What A Quiet Place writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck want you talking and thinking about after the religious-themed horror movie Heretic, in theaters now.
The ending of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ horror movie Heretic comes as a surprise: It’s a silent, transcendent moment after a tense, dialogue-heavy story. (End spoilers ahead, as the headline suggests.) A seemingly benign man, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), traps two young female Mormon missionaries in his house to test their faith and explain his own. He proclaims he’s going to show them a miraculous resurrection, but his miracle turns out to be fakery and manipulation.
Mr. Reed murders one of the missionaries, Sister Barnes but late in the movie, she seems to miraculously resurrect long enough to kill him, saving her partner, Sister Paxton (Chloe East). The movie ends with Sister Paxton escaping the house, staggering through its grounds, and falling. In the penultimate shot, she sees a butterfly land on her hand, and regards it with wonder — it’s a callback to a line earlier in the movie, where Paxton said that after death, she’d like to be resurrected as a butterfly, and visit her loved ones.
The implication is that she’s seen the promised miracle after all, and that now, her partner’s spirit is visiting her in a new form. But the final shot of the movie shows the butterfly isn’t there after all. What does it mean? Polygon asked writer-directors Bryan Woods and Scott Beck (A Quiet Place), who discussed their take on the ending, what they want people talking about after the movie, and how Joe Dirt helps explain it all.
[Ed. note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Polygon: I’m sure a lot of people will be trying to unpack and debate Heretic’s final moment. For me, it felt like a statement about faith and belief — Sister Paxton believes Sister Barnes’ spirit is with her, and takes comfort from it, so it doesn’t matter whether that’s objectively true or not. Can you can speak to what you meant by the contrast between those final two shots?
Scott Beck: Without giving our own direct feeling on the moment, what you’re talking about, that it’s reflecting upon the statement of belief — that is the sweet spot. We screened the movie a few times at AFI, and Fantastic Fest, and Toronto, and what’s been really engaging for us is to hear many people have multiple interpretations of what that ending means, and how that intersects with their own sense of self, and their own sense of how they view the world.
