So...the girl falls to the bed and giggles...they wheel her off and say she's a schizo....what just happened?? it seems so weird how...just everything about this movie was confusing. I mean I get what the story was saying, but why did they just not explain anything.
shareI think the doctor was wrong about the schizophrenia.
Remember the scene right before the bedroom levitation scene?
The father breaks down in the interview and admit that the mother was just evil. He said after he got done yelling at her for having another man in the bed with her she had "a twisted smirk on her face".
Now in the bedroom scene with the daughter. She's screaming for help, levitating.... but when she finally comes down to the bed she has a twisted smirk. Clearly there's more than schizophrenia going on. Whatever made the mother "evil" as the father recall during the interview is what is making the daughter evil.
They were both tormenting him with their smirks.
I agree...
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if she was truly carted away for being schizo, she should have been strapped down...and she was not.
shareNot necessarily. I have assisted in psychiatric facilities for several years, including one that is mostly designed for schizophrenic patients. The daughter has probably been sedated prior to being placed on the stretcher.
Even if she ISN'T sedated and seems awake, they would only strap her down if they felt she placed an imminent threat to herself or others, and even if this was SUGGESTED by people (like the father or crew saying she might be violent) EMTs will generally not strap someone down unless they first-hand witness self-mutilation or violence on others OR if the patient directly admits this to the EMTs.
Every EMT- whether they are taking her to a medical hospital emergency room or the admission part of a psychiatric unit- is trained to be able to restrain a patient at any given point in time. Restraints are usually on hand and they can also physically hold a person down if need be; but in view of a person's illness (even psychotic) being not their fault, they will not strap someone down unless they're given no choice, mostly because A. it can be painful and upsetting to patients and B. in today's world, a patient could arguably sue if they feel the restraints were unnecessary. Sorry for the big ol' brick of text :P
Every EMT is trained to be able to restrain a patient at any given point in time. not true
shareI think you may be missing the further point that just because someone has schizophrenia that they need to be sedated or strapped down at all. Someone who works in psychiatric facilities, as you claim, should be aware that the vast majority of schizophrenics are in no way dangerous. Schizophrenics with delusions of grandeur are generally not dangerous to anyone but themselves if they believe they have abilities beyond the realm of normal human abilities. Schizophrenics with paranoid delusions can cause disturbances, but for the most part they are just trying to protect themselves from unseen ideas and entities.
In regards to the film's claim of the schizophrenic mother not taking her medication, schizophrenics generally do not have this issue if they are suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Regardless, if she was actually dangerous, the antipsychotic medication would be given to her intravenously and that would deal with the issue. If you have never taken anti-psychotics, you would not be familiar with the extraordinary power of sedation that they have.
In the past I have had three stays in psychiatric wards because of severe anxiety related to obsessive compulsive disorder and have had plenty of first hand contact with schizophrenics. Afterwards, I got my undergrad in psychology and am working on my phd in clinical psychology. So firsthand I can tell you that most schizophrenics are not remotely dangerous.
You can say "schizophrenics are generally not dangerous" all you want. LOL. Especially the paranoid variety. I beg to differ. I decline to say how I know first hand, but it's dangerous to generalize anyone with a psych disorder. Your training should tell you that.
shareP.S. Good luck with your training and in the field.
shareI think despite what the doctor was saying, it was in fact a possession. Possessions try to destroy the life of whomever's possessed. First the mother and then passed to the daughter. I have no idea what 'science' they used to rule out possession or how they think a poltergeist could cause everything that was seen. Not to mention the deleted pic of the ghostly female, seeing her in the living room, and again in the end. Uhh yeah ahd not to mention all the times the girl was possessed. Just because someone walks in all sounding smart doesn't mean they know wtf they're talking about, haha. Grade A pretentious doctor...
shareagreed. i believe the doctor was just a huge red herring. viewers who were confused obviously trust these "doctors" a little too much.
nonetheless, he DID get every phenomenon started and recorded. as a scientist, he scores high marks in the 'curiosity' department. he was also kinda "brave", in that he wasn't afraid of no ghost... but we could chalk up his bravado to his amazing arrogance and callous lack of concern for his hosts. then there were his "hypotheses" which came off sounding like psychobabble pseudoscience at best and pompous pretentious garbage at worst.
well, at least he spared a fag for the girl.
