SPOILERS OF COURSE






Id say it’s because my watching Rosemary’s baby is so far removed that I forget the ending, but I rewatched Wicker Man recently (and the remake, lol) plus another recent UK horror-thriller (not gonna name it to keep it spoiler free) so it wasn’t my first time at the creepy suburban cult ending rodeo.

I look at it like this; it was the third act of a horror movie where things were going down and usually one of three things happen.

1)The “Hero” barely escapes with his/her life vanquishing evil (perhaps there’s a ‘Still gotcha bitch’ final scare around the credit scene showing evil won out in the end)
2)”Hero” dies by the evil’s hand but is able to get rid of the evil on the way out
3)Evil wins, but wins in a way where the audience feels satisfied and less, ‘THE WORLD SUCKS’.

They tried to go another route and go full gore porn/fangoria with his decaying sister mounted on a head with a good amount of devil worship smeared all over the screen. I found the payoff earned because I still didn’t know where they were going with it until he stepped into the treehouse, and I found it effective because that scene was disturbingly beautiful composition of the bodies particularly the ‘praying’ ones, etc. Yeah, cramming a bunch of naked old people into a treehouse seems like a lolz idea on paper but because of all that other stuff it worked for me. You had all that built up tension over the run-time and I felt that seeing a callback to a previous characters messed up death was a good way to let it out as opposed to the easy + expected comedowns in the previous 3 points