The Left 4 Dead Easter Eggs You May Have Missed In The Cabin In The Woods

It's always a joy to see a reference to a favorite game make its way off console or PC and into other outlets in pop culture. While it's something fans have grown semi-accustomed to with major franchises like "Mario" or "Sonic the Hedgehog" transcending the controller for everything from clothing to feature-length films, there's still that little ping of excitement when video game characters or allusions make their first jump to other media. 

Though many films or brands will do everything they can to draw attention to the fact that a popular video game is being showcased, sometimes these details or Easter eggs are tucked away and fly under the radar. This is the case for the "Left 4 Dead" Easter eggs within the film "The Cabin in the Woods." A cross reference between a multiplayer zombie action game designed to parody horror movies and a film that also pokes fun at common horror tropes makes total sense. In fact, there's some history behind the "Left 4 Dead" Easter eggs in "The Cabin in the Woods" that may leave fans wishing things turned out differently.

"The Cabin in the Woods" isn't really a horror movie; rather, it's a study on what makes horror movies tick. The premise is all too familiar to anyone who's ever watched "Friday the 13th" or "Evil Dead." A group of teenagers head to a secluded cabin for a nice getaway, but things take a turn for the worst when they inadvertently summon the dead. In actuality, the group of friends is being manipulated at every turn by a mysterious organization that's trying to recreate certain horror tropes to stave off the impending doom of the planet. 

What follows is a lot of deaths, a lot of laughs, and some great twists along the way. Namely, when the survivors discover the hidden entrance to a lab underneath the cabin — that's where the "Left 4 Dead" Easter eggs are snuck in. There's a scene that slowly reveals a Rubik's Cube-esque series of prison cells that show all of the possible monsters and entities the teenagers could have gone up against. As Reddit users have pointed out, viewers can spy a Boomer, Tank, and a Witch in the holding cells during the scene, but some contend that there are even more Special Infected populating the cells.

While it may not immediately be clear as to why "The Cabin in the Woods" includes full-fledged character models from "Left 4 Dead," it's hard to argue the fact that the two share a lot of the same tone and inspiration. In fact, the co-op zombie survival game and the horror comedy film were actually supposed to be much more involved with each other than just a few Easter eggs. As it turns out, there was initially supposed to be DLC made for "Left 4 Dead 2" that'd let players venture into the titular cabin in the woods and take on the horror both above and within the underground facility. 

In an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, director Drew Goddard gave fans some background about the DLC that could have been and why it never saw the light of day. Goddard said, "We actually were going to do a downloadable 'L4D2' expansion pack, where you'd fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it. But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background (I had a lot of cubes to fill.)"

Players may never have gotten the chance to play through the "Cabin in the Woods" DLC for "Left 4 Dead," but the connection between the two will forever be immortalized in the Easter eggs hidden within the film.