Fridge Brilliance
- Why does the Man bleed out so much quicker than John did? Because Maddie stabbed him with a corkscrew, which is wider all the way around than his thin knife blade and would've forced the wound further open, making him bleed far quicker and was driven clear through his throat as well as causing a lot of structural damage. On top of this, he'd already been stabbed in the leg and shot in the chest with a crossbow, which he hadn't been able to tend to yet meaning he was already losing blood.
- So... the Man seems to be handling the Idiot Ball quite a lot, doesn't he? He makes some really dumb mistakes, including gloating at the wrong time, and often gets the upper hand through blind luck. Actually, as noted on the main page, he's Too Dumb to Live. And that is textbook behavior for a serial killer. Those serial killers who get caught, get caught because they became overconfident, got sloppy, and started making stupid mistakes... just as this one does. And it's not just overconfidence: it's spite and wrath. He's playing around to begin with, but it's clear that he's royally ticked off when Maddie manages to actually wound him. She bruised his ego and made him mad. A main weakness of sociopaths is poor impulse control, and that only gets worse when enraged. He's relatively competent before that other than drawing out her suffering, but the angrier someone like that gets the harder it is to rope in his impulses.
- For all that the Man seems stupid, for most of the movie he’s better-armed, more experienced, and much stronger than his opponents. He really DOESN’T have any reason to think he would lose this.
- By that token, a lot of the film makes sense when you imagine it as the killer playing a videogame. Discovering Maddie with her handicap is like an especially interesting area, and like any gamer, he wants to play around with it to see what will happen. But like an especially arrogant gamer, he refuses to get dangerous even when the consequences start mounting, and by the time he really gets serious, he’s already taken too much damage. Anyone who’s been unexpectedly killed in a video game can understand.
Fridge Horror
- At the end of the movie, the Man smashes up Maddie's hand. Of all the things he does to her during the night, this one might be the worst long-term, because she is deaf. She uses sign language and her career is typing. For at least a while, he's hindered her ability to communicate.
- Because she's Deaf, Maddie was unable to notice her friend Sarah being murdered just outside her home, who was also trying in vain to warn her of the approaching killer. John is also distracted by Maddie warning him of the killer's presence without any knowledge that John had already known, and was in the middle of incapacitating the killer, inadvertently giving the intruder ample of time to kill John. By the end of the film, Maddie will likely live the rest of her life feeling responsible for the death of her friends.
