MovieChat Forums > The Houses October Built (2014) Discussion > A full perspective on what happened - AL...

A full perspective on what happened - ALL SPOILERS

posted 9 years ago by FourthYear
13 replies | jump to latest

I'll throw my hat in this ring and share my theory, I guess, as I really enjoyed this movie. It was far better than I expected. I'm not married to the below, but it would make sense to me based on the information presented in the film.

SPOILERS GALORE, HERE.

Key factors to note going into this:
- This is a found footage movie – it doesn't present this as "people were never seen again"
- The party is looking for an off-the-radar haunt where people simply want to scare as much as they can. So take concepts like "Blue Skeleton making a profit" or "customers" out of your line of thinking; this is intentionally off the grid and word of mouth for only those who are REALLY into trying to find it. Extreme stuff, if you will.
- The end of the film doesn't necessarily show anyone dead, just being buried.

So from what we know, Blue Skeleton is an off the record haunt that changes location from year to year and provides the most horrific extreme haunt experience possible. There’s no set location, no actual company… you need to drop any idea of “legal ramification” or “marketing” from your mind, as the viewer, to envision this accurately. The movie also heavily suggests that some of these actors are dedicated to doing the absolute most they can to scare (almost) the life out of you, as seen from the documentary footage.

As a result of this… there’s no money. There's no lawsuits, there are no waivers, there is no evidence. They go to great lengths to hide where they are - the party was hooded and in a bus playing loud music, and they left their RV where it was. This group could do anything they wanted to the party and, short of forensic evidence, get away with it.

The closest we see to someone dying is the scene in the alley where Jeff is attacked. It sounds like his tongue is essentially ripped out, but we don’t know that’s the case. Or, hey, maybe it is the case. They clearly have taken his phone which they then use to contact the group before transferring them onto the bus. The bus drops them off at what appears to be different locations but could actually just be driving in circles around one central location, which would make more sense since at least some of the party see each other later on.

So at the end… are they dead or not? That’s the big question. Based on the above… I say they’re alive. Is there evidence to it? Nope, but it would fit within the mythos created for the film for what would happen after. The Blue Skeleton crew has created a horrific experience, short of actually killing these people, and could release them in any number of ways. All that would be left is the experiences they’ve had and the word of mouth they would have to share, much like the guys that sent them to Louisiana – “The Blue Skeleton is the most extreme haunt out there.” Without them surviving, then the word of mouth wouldn’t happen, and people may not come looking for Blue Skeleton. Maybe they would, but maybe not.

As for the footage itself, well, we already saw in the movie that footage was uploaded onto a website of the guy getting onto their RV, stealing the license, and touching the girl. So why not release *the presented footage we see as viewers* onto a site the same way and just say “BLUE SKELETON” on it? They’re creating their own underground mythos by doing so, the party we follow has experienced the best haunt in the world (as was their goal), and no one knows who the bloody heck these Blue Skeleton people are.

As for Jeff, again, who knows? They could have actually killed one person and let the rest go. That's pretty extreme, right? This is still a movie.

So there's my take on it. Again, really enjoyed this far more than I expected to. Hopefully the writer does more.

[–] andresfprieto 9 years ago

Good theory. Works for me. Just finished watching it, great flick to watch during Halloween.

All out of bubble gum.

[–] demonlord6696 9 years ago

Yes they mean to give the group an extreme scare at the expense of actually killing one of them. Yeah that sounds logical.

*face palm*

[–] RedInfluence 9 years ago

Instead of being a sarcastic moron, how about providing us with your thoughts on what happened. Or are you incapable of coming up with ideas?

[–] FourthYear 9 years ago

Instead of being a sarcastic moron, how about providing us with your thoughts on what happened. Or are you incapable of coming up with ideas?

Yeah, he wasn't a helpful poster.

I still find myself thinking about this movie and the various ways you could conceive of what happened at the end. I like that it leaves it just open enough for the viewer to decide what actually happened. In some films, that can be a cop-out, but for this one, I think it works well.

[–] 9 years ago

[deleted]

[–] pinchpot 8 years ago

They had to dig them up at some point to get the cameras. Unless they were wirelessly streaming, which would be tough under layers of dirt, but still plausible I suppose.

[–] Theshornwonder 8 years ago

The point, I think is, you had a theory up until you said maybe they really killed one. Who in their right mind would recommend a haunt that requires one of you to actually die? There's no word of mouth about it being an "extreme haunt" if even one of them dies. There is a murder investigation instead.

