Theories That Make Horror Movies Even More Freaky

There's nothing better than a good horror movie. But it's easy to get so distracted by the blood-and-guts or the psychological nightmares that you don't really take the time to analyze what might have been going on in the filmmaker's head. It's a horror movie, after all, not Shakespeare, so it's understandable. But fortunately, there's plenty of people on the internet who do exactly that sort of thing, and they've come up with some ideas that make some of our favorite horror movies even more horrific ... and some of our childhood favorites into horror movies. 

Yeah, right, you're saying already, because you've already read the title for this one. If you tried to pick two movies with as little in common as possible, Home Alone and the Saw series would be legitimate choices.

Only, not so fast. There's a fan theory that suggests the Home Alone movies are the origin story of Jigsaw, and it makes both franchises so much cooler to think they're linked.

Let's look at Home Alone not as the charming, money-making holiday movie, but for what Macauley Culkin's Kevin McCallister really is. He's got some serious anger issues (understandably, as he's from a family that pays so little attention to him that they forget to take him along on major vacations — we're not talking a trip to the store here). Before they even forget him he's attacked his cousin (though we'll give him a pass on this one — it's legit).

Later, he threatens an unsuspecting pizza boy, records his uncle in the shower and later uses said video for not-cool ends. He sets a whole series of elaborate traps designed not just to protect his home, but to do serious damage to would-be burglars ... traps that are triggered by the victims. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

You remember that whole thing as a delightfully clever and slightly hilarious part of the movie, we're sure. But when Dr. Ryan St. Clair from Weill Cornell Medical College weighed in with his professional opinion on just what kind of damage the traps would have done, we're talking some pretty permanent damage. Remember the blow torch to the head? That would cause burning down to the skull, and require a transplant to fix. That's right, people: a skull transplant. The iron to the face does just as much damage, and that would really shatter your face.

Now, add in his hallucinations (especially the furnace monster, which can arguably be said to make an appearance in Saw II), and his obsession with his neighbor, who he's convinced is a serial killer who keeps his mummified victims. Heck, Macauley Culkin and Tobin Bell even look alike. We're sold.

If you're looking for films with deep, hidden meanings, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre probably isn't on any list, no matter how long it is. But some believe it's actually an incredibly gory commentary on animal rights, the horrors of animal slaughter in the meat industry, and, ultimately, why you should probably give vegetarianism a chance.

In case you've forgotten some of the details, the Sawyer family — which includes the infamous Leatherface — are actually from a long line of slaughterhouse owner/operators. There's animal bones all over, after all, and you hear the sounds of animals, even though there's none there. One of the characters even describes just how animals are slaughtered, and when the Sawyer family finally sits down to a meal of people, they make animal noises at their final victim.

PETA wrote about the movie being one of the biggest films ever made in support of vegetarianism, and even though you might not want to believe PETA, director Tobe Hooper even said that he stopped eating meat when they were filming. "In a way, I thought the heart of the film was about meat; it's about the chain of life and killing sentient beings, and it has cannibalism in it, although you have to come to that conclusion by yourself, because it's only implied."

He goes on to say that Guillermo Del Toro went vegetarian after seeing the film, and if you can freak out Del Toro enough that he makes a major lifestyle change, we're guessing your mission was accomplished.

When we first saw the trailers for Cabin in the Woods, we admit it. We cringed. It was like every single trope was stuffed into one movie, and seriously, Joss Whedon, we expected so much more. Did you lose a bet? What's up with this thing?

Fortunately, Joss Whedon didn't sell out, and we find out later that the whole thing is set up by a group of creepers called Facility. According to one fan theory, Curt's in on it the whole time, and working for the creepers.

Curt — also known as Thor — is the one that leads the proverbial lambs to the slaughter (and he's popular enough to get all of this group of complete misfits to go with him). Take a rewatch, and you'll see that he might have done a few questionable things — like getting his girlfriend alone, so she can die — and maybe not doing all that he probably could have to get them out alive. Sure, he dies, but it's definitely not the first time someone's been double-crossed.

There's another theory that brings you into all this, dear audience, and it's not a flattering one. If Facility is responsible for keeping the old gods appeased with their sacrifice of teenage blood so they stage a show for those gods before giving them their sacrifices, isn't that a metaphor for exactly what filmmakers are doing by giving you the movie to watch? The Facility are the movie-makers and the writers, and they're appeasing you by giving you the blood-and-guts show you want. You heathens.

The Scream series is a classic. We know, there's enough of them. But the original set of movies were enough to make any teenager look at their peers with a bit of suspicion, and to be fair, it was probably all rightfully deserved. We eventually find out that there's been two killers on the loose the whole time: Billy Loomis and Stu Macher. Pretty straightforward, but one theory says that there were three.

Roman Bridger explains who he is at the end of Scream 3: he's Sidney's illegitimate brother, and he first showed up in town before all this killing stuff started happening. When he did show up, he was shunned by his mother ... and if you've ever seen an episode of Criminal Minds, you know that's just the sort of thing that'll kick off a killing spree. And according to him, that's just what happened.

He's the one that plotted to destroy everything, and sent the two long-accepted killers off on their spree ... while he joined in, every so often. If you take a rewatch and look for continuity errors, you'll find a couple major ones that could be explained away by a third killer. The best little Easter egg that hints at just who that might be happens in the grocery store, when the reflection of the creepy masked killer appears over a brand of ice cream, conveniently called "Romantica." That just can't be an accident.

