“This Land is Their Land.”
— Tagline
Wrong Turn (also known internationally as Wrong Turn: The Foundation) is a 2021 horror film directed by Mike P. Nelson and written by Alan McElroy (who previously wrote the original film). The film is a reboot and the seventh installment of the Wrong Turn film series, though In Name Only. The film stars Charlotte Vega, Adain Bradley, Emma Dumont, Dylan McTee, Daisy Head, Bill Sage and Matthew Modine. It is an international co-production between the United States, Germany and Canada.
The reboot marks a departure from previous entries by moving the setting from West Virginia to regular Virginia and replacing the franchise's murderous, inbred cannibals with the Foundation, a secluded, self-sufficient civilization who are hostile to outsiders. This time around, a group of young hikers make an inadvertent wrong turn when they stray off-course on the Appalachian Trail, despite warnings from locals, putting them in the path of the Foundation. Their lives now in danger, the hikers attempt to escape back to their own civilization, but the Foundation doesn't intend to allow intruders to set foot on their land without consequence.
Wrong Turn (2021) provides examples of:
- Adaptational Backstory Change: Whereas the main antagonists in the original series were a group of inbred cannibals, their counterparts here, the Foundation, are just a group of isolationist settlers who are murderously hostile to outsiders.
- Ambiguously Evil:
- The Foundation claims that they didn't want to kill Adam, and were simply carrying him to a place where he could be found and rescued. Whether or not this is true is left ambiguous, seeing as they keep dozens of people blinded in the "Darkness", how they wanted to punish Jen's father for trespassing after he came looking for Jen, shooting arrows against any trespassers (One of which grazed a hunter's forehead and needed 19 stitches) and that most of their traps seem to be built specifically to maim or kill people (Specially since most of their spike traps seem to aim for the average human chest height).
- There's also the cabin with all the items that probably belonged to their victims, all the townspeople who went missing in the mountain, the mysterious silhouette standing at the top of the slope after a huge log falls down and almost kills the entire group (which implies it was a trap that was triggered), and whoever stole their phones while they were camping at night. Most of these actions border the line between scaring people off and trying to kill anyone who gets lost in the forest. It's very likely most people caught by the Foundation are forced to stay, and if they refuse they're either killed or sent to the "Darkness" judging by how many people they have trapped in those caves.
- And Now You Must Marry Me: Jen is forced to marry Venable and spends six weeks as his wife before her escape. As part of this arrangement she explicitly has to have sex with him, resulting in pregnancy. In an unusual twist, this was Jen's idea rather than Venable's - she came up with it on the spot to spare herself death or "Darkness," and Venable would never have thought of it otherwise.
- Berserk Button: Clearly Venable pushed it by coming after Jen, threatening her family and bringing all those memories back that she worked so hard to put behind her.
- Big Bad: Venable, the leader of the Foundation.
- Bittersweet Ending: A tragic, but nevertheless positive one. Although Adam, Gary, Luis and Milla sadly do not survive, Jen and her father Scott manage to escape from the cultist's settlement and are able to return to their normal lives. However, just when things may seem to take a turn for the worse once again, Jen manages to escape once again and returns back to her stepmother's house. See "Ray of Hope" Ending below for more on the finale.
- Black Dude Dies First: Averted with Darius, who survives, but we get a variation of the trope with Gary who, as one of the few gay characters of color in a traditional horror movie, is the first to die.
- Booby Trap: The Foundation are prone to using these. Milla falls into a pit they dug and is impaled on one of the spikes.
- Bury Your Gays: Gary and Luis don't survive.
- Child by Rape: Venable forces Jen to have sex with him, and after the Time Skip near the end of the film, it’s shown that she’s pregnant as a result.
- Darker and Edgier: In comparison to the sequels and maybe the original. The whole film is much more serious in atmosphere, tone and plot. It lacks the comic relief and goofiness from the Cannibals themselves. Instead they are replaced by a Cult
- Eye Scream: The sentence of "Darkness" is to be blinded with a hot poker and thrown in a cave. This is what happens to Luis.
- Fate Worse than Death: The Foundation sentences those who wrong them to "Darkness," which entails burning out their eyes and throwing them in a cave. The prisoners seen during Jen and Scott's escape have been reduced to an animal-like state by blindness and hunger, crawling aimlessly around the cave in search of food.
- Foreshadowing: After the group gets chased by the giant log, Milla angrily confronts Adam for leaving her behind while he took off on his own. He leaves her behind again after she lands