“Antlers,” one of the year’s most anticipated horror films, stunned the audience with jaw-dropping emotion—and not in a charming manner. From the very beginning of the film till the very end, there is a strange fear-like sense that never goes away. And you are left wondering, “Oh, what will happen next?”
The film is more than simply another foray into the supernatural; it steadily reveals the darkness within both Julia Meadows, an elementary school teacher portrayed by Keri Russell, and Lucas Weaver, one of her students played by Jeremy T. Thomas. We do not find out about the genuine danger lurking in the Oregon woodlands until much later in the film.
Now here’s something you probably did not know: “Antlers” premiered on October 11, 2021, at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles. On October 29, 2021, it was released in theaters in the United States.
It is a film about the darkness in all of its forms. The characters are humanly dark, the mythological creature is supernaturally dark, and the backdrop is literally low-lit filmmaking gloom. The majority of the footage was shot in and around Hope, British Columbia.
“Antlers,” directed by Scott Cooper and produced by Guillermo del Toro, is based on Nick Antosca’s short tale “The Quiet Boy.” Cooper’s first film since 2009’s “Crazy Heart” is his first without Masanobu Takayanagi as director of photography. Cooper’s first digitally shot film as well.
Movie Story
The narration at the beginning of the film is in the Ojibwe language, which is still spoken nowadays. The isolated town of Oregon that Cooper captures in the movie is visibly trapped in poverty and hopelessness. And that can be seen from the very beginning of the movie with buildings left vacant, half-painted concrete walls, and fields littered in debris.
So, Cooper definitely gave us, from the start, a visual of what terror looks like in the form of a dying town. What’s remarkable about the movie is that it started filming on 1st October 2018 and by 30th November the very same year, it was finished. Crazy right? Well, that’s what you get with the team that has both Cooper and Del Toro. Now of course its worldwide release dates got postponed due to Coronavirus. Safe to say, it kept us all the more excited.
The genius of Cooper reflects in the fact that it’s not just a film about a mythological creature from indigenous folklore; the emotional trauma of the characters is also at the forefront. Despair is prevalent in the eyes of Julia, who returns to her Oregon hometown after the death of her abusive father. She takes on a job at the local elementary school, teaching a classroom of unresponsive 12-year-olds.
You would think that there would be much more enthusiasm in a bunch of kids, but oh well, it is this dull nature along with the eerie sounds that keep the stench of horror going for us.
Now, Julia has her own issues to deal with because along with the flashbacks of abuse that she suffered as a child, she also feels guilty for abandoning her brother, Paul, who is played by Jesse Plemons. While she was away, he became the sheriff. And guess what, this is the third time for Jesse Plemons to be playing the role of sheriff. He previously played a sheriff in “American Made”, 2017 and “Game Night”, 2018.
Julia takes an interest in her student, Lucas Weaver, who is a rather quiet child exhibiting domestic abuse symptoms, which Julia is quick to recognize from her own past. She learns that his father, Frank Weaver is a single parent with a criminal record and upon finding disturbing art on his desk, she’s sure that something’s definitely wrong in that house. Much to our surprise, Lucas’ case is nothing like Julia’s. He’s harboring a much darker and deadlier secret at home. That’s when the audience sees Lucas killing and bringing home animals. And to think that a child lives like that, with bolted doors and a smelly and bloody house. That’s scary as hell. But hold on the scariest bit is yet to come!
Paul begins discovering brutally dismembered bodies in the woods outside of town, and even the local coroner does not know the cause of death. Yeah, at this point if you are thinking that the mythological creature steps in, just hold on tight. Julia tries to investigate what’s going on at Lucas’ house and then comes the big reveal. This is when Paul and her stumble upon a local folkloric legend about a creature called the ‘Wendigo’, who feasts upon humans. And guess what, that’s whom Frank is gradually turning into. Hence all the animal remains that Lucas feeds him is only hoping that his father would get better.
Unlike most horror stories that grapple into the world of addiction as the source of true evil, in “Antlers”, we see that even though Frank ends up becoming the monstrous creature, he was a loving father and only wanted to take care of of his sons. Exactly why he asked Lucas to keep him locked up because he knew that if he was set free, countless lives would be lost.
There comes a horrific scene where we get the first real look of the ‘Wendigo’ with a mask-like the face of Frank on it, who is about to attack his victim. If you’re sitting with popcorn, well some of those corns are going to pop right out of your mouth because that scene will leave you struggling for breath.
With the emotional trauma of the protagonists on edge and the struggle Lucas went through to try and save his father and younger brother, only to lose them both at the end, and the insane hint at the end of the movie that all is clearly not well when it looks like Paul might be showing early signs of the birth of a Wendigo, “Antlers” definitely has us on the edge of our seats.
A Mythological Creature ‘The Wendigo’ Explained
Now let’s take a deeper look and explore our mythological creature, ‘The Wendigo’.
