We're not getting out of here. None of us are. That thing won't let us.
Unmarked spoilers below!
- What happens to Ezra's cat, G-Spot, after the Color infects her. Ezra nonchalantly warns Ward that if he sees her he won't recognize her. The very next scene is of Nathan nearly running over a feline Animalistic Abomination with translucent purple skin and glowing magenta eyes. And then late into the movie, Ward is shown the corpses of G-Spot and numerous other animals grotesquely mutilated by the Color, mangled by what he describes as radiation burns.
- The first sign of the Color affecting the family is when Theresa is absent-mindedly preparing dinner. She doesn't notice that the egg she just cracked has blood in it and as she's chopping up a carrot, she slices her fingers clean off without realising it.
- The fate of the Gardner family alpacas...
- They heavily resembled the merged Dog-Thing from The Thing (1982), and are every bit as horrifying.
- Not to mention the Theresa and Jack fusion, particularly towards the end of the film where they try to eat Lavinia.
- How Benny Gardner dies. He ends up crawling down the Gardner well in order to save the family dog, Sam, but instead is engulfed by the Color, all the while screaming his lungs out. Arguably the worst part is that we never find out what happened to him -- although one can imagine that like Lavinia, he was simply vaporized by direct contact with the being, Nathan's offhand remark that he "lives in the well" implies something even more horrifying may have happened to him.
- Nathan's gradual descent into madness, going from normal family man to snarling through his teeth to murderous psychopathy. Nicolas Cage's performance isn't a million miles away from Jack Torrance.
- The moment when Ward and the Sheriff discover Ezra's corpse, which has been twisted and desiccated by the Color. This moment is made even creepier by the recording that Ezra left behind, in which he surmises that the Color is trying to remake the Earth into an environment it understands. Bonus points for the recording itself sounding distorted and the pitch in Ezra's voice constantly changing thanks to the Color's influence.
- The recording alone is utterly unsettling; one would never think that Tommy Chong of all people could deliver such a disturbing speech:Ezra: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Cold and wet... But it burns... Sucking the life out of everything... It came down in the rock. It lives in the well. It grew down there. Poisoning everything. Changing everything... into something like the world it came from. Into what it knows. We all know it's coming, but we can't get away. It's got everything that lives. They all drunk the water. It got strong. Fed itself on them. It came from the stars... where things ain't like they are here. It's just a color. But it burns. It sucks, and it burns. It burns.
- The recording alone is utterly unsettling; one would never think that Tommy Chong of all people could deliver such a disturbing speech:
- The way the Sheriff bites the dust. After witnessing Ezra's corpse collapsing in on itself due to the Color, he is yanked off his feet by an evil tree and gets a branch rammed down his throat.
- The climax. Ward finds an entranced Lavinia standing in front of the well. He puts a hand on her shoulder and she turns to him as her eyes and the Wiccan rune she carved on her forehead start glowing. By touching her, Ward experiences a disturbing vision of the realm from which the Color originates: a rocky wasteland infested with writhing tentacled creatures and towering horn-like stone structures, all to Colin Stetson's eerie soundtrack. Ward can only scream in terror and fall back, while Lavinia holds her hands out in a messiah-like fashion as the Color bursts out of the well in a swirling purple funnel as it leaves Earth, all the while bending time and space around it, while Lavinia disintegrates from its corruption of her. Ward struggles to make his way into the house as the horrid pink glow warps his body in weird blurry shapes, and as he gets in the house, distorted voices of the Gardners echo through the house, and what appears to be a possessed Nathan, the source of these voices, gets up and attacks him. Ward can hardly manage to get into the wine cellar as the Color's departure fully destroys the property. The final shot shows Nathan's charred corpse, still with his wedding ring on as Ward climbs out of the cellar, finding the farmstead gone, nothing but white ash flowing in the wind and covering the ground. Ward's haunted look and recollection upon examining the newly-built reservoir tops off how hellish his ordeal was and how thoroughly traumatizing the Gardners' deaths were for him.
- Lavinia ends up betrayed by her father, nearly dies to her mother/brother hybrid, loses her other brother to obvious Schmuck Bait and her father later gets shot and dies in her arms all within a single night. No wonder she crosses the Despair Event Horizon.
- "Now feed your mother."
