#it’s clear that the people writing and making the story had so many ideas that Never panned out or never got to pan out

[giantkillerjack]

Okay, so

Yes, get their asses!!!!!!! 👏👏👏👏

Idk what deer you are talking about? She didn't kill a deer, did she? She saved someone "They" were trying to claim, thus taking something from "Them."

I didn't know about the influences on this movie! That is very interesting!! It suddenly makes a lot more sense that the movie was validating the shitty conspiracy theories of true crime podcasts when such theories hurt people irl! (Kudos to my wife catching that as a shitty thing before I did.) The whole film is linked to another gross conspiracy theory!

This film is well-acted and well-shot, but the scariest and coolest part of the whole movie is literally in the YouTube trailer thumbnail, so it's all downhill from there really. In some ways, this movie could have been an email. An email with a 5-second gif of the scary tree head/face.

I think the fact that the film is so competently produced made it extra confusing when the writing didn't pan out in a good way. It's lacking so many of the tropes we associate with trashy horror, so I think I just assumed it was going to be good, but... ???

I am not sure the filmmakers actually had any idea of what they wanted to say, outside of a general engagement with the idea of trauma. Which makes their use of traumatic imagery feel, in retrospect, flimsy, gross, and unnecessary.

Especially when the moral of the story seems to be, like, "sometimes there are powerful forces that horrifically consume people, and even if it your job to help those people, you should instead let them suffer and disappear." Like, not every story needs to have a moral. But this story DOES have one. And from what I can tell, that's what it is.

8. But more than anything, I just can't get over the fact that they made a movie about nature and national parks THAT FUNCTIONS AS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST PRESERVING NATURE.

Literally, it seems like the only way to stop "Them" from sadistically kidnapping/murdering a bunch of innocent people for forever... is to drain the lake, fill the sky with light pollution to obscure the stars, and then clear out the dense vegetation to make way for roads!! Which feels eminently reasonable when the alternative is to continuing feeding innocent children into an eternal nightmare realm!

And just-- Why??? Why make a movie with this messaging?? Ms. Sutherland, are you trying to develop a shopping mall on this land like a Scooby-Doo villain? Did a national park spit in your coffee?? Have you not been paying attention to the dire state of nature conservation that has been a constant presence in North America ever since white people started showing up here??? Like, what is UP, girl?

watched lovely dark and deep and i'm so grumpy about it

it's important not to overexplain a horror concept because overexplaining or providing too much information can end up removing the fear aspect from your premise

but here it's just like. ok. why would she do that though

if she doesn't want to shoot someone in order to escape, why would she just stay in the woods and let it continue to keep other people? are we to assume that killing a deer is equivalent to a human life - and if so… what about many areas of wilderness, where hunting is permitted? what about the fact that most national parks do allow for some animal death even if not hunting, like necessary deer culling?

especially because this story is explicitly linking itself to and referencing the reddit SAR series and separately paulides' missing 411 work, it seems absolutely absurd to me for the story here to take the premise that the rules of the national park are somehow according to a spiritual law or practice or whatever set by "them" rather than a human thing put on signs to remind people not to litter or to accidentally cause damage to ecosystems within the parks

the problem with some of these films is that they're very attached to a white american's idea of ecology and particularly to like. nature-based spiritualism

and subsequently it ends up like "WELL IF YOU KILL AN ANIMAL… THE FOREST WILL KILL YOU BACK… LAW OF NATURE…" and it's like. no, animals die. humans die. death is fine and normal. humans are part of the broader ecosystem.

if you want as a storyteller to ascribe a higher meaning to humans dying or humans killing, you have to do it for a purpose or with some sort of reasoning in mind - trespassing, spilling blood on specific, sacred ground (not large swathes of wilderness), attach a reason as to why humans are more important than any other animal, particularly any other predator or hunter

because otherwise you end up with this fucking nonsense that's like "mmm mother earth wants us to go vegan because she feels bad for the deer <3" and it's absolutely fucking facile.