MovieChat Forums > Are You Afraid of the Dark? (2019) Discussion > In the woods after dark?

In the woods after dark?

posted 3 years ago by MAGolding (1096)
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So in the 2021 series, the Shadowman, who seems to be a version of a real urban legend, goes after kids who are in the woods by the lighthouse after dark.

So how did the people of the town learn about the Shadowman and find out that he only stalks children who are in the woods after dark?

If the legend of the Shadowman comes from some supernatural source, that supernatural source could know all the facts about the shadowman and relate all the correct facts to some humans, and thus the legend of the Shadowman could be completely accurate.

Or the supernatural source could have been misinformed or careless or even deliberately misled humans about some aspects of the Shadowman's curse.

But what if the humans learned about the curse of the Shadowman by investigating the missing kids and by deduction from the available information about those misssing kids. The deductions made by the humans could be flawed due to insufficient evidence to learn all the workings of the curse - if there were many child disappearances in town the town would be abandoned or else build a wall the size of the KIng Kong one around the woods. So if there have been only a small number of child disappearances there might not be enough data to correctly deduce how the Shadowman's curse works.

And people with enough data might make inaccurate deductions from it.

In the first episode, the kids are warned to stay out of the woods after dark, and Jai sets his watch to warn them a few minutes ahead of sunset. I note that Jai might have been extra careful, since darkness actually starts sometime after sunset. The kids all think that they have escaped from the woods before dark, Luke making it out just a minute before sunset. But it seems that at least Luke is effected by the curse.

So maybe the Shadowman's curse can fall upon kids who are in the woods even earlier than sunset. And maybe the legend doesn't say that because all of the previous kids who were taken ventured into the woods after dark, and all the kids who went in the woods but weren't cursed left the woods early enough to avoid the curse.

Or maybe the kids were wrong to think that they were literally and figuratively out of the woods when they passed the signs warning to stay out. Possibly for the purposes of the Shadowman's curse the woods extend beyond the warning signs, as far as the tree branches reach, and I noted that the kids foolishly stayed under the tree branches past sunset.

Or possibly the curse extends to the original borders of the woods, and developers cut down parts of the woods to build houses, without changing the borders where the curse takes effect.

Or passibly Jai made an error about the time of sunset at that date and location.

Or possibly the curse affects children in the woods after the time when darkness starts during the shortest day of the year, no matter what time sunset actually is on the specific day those kids enter the woods.

[–] MAGolding (1096) 3 years ago

In the second episode Jai realized that he made an error about the timing, though I am not sure what it was.

Jai said that it remains light for a little while after sunset. That is ovvious. It is called twilight, when the sky is still lit by light from the Sun below the horizon.

But my memory is that Sardo said that kids in the wooods after dark were cursed, not kids in the woods after sundown. So maybe Sardo doesn't know the curse limit is sunset instead of darkness, or maybe he lied to the kids for some reason. Or maybe I remembered what Sardo said incorrectly.

I note that Jain was looking at a map of time zones when he made his discovery. I note that the average time zone is 15 degrees of longitude wide or hundreds of kilometers or miles, though of course the borders of official time zones aren't straight north and south but zig zag a bit to follow state borders and stuff. Every place within a time zone has the same offiical time, but the time relative to the sun varies by four minutes for every degree of longitude. if Shadowville is at the eastern edge of the time zone physical sunset could be half an hour before the official time of physical sunset in the center of the time zone - maybe more if the eastern border of the time zone zig zags east to include Shadowville. And perhaps Jai looked up the time of sunset that day in a big city which was farther west in the same timezone, falsely assuming that the physical sunset would be the same in every part of the time zone.