Never let go thankfully avoided committing one of the worst movie sins

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Never Let Go

While Never let go The horror movie has a few nasty surprises, the horror movie steered clear of one twist that no viewer wanted to see. Even the darkest horror movies rarely cross certain cultural taboos. It’s unusual for slasher villains to kill children, for example, because it’s too unnecessarily nasty for audiences who want to guilt-trip the masked killer. Although Never let goThe twist ending was bleak, the story of the movie was able to avoid this issue by sidestepping a particularly gross twist. Director Alexandre Aja’s psychological horror skirted close to a major taboo but backed down.

Never let go Follows the unnamed mother of Halle Berry, a survivalist who ekes out a rough, deprived existence in an isolated woodland with her two sons. According to her, the world is being destroyed by an ambiguous evil that she can see, but her sons cannot. Now, the family will survive only by staying attached to their distant home. One of the mother’s sons, Nolan, begins to question this version of events, while the other, Samuel, remains firm that their mother can be trusted. Never let goHis largely unseen evil is complex, and his presence almost crosses a major horror genre taboo.

Never let go back from killing the dog

Never let go killed the mother before his animal hero

In the middle of the story of the movie, Never let goS heroes begin to run out of food. Reduced to eating the bark of trees, the family is forced to contend with an unthinkable option. The mother explains that they will need to kill and eat the family dog ​​to survive, something Nolan refuses to accept. Nolan locks his mother in their shed in the hopes that she will come to her senses, stopping her from killing the dog in the process. Never let gos big twist then reveals that the mother is actually hallucinating the evil, leading her to take her own life.

Never let go doesn’t go through with killing the family dog, Despite how close the movie comes to breaking the unwritten horror taboo. While many horror movies have killed people’s best friends, it’s no coincidence that one of the most popular indexes for pop culture trigger warnings is called out a lot. Does the dog die?. Pet death is a controversial twist in horror movies, and many classic horror movies have cut scenes that broke the taboo for fear of alienating audiences. The original script for Gremlins Killed the family dog ​​before screenwriter Chris Columbus thought better.

Never letting go killing the dog wouldn’t even have been the worst part

Never Let Go’s cruel plans for the family pet just got nastier

The real reason that Never let go Not going through with the dog’s death is what would have come nextAs if that would have made the movie a much darker affair than it already was. Aja’s psychological horror operates as a sort of dark modern fairy tale in which the evil, whether imagined or not, exerts a supernatural power over the family. For most of its runtime, the movie is a blend of survival horror and strange, offbeat fantasy, but the reality of the family’s plans for their dog would have made it unwatchably grim.

The mother planned to slaughter and eat the family dog ​​after it was the only source of food she could find for her sons. While Never let goThe Polaroid is creepy, nothing in the movie could be called outright disturbing or realistically horrifying thanks to its strange, fantasy-tinged tone. Depicting the family killing and eating the dog would have changed the tone completely, making Never let go Feel more akin to a relentlessly downbeat horror drama than 2024’s The devil’s butt or 2017s Haghazusa: a Jewish curse.

Killing the dog in Never Let Go would hurt the movie

Death is not right for never letting go

by and large, Killing Dogs is a twist that few movies can pull off successfully. The few examples of this shocking moment that work well are usually outrageously dark comedies, like The Absurd Tam. The toxic revengeOr classics where the scene in question is short, like Halloweens revelation that Michael Myers killed a dog after escaping an asylum. For many more horrors, what is supposed to be a shocking twist ends up being gratuitously unpleasant and leaves viewers disheartened and disengaged.

of The butterfly effect to Hollow manToo many horror movies use the death of a dog as a cheap shock tactic to upset viewers. For every exception to the rule, like 2023’s comp M3GANThere are a lot of movies like Funny games (both the original and the remake) in which the death of a family dog ​​serves little purpose beyond signaling that the movie is determined to leave viewers miserable. The twist is both predictable and less effective as a result, meaning Never let go Was due to cleverly sidestep the tired reveal.

Source: Does the dog die?