Antlers! Lets Talk About It!!!

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog!

I hope you are having a wonderful day!

I know it has been a long time coming since I have been able to post on my blog and I am excited to say that I am going to be back into writing again and will be posting more frequently again! I have a lot of post planned and I cannot wait to share all of them with you guys!

So, let's get into it!

The other night Tyler and I were watching a scary movie that neither one of us have seen before called Antlers and it is a movie with a twist on the old Native American tale about the Wendigo. It was made in 2021 directed by Scott Cooper. It got a 5.9/10 rating on IMBD. It is a fast-paced movie that gets to the point of explaining things rather quickly, but I guess that makes sense since the nature of the Wendigo is fast paced and works quickly from this version about it.

********SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!********

(I will not include all of the details of the movie but will provide a brief summary so there is still some sort of surprise to some of the events that happen in the movie if you decide to go watch it. )

The movie opens up to a beautiful view of an Oregon mountain off a lake. The mountains were huge and stretch out for miles and the rivers and lakes in between the mountains were the most crystal clear and calm waters I have ever seen. I have never been to Oregon but after seeing the landscape in that state I am definitely adding it to my places to see someday. Because the landscape of this place was absolutely breath taking.

Then we jump to a little boy named Aiden walking alone around what seems to be an abandon factory. He runs into a truck and a man comes out of the building telling him to wait for him in the truck and that they are almost ready to leave and go pick up the little boys' older brother Lucas. The father named Frank goes back into the factory and walks through to a part that has mining caves attached to it. Him and another man look like they are making some sort of drug in the mines, and they are definitely not supposed to be there. As they are finishing up, they hear strange noises coming from the mines and they quickly start to leave. But as they leave, they are attacked by a creature that is not shown.

Fast forward three weeks after the attack and we are introduced to Julia who is a teacher in the town and her brother Paul who is the Sheriff. The young boy Lucas is in Julia's class, and you can tell that there is something wrong with this situation. He is bullied in school, comes to school dirty, and then walks himself home every day. He draws very disturbing and dark pictures in his journal that show strange creatures eating humans and dead animals covered head to toe in blood. He takes home dead animals or roadkill he finds and takes it upstairs to his father and brother who are locked by a lot of pad locks on a door. At this point in the movie, we don't know why the father and brother are forced to stay upstairs away from Lucas, but it is very clear that they are not well.

Julia is very worried for Lucas after seeing his drawings and deciding to go to his house to talk to his father and all she heard was banging and weird noises coming from the house. She goes to the school's principal Ellen who also decides to go to the house, but she goes a step further and actually walks inside the house after hearing the same strange noises. She walks in and sees that the house is a mess, smells horrible, has no power and slowly finds her way to the door that the father and Aiden are locked up behind. She goes into the door and up the stairs calling out to the father and Aiden. After maybe a couple of minutes she is attacked and killed by the father and he second after eating her the father starts to have some sort of supernatural transformation where his body starts to twist and distort itself. Then his entire body looks like it is on fire from the inside and antlers start to pop out of his mouth ripping his face apart as more and more antlers come out of him. But we still do not see what he looks like in this transformed state, we see that little bit of the transformation and hear disturbing sounds as he turns.

Julia and Paul start investigating what could be going on with the father and Aiden after they hear what happens to the school principal and Paul goes and sees the crimes scene. From what he saw he knew that they were not dealing with something that was nothing like what they were used to dealing with. So, Paul and Julia go to the old sheriff of the town, Warren Stokes, to see if he can help them figure out what is going on. They think that the father is abusing his children and having them help him with making drugs. But what they find out is so much worse than what they thought. Stokes tells them that the father is not doing the things that they say he is doing to his children. He tells them that the father has been taken over by an ancient native spirit called the Wendigo. A dangerous spirit that used to be a man in its past life, before getting lost in the woods on a hunting trip, resorts to cannibalisms to survive and turns into a hideous creature that knows nothing but hunger that it can never satisfy. This spirit moves from person to person as they become seriously ill and then after eating a human they transform fully into the cannibalistic beast. But it is unclear yet as to how they turn into the Wendigo and how Frank and Aiden were involved.

They take Lucas back to their house to try and weed out the wendigo, it follows them there, kills one of the cops, attacks Paul by stabbing his arm with one of its antlers, and runs off with Aiden for Lucas to follow them back to the mining caves to hide. Julia follows them and finds Lucas and Aiden hiding in the mines, she waits for the Wendigo to show itself.

This is the first time in the movie where we see what the Wendigo actually looks like, and this thing was absolutely freaky looking! (And I have seen quite a few monsters' horror films, so I have seen some creepy things). This version of the Wendigo has the skeletal body of a human with sharp claws and a face made up of what looks like the skull of some sort of animal with no facial features, and dozens of antlers coming out of the top of its head and face. Here is a picture of what the artists of the movie had in mind for what they wanted the Wendigo to look like and this thing is freaky looking!

(Like I said before, this thing is freaky looking and definitely not something I want to run into in the middle of the woods. If I saw this thing out one night, I would pray to every god I could think of and kiss my life goodbye because there is no way I could kill this thing. Might even find some seasoning or something to toss on myself to taste better for it because this thing would most definitely eat me. )

They fight for a few minutes and then she kills it with a broken of piece of its own antler that was left behind when he attacked them at their home, into the heart. Then as the Wendigo dies and leaves Franks body it goes immediately into Aiden, and she unfortunately must do the same thing to him.

