Heretic Butterfly and What It Means Explained

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Heretic (2024)

The butterfly that appears in HereticThe ending of may seem like a relatively small detail, but this animal’s appearance is central to the film’s symbolic story. The religious horror of A24 Heretic is a densely packed film, which is quite a feat considering the story only has three named characters. For most of its running time, the unbearably tense Heretic follows Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, as they try to convert the seemingly sweet Mr. Once the pair try to leave the Reed house, things take a dark and unexpected turn.

Trapped in Reed’s labyrinthine house, the young women are subjected to various psychological tests that question their shared faith. Reed uses clever tricks to seemingly poison a woman and bring her back to life, but this fails to convince Sister Barnes. HereticThe small cast of characters gets even smaller when a frustrated Reed abruptly slits Barnes’ throat, leaving only him and Paxton alive in the end. Paxton discovers Reed’s deceptions and realizes that his supernatural powers were mere tricks, mustering the courage to stab him. A dying Reed tries to kill Paxton, but Barnes uses the last of his strength to kill him.

Sister Paxton said she wanted to come back as a butterfly

In the final moments of HereticPaxton prays on the floor of a damp basement as Reed reaches out to slit his throat. Her prayers are apparently answered when Barnes returns to life long enough to kill Reed and save her. Paxton runs out of the basement and escapes the house, climbing through a downstairs window into the snow-covered garden outside. Once outside, a butterfly lands on Sister Paxton’s hand for a brief moment before seemingly disappearing. This enigmatic image is a callback to Paxton’s earlier comment, as well as a symbolic encapsulation of the film’s larger story.

Long before Reed imprisons the women and begins to test their faith, Paxton mentions during a conversation that she would like to be reincarnated as a butterfly after she dies. Although reincarnation is not an established part of the Church of Latter-day Saints, Paxton says he hopes to return as an insect so he can land in the hands of his loved ones. That is, they would know that she was still present in their lives after her death. As such, it makes sense that a butterfly would do just that to Paxton at the moment Sister Barnes presumably dies off-screen.

Heretic’s Ending Leaves The Butterfly’s Existence Ambiguous

A hard cut makes the heretic’s sweet moment hard to decipher

Butterfly apparently disappears a second after appearing on Sister Paxton’s handso it could just be Paxton’s exhausted and traumatized delusion. After suffering from seeing her friend die and almost die, Paxton may have imagined the comforting image of a butterfly to represent her dead friend. The hard cut from Paxton’s butterfly sighting to his shaking hand in the garden implies a harsh discord between his experience of the situation and what is actually happening in the garden. Hereticthe story. Ironically, the entire ordeal was based on Reed’s attempt to trick women into believing something that wasn’t necessarily real.

Although Paxton and Barnes were women of faith, they still refused to believe that the calling “Prophet” really did return from the dead. Barnes hazarded a guess that the woman simply had a near-death experience, but that wasn’t entirely correct. In reality, the sick woman died after voluntarily poisoning herself with the pie. However, she was replaced by another nearly identical woman who played her revived self. Paxton resolved this in Hereticending, resulting in his final confrontation with Reed. This fight apparently ended with Paxton escaping, although the butterfly could subtly suggest otherwise.

Mr. Reed’s Butterfly Dream Monologue Is Tied To Heretic’s End

The heretic’s end may be a dying dream

After killing Barnes, Reed references Chuang Tzu’s “Butterfly Dream”. This Taoist story tells the story of a man who dreamed that he was a butterfly and wondered, when he woke up, whether it was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. This allusion strongly implies that Sister Paxton may have died in the basementand she passes the end of Heretic experiencing a butterfly dream from which she escaped. HereticThe twisting horror story appears to depict Barnes rising from the dead to kill Reed, preventing him from killing Paxton. However, this seems unlikely given the scene of his death.

Barnes bled out almost immediately after Reed slit her throat, apparently dying on the floor within minutes and unresponsive as Reed removed a birth control device from her arm. About fifteen minutes later, she returned to consciousness long enough to beat Reed to death with a wooden board before dying again. This was apparently the kind of miraculous resurrection that Reed claimed he could perform before, and it conveniently happened as Paxton was sitting on the floor bleeding from a stomach wound as Reed tried to slit his throat. So, according to this theory, Reed may have killed Paxton and she just imagined his escape.

Heretic’s Butterfly Highlights A24 Horror Movie’s True Message

Sister Paxton’s personal experience is impossible to refute

Paxton Heretic the ending could be a delirious death dream, similar to the famous twist in author Ambrose Bierce’s seminal short story, “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge.” However, it is vital to note that A24’s horror film does not support this interpretation in relation to another reading of the ending. There is literally no way to know if the butterfly in Hereticthe final scene is realwhich illustrates the entire message of the film. Despite what both missionaries and Reed assert at different stages, faith and belief are always subjective and, although subject to manipulation, can ultimately only be experienced individually.

Reed tries to create circumstances to make the missionaries see him as a god, but despite his faith, this doesn’t work. Meanwhile, Paxton genuinely believes in HereticAt the end of which she defeated Reed, Barnes came back from the dead to finish him off and save his life, and her dead friend’s soul was then transferred into a butterfly to assure Paxton that she was okay. There is no way to know how much of this happened, just as there was no way for Reed, Paxton, or Barnes to prove that they were definitively correct in an argument about the unknowable philosophical truths at the heart of Heretic.