Years of discussion and still no answers!
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00:00 The scariest thing in the horror genre is the unknown, and the very best horror movies
00:04 know that the audience's lack of control is a tool to be used to disarm them and, yes,
00:09 absolutely scare the willies out of them as well.
00:12 For good or bad then, all of the following horror movie moments left the audience scratching
00:17 their heads.
00:18 I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are 8 Horror Movie Moments Nobody Understands.
00:23 8.
00:24 What does the ending mean?
00:25 Martyrs.
00:26 Martyrs is one of those classic horror movies that's been talked about to death, which
00:30 is why it's even more impressive that nobody has been able to come down conclusively on
00:35 its ending one way or another.
00:37 Though the film starts off relatively simple with a woman invading a house to murder the
00:42 people responsible for keeping her captive as a young girl, it quickly moves into the
00:46 surreal as the woman is killed off and her friend Anna is recaptured and subjected to
00:52 torture.
00:53 Her captors have a pretty nuts goal behind her suffering too, to figure out once and
00:59 for all whether there is life after death.
01:02 In order to achieve this answer, they need to create a martyr, someone who is tortured
01:07 so extremely that they essentially become a being caught between two worlds, in a frightening
01:13 liminal space of being not quite dead, not quite alive.
01:17 After being gruesomely flayed, Anna achieves this liminal state and whispers the secret
01:23 of the afterlife she discovers into the ear of the organisation's leader, who then promptly
01:30 kills herself.
01:31 Without being privy to what that secret actually was, audiences are left to ponder what does
01:36 come after death, if anything.
01:39 7.
01:40 What does the picture mean?
01:41 The Shining.
01:42 A classic of the genre, The Shining's ending will be debated for all time.
01:47 You know the story of this movie by now.
01:49 In a snowed-in old hotel in the mountains, family man Jack Torrance torments his wife
01:54 and son with an axe, driven mad by the spirits, both the drinking kind and the ghostly kind,
02:00 housed within the building's walls.
02:03 Eventually outsmarted by the quick thinking of a five-year-old boy, Jack freezes to death
02:08 after becoming lost in the hotel's garden maze.
02:11 That's not the end though, as we then cut back into the building and zoom in on a particularly
02:16 eerie framed photograph hanging on the wall.
02:19 As we get a close-up of what turns out to be a photograph of a dinner party, we see
02:23 that Jack is actually there in the image, front and centre.
02:28 The only issue is, well, this picture was taken in 1929 and the movie takes place 50
02:34 years later and Jack hasn't aged a day.
02:38 So what's the deal here?
02:39 Was Jack reincarnated?
02:41 Was he a ghost the whole time?
02:43 Was he assimilated by the hotel after dying?
02:46 It's an ambiguous note that's been hotly debated for years, with no official answer
02:51 coming either way.
02:53 6.
02:54 What is The Doppelganger - Annihilation?
02:56 Annihilation is a truly underrated sci-fi horror film from Alex Garland.
03:00 A pretty dense flick, all things told, it follows a group of scientists as they venture
03:05 into the Shimmer, an alien, environment-changing phenomenon that causes a break in reality
03:11 itself.
03:12 Inside the Shimmer, pretty much anything can happen, as the world mutates and births some
03:18 terrifying creatures, with one bear in particular guaranteed to keep you lying awake for weeks
03:24 on end.
03:25 While there are concrete explanations for virtually everything in the novel that the
03:30 movie is based on, Garland actually decided to pretty much rip those details up for the
03:35 movie and opted for a more metaphorical film rather than hard sci-fi.
03:40 As a result, the ending has left anyone who's seen it scratching their heads.
03:45 And that ending sees the only scientist who hasn't succumbed to the Shimmer, Natalie
03:49 Portman's Lena, encountering a shimmering humanoid in a lighthouse.
03:55 This being mimics every move Lena makes, before she ultimately manages to escape after hitting
04:01 it with a grenade.
04:03 Exploding it with a grenade!
04:04 Whichever one works, and they tell me I'm a writer apparently.
04:07 Anyway, back at the base, it's unclear what has actually happened to Lena, who has now
04:12 taken on characteristics of the other scientists she was with.
04:16 Exactly what the doppelganger was and how Lena had been changed by her experience is
04:21 never truly explained.
04:24 What is The Colour?
04:25 The Colour Out of Space?
04:27 The first, but certainly not last, Nicolas Cage movie on this list is a solid HP Lovecraft
04:32 adaptation.
04:33 In The Colour Out of Space, a family becomes tormented by a strange, otherworldly purple
04:38 light that infects and mutates their bodies, with each passing day birthing increasingly
04:44 strange sights.
04:45 With this being based on a HP Lovecraft story though, an author who was famous for using
04:51 the Get Out of Jail Free horror card of just describing monsters as being so scary the
04:55 human mind can't even comprehend them and then just letting the readers do all the legwork.
05:01 So much of the story is left intentionally ambiguous.
05:05 As a result, audiences leave the film none the wiser about what the titular colour actually
05:09 was or how it really works.
05:12 Hell, the wiki for the story quite literally describes it as a "force of the knowable",
05:17 so when it takes the characters in the film away towards the end, nobody has any idea
05:22 where they're actually going.
