“Don’t follow me again.”
That’s what 12-year-old Lucas Weaver tells his English teacher, Julia, after they meet by “chance” and Julia treats him to ice cream.
Julia has been watching Lucas. She’s seen his drawings filled with shadows and fangs. She’s watched him cower in the back row, scared and sullen, looking like a hunted animal.
Julia knows that look. She knows the signs. She knows an abused child when she sees one, because she was one.
But she needs to know more before she, or anyone else, can help Lucas. So Julia follows him one day—right to the door of the ice cream shop. She offers to buy him a snack, joking that she considers ice cream a vegetable. She does her best to talk with him—to learn about what his home life looks like and, slowly, to gain his trust.
But the second Julia’s questions get too invasive, Lucas shuts down and announces he’s got to go. And he gives her that warning: Don’t follow me again.
She’s familiar with that reaction, too. Abused kids are often scared, embarrassed, sometimes even curiously protective of how they live and who they live with.
And perhaps that’s true for Lucas … to a point. He does love his father. He cares deeply for his little brother.
But there’s another reason, too.
For in Lucas’ house stands a door, locked and deadbolted and protected by charms. Behind that door come growls and thumps. What lurks behind that door is hungry. Always.
Just as Julia’s trying to protect Lucas, Lucas is trying to protect her.
Only Lucas dares unlock the door. Only he is prepared to feed the thing—to slide the bloodied animal carcasses to what lies inside. Only he can face the hunger. The hunger that might, one day, swallow him whole.
[Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections.]
Lucas is definitely a brave little boy, doing his best to keep himself and his family together under some pretty staggering conditions.
But the hero of this tale is really Julia. She seems like a good teacher for one thing. But Julia knows that her job doesn’t end at the classroom door. When she begins to suspect that Lucas is in real trouble, Julia tries every avenue she can to try to get him help. She talks with her brother, who’s the local sheriff. She pleads with the school principal to intervene. And when it looks as if Lucas might not really have a family, Julia shows a willingness to step up and care for the kid herself.
Her brother, Paul, is a little more reluctant to get involved so personally. But he’s clearly welcomed his sister into the family home ’til she can find and afford a place of her own. And he shows some courage and spirit when he needs to.
We should mention Lucas Weaver’s father here, too. Frank Weaver is, in many ways, a terrible dad. But he truly seems to love his two sons. And when things begin to go, shall we say, wrong, He’s the one who originally puts those heavy locks on the door—telling Lucas to lock him in and to not open the door, no matter what he hears or how pitifully he pleads. Frank does his best to protect his boys from himself—even as his mind slowly twists into a place of everlasting craving.
The Weavers are Christians, and Julia finds a Bible in Lucas’ desk. But circumstances shake and, in some ways, break the family’s faith. One night, Aiden, Lucas’ little brother, asks Lucas if it’s true that God is dead, like their father says. Lucas sidesteps the question and gives him some French fries.
Julia’s class is focusing on myths, fables and fairy tales as the film opens. These stories often are meant to teach lessons or explain part of the world, Julia explains. And she mentions that in this part of Oregon, the first such stories came from the land’s indigenous people.
Naturally, those original stories featured many gods and supernatural creatures. And one of those creatures—the Wendigo—becomes the focal point of the film.
Native Americans believed that the Wendigo might manifest during times of great desperation, starvation and depravity: This thing was always hungry, and eating would only make it hungrier. It could be kept at bay with “medicine bags,” essentially warding charms not unlike garlic would do with vampires, and we see plenty of those bags suspended from the ceiling in a coal mine. One also is attached to the locked door in the Weaver’s house.
Julia also finds a book about folklore in Lucas’ desk—a book that would surely include information about many supernatural creatures. (We assume that Lucas learned about the medicine bags from that book.) We also hear about Mother Earth, and how the Wendigo serves as a punishment for those who abuse her.
When Paul describes a crime scene to Julia, she responds with an abuse of Jesus’ name. “From what I saw, I don’t think Jesus was anywhere to be found,” Paul says.
The movie suggests that Julia’s father was sexually abusive. In one near-hallucination, an adult Julia imagines her dad’s hand rubbing suggestively over her upper chest. In another, we see her dad, completely naked, lying on what may be Julia’s bed as a child, whimpering. (A stuffed animal obscures his privates.)
Julia angrily tells her brother that he wasn’t the one who had to cater to their father’s every whim (what those whims were go unspoken). Paul levels his gaze at Julia and says, simply, “You have no idea what he did to me.” Again, what that might’ve been is left unsaid.
There’s no real suggestion that Lucas’ father was sexually abusive, but a doctor does say that the boy had clearly been subjected to some sort of abuse for “quite some time.”
In class, a bully draws Lucas’ attention to the bully’s crotch as he grinds against a stuffed animal. When Lucas takes his own stuffed monkey out of his backpack, the bully again makes a grinding motion—perhaps suggesting that he’d done those movements to Lucas’ own toy. (Later that day, Lucas cuts the head off the monkey.)
The Wendigo kills to eat, and that habit results in some incredibly gruesome moments.
