What really happened to the characters in Blood Conscious (2021): meaning of film ending, plot explanation, similar movies.
Country: USA
Genre: horror, thriller
Year of production: 2021
Director: Timothy Covell
Actors: Ogenero Badge, Lenny Thomas, Deshaun White, Nick Damici, Laurie Hammel.
Slogan: “Everyone has their own demons.”
Filmed as a retro-horror film, Blood Conscious seems to claim to be deep and mysterious. However, in reality, the film rather gives the impression of an amateur production, which is based almost on absurdity. Let’s try to analyse the plot and understand what the director was trying to convey.
What the film is about
The film Blood Conscious begins with a quote without indicating the source, the meaning of which we will consider further.
We watch the main characters: a girl Brittney, her younger brother Kevin and boyfriend Tony. The company drives in a car along the autumn highway to a picturesque place by the lake. There is a recreation centre there, where Britney and Kevin’s parents spend time. However, upon arrival at the place, the young people see a broken down car and do not find a single living soul.
Brittney and Kevin are horrified to discover that their parents and acquaintances are dead. A stranger with a gun appears, claiming that the deceased were no longer human – their bodies had been taken over by demons. Threatening the heroes, the man takes their phones and the key to the car and drives away. Before doing so, he advises to lock the door and not let anyone in.
However, after the stranger’s departure, the heroes begin to look around the neighbourhood to find a way to leave or call for help. Nearby, they discover another car with a bloody windscreen, a broken side window and no key.
Tony figures it’s only a couple of kilometres to the highway and about fifteen to the gas station. He gets the idea to go for help on his own. Kevin assumes that the guy will quickly find a hitchhiker. Brittney, on the other hand, is worried: passing motorists are more likely to stop to beat up a black man.
Tony discovers on the road first taken away smashed phones, and then his burning car – it seems that the stranger did not manage to escape. However, the latter returns with a scorched face and starts threatening the heroes with a shotgun again. He says that he was ambushed, that demons burned the car. Kevin tries to convince the stranger that he and Britney are regular people, since they have a pulse and drink alcohol. It seems to be working. Taking advantage of the confusion, Kevin attacks. Tony returns and helps calm the stranger down, nearly killing him.
The heroes lock the man in the basement. The man again warns of demons, but can’t say how people become possessed by them. Tony checks to see if there is another way out of the basement – there doesn’t seem to be.
After a while, the locked man starts screaming, saying that someone is near him. There is a rumbling sound and the lights go out. Descending into the basement, Tony and Kevin find a body buried under a fallen shelf.
The lights come back on and the heroes see a woman outside. Seeing the shotgun in Tony’s hands, she claims that he took her husband, Walter. Britney objects: it was probably a stranger they locked up who is already dead.
The woman introduces herself: her name is Margie Neilands. She says that Britney and Kevin’s father, unlike the others, did not run from the stranger with a gun and accepted death one of the first to die. Margie was hiding in the woods but got lost. In the darkness, she lost her phone. To the suggestion that there were several armed villains, Margie earnestly assures: no, there was only one killer.
The company decides to stay in the house overnight and hit the road in the morning. Kevin alone with Brittany voices his suspicions. The thing is that there are contradictions in Margie’s story. For example, their father has never been a daredevil, preferring to stay out of the way in such situations. Also, Margie didn’t ask how the armed stranger died at all.
At night Tony has a dream in which otherworldly voices call out to him, “We are waiting for you”. When he wakes up, he finds his phone ringing from somewhere. It turns out to be in Margie’s bag. She assures him that she sincerely thought it was lost, but refuses to let the heroes use it. Margie plays the offended victim. She goes outside and supposedly calls the police. But Kevin sees that the woman is just smashing the phone. When Tony and Britney run outside, Margie reports that the guy assaulted her.