Once you hear this one, you won't be able to unsee it. Drag Me To Hell wasn't about demons at all: it was all in the overactive imagination of a starving woman who was struggling with an eating disorder. Bear with us.

The problems start when banker Christine denies an old woman's application for a loan. She's cursed, and shenanigans happen. But watch closely, the theory goes, and you'll see that there's a constant connection being made between food and the appearance of the demon that's haunting Christine.

Most damning (get it?) is Christine's admission that her mother was sick, and a photo of her as a child — an overweight child — in front of a sign that says "Swine Queen." That's enough to mess anyone up, much less a child, and most of the horrible things that happen to Christine can be connected to an eating disorder. She's constantly being vomited on, getting arms — and things — forced down her throat, and there's a huge number of people eating and drinking through the entire movie ... except for Christine. Once you watch with that in mind, it's almost impossible not to see. Just check with the eyeball in the cake.

In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, the premise is that Freddy Krueger is a vengeful ghost using the dream realm to murder the children of the people who had killed him. This is a pretty straightforward motivation, but in the course of its infinity sequels, Freddy definitely ends up killing some kids that had nothing to do with his death, and then also like some shower murders. Maybe these are just for fun, but maybe he had another motive? Also, in Freddy's Dead we learn that the powers that Freddy gained from the demons are 1) to enter dreams and 2) to be eternal. Not to stretch his arms like Inspector Gadget or turn into a TV or become a giant phallic snake. Where does he get these powers?

There is a theory that tries to answer both of these questions. Since we know dream warriors exist and that Freddy takes the souls of the children he kills, what if Freddy absorbs the powers of the children he kills? This would explain why Freddy becomes more and more powerful over the course of the series (if you don't like sequelitis-fueled power creep as an explanation) and also why he would kill kids unrelated to his death, as well as why he does so in such outlandish ways. The idea that Freddy might be after anyone and that his power will only increase over time definitely turns him into more of a threat, but do you think he killed a kid with pun-based powers somewhere after the second movie?

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is one of the most significant influences on John Carpenter's Halloween in part because the earlier film moves its setting away from the archly gothic castles and crumbling mansions that had defined the previous decades of horror into the mundane world of roadside motels. Carpenter took this even further by taking costumed knife murder into the suburbs. What's more, Carpenter wasn't afraid to wear this influence on his sleeve, borrowing character names from Psycho and applying them to his own characters, most notably in the form of Dr. Sam Loomis, Michael Myers's psychiatrist who shares a name with Marion Crane's boyfriend in Psycho.

But what this theory presupposes is, what if he didn't borrow that name? What if the two Sams Loomis are one and the same? The original Loomis is, of course, the one who catches Norman at the end of Psycho and puts an end to his murder streak. (Well, until the sequels.) What if the death of his girlfriend at the business end of a psychopath's knife inspired Loomis to try to stop anyone else from experiencing the pain he felt by nipping slashers in the bud, so to speak? He goes back to school, gets a degree in psychiatry, moves to Illinois, and one of his first patients is a little boy in a clown costume who just murdered his own sister. This makes Loomis's story all the more tragic and makes his occasionally extreme reactions to Michael more understandable because they're more personal.

All right, so, this particular theory stands out because it bears some (pun alert) haunting implications for the real world. The Paranormal Activity franchise was hugely successful, with the first film having been made for a mere $15,000 and earning $193 million at the box office, a return of well over 1 million percent. It naturally spawned a host of sequels: five domestically and one in Japan. How did Oren Peli, a first-time director whose previous work experience was primarily in software programming, manage to make one of the most profitable horror franchises in history?

The demon that haunts multiple families across the span of the Paranormal Activity franchise shows both that it knows when it is being filmed and also that its power increases when people are aware and afraid of it. This theory, then, presumes that the demon is real and also that the footage of the Paranormal Activity films is, as the movies themselves claim, authentic. Oren Peli made a deal with the demon in exchange for wealth and success (like for example a majorly profitable film franchise), with the understanding that Peli would bring the footage in front of international audiences, scaring innumerable millions and thereby greatly increasing the demon's power. Although we can't possibly know what the demon wants to do with its newfound power, it can't be worse than what Peli did with his, which was to make Chernobyl Diaries. That's an atrocity worse than claiming a few first-born sons.

Among horror fans, the Evil Dead franchise is one of the most beloved film series in the history of the genre, with its protagonist Ash frequently named in the same breath as horror icons such as Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. But it's also one of the strangest franchises in the genre's history, as the tone of each successive film — not counting the 2013 remake/sequel (an ambiguity which is already a tradition within the franchise) — is more comedic than the previous one. The first Evil Dead is played pretty straight and almost entirely for scares, with trees doing things trees oughtn't do, but by Army of Darkness, Ash is dropping quotable one-liners and doing full-on Three Stooges routines. While the real-life explanation for this tonal shift is that Sam Raimi and the other creators of the series felt that comedy came to them more easily than straightforward horror, what if there were an in-universe reason for things becoming more cartoonish as time goes on?

One theory has an idea on this: Ash is progressively losing his mind more and more over time. You can practically see Ash's mind snap in the first half of Evil Dead 2, and from that moment on, things start to get sillier. Not only do the scenarios get more bizarre, but Ash also begins to become so detached from reality that he stops fearing the deadites as much as he should, and so they start getting depicted as increasingly bumbling and clownish. This theory certainly gives Army of Darkness a darker sheen.