What part of "parapsychology" do you (alveolate and the one you're replying to) not understand?
shareOK as if it isn't obvious, there will be spoilers here...
I kinda thought it was a bit obvious as to what happened unless you overthink it too much and get coloured by the irrelevant stuff most of the team say to distract you from the obviously supernatural stuff that is happening all the time. As one of the other comments here stated, it was a posession, but we don't know what the mother looked like... so either it was the mother's spirit or it was the spirit/demon/whatever that possessed the mother, now trying to transfer to the girl. I beleive it is a demon or malevolent spirit and here is why:
It seems obvious that the father did not abuse the daughter, he cared about the kids a lot, he fought the mother over the kid's welfare, he fell apart on camera and the story he gave up which seemed genuine showed what the mother was like and what he was like, he allows his daughter to treat him like crap because he is too lenient to take a hard line with her because he feels bad enough already with shouldering the burden of the mother's failings, not the hallmarks of an abusive paedo parent. Even the doctor didn't buy that he was an abuser and thought it was the daughter projecting this. However when the daughter zones out during the seance type thing and she is appearing to channel one of the voices says that he is a murderer and suggests he abused the daughter, as with the footage of her nightgown being raised showed earlier. This in my opinion at least suggests that it is a malevolent spirit pretending to be the mother accusing the father -possibly to take him out of the picture as a guardian to maybe make it easier to break the daughter's spirit so she can be fully taken over maybe-, as the father and the team are trying to expose what is going on and maybe fight it... partly because I think the mother would have to be some major kind of ***** to be trying to get the father locked up for stuff he didn't do even now that she is dead as if possessing her daughter wasn't bad enough. But who knows, maybe it was the mother, it seems plausible, I don't think if possession is real that medication would be able to suppress the demons in you, maybe she was just a ***** who refused to take her meds, went crazy and then tried taking over her daughter and wanted to ruin the father because she is a nutcase ghost.
The other reason I felt it was obvious that it was a possession is that you see the spirit of a woman (like i said not sure if it's the mother since we don't know what she looked like)twice, once behind the girl in the photo, and again during the strobing scene, but after the daughter smirks and is carted away, you see what looks like the daughter in ghost form crawling across the ceiling now, not an older woman, suggesting that the daughter's spirit was removed from the body and now something else is there.
Don't overthink the film though, it's purposefully vague and full of plotholes, the doctor says there is nothing supernatural, then the house gets blown apart and a girl floats off the bed, sure, ok I get it, he is trying to say there is a natural explanation for all these things no matter how bizarre, but you're telling me all this comes under his blanket of schizophrenia?!?! that doctor needs to be sent back to college.
In fact I don't understand why in the world a psychologist would associate schizophrenia with people being suspended in the air, objects moving in the dark, people being thrown on a glass door with violence, ghost-like images in the photos... there's clearly something wrong, Doc.
shareThe doctor thinks that people's minds, at least when stressed or afflicted with a condition like schizophrenia, could impact the world around them (using the power of electricity/electro-magnetism, or some such). This is how he explained poltergeists to the father.
But, if the doctor was pretty sure at the outset that the girl had schizophrenia, why did he go through the whole investigative rigamorole? He seemed genuinely upset at the end that they couldn't "prevent anything from happening"--but they sure could have if they'd gotten her medication or therapy right away!
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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"--Pres. Merkin Muffley
Yes he did say this at the start nearly, that poltergeists are actually poltergeist "phenomena" and it is almost like our mind and fears etc being projected and manifesting or whatever... I didn't focus on remembering this trash that well.
...The thing is though, a doctor should know that this is not schizophrenia, schizophrenia already has a list of symptoms that diagnise it as what it is, and being able to go all Carrie and demolish half an apartment with a brain fart isn't one of them. So if that doctor is so sure that the mind is capable of doing such things he should invent a new mental condition to classify this accurately and establish his theories properly, come on, American shrinks already have a bad rep for telling fat people it isn't their fault, and for giving kids ritalin and saying they have ADHD when all they need is a slap and parents who aren't morons.
