. (Setting aside, for a moment, the very real problem of climate change, which provides strong challenges to this reading of capitalism’s outcomes.) But from a deontological perspective, the harm it requires inflicting on capitalism’s sacrifices is unacceptable, and should be rejected because it is not right in and of itself. This is Tremblay’s challenge to both our religious systems, and our wider social and economic systems as well—can we participate in an unethical system, even if it provides benefits for the majority of its participants?
Shyamalan, in contrast, turns this question on its head through his version of the film. Andrew and Eric are faced with the same dilemma, but arrive at a very different choice. Rather than refusing to participate in an immoral choice, they decide that humanity is worth saving—that there is enough goodness in our relationships with each other that this unjust choice is worth making to preserve the bonds of love that we share. Shyamalan’s film is willing to overlook the systems undergirding our society in favor of a focus on individual human connections. In this sense, the decision Andrew and Eric make in the film is to privilege the greater good of these human connections over the injustices of the sacrificial system. Neither of them are willing to concede that the sacrifice they’re being asked to make is just—they simply come to believe that the good that will come out of it is greater than the injustice.
It’s a choice that’s in line with much of Shyamalan’s work throughout his career; human connection and kindness is always worth saving, and is frequently the animating force behind his characters’ choices. In The Sixth Sense, young Cole Sear realizes that his haunted life can be in the service of helping the dead connect with their living loved ones; in Signs, the bonds of love for his family that the tormented Graham Hess must remember are the key to saving humanity from the alien invasion. Knock at the Cabin follows this same through line—humanity’s goodness and kindness towards one another is worth preserving, at any cost. There’s no sacrifice that can’t be healed by bonding together over the car stereo. It’s a challenge that Shyamalan’s films have struggled with all along: his resolutions frequently move too quickly away from the deeply unsettling problems the films introduce, and place a higher value on simple acts of kindness than they’re able to bear.
Still, Knock at the Cabin leaves us with questions that the too-easy resolution can’t quite erase. What if this is the divine structure on which our world is built? Would we still choose to participate? Or do we opt out, regardless of the consequences for ourselves—and the rest of humanity? And—perhaps most troubling—what does this decision mean for the economic and political system of the world we find ourselves living in?
Paul Tremblay’s work forces readers to grapple with these larger questions—his brand of horror avoids easy answers and resists the desire for comforting rationalizations. If you’ve read Cabin at the End of the World or his other books, let us know your thoughts. And if you have recommendations for other works of horror or science fiction/fantasy that explore the ethics of sacrifice and personal responsibility, please share them below.
JR Forasteros cut his teeth on Goosebumps books and Sword of Shannara. These days, he’s a pastor, author of Empathy for the Devil and scifi/fantasy junkie in Dallas, TX. Once he makes it through his to-read list, he plans to die historic on the Fury Road. Find him on Twitter or Instagram, or on the Fascinating Podcast where he is a co-host.
Brandon R. Grafius is associate professor of biblical studies and academic dean at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. His most recent book is Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us, published by Broadleaf Books. Connect with him on Twitter @brgrafius.
