“Typically, horror is accused of desensitizing violence for people as opposed to heightening your response to it. If you’re wondering why Tremblay (and so many readers) feel strongly about the importance of Wen’s death in the film, here’s how the author explains it. Tremblay said he sees the Wen incident as one of the “fulcrums of the story going in two opposite directions.” And while he would have still preferred Wen to have died in the movie, he admitted, “after meeting Kristen, I’m sort of glad I didn’t have to watch her die in some ways.” From there, the story deviates pretty heavily from its source material. In the book, there is a struggle with a gun that ends with Wen tragically being shot and killed. While there are some subtle changes throughout the first half of Knock at the Cabin, the first major change between the book and the movie happens towards the end. From there, the stories deviate pretty heavily, and audiences have had mixed responses to those changes. Either Wen or one of her fathers, Eric or Andrew, must die in order to save the world. In order to do this, Wen’s family must make a terrible choice. Ultimately, Leonard reveals that he is not alone and that he and his friends have come upon Wen and her family at this cabin for a purpose: to stop the end of the world from happening. As they continue to talk, Wen becomes more and more uneasy with their conversation. A young girl named Wen is catching crickets and talking to Leonard, a large man who is a stranger to her. We open on a scene that will be familiar to Cabin at the End of the World readers.

Unsurprisingly, the movie is different from the book in a lot of ways. While I’m a fan of both of their works, Shyamalan and Tremblay are very different storytellers, and I was curious to see how Shyamalan would interpret Tremblay’s devastating psychological horror novel for a wider audience. Night Shyamalan, I was incredibly excited, in part because I had no idea how this was going to go. When it was announced that Paul Tremblay’s apocalyptic horror novel Cabin at the End of the World was being adapted as a film by director M. Promotional image from Universal Pictures

Cabin end of the world