Tony doesn’t support Kevin’s suspicions and doesn’t seem to believe him. The latter goes off somewhere. When he returns, he apologises to Margie and asks for her husband’s (Walter) name again. It turns out that Kevin has collected documents from the corpses – no Walter was among them. He takes Margie’s own ID and, threatening her with a knife, asks her to tell him the city and state she’s from. She freaks out. A shot rings out, and the woman drops dead. Tony assures her that she actually killed herself – he didn’t even pull the trigger.
Kevin shows Brittany Margie’s ID. It turns out that the dead woman’s name was different – Carol Ani McCarthy.
Tony blames himself for Margie-Carol’s murder and says it’s like he’s not himself. He urges Brittney and Kevin not to wait until morning and go through the woods to the highway. They agree. Tony says, “Great, they’re waiting for us,” supposedly referring to the cops. This arouses suspicion on Kevin’s part and he rushes into the room to get his gun. Tony rushes after him. A fight breaks out, a shot is fired. Only Tony comes out of the room. Britney runs outside. Tony goes looking for her.
We’re shown Kevin, who turns out to be alive. Apparently, he passed out from the impact and the bullet didn’t hit him. The stranger reappears in the house. It turns out that it is not his body in the basement – it was one of the “possessed” who died. He regrets that he did not immediately take the heroes with him. The stranger, says that he is a plumber and originally came here on a call. And he took his gun with him to protect himself from the bears that inhabit the local forests.
Meanwhile, Tony finds Britney. She asks him the date of the future wedding, at least in what month. He replies: “It’s not any month.” Kevin arrives and kills Tony with a gun taken from one of the corpses.
In the morning, Kevin, Brittany and the plumber leave the ill-fated place by boat. They dock at the opposite shore, where they are met by men armed with various objects. One of them, holding a gun, pronounces: “We’ve been expecting you.” The plumber utters with surprise: “You?”. Equally surprised is Kevin, who recognises the man as the same Walter. The same man is puzzled. Then the plumber picks up a gun and shoots himself in the head. The woman holding the gun asks: “What are you?”. Kevin and Britney, looking back at the other people whose faces are stained with blood, seem to realise something.
Meaning of the film Blood Conscious
Debutant director Timothy Covell said in an interview that with his film he wanted to turn the idea of horror films upside down by making a kind of “horror film in reverse”. The point is to show the events that take place after the end of the plot, typical of so-called slashers – pictures, the main content of which is associated with the murder of many characters by a maniac or sometimes an otherworldly force.
Covell assures that to understand the essence of the film Blood Conscious it is worth watching again. And indeed, upon close viewing something becomes clear. At least you can get, though not exhaustive, but an explanation of what happened in the course of the action.
The main intrigue, which we have to ponder over, can be summarised as follows: were there demons? The answer is: it seems that there were, but only before the events shown in the film.
The main argument in favour of this version: those who were taken for demons, all the time until the end, deliberately did not kill anyone. Moreover, they became victims themselves. For example, Margie-Carol could well have made an attempt on the sleepers (as, by the way, and Tony), but did not do it. She took up the gun in a fit of anger over the confiscated documents, but it is not certain that she would have fired.
Tony behaved aggressively towards the stranger, later identified as a plumber. But it is quite understandable, given the threats of the latter The trigger pull at the moment of Margie-Carol’s hysterics was clearly reflexive – Tony himself did not realise how.
Even the strange plumber probably didn’t actually kill anyone (except himself in the final scene). Throughout the action of the film for sure. But also before. After all, we don’t actually know whose victims were the people whose corpses we saw at the beginning. When Kevin suggests that the stranger plumber did it, he doesn’t refute it, but he doesn’t confirm it either.
Now to the interpretation of the oddities in the characters’ behaviour. It is quite clear that both Margie-Carol and the strange plumber have witnessed something unimaginable and very scary – that very slasher horror in real life. So their suspiciousness and in places paranoid behaviour is understandable. The former introduces herself by another name, the latter doesn’t bother to give hers at all. Adding to the tension between these characters and the protagonists is racial intolerance, which is constantly hinted at in the film.
