What did the ending mean to you?

riki_san said it best here, and other points have been covered quite well too by other posts on here.

I don't understand all that much why there is confusion here, the film does a good job explaining itself without resorting to overly-obvious exposition. I'm glad people have their own interpretation, but I feel the one mentioned by the majority of people on here is the one the film makers were going for, as there is evidence of that premise throughout the film.

Perhaps I've read too many books on Screenwriting to smell hidden exposition a mile away, as I found this film to present itself quite well. Without being confusing or resorting too much to exposition. Such as films like 'Inception' that rely on it.

To add to the points riki_san touched upon...


One Quote I find deserves a fun mention is...


Michael - ''Why would they just leave all that stuff, you know?''
Chris - ''Because they don't exist I think...''

These clues are just cannon fodder to move the plot forward, which is what WE as a viewer want or maybe they are missing because they somehow escaped this fiction.


Also

Chris - ''if someone is following us (that's us, the viewer) why don't you just uncuff me so we can get away from them?
Michael - ''Will you go into rehab?''

...because we won't be happy till he says yes, right?



Also.. as said before...the french man explains most of the premise..

French Man - ''I think if it is something, it is none of these things, or perhaps all of them? how does an isolated tribesmen in ecuador, know the difference between an alien, an angel and a ghost. He doesn't...but he tells a story..to make sense of the infinite.''

This implies that the true GHOST, ALIEN, GOD or ANGEL is that of us, the overseer. We are the ones lurking in the shadows of their fiction, watching, waiting for twists and turns in the fiction, be it cave drawings, written, or film...and essentially WE could be nothing more than characters in somebody else's fiction, and so on...into the infinite.


It is also worth a mention look at is this Cabin in the woods, along with the Caves in the surrounding area are a hotbed for this activity, because they are essentially tropes and cliches in which allot of fiction take place. This place is visited frequently by us, by cliche, by our minds.


For me the biggest give away of the premise is when...
and I can't remember the quote but Chris says something along the lines of 'the footage could exist anywhere, I't could be on a harddrive somewhere'. Its likely we will be watching this film off exactly that, our laptops

And lastly...for those who are not happy with an ending without putting it down to an alien or monster of some kind...that is Exactly the point the Frenchman was making. We can't take we are the devices of a higher power's fiction so we create such explanations

riki_san ..... According to me you nailed it.Thanks Man :) .... this one had me perplexed.

I had a totally different idea about this movie before I came her. I'll just throw my initial thoughts into the ring.

First of all, we know from Byron that people have always come to this area to study the strangeness that seems to happen. Even the Native Americans had no interest in rebuilding the house once it was burnt down, like they knew it was a bad place. So, there's a bit of supernatural set-up (that came from outside the personal experiences of Mike and Chris).

Then there are Chris and Mike's actual experiences. Chris acts as if a lot of these strange things are old hat and wonders why Mike is making such a big deal about them. He blames things on satellites and Satan worshippers. Mike is seeing these things for the first time, and being a more curious guy, investigates things. The more he investigates, the more that seems to happen. A lot of the equipment was older - supposedly left by the French students from 30 years prior.

What if all of the things Mike and Chris see and hear on the slides/records/CD/film are products of their own imaginations? Like shared psychosis? The first things they saw were random people doing strange things, but as the movie went on, the things they began to see involved them. They even thought they saw their future selves, although none of the things they saw happened exactly like the media suggested. Would it really be that out of character for them to be afraid of being killed by either the druggies or the Native Americans and projected that fear onto what they were watching? Maybe the media was actually blank and their minds filled in the blanks on what was actually there? And the more scared they got, the more intense the media became. But, what would cause this? Maybe I watch too much Supernatural, but my first thought was a Buruburu, the ghost of the fear that someone felt as they died (maybe the Native American who died in the original fire, maybe someone who's story we never heard). They spend their time making people around them feel fear, even in situations where no fear should really be felt. Over and over, Chris and Mike were shown terrible endings and the implication that they would have some horrible thing happen to them. This backfired when the media that scared them also taught them what to avoid, so their "ending" wasn't as fear-inducing as the Buruburu had wanted. So it manifested, and Mike realized what it wanted. It wanted to feel the men's fear but only instead was feeling their relief. So he asked, "Can we end this another way?", as if offering to make up a more fearful ending to satisfy the ghost. But, since we don't see how it ends, we can assume that the Buruburu didn't want them to make up another, scarier ending. It had wanted fear and it had wanted it immediately, so the fear of their own upcoming death was more intense than any ending they could have come up with on their own. Plus, it didn't have to wait.

I've got two good posts in me and I just wrote my third...

************spoilers***************


I definitely saw his wife's words as the ever so famous Harbinger of death. She predicts their doom, and the story can't end without doom. We end up getting that particular ending because no other ending can ever be better. We can create our own ending.

My ending is the one commonly shared-- about us the viewer being the monster, and the fourth wall breaking down. I think every time the screen flashed with red (sorry, I forget the proper term for the film reacting to heat or whatever like that) the viewer/monster is frustrated or anxious.

I think when they brought up the monster's wants, the monster gets uneasy and suggest an ending, but I think they were set up to fail since the monster kept interring. Which reminds me of god.

Everything can be made really simple in this story or everything could be complex and Indian spirits of fear yadda yadda.

I think it is like Cabin In The Woods, and both make you have to really over think it to appreciate it, and I think that's the point. It's fun getting lost in the whys and the interpretations, and the hidden clues.