Oct 25, 2026 · 46 min · 18 segments
Join us for the fifth and final episode of the Crime House of Horrors Limited Series, and Vanessa Richardson tells you all about the Cabin in the Woods, a 2012 horror film about five college students…
Vanessa RichardsonHostIf someone told you the only way to stop the end of the world was to kill five people, would you do it? Before you answer, know this.
Humanity's been answering that question for thousands of years, and we were not hypothetical about it.
In their cosmology, the world only existed because the gods had sacrificed themselves to set the sun in motion, which meant every sunrise ran on borrowed divinity.
So at the Templo Mayor, the great double pyramid at the heart of their capital of Tenochtitlan, priests led captives up the steps, laid them across the altar, and, with obsidian blades sharper than modern surgical steel and generations of anatomical practice, opened their chests and removed their still-beating hearts.
It was the sacred center of one of the largest, most sophisticated civilizations in the hemisphere.
The skulls of the sacrificed were displayed on an enormous public rack called the Zompantli, flanked by towers built of skulls and mortar.
Conquistadors claimed the Great Rack held as many as 130,000 skulls, and scholars knew the Spanish had every incentive to exaggerate Aztec brutality because the horror stories justified the conquest.
Then in 2015, archaeologists digging beneath downtown Mexico City found it.
The postholes of the Great Rack, hundreds of skulls, the remains of the towers, skulls mortared together right where the chroniclers said they'd be.
Among the hundreds of skulls, alongside the expected captured warriors, were women and children.
If someone told you the only way to stop the end of the world was to kill five people, would you do it? Before you answer, know this.
Humanity's been answering that question for thousands of years, and we were not hypothetical about it.
In their cosmology, the world only existed because the gods had sacrificed themselves to set the sun in motion, which meant every sunrise ran on borrowed divinity.
So at the Templo Mayor, the great double pyramid at the heart of their capital of Tenochtitlan, priests led captives up the steps, laid them across the altar, and, with obsidian blades sharper than modern surgical steel and generations of anatomical practice, opened their chests and removed their still-beating hearts.
It was the sacred center of one of the largest, most sophisticated civilizations in the hemisphere.
The skulls of the sacrificed were displayed on an enormous public rack called the Zompantli, flanked by towers built of skulls and mortar.
Conquistadors claimed the Great Rack held as many as 130,000 skulls, and scholars knew the Spanish had every incentive to exaggerate Aztec brutality because the horror stories justified the conquest.
Then in 2015, archaeologists digging beneath downtown Mexico City found it.
The postholes of the Great Rack, hundreds of skulls, the remains of the towers, skulls mortared together right where the chroniclers said they'd be.
Among the hundreds of skulls, alongside the expected captured warriors, were women and children.
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