Headscratchers / The Empty Man

• I'm still a little confused about what exactly James is. I understand he's a tulpa, but what does that mean? Is he even a physical person? If so, does that mean he was just some poor schmuck the cult brainwashed with a fake backstory to make him a vessel for the Empty Man? Or is he literally just another imaginary being that everyone "sees" as a kind of shared hallucination?
  • Neither. The Pontifex Institute's whole deal was using the Empty Man's power to manifest things out of thought. Tying back to Amanda's beliefs in Solipsism (the philosophical standpoint that one's own mind is the only thing one can be sure exists, and everything else is just a figment of one's imagination). James was a product of the Institute's experiments, basically creating him whole cloth out of pure thought by using the Empty Man's power, to serve as the next host for the Empty Man when his current one dies. We learn in the film that naturally ideal hosts for him only come about rarely, so to speed up the process the Institute used their manifestation experiments to create James as the perfect host for the Empty Man, so they could continue their work.