And, a doctor shouldn't draw conclusions about a patient's diagnosis from notes made by another doctor--he needs to examine this girl away from her house using proper techniques!
I think it's clear why this man is a psychic investigator, not a practicing psychologists! Okay, okay, I realize this is a movie not the real world...
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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"--Pres. Merkin Muffley
to be fair despite these failings I've got to be honest and say I still preferred this to the formulaic Big Brother with a ghost crapfest that is Paranormal Activity... nothing suspensful or scary about a swinging light or sudden noises, any lazy writer can get cheap shocks that way. At least this was going a slightly interesting way by making you consider that it was being mentally projected and then trying to consider who it may be and why with the whole was the father abusing the girl or not angle. Like it or not this was pretty original for the footage-horror genre
shareI think that if Apt 143 had come out before Paranormal Activity I would have preferred it, but having seen a few of the PA franchise, this movie is too much the same thing. It certainly does have a more interesting plot--I only kept watching it because I thought it weird that the mother might be haunting her daughter and wanted to know the resolution.
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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"--Pres. Merkin Muffley
Movies like this tend to have plot holes however, this thread caught my attention. I found the movie very easy to understand. The Doctor is not saying that the levitating things are due to Schizophrenia in anyway. In fact he believes that there is nothing supernatural because nature cannot transcend itself. He believes ghost, demons and specters are all part of nature and not considered "supernatural", they are a part of nature. How does the Doctor rule out demonic possession? The father mentioned that this had happened in there previous house and in this one as well. It can't be two haunted houses, although to make sure they use that machine to ward of ghost or demons and it doesn't leave. So the Doctor says that it is Psychokinesis, which is the ability to move physical things with the power of the mind. Does the daughter do it willingly? No the Doctor claims that the Daughter is suffering from the same Schizophrenia that the mother suffered because his daughter would inherit it. So the Psychokinesis episodes are not being manifested by the daughter, but by an alternate personality of the daughter. That conclusion was come to when during the seance she says there are many of us. Why go through all this trouble? At the end he says as scientists we had to rule everything out but they couldn't prevent anything from happening. That is his conclusion, at the end with the girl crawling on the ceiling tells that it was in fact a demon (or demons) and that the Doctors hypothesis was wrong.
shareGreat theory, magnum, but there is one problem with it: You're confusing schizophrenia with dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder (MPD). They are not the same. Someone with schizophrenia will not have alternate personalities. Me, Myself, & Irene is famous for making this same mistake.
shareThey do show the mother. At the beginning, when the team is setting up, the camera man helps the blonde girl get stuff out of the car and puts the camera down on the table facing a photo of the family.
shareKinda dumb that they'd use "schizophrenia" because schizophrenia is nothing like this.
shareWho cares. The daughter was such a little b!tch that dad should have just thrown her and her pathetic attitude out into the street and focused on Benny.
If I had a miserable little brat like the daughter she'd be in the street faster than she can cry foul. I wish Dad would have forced her out and been done with her. Or was I supposed to feel sorry for yet another troubled, stuck up little princess?
The whole film made no sense. It annoyed me when the daughter, who by the way was possibly the most annoying character ever, suddenly she started talking in a completely different voice, had white eyes, hair became very messy, you can guarantee in a possession film the person's hair always goes crazy and she managed to push her dad away without touching him and they blamed it on her being schizophrenic. The way they filmed it annoyed, you couldn't see half the stuff and the blurred out machine just confused me
shareUh, you would throw your underaged daughter out; same one who just lost her mother?
Do you have kids? They ALL have bad patches. Her's was not extraordinary at all.
Anywho, if she had schizo, that wouldn't explain the levitation, the objects moving around.
And, again, the pic of the ghost...
Not clear on a couple of things:
Why did the mother go out and 'wrap the car around the tree'?
Also, the end of the movie, did the Dad get killed?
I'm going to be honest, it's been 3 years since I wrote that comment and after reading it. I have no idea what I meant and have no idea what the film is about. I can't really answer your reply because I can't remember
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