‘The Wendigo’ is a cannibalistic creature from the Algonquin myth. Why cannibalistic? Here’s how the myth goes. It is said to involve a dark spirit that possesses a man and turns him into a feral, elk-horned creature, that craves human flesh. The more it eats, the hungrier it grows, which is why the most common translation of its name means “the evil spirit that devours mankind”.
What’s so interesting about myths like this is that it almost seems so real. Like something like this must have definitely existed at a certain point in time. In fact, the wendigo is known to live in Canada and United States, in cold climates. There is also a place known as ‘the Cave of the Wendigo’, which is near lake Mameigwess in Ontario, Canada and it is supposedly the Wendigo’s hotspot.
As most legends go, there are several physical attributes that are associated with this creature. It has glowing eyes, long yellowed fangs, and long tongues. They are also exceptionally thin and skeletal-like, their skin is stretched so tight over their body that you can clearly see all of their bones.
But, the two most horrifying traits are its height and its antler rack. Legends say that it’s about 15 feet tall. Yeah, that tall! Imagine being Lucas and having to kill it. The enormous antler rack allows it to injure and fatally penetrate the prey. A look of which we clearly saw in “Antlers”, during the last scenes when it gruesomely killed Paul’s colleague, Dan, and left Paul brutally injured.
The ‘Wendigo’ serves as a very peculiar and fitting symbol of greed, hunger, and selfishness, among other things. The way it keeps devouring humans yet its hunger is never satisfied; is a clear reflection of how scarce resources or potential starvation could easily give way to fears of cannibalism.
We have seen pretty much everything about the way the wendigo starts to take over the human mind and body, to take on its true form. Frank slowly starts to lose speech and an insatiable hunger develops within him. It affects his mind in such a way that he slowly starts to lose his sanity as a human being. The body is constantly cracking because it is preparing to adapt to the body structure of a wendigo. And finally, when he feasts upon human flesh, it happens. He completely loses anything that is even remotely human about him and reaches the point of no return because let’s face it, it’s impossible to think straight in that condition, after eating a person.
It’s curious when you think about it, that the wendigo spirit feeds off addiction and pain. It’s almost as if it is attracted particularly to those souls. We have all the signs present in “Antlers”, from the very first point where we see the birth of the wendigo when the creature attacked Frank and his colleague in the mine which was their meth lab. And since the other guy was literally eaten off, it took over Frank, who is clearly an addict. Later on, when Lucas successfully kills the wendigo that was his father, it took over another weak body, Lucas’ younger brother Aiden, who was already vulnerable to the wendigo because of his illness and in the midst of his own horrific transformation.
In the end, we see early signs of a wendigo in Paul, when black dirt starts coming out of his eyes, the same way it did for Frank and Aiden. And Paul was chosen because much earlier in the movie, we see him taking some medication. Although his drug use might not affect his work, it clearly left him vulnerable to wendigo.
So, the creature basically reflects our own inner demons, and it is like a metaphor for how we are constantly destroying our bodies with drug addiction, opioids, drinking, and how all the generational trauma, emotional trauma, and child abuse keep tearing down our bodies until it reaches a stage from where we cannot ever recover.
Much like how there is no going back after turning into the wendigo, there is also no going back after you walk down the road of addiction.
Now, let’s go back to the narration at the beginning of the movie. It foreshadowed the creature’s motives by explaining in the introduction that the abuse inflicted on Mother Earth released a malevolent spirit into the world, playing into Wendigo’s original essence.
And that’s why we have the arrival of Wendigo for the very first time in the mines, desolate and surrounded by darkness, ruins, and in the dirt. It is reflecting the destruction of our natural resources. It is like the spirit of lonely places, of issues that people would rather not confront.
The cultural ignorance of the protagonists about Wendigo’s myth is very prevalent to how something that is so deeply engraved in the culture of the indigenous people, is not even common knowledge to the people living in the town. And through that, Cooper opens up a whole new perspective on what a Wendigo embodies. In this movie, it is the death of a town with abandoned factories and mines, a rather gloomy place where people are leading monotonous lives with pretty much nothing to look forward to because it is swimming in poverty.
An interesting fact about “Antlers” is that the production employed a professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program from Portland State University as the Native American advisor, to give a better outlook into the film’s vision about the deep-rooted myth of Wendigo.
Review
Everything about “Antlers” as horror is absolutely stunning. The dark gloomy setting, the graphic of horror, and the production design are all superb. “Antlers” delivers a terrific performance by Russell as a woman trying to deal with her own dark past, leading the hunt towards the unknown in order to save the young boy. And the brilliance in young Thomas for executing such a difficult and emotionally challenging role is remarkable. All in all, a great mixture of the concept of domestic abuse stitched together with folklore legend, and an incredible cast and crew, definitely make it worth watching.