Antlers‘ ending twist and mythology sets up a sequel that hasn’t come to pass. The horror film, directed by Scott Cooper, faced plenty of delays before finally releasing to theaters. Starring Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons, Antlers is a film that explores a creature from Indigenous lore, and the darkness lurking inside humanity as well.
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Antlers follows Julia Meadows, a middle school teacher in Oregon who grows concerned about the wellbeing of Lucas, one of her students. Along with her brother Paul, the local sheriff, Julia attempts to figure out what’s really going on with Lucas, what happened to his father and brother, and exactly what supernatural creature (a wendigo) is out for blood and wreaking havoc. The horror film is disquieting as it builds towards its finale, allowing for a couple of shocking and heartbreaking subplots that change the direction of Antlers’ ending.
Antlers Ending Explained
Julia Saves Lucas
Lucas is still afraid of the creature, but his response to it is born of trauma and abuse…
Following Warren Stokes’ explanation of a wendigo, Julia and Paul find themselves embroiled with the creature, who follows them home in a bid to find Lucas. The middle-schooler was convinced that if he kept feeding the wendigo, under the belief that it’s a new version of his dad, it would love him no matter what and he could keep it happy.
Lucas is still afraid of the creature, but his response to it is born of trauma and abuse, with Antlers establishing that Lucas, like Julia and Paul, had an abusive father. It’s a coping mechanism for Lucas and a means to continue to receive affection by aiding someone under threat of harm.
Following the wendigo’s assault on Paul and Officer Dan, Lucas goes to the cave with the creature; Julia follows, knowing she has to stab the wendigo and rip out its heart to save Lucas and the rest of the town. Unfortunately, Aiden, Lucas’ younger brother, is a casualty of the wendigo’s first attack.
Sensing he is about to transform fully and leave behind his human flesh like his father Frank, Julia also stabs Aiden before that can happen. With the reign of the wendigo seemingly over, Julia and Paul, now recovered from the creature’s attack, take Lucas in, three orphans caring for one another.
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Why Julia Returned To Oregon After So Long
Julia Finds Returning Home Difficult
The abuse Julia faced at the hands of her father growing up is shown in flashbacks to her youth. However, Antlers keeps things vague, alluding to brutality and devastation without showing the grisly details. The reason she returned to Oregon after living in LA for so long was to be closer to her brother Paul, whom she left behind in a bid to get away from their father.
While Julia could have come back years prior, she didn’t do so until after her dad died, likely because she couldn’t face returning to her childhood home if he was still around. Julia is very much working through the lingering trauma in Antlers, and it’s easy to see how her father’s mistreatment still affects her. Facing him would have been a raw emotional ordeal, so Julia stayed away until it was safe to drop in on Paul and reestablish their relationship.
The
Antlers
screenplay was nominated for a 2021 Bram Stoker Awards.
Antlers Mythology Explained & Why Wendigo Was Used
The Wendigo Comes From An Algonquian Story
The wendigo’s existence in lore is deeply tied to Indigenous struggles against colonial violence…
Antlers adapts the wendigo mythology, which originated with the First Nations Algonquian tribe. The creature is a part of the folklore of Algonquian-speaking peoples, passed down through the generations. In mythology, a wendigo is a supernatural creature that can possess humans and take on their form, becoming malevolent and cannibalistic. This cannibalism consumes it as the wendigo continuously feasts on human flesh without ever feeling satisfied.
The use of the wendigo is purposeful when considering the setting and characters in Antlers. The wendigo is a representation of excessive consumption, which is why the cannibalistic traits appear, with the creature’s hunger never satiated. The wendigo’s appearance conveys an imbalance in nature, greed, and destruction of land and the natural state of things.
In short, the creature is all-consuming, a striking reference to how colonization of Indigenous lands consumed and destroyed First Nation tribes, taking without giving back. The wendigo essentially consumed Frank because he trespassed and disrupted the mines, ignoring the sigils that were in place as a warning to anyone who entered; he was also a bad person.
The supernatural creature is also representative of the darkness that lurks within human beings, feeding off of their hatred, their negative energy, and the disregard they have for each other and the environment, among other things. The wendigo’s existence in lore is deeply tied to Indigenous struggles against colonial violence, greed, and starvation facing their communities. The wendigo is the personification of these things, with ties to restoring what was lost.
