#I saw a Zepotha art cover? and I heard about wlw

[dangerclaw]

It’s because Seraphina became so good at acting during her time at theater camp, she managed to fool herself, the other campers, AND the audience all at the same time.

It started in stages, though. When the movie began to progress- with practically everybody dropping like flies- that’s when you really feel the heebie jeebies. The feeling that something’s not quite right, even though things look okay.

The final girl is winning, but she’s also pushing people right towards the killer to save her own skin. It’s normal to feel conflicted about it, the heroine not being entirely good. As people keep dying, though, it begins to feel too coincidental, too calculated. And it gradually dawns on us that Seraphina is actively leading people to their deaths and she knows it.

(Don’t even get me started on her scenes with Caroline. Their chemistry was off the charts, but then Seraphina would put her mask on and push her away. When it was eating at her from the self sabotage of her own happiness?? Tell me why Seraphina would always have a headache/stomach ache until Caroline arrived to the scene? That adds up to something, I don’t care what other people say.)

And the added themes of Seraphina hiding her pain and queerness to survive in a performative, heteronormative space. Something in her breaks, and we see it happen during the sauna scene.

Seeing her best friend/romantic interest get trapped in the sauna room as she was trying to hide from the killer. Hearing her screams from the hot room while she suffocates. It’s devastating to hear, since Caroline was always talking about becoming a singer throughout the movie. It was giving canary in a coal mine themes.

The one thing she never planned for happening to the one person she doesn’t want to lose.

But you see the gears turning in Seraphina’s head. What if she lets her die? If she dies, then there’s no us, (callback to the “We can just be… us” line) and she can be the best actress without the one who always saw through her act. How good of an actress are you if not everybody believes you, right? She has the gift of a true actress, and the promise of fame and power and glory is a bone she won’t let go of.

She’s completely aware of what she’s doing, but she can’t help it. She has the opposite power of Cassandra: a silver tongue that everybody believes. The rush of adrenaline as she thinks to herself, “Is this what is feels like to be an actress?” Because the whole world is a stage, right? And she was set on becoming the best actress ever known from the very beginning.

It was horrifying to see how disconnected she became from her own sense of self into someone that thrives in the spotlight, no matter the cost. Her constant emulation to a concept that she could never truly conform to: the powerful and calculative Sephira (key character from the play they were about to perform at camp, before all hell broke loose).

A shell of her former self, with a painful reminder of the past. What she could have had, if she was only brave enough to face it. But she kept putting on a mask, until the very end. So all she has left is a smile that isn’t really hers anymore. Seraphina became Saphira, in such a slow morph that was barely noticeable, leaving the audience horrified to see it come into fruition.

The movie is a trip, that’s for sure.

Actually, no, I am going to say it; Zepotha is being done so dirty by the tiktok people.

Zepotha was phenomenal in its handling of what otherwise would've been a tasteless story. Like, I have yet to see a movie utilize an unreliable narrator in such a way that it keeps you on high alert through the entire movie, because you know something is wrong but can never truly pinpoint it until it's too late. It truly put you in the headspace of Saphira, you saw everything like she did, and that was fucking genius.

Like even during my rewatches I still find myself siding with her, even though she's very much not in the right, not even slightly, and I should know that.

It's such a raw and brilliant way of exploring the human psyche and or sense of morality and I will die mad that it's being reduced to just an edgy slasher !!