[–] lil_moe 8 years ago

My ideas exactly but for me the ultimate telltale was that no one (aside from Jeff who is a question mark) was really harmed in anyway, whatsoever.
We hear the chainsaw buzzing, punches pounding and the bearded guy leaving a bloody hand print on the glass but you never ever really see anyone getting actually hurt or even anyone with so much as a scratch. At the coffin scene, you can see none of them has even a tiny bruise. If the blue skeleton are maniac killers then why go to extra trouble to pretend to physically harm people but not actually harm them (especially if the goal is a snuff film as some posters theorized)?
The coffin scene itself is a telltale as well. They were waiting for brandy to wake up and soon as her eyelids started moving they shut down the coffin. If the goal is a snuff film then they would more likely bury the coffin while she was passed out. The panic of not knowing where you are when you wake up in a very tight closed space is probably much worse than her waking up to see what's happening. Also, why was their a mic (or a mic-equipped camera) in her coffin but not in the guys' coffins? A snuff film viewer presumably would enjoy males screaming their head to death just as much as females. The way I see it, the blue skeleton just thought why bother with the guys when the girl can scream like a champ and the haunt/prank viewers would be more shocked and amused by her only screams.
Now, to go back to Jeff who is my only ambiguous story line. I rewatched the scene where he's attacked in the alley 20 times and I cannot say for certain that he was really injured or was it just an elaborate scary prank. The girl obviously stabs him with a sharp object (a screwdriver?) but the scene cuts off a second before Jeff's tounge is supposedly cut. A few seconds later, we hear Jeff trying to shout while being dragged but his muffled sound is that of a gagged person not a person with a severed tongue (not that I know exactly what a person with a cut tounge sounds like but I DO know what it sounds like to be gagged). Yet a few seconds later we see Jeff being dragged but the camera angle makes it impossible to see his face but we do see that he's being dragged face down. However, I assume a person whose tongue was just cut off would be bleeding like a stuck pig but Jeff had no bloody trail at all. Next frame, one of the villains crosses the path where Jeff was just dragged and again we don't see a single blood drop. I'm thinking it's safe to assume the blue skeleton guys edited the tapes (or at least THAT PARTICULAR tape) to the effect they desired.
All in all, I didn't see any of the actors get beat, stabbed, cut or harmed in anyway. I assume they were knocked out either by hand or using blunt objects but the blows were delivered so precisely as to not inflict permenant damage or even break the skin.
Last note is that I absolutely agree about doing these haunts for the fun of it instead of for profiting. A few years ago we visited what was on the top 5 haunted houses in the US at the time. They charged $100 a person but being the nerdy business minded that I was, I did the approximate math and found that those places don't turn out as much profit as you would think. Nor do the employees get paid nearly as much as they deserve for the efforts they go through. In a big part, it requires you to have a certain amount of commitment to scaring people (pretty much like the haunted houses staff in the interviews mentioned). Some people get a kick out of being scared by others and others get a kick out of scaring people.
So my proposed scenario is: the blue skeleton are really into providing the ultimate haunt experience. They zero in on one group of people (or multiple small groups of the distances weren't far). They choose a group who's actively trying to look them up. Once they decide the targets they stalk them and tailor a haunt that would blow their minds away. Part of the "program" is creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia (the near-rape, the clowns being aggressive, etc) so that when the real thing starts, the victims wouldn't know wether it was real or make believe. At some point, the RV was bugged with mics and possibly cameras that would document the whole experience (hence the emphasis on recording everything outside of the RV and the school bus). The scare ends with the illusion of being buried alive but they are monitoring closely and would excavate the coffins (probably just Brandy was buried) in a few hours. Our friends would be in shock for a couple of days but then they start going back to their normal lives and making jokes about it. Eventually, they start talking about their experience online while Blue Skeleton posted teasers of their latest job all around the net so the hype gets bigger.

[–] FourthYear 8 years ago

I'm fine with not having every little detail add up, as this is a low-budget movie... and it's a movie. I appreciate someone else wasting as much time thinking about this film as me, though -- I really like the story it tells, and the aftermath it doesn't tell. A good movie can make you think, and this certainly did.

