Nothing beats a great horror film.
But fans have come up with plenty of theories that make some of your favorite horror movies
even more horrific.
These theories might just change everything.
Are you ready?
"Let's go."
If you're looking for films with deep, hidden meanings, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre probably
isn't on any list, no matter how long it is.
But some believe it's actually an incredibly gory commentary on animal rights, the horrors
of animal laughter in the meat industry, and, ultimately, why you should probably give vegetarianism
a chance.
In case you've forgotten some of the details, the Sawyer family, which includes the infamous
Leatherface, are actually from a long line of laughterhouse operators.
There's animal bones all over, after all, and you hear the sounds of animals almost
constantly.
One of the characters even describes just how animals are laughtered, and when the Sawyer
family finally sits down to a meal of people, they make animal noises at their final victim.
PETA wrote about the movie being one of the biggest films ever made in support of vegetarianism,
and even though you might not want to believe PETA, director Tobe Hooper even said that
he stopped eating meat when they were filming.
"In a way, I thought the heart of the film was about meat; it's about the chain of life
and kling sentient beings, and it has cannism in it, although you have to come to that conclusion
by yourself, because it's only implied."
He goes on to say that Guillermo Del Toro went vegetarian after seeing the film, and
if you can freak out the director of Pan's Labyrinth enough that he makes a major lifestyle
change, we're guessing your mission was accomplished.
When we first saw the trailers for Cabin in the Woods, we admit it.
We cringed.
It was like every single trope was stuffed into one movie, and seriously, Joss Whedon,
we expected so much more.
Did you lose a bet?
Fortunately, Joss Whedon didn't sell out, and we find out later that the whole thing
is set up by a group of creepers called Facility.
"The hair dye."
"Dumb blonde, very artistic."
"Works its way into the blood through the scalp, very gradual."
According to one fan theory, Curt's in on it the whole time, and working for the creepers.
Curt is the one that leads the proverbial lambs to the laughter.
Take a rewatch, and you'll see that he might have done a few questionable things, like
getting his girlfriend alone, so she can die, and maybe not doing all that he probably could
have to get them out alive.
Sure, he dies, but it's definitely not the first time someone's been double-crossed.
There's another theory that brings the audience into this, and it's not a flattering one.
If Facility is responsible for keeping the old gods appeased with their sacrifice of
teenage blood so they stage a show for the gods before giving them their sacrifices,
isn't that a metaphor for exactly what filmmakers are doing by giving you the movie to watch?
The Facility are the movie-makers and the writers, and they're appeasing you by giving
you the blood-and-guts show you want.
You heathens.
"Your basic human needs disgust me.
Get out of here."
The Scream series is a classic.
We know, there's enough of them.
But the original set of movies were enough to make any teenager look at their peers with
a bit of suspicion, and to be fair, it was probably all rightfully deserved.
We eventually find out that there's been two klers on the loose the whole time: Billy and
Stu.
"What's the matter, Sydney?
Look like you've seen a ghost."
"Why are you doing this?"
"It's all part of the game, Sydney."
Pretty straightforward, but one theory says that there were three klers.
Roman Bridger explains at the end of Scream 3 that he's Sidney's illegitimate brother,
and he first showed up in town before all this kling stuff started happening.
When he did show up, he was shunned by his mother… and if you've ever seen an episode
of Criminal Minds, you know that's just the sort of thing that'll kick off a kling spree.
And according to him, that's just what happened.
He's the one that plotted to destroy everything, and sent the two long-accepted klers off on
their spree… while he joined in, every so often.
If you take a rewatch and look for continuity errors, you'll find a couple major ones that
could be explained away by a third kler.
In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, the premise is that Freddy Krueger is a vengeful
ghost using the dream realm to muder the children of the people who had kled him.
This is a pretty straightforward motivation, but in the course of its infinite sequels,
Freddy definitely ends up kling some kids that had nothing to do with his dath.
Also, in Freddy's Deed we learn that the powers that Freddy gained from the demons are to
enter dreams, be eternal, and crack wicked one-liners.
"Groundeeeeed!"
Those powers don't include stretching his arms like Inspector Gadget or turning into
a TV or becoming a giant snake monster.
Where does he get these powers?
There is a theory that tries to answer both of these questions.
Since we know dream warriors exist and that Freddy takes the souls of the children he
kls, what if Freddy absorbs the powers of the children he klls?
This would explain why Freddy becomes more and more powerful over the course of the series,
if you don't like sequel-fueled power creep as an explanation.
It also explains why he would go after kids unrelated to his dath, as well as why he does
so in such outlandish ways.
The idea that Freddy might be after anyone and that his power will only increase over
time definitely turns him into more of a threat.
John Carpenter's The Thing is one of the scariest movies of all time.
A shape-shifting alien monster means dath could look like anyone or anything, even someone
you previously thought you could trust.
What could be scarier than that?
Well, what if there were two shape-shifting alien monsters?
The premise of this fan theory is that there are in fact two different creatures: one that
is introduced in the form of the dog, and one that is in the corpse taken from the Norwegian
site.
But an interesting twist to the theory is that they're not working in tandem, but rather
against each other.
This theory presumes that the alien spreads infection through saliva, and that's why there
are so many conspicuous scenes of people sharing bottles.