Just as a side note really quick, something I found pretty interesting in this movie was that even though the father was sick and turning into a horrible beast that is said to only know hunger, he never once attacked or tried to hurt Lucas or Aiden. Yes, he was definitely harsh with the way he spoke to them, but he didn't want Lucas getting sick like him and Aiden were. Even when he was in the full transformation as the Wendigo he never went after them or hurt them. He just wanted to get them both back to him.

The movie end with Lucas, Julia, and Paul standing in the mountains looking out at the lake from the shore. They are all talking and getting ready to leave when Paul starts to cough up blood just like Frank and Aiden had done at the beginning of the movie and the movie ends.

**All of the images from the movie were found online and from their IMBD page**

All and all I would give this movie a rating of a 6 out of 10. I had high expectations going into this movie hoping it would be a good movie to watch and don't get me wrong it was a good movie with its own twist on the legend of the Wendigo. But it's not really a movie that I would go back and watch again.

First let's talk about the history of Wendigos to get a little information to compare it to the movie. Up until this point the only information that I had on the Wendigo were the thinks I learned from seeing them in Supernatural where the Wendigo was a creature that stalked hunters and campers in the middle of the woods, Charmed where the Wendigo was one person who could turn others into one with just a scratch, and Teen Wolf where the Wendigo was a hereditary thing that was passed down through a family. All very different telling's about the Wendigo.

I did some research on the lore of Wendigos to see where the movie would've gotten some inspiration from but every retelling of the Wendigo story and where it originated from is always different but there are a lot of similarities in some of the different story telling's about this supernatural creature.

The Wendigo comes from Native American lore, originating from the northern parts of the United States towards the Great Lakes, and Canada. The first Wendigo was believed to be a hunter who got lost in the middle of winter, driven mad by his will to survive and the only way that he was able to stay alive was to eat human flesh. Thus, transforming him into a soulless, hunger driven creature that travels around looking for unsuspecting victims. Never able to satisfy his hunger making him a mindless killing machine who never goes back to who he was before. The Wendigo was believed to be either a cannibalistic spirit that could possess people or a creature that humans could transform into after consuming human flesh.

The main theme that seems to circle around the Wendigo lore is cannibalism. It is not just a mindless creature who goes around killing people or else they would just talk about its murder tendency and what it preferred. It used to be a human who had to resort to an animalistic means of survival in order to continue living. That person ate another human being in order to survive, something that has been documented and reported on not only in ancient times but also in more recent times, which quite frankly is terrifying to think about. Cannibalism has been used in countless books and movies to creep the living hell out of us because you sit there and think there is no way possible that someone could actually eat another human being right? Wrong! It has happened throughout history, and it will still probably continue happening all over the world. It has been used in ritualistic and religious ceremonies where you could gain new wisdom by consuming human flesh and carry part of the person that you are consuming with you long after they are gone. Or in some cases it is a last resort form of survival where a poor society with little resources to sustain its people so eating other people in their society is the only way to continue living.

Another theme that also circles around the lore of the Wendigo is greed. Not only in the sense that the Wendigo itself has a greed for hunger that can never be satisfied and that is why it is so dangerous. But in the literal sense of the word greed someone could be called a Wendigo if they are greedy for power and once, they get some they need more and are never satisfied.

Now let's talk about that ending after getting a little back story on the Wendigo.

So, the end of the movie sort of ties something together for me that I had been thinking about while watching the movie. How the heck did the Wendigo infect other people? At first, I thought you strictly had to eat another person in order to turn into one, but that was not the case in this movie. Not only did you have to consume human flesh, but the previous Wendigo had to infect you in some way, and at the ending where Paul started coughing up blood like Frank and Aiden where it hit me that just like most horror movies go, you think everything is fine and dandy, but nothing is ever that cut and dry when it comes to evil. You can't always kill something and boom it's gone for good, a series of events happen that are either planned out by the evil being or just happen coincidentally that give that evil a way to survive or come back. This version of the Wendigo was not the basic humans eating humans' story. This creature had been doing this for probably centuries now going from person to person in this little town undetected for ages until now infecting people so it could live on.

This movie was as a whole a good movie but like I said earlier not on my list of movies that I would go back and re-watch. I definitely recommend you go check it out because it was a great movie.

As always, I will end this post with a quote from my favorite TV show Supernatural in one of the earlier seasons when they were hunting a Wendigo.

Sam: We never should have let you come out here in the first place, alright? I’m trying to protect you.

Roy: You protect me? I was hunting these woods when your mommy was still kissing you goodnight.

Sam: Yeah? It’s a damn near perfect hunter, & it’s gonna hunt you down & eat you alive unless we get your stupid, sorry ass out of here.

Roy: (laughs) You know you’re crazy, right?

Just like the characters in this TV show who were part of the town their who lives thought that they knew how to take care of getting rid of the Wendigo. The people in the Antlers movie also thought the same way since they had grown up hunting on that land. They thought they could beat it just because they had never seen or heard of anything like this in their town. Supernatural creatures show you that no one can ever truly be an expert on things because nature is unpredictable. We really don't know what's lurking out there in the darkness.