05:25 Was Child's The Thing The Thing?
05:27 The ending of The Thing is another classic, and leaves viewers with a question that nobody
05:31 has been able to concretely answer one way or another.
05:34 That of course being, is Child's The Thing?
05:37 But okay, let's back up for a second.
05:39 After being terrorised by an alien shapeshifter at a research base in Antarctica, only two
05:44 survivors remain by the end of The Thing, Child's and MacReady.
05:49 The latter has assumedly just blown the alien creature to kingdom come, destroying the whole
05:54 base in the process.
05:55 Fading by the fire and slowly freezing to death, he's then greeted by Child's, who
06:00 has miraculously survived and somehow caught up to him.
06:04 Both understanding that they're totally done for either way, they tentatively offer
06:08 each other a drink, uncertain whether one of them is The Thing.
06:12 Now, there have been a ridiculous amount of theories attempting to get to the bottom of
06:16 this mystery over the years, analysing everything from the visibility of the actor's breath
06:21 to the subtitles, but none have ever provided a real answer.
06:25 That of course is kinda the point though.
06:28 At this point in the story, it doesn't really matter either way if one of them is The Thing,
06:32 they're both dead meat once that fire goes out.
06:36 What Happened To The World?
06:37 Resident Evil
06:38 Paul W.S.
06:39 Anderson's Resident Evil movie franchise did not care for such things as continuity
06:44 or story or characters, and it laughed in the faces of everyone who assumed that it
06:50 would.
06:51 It had a big throaty laugh as well, like the one that Grinch does where he goes "HARK!"
06:55 As a result, the franchise played fast and loose with coherency and made a laughingstock
06:59 of anyone trying to piece together a proper timeline or a stable mythology for the whole
07:03 story.
07:04 The biggest headache in the series though regards the state of the world.
07:09 While the zombie outbreaks initially started small in the first two movies, the third movie
07:13 establishes that the T-Virus responsible for that has somehow gone airborne and devastated
07:19 the entire world.
07:21 Not only has most of the population been killed, but the virus has actually dried up the oceans
07:26 and transformed the world into a Mad Max style desert wasteland.
07:30 Which is all well and good, that is a very cool aesthetic, but then the fourth movie
07:36 reins all of that back and transports our characters to locations with lush environments,
07:41 huge bodies of water and nary a speck of sand in sight.
07:46 So what gives?
07:48 Well, nobody knows, this is just the beauty of this franchise I guess, continuity does
07:53 not matter.
07:54 The change is actually never even directly addressed in the movie, so audiences are just
07:59 supposed to rely on their own imagination to fill in the blanks as to why the world
08:04 changes states so dramatically.
08:07 Is it just a drug trip, Mandy?
08:10 Mandy was a big part of the Nick Cage resurgence, and you can totally see why.
08:14 It plays to the actor's madcap memeable strengths without falling into total parody,
08:20 and straddles the line between being an art house horror and a batched bit insane dark
08:25 comedy.
08:26 Essentially, the general thrust of the narrative sees Cage attempting to avenge the death of
08:31 his wife at the hands of a sinister cult.
08:33 It's easier said than done though, as Cage's character is forced to fight against demonic
08:39 bikers and later suffers through apocalyptic visions, with his sanity well and truly slipping.
08:46 The film is quite up front as well with the fact that drugs play a heavy part in what
08:51 audiences see on screen.
08:53 Hell much of the story hinges on characters being dosed up on LSD, so surely the wider
08:58 moments can be chalked up to that right?
09:00 It's all just one bad trip.
09:02 Well it's not really clear.
09:05 The movie goes so mad and blurs the line between characters tripping and full on supernatural
09:10 shenanigans that nobody can really parse what's going on.
09:14 1.
09:15 Were the Bugs Real?
09:16 Bug.
09:17 Bug is a horror movie all about delusions and paranoia, so it's no surprise that it keeps
09:21 the reality of its story closely guarded.
09:25 Ostensibly, it's about two troubled lovers, one of whom is convinced that he's been
09:29 infested with microscopic bugs by the military.
09:33 He claims that during his time in the service he was experimented on and is now being monitored
09:38 by some unforeseen force, and that the motel room he's staying in is littered with these
09:44 creepy crawlies.
09:46 The only issue is though, the audience never actually sees any of the bugs in question.
09:51 In fact, his lover initially doesn't see them either, until she also starts to buy
09:55 into his story and starts to spiral into paranoia with him.
10:00 Interestingly, while the movie pushes you into thinking that this dude's story is
10:04 clearly nuts, it does also make you second guess whether or not he might actually be
10:09 onto something.
10:10 There's some confirmation bias purposefully left in there, some coincidences that do line
10:15 up which makes you leave the movie wondering, were they actually right, or have I been sucked
10:21 into their conspiracy as well?
10:22 So that's our list, I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below,
10:26 which other horror movie moments are you totally confused by, and do you think you know the
10:30 answer to any of these?
10:32 Let us know, and while you're down there could you also please give us a like, share,
10:35 subscribe, and head over to WhatCultureHorror for more lists like this on the regular.
10:39 Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see