The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Most people think so. 74% of audiences gave it a thumbs up, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 82%.

Five friends set out for a weekend at a remote cabin in the woods, expecting nothing more than fun and relaxation. As night falls, they discover that something far more unsettling is at work and that nothing about their getaway is what it seems. Wikipedia ↗

The Cabin in the Woods is a 2012 American horror comedy directed by Drew Goddard and co-written with Joss Whedon. Five college friends travel to a remote cabin for a weekend getaway and encounter classic horror tropes — the creepy gas station attendant, the foreboding cellar, the ancient book of summoning — but the film simultaneously reveals that their horror experience is being orchestrated by a team of technicians in an underground facility who are manipulating events as part of a ritual. The Cabin in the Woods was a brilliant deconstruction of the horror genre that functioned as both a genuinely scary film and an incisive analysis of why horror films exist and what audiences demand from them.

Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's screenplay used the "controllers" in the facility as stand-ins for filmmakers and audiences, exploring the idea that horror narratives serve a ritualistic cultural function — appeasing something dark in the human psyche through the sacrifice of archetypal characters. The third-act revelation of every possible horror scenario stored in the facility's archive was one of the most creatively ambitious sequences in modern horror. The film earned $66 million worldwide on a $30 million budget.