Heretic’s directors unpack its ambiguous ending

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 (Sophie Thatcher) — 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.

Sometimes, days later, we hear that they’ve reflected upon it in a different way. And that, to us, is kind of the beauty of life — not be stuck in stasis, or stuck in the certainty of “This is the only way to view the world around me,” or to view a relationship or non-relationship with faith, belief, disbelief. To keep your eyes and ears open and interact with the world in a way that is both reactionary and proactive, but you’re always kind of being fluid in the way that you view the world.

Bryan Woods: It’s a very difficult thing to talk about, because we make the movie, we spend three years trying to put this conversation in a cinematic context, and we’re timid about coming in with our thoughts about what we were trying to say. Then it reduces that experience to a soundbite.

Beck: It’s an ending by design to leave it with the audience. That’s really it. The ambition is to deliver questions, and not to necessarily deliver an answer, because more than anything, this to us would be a take-home movie.

Woods: I know that there’s this feeling — people get to the end and they’re kind of curious, are we coming out on belief or disbelief? Which is it? Which is maybe too binary for what we’re talking about. But one of the things we’re certainly discussing in the film is a critique of certainty, and a critique of — in life, whether it’s religion or politics or even moviegoing, this feeling of, “I know what’s right, and you’re wrong.” We hate that, because that kills conversation, and then no dialogue exists.

Our taste ranges from lowbrow movies to highbrow movies. We’re all over the map. I love a good lowbrow, broad comedy like Joe Dirt, but if somebody came up to me and said, “I know that Joe Dirt is the greatest movie of all time,” I would be like, “You’re terrifying me.” That’s scary to me.

Beck: But if they said it’s the worst movie of all time, I also would disagree with that, too!

Woods: That would also be scary! So then you apply that to politics, and you apply that to discourse and religion, and therein lies one of the things we’re attempting to get out of this.

Beck: I feel like the internet has made human beings seem dumb, but that’s not the case. We’re all very complex intellectual people that don’t share 100% of the same views, and we can’t all be lumped into one group. And that’s what I feel like culture has cultivated right now. And that’s a shame. And I hope there’s a way to get over this hump of where we are currently as a society .

Woods: And it’s hard, because of the digital aspect of social media. We’re not present together as people. We’re on screens, and we’re commenting, and it just dehumanizes the conversation. And that’s part of the problem, I think as well.

What’s the ideal way you want people to walk away from this movie? What do you want them to be talking about or thinking about?

Beck: I hope they’re thinking about their own relationship to their ideologies. Whether it is coming from an atheist perspective or a perspective steeped in rich belief, I hope it’s a conversation, a conversation that echoes what Brian and I had over the last almost 30 years of friendship. Why have we come to the conclusions we came to? To us, the relationship with these great existential questions is ever-evolving.

That’s the fun of life — the mysteries of life, the pursuit of questioning what is around you, and how to be a good human being, and how to interact with the world through that lens. So we hope that there is a lot of introspection, that people can engage with it at that level.

Woods: And talk about it. We’re at an interesting point in culture — certainly American culture, but I am sure there’s a kind of global feeling about this too, where it’s hard to talk about things. The internet dramatizes sides. You’re either here or you’re there, and fuck everybody else. When the reality is, we’re all probably somewhere on the spectrum.

And the idea of being able to have a civil conversation about anything has almost completely disappeared. So one of our hopes was to dramatize a conversation about religion, a thing that is difficult, that you’re almost not supposed to talk about — dramatize it to the most extreme level, so that any conversation that follows the film will feel civil and cordial by comparison to the experience that hopefully the audience just had.

And if we can translate a cinematic conversation to a conversation that people have at dinner after they see the film, for us, that would be the equivalent of a home run. That would be really special. Even if they just talk about religion for five minutes after seeing the movie, that would be a win as well.

Heretic is in theaters now.