We see the Wendigo attack someone—biting first the victim’s hand (and tearing some flesh off of it) before it rips out the unfortunate’s throat. We later see the corpse, mostly stripped of flesh and meat and barely recognizable. The face is still there—torn and bloody–but the gore-spattered ribcage is completely exposed.
It’s not the only such corpse we see. A hiker finds the horrific remains of half a human victim in the woods (where we see the victim’s feet and part of his legs in the pile of leavings) and see that half—in chunks—pieced together on an autopsy table. (The rest of the man’s body is found in a nearby mine. The rest that wasn’t eaten, that is.) The coroner is deeply disturbed when he discovers the bite marks look human.
A blanket covers the remains of yet another victim, found on some train tracks. (The coroner looks at Paul hopelessly, telling him the body is so mangled he doesn’t even know how to begin his inspection.) A couple of people are impaled by the beast’s titular antlers. He attacks, and begins to eat, other people, too, though most of the carnage in these particular instances takes place off-camera.
The Wendigo begins as a human, by the way, and the transformation ain’t pretty. It begins with a blackish-brown substance that comes out as tears or mucus coughed up by the poor soul. Then comes a light from inside the ribcage—a product of the beast’s literally glowing heart. The Wendigo’s characteristic antlers start pushing through the human’s mouth (which, as you might imagine, looks extremely uncomfortable). When a Wendigo is fully formed, he leaves his human-self behind like a snake might shed his skin. What remains looks more like a grotesquely flayed victim.
Lucas tries to sate the beast with meat from other sources. We see him pick up a rock suggestively when he spots a skunk, apparently preparing to kill it. He bags an animal carcass, gutted and revealing its intestines. He sets traps and appears to carve up the meat in the basement. Naturally, the entire Weaver house smells terrible, and the walls and floors are streaked with blood. And later, the Wendigo apparently kills and begins to eat on an entire bear.
A bully presses Lucas’ face against a window as he twists his arm. In a doctor’s office, we see that Lucas’ back is covered in small scratches. Julia says that her father snapped her arm when she was a girl, and in a flashback, we see her cowering under a set of stairs—hoping her dad won’t find her.
Creatures are stabbed. Hearts are removed. And in a heartbreaking scene, a child is killed, albeit off-camera. Lucas’ artwork can be very creepy and gruesome. We hear that someone committed suicide.
More than 20 f-words are uttered. Three s-words are used, too. We also hear “d–n,” “h—,” “p—y” and “f-ggot.” God’s name is misused at least four times, once with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused about a half-dozen times.
When we first see Frank Weaver, Lucas’ father, he and a “coworker” are packing up a methamphetamine lab in the bowels of an abandoned coal mine. His youngest son, Aiden, is waiting for him outside the mine, and Frank appears to give the boy a baggie of meth to hold on to. We’re told later that many families homeschool their kids in order to use them as meth couriers (or even participate in the drug’s production).
Paul tells Julia that Frank’s been arrested plenty of times for drug use and possession. But no one ever wanted to put him in jail because he was raising two little boys: What would become of them?
Julia, the movie suggests, is a recovering alcoholic. We see her twice in a grocery or convenience store, eyeing the bottles of liquor behind the counter and obviously debating with herself whether to cave in and buy one (or several).
We see Paul popping what apparently are prescription pills. We don’t know what they’re for. But he does seem to take them in stressful situations, and the movie clearly wants us to notice them.
In revenge for some of the bullying he’s been subjected to, Lucas puts some dog feces in another student’s backpack. Someone makes fun of Lucas in class. Julia sits on a toilet (though we don’t come close to seeing anything).
Antlers wants to be more than a supernatural creature feature.
The monster here serves a lot of purposes: We’re told that the Wendigo appears in times of misery and depravity, and so it is here—appearing first to two meth cookers living in a poverty-stricken community.
We also hear that it might be a supernatural punishment for those who mistreat the environment. Tree stumps and barren lakes and the town’s bleak, gray surroundings stress that this community is guilty of said mistreatment. And there’s a certain significance that the creature first haunts an abandoned coal mine—one that’s restarting in just a few short weeks.
The Wendigo could be especially seen as a metaphor for child abuse, too. The monster is a secret, just as abuse often is. Lucas’ home is unlivable, and yet he lives there anyway. “I just have to feed him, and he’ll love me,” he says.
All of that is heartbreaking and thought-provoking. But if Antlers is more than a monster movie, it is also exactly that: a monster movie, when you get down to the guts. And my, what guts we get down to.
As a whole, Antlers is more creepily atmospheric than it is a relentless bloodfest. But where it does get bloody? It goes all out. The carnage is appalling. The fact that children are imperiled here makes it all the harder, and more disturbing, to watch. The language can be pretty brutal, too. And the suggestions of abuse—well, those are as horrific as anything we see.
As in most horror movies, we see people do some very dumb things in Antlers. They walk through hallways smelling of rot and death. They flick unworking light switches and still don’t run away. They unlock doors that should never, ever be unlocked. These scenes are so pervasive in horror flicks because directors know the theaters will be filled with people thinking—if not screaming, “What are you doing?! Don’t go there!”
And sometimes horror movies themselves trigger that same response. Don’t go there. And yet, people do—knowing full well that monsters hide inside.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