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How The Wendigo Lore Is Different In Antlers
This Wendigo Does Not Have Human Features
In Indigenous stories about the wendigo, the creature is humanoid and has a heart made of ice. Additionally, Native folklore suggests the surrounding environment turns cold whenever a wendigo is near, which is not dissimilar to a spirit entering a room in ghost stories. The coldness is specific to the creature’s lore, which is most closely associated with the winter months.
In Antlers, the wendigo appears in what looks like late fall rather than in the dead of winter. The creature in the film sheds its human skin when it’s fully ready to take over, rather than being a humanoid giant with pulled flesh and its bones jutting out.
What’s more, the wendigo has literal antlers coming out of its head in the film. This aesthetic trait is not prevalent in Indigenous stories of the wendigo; the antlers — or horns, as is sometimes depicted — are more aligned with Hollywood’s view of the creatures. What Antlers also keeps out of the movie is the wendigo’s agility, its mimicry of voices, which is done to lure people to it, and the infiltration of not just the flesh, but of people’s minds as well.
How Antlers’ Twist Ending Sets Up A Sequel
Antlers Teases A New Wendigo
Antlers ends in a fairly ominous way. Sure, all the loose ends have been seemingly tied up, with Julia and Paul taking Lucas in to care for him (at least for a while), but that isn’t all. What is unexpected is seeing Paul start bleeding from his eye as Julia and Lucas walk away. There is a close-up on the black, soil-like substance staining Paul’s hands, and it’s clearly foreshadowing his turn as the wendigo.
…despite killing the wendigo haunting the town, it continues to infect others…
Antlers’ twist appears to set up a sequel involving Julia having to face down her brother. It would be emotionally resonant because she and Paul have been through a lot together in their childhoods and are still close. Antlers saw Julia remorsefully kill Aiden because she knew he was too far gone to be saved. Considering her close relationship with Paul and how they finally seem to be on the mend after their father’s passing, an Antlers sequel could create tension between them, forcing Julia to fight for her brother or kill him as she did Frank and Aiden.
What ultimately stands out, however, is that despite killing the wendigo haunting the town, it continues to infect others, passing down its traits from one person to the next while devouring more flesh, always hungry and never satisfied. Whether there will actually be a horror sequel to Antlers remains to be seen, but the twist with Paul having been infected surely leaves the door open for more of his and Julia’s story to tell.
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The Real Meaning Of The Antlers Ending
Antlers Examines The Cyclical Nature Of Abuse And Destruction
While some might dismiss Antlers as a creature-feature that doesn’t offer much social commentary, that isn’t the case. Beyond featuring a frightening creature, the movie uses the wendigo to symbolize the monstrous nature of an abuser and the cyclical nature of that abuse.
Julia, after all, is someone who has experienced abuse herself and recognizes the signs in others. She uses her own experience to offer help. It just so happens that her help comes in the form of having to battle a monstrous creature instead of a human being. Julia being able to put a stop to the abuse, but both destroying the wendigo and the infected Aiden, shows that she’s able to put a stop to the cycle.
While Paul isn’t an abuser himself, his being the next person hinted at becoming a wendigo in the Antlers twist ending demonstrates how hard it is to move beyond the effects of trauma and abuse. The wendigo has long been used as an allegory for those who harm the land, but here, that idea is combined with those who harm other people. Both Julia and Paul struggle to move beyond their own trauma, and they are both in the middle of the Antlers violence when they try to.
From producer Guillermo Del Toro, Antlers centers on a middle-school teacher and a sheriff of a small town who realizes one of her students is experiencing horrifying encounters with an ancestral creature. Crazy Heart and Black Mass director Scott Cooper helm the film with a cast consisting of Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, and Jeremy T. Thomas.
- Director
- Scott Cooper
- Release Date
- October 29, 2021
- Writers
- Scott Cooper , Nick Antosca , C. Henry Chaisson
- Cast
- Jesse Plemons , Amy Madigan , Sawyer Jones , Scott Haze , Cody Davis , Rory Cochrane , Jeremy T. Thomas , Keri Russell , Graham Greene
- Runtime
- 99 Minutes