[–] ArcherAdam 8 years ago

I love doing this kind of thing too. I could debate subtlety in a movie for a couple of hours, without any irony (especially horror movies), so I don't think it's a waste of time at all. I liked your theory, but I can't get behind the ambiguity about Jeff. There are two things that happen in that scene that indicate to me that Jeff was at least seriously injured, and very likely stabbed and his tongue cut out.

Plus, we never see him again. Not at the house, not in the coffins, nowhere. Because of Jeff's situation, I took the ending as literal. Plus, it really did go out of its way to point out how dangerous people who run these types of things really are.

I liked most of the theory, but I have to disagree that what happened to Jeff was ambiguous and open to interpretation. But this is why I love this type of movie. It's the type of narrative that makes people want to talk about, and agree or disagree about what happened.

One other thing that I would question. Brandy has no idea how deeply she is buried, so why dig a hole to put her in, when they simply could have thrown some dirt over it? It would have the same effect on her either way, so why go through the trouble of digging it in the first place?

I didn't think this was presented as a found footage film. No one actually finds the footage. It's presented as a long first person sequence recorded by multiple people in real time.

To deviate from the discussion about your theory a bit, there were a few subtle things in the film that sparked a small bit of debate between the 3 of us who were watching. For example, I noticed they made a point of lingering on the fact that one of the abductors was female. Twice. To me, there was no reason to do that unless it tied in. So, I thought maybe she was someone they met at the same haunt as the porcelain doll girl.

Hell, there was even a discussion about some of the characterizations. For example, two of us just made a nonchalant, off-handed comment that Jeff was gay. It made no difference to the story, and not something that needed to be pointed out in the least, but one of us had no idea how we read that. Just another one of those minor moments of ambiguity that ended up in the conversation. To me that's a good thing. And so, I don't understand why people hated the ending so much. Whether it wrapped the story up in a nice bow, or left it open to interpretation, the main point was that they were looking for extreme, and they got more than they bargained for. Half the fun for us was getting there.

Personally, I think what we saw is exactly what happened, but your theory was an enjoyable read either way.

(edited becuz I spelt stuff rong)

[–] oddmarc 8 years ago

I agree with the idea that they are all alive in the end. Think about it this way, what if what we are watching is not "found footage" but instead an edited video created by Blue Skull? Which means then they would purposefully make it so it seems Jeff is dead and end the video with the burial, when in fact, maybe Jeff went through the exact same haunted house as them, and maybe the casket that is being buried at the end isn't the same one Brandy is in.

All the interview footage also points to people hearing about very intense haunts and explains why some people would do this for free. For the thrill of scaring people.

As for the fact that Blue Skull seemed to have followed them from the first haunt onward, I would speculate that while on his online message boards, Zach may have explained his plan and asked questions about this underground haunt. I figure the two guys who told them where is was this year were probably with them anyways.

The only real question that would remain is why edit the videos this way? Maybe as a keepsake for those who performed the haunt. I doubt the five would get a copy since they probably won't be super happy about what happened. Video evidence and whatnot.

[–] horrorgasm 8 years ago

So...how do you all explain the fact that this horde of people was just able to appear and disappear at will wherever the group was at any and all times?

The blue skeleton people didn't actually contact and start directing the group until almost the end, so they couldn't possibly have known where they would be all those times. They could not possibly have had 50 people waiting in the exact spot in the woods they randomly picked to camp and then made them all vanish and etc.

It's not at all believable that they could have had all these people waiting and ready to target these specific people at every single location they went to, especially not just to scare FOUR people (hey, how exactly did they know to prepare all of this for those 4 people again?).

and ok, fine, let's pretend for a minute that that's all possible. They did ALL OF THAT stuff over that whole week to terrorize these people, with this huge group of people in elaborately creepy costumes, making a MASSIVE coordinated effort to convince the group that something supernatural must be going on...and their big endgame was to just have 3-4 guys in jean jackets and skull masks put the group through another crappy haunted house? Nope. I don't buy it. This just reeks of them simply not knowing how to end the movie.

[–] northernlad 8 years ago

So...how do you all explain the fact that this horde of people was just able to appear and disappear at will wherever the group was at any and all times?

I watched it again and there was definitely something up with this aspect of the movie. In RV...they see they are surrounded by these haunt people and then look again and all those people are gone. Are they implying a supernatural aspect of this movie? I am unclear about that.

As for what happened...I don't think there is much room for interpretation. They were buried alive...therefore they are dead.

American Horror Story Season 7: Donald Trump