This means that MacReady is Thing 1 and did the blood test to flush out Thing 2.
"That's a crock of s---."
The final scene shows a laughing, victorious Thing 1 in the form of MacReady handing his
bottle to an about-to-be-infected Childs.
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is one of the most significant influences on John Carpenter's
Halloween, and Carpenter wasn't afraid to wear this influence on his sleeve.
He even borrowed character names from Psycho and applied them to his own characters, most
notably in the form of Dr. Sam Loomis, Michael Myers's psychiatrist who shares a name with
Marion Crane's boyfriend in Psycho.
But what this theory suggests is, what if he didn't borrow that name?
What if the two Sams are one and the same?
The original Loomis is, of course, the one who catches Norman at the end of Psycho.
What if all that business with a psychopath inspired Loomis to try and stop anyone else
from experiencing the pain he felt?
He goes back to school, gets a degree in psychiatry, moves to Illinois, and one of his first patients
is a little boy in a clown costume who just mudered his own sister.
This makes Loomis's story all the more tragic and makes his occasionally extreme reactions
to Michael more understandable because they're more personal.
A Descent into madness
Neil Marshall's 2005 film The Descent is one of the best-regarded horror films of the 2000s,
due in no small part to effectively using its cave system setting to evoke a real claustrophobic
reaction in its audiences from the dark, cramped tunnels.
In fact, for some viewers, this horror movie would be scarier if it were just about getting
lost in some caves, and there weren't any freaky, mutated cave monsters in the movie
at all.
Well, uh, what if there weren't?
This particular theory proposes that the crawlers who dominate the latter portions of the film
don't actually exist, and that the deed spelunkers are all kled by a hallucinating Sarah.
Hallucination is, after all, a recurring fear in the movie.
Furthermore, we see Sarah kll five crawlers, which lines up exactly with the five cavers
who are kled.
The whole trip is meant to help Sarah overcome her past traumas, but what if instead it triggered
something much worse?
Could it be that the descent of the title is also Sarah's descent into a trauma-induced,
tragic madness?
The Paranormal Activity franchise was hugely successful, with the first film having been
made for a mere $15,000 and earning $193 million at the box office.
It naturally spawned a host of sequels: five domestically and one in Japan.
How did Oren Peli, a first-time director whose previous work experience was primarily in
software programming, manage to make one of the most profitable horror franchises in history?
The demon that haunts multiple families across the span of the Paranormal Activity franchise
shows both that it knows when it is being filmed and also that its power increases when
people are aware and afraid of it.
This theory, then, presumes that the demon is real and also that the footage of the Paranormal
Activity films is authentic.
"Spooky."
Oren Peli made a deal with the demon in exchange for wealth and success, with the understanding
that Peli would bring the footage in front of international audiences, scaring innumerable
millions and thereby greatly increasing the demon's power.
Although we can't possibly know what the demon wants to do with its newfound power, it can't
be worse than what Peli did with his, which was to make Chernobyl Diaries.
That's an atrocity worse than claiming a few first-born sons.
The Exorcist is widely regarded as one of the best and indeed scariest horror movies
ever made.
It was the first horror movie ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and has become the
standard by which all scary movies have been measured ever since.
So how do you make history's scariest movie even scarier?
One theory suggests that the demon, identified as Pazuzu in both The Exorcist novel and the
sequel Exorcist II: Heretic, but only given the name Captain Howdy in the first film,
has an even greater influence than is popularly believed.
At one point in the film, Father Karras is confronted by a homeless man who asks him
for money, surprising him.
Later on, Pazuzu repeats the homeless man's words to Karras via the possessed Regan.
While the obvious interpretation is that Pazuzu is using the man's words simply to torment
Karras, this theory poses the idea that the homeless man was in fact a demonic agent of
Pazuzu, and Regan's repetition of his words is meant to communicate to Karras that he
is always being watched.
This also neatly ties up the question of how Pazuzu knows about Karras's mother: She doesn't
have to have ended up in Hell for Pazuzu to have information on her if he has spies on
Earth reporting to him.
A well-informed demon is a more efficient demon!
Among horror fans, the Evil Deed franchise is one of the most beloved film series in
the history of the genre.
But it's also one of the strangest franchises in the genre's history, as the tone of each
successive film, not counting the 2013 remake-slash-sequel, is more comedic than the previous one.
The first Evil Deed is played pretty straight and almost entirely for scares, with trees
doing things trees oughtn't do, but by Army of Darkness, Ash is dropping quotable one-liners
and doing full-on Three Stooges routines.
While the real-life explanation for this tonal shift is that Sam Raimi and the other creators
of the series felt that comedy came to them more easily than straightforward horror, what
if there were an in-universe reason for things becoming more cartoonish as time goes on?
One theory has an idea on this: Ash is progressively losing his mind more and more over time.
You can practically see Ash's mind snap in the first half of Evil Deed 2, and from that
moment on, things start to get sillier.
Not only do the scenarios get more bizarre, but Ash also begins to become so detached
from reality that he stops fearing the deedites as much as he should, and so they start getting
depicted as increasingly bumbling and clownish.
This theory certainly gives Army of Darkness a darker sheen.
Crazy or not, though, there's no denying that Ash is still king.
"Hail to the king, baby."
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