If you analyse Tony’s behaviour after returning from the forest, you can hardly find anything really suspicious in it either. Yes, he finally decided to walk with everyone together to the road through the forest. But if this particular hike was his goal, he might well have called for it much earlier. Tony wasn’t trying to kill Kevin – only to stop him and, in effect, to produce self-defence. There is also no hidden meaning in the answer to Britney’s question. Tony clearly appeared to be upset by the girl’s distrust, so the wedding is really coming up in “no more” month.
Another argument in favour of the fact that there are no demons in front of us: these people don’t behave like possessed people. Of course, we have no idea what kind of otherworldly beings allegedly taking over the bodies of ordinary citizens we’re talking about. But since the director is starting from the classic slasher horror films (the very style of the film – in the spirit of the seventies and eighties – speaks about it), it should be about real demonic possession, soaked with aggression and mystical horror with all the special effects.
If we analyse who was the main evil in the course of the film, we can come to the conclusion that it was Kevin – the one on whom the suspicion of demonic possession and did not fall (unless you count the stranger plumber, who suspected everyone). After all, he provoked Margie-Carol’s aggression, followed by her unintentional murder. And in the end he had already intentionally killed Tony essentially because he prevented him from killing himself and somehow inarticulately answered Britney’s question. Kevin is probably the most “obsessed with blood.”
By the way, in the original, the title of the film can be translated as “Awareness of blood” or “Feeling blood”. The meaning of this phrase domestic localisers probably reproduced correctly. The heroes, really dumbfounded by the events that happened, become “obsessed with blood”.
At the beginning of the film is a quote: “There is no mediator between us who can lay his hand on us both. Let him withdraw his rod from me; let not his fear terrify me. These words are from the ninth chapter of the Book of Job, part of the Old Testament of the Bible. Much of it is a poetic discourse on the nature of evil and misfortune. The protagonist loses his wealth, family and health at God’s will. Job takes it for granted (“God gave – God took”) and does not try to explain it by possible transgressions, trials or any other reasons, and in the end he gets back everything he lost in double measure.
It is the above quotation that signifies the impossibility of imagining some kind of judgement in which God could condemn Job. The divine nature is incomprehensible and there is no mediator to interpret it. It is therefore worthwhile to accept God’s will humbly and without fear.
In the context of the film Blood Conscious this probably means the following: something unknown and incomprehensible happened earlier, now it is not worth trying to find and punish those “intermediaries” through whom evil was done. Or even so: evil can be done by mistake, without any “intermediary-demons”.
Alas, all these attempts of the director to give the film depth by means of some riddles and references rather failed. In fact, we see rather mediocre acting, implausible actions and reactions of the characters, and silly dialogues. In other words, we really have a kind of “slasher without a slasher” in front of us. It may be original, but in the end it’s rather empty.
Blood Conscious Explanation of the ending
The meaning of the ending of the film Blood Conscious makes it quite a bit clearer what happened. We see the very same Walter, Margie-Carol’s husband. So the woman didn’t make him up – another argument in favour of her not being possessed by a demon.
The plumber also interacted with Walter (recall Margie-Carol’s words that he took him). We also see people who, judging by the bloody footprints, witnessed what happened before the events of the film. And they probably had to deal with real demons. Again, no hints of details are provided by such an explanation of the ending.
But, apparently, some of the people became victims of the murderous rampage of the “possessed”, the other part managed to escape. And it is understandable that they are wary of the “guests”.
Why would a plumber shoot himself in the head? He probably thinks Walter and the others are demons now. In order not to become their prey, not to let himself be taken over by them, he commits suicide.
Related films of Blood Conscious
- «The Evil Dead 2 (USA, 1987): a classic comedy-horror film whose ending served as a jumping-off point and inspiration for the director of Blood Stirred;
- “Homicide Vacation” (Canada, 2010): a comedy thriller where the main deadly danger is the stupidity of the characters;
- “Cabin in the Woods” (USA, Canada, 2011): another reinterpretation of horror film staples;
- “Inferno” (Australia, 2020): after getting out of prison, the protagonist becomes the victim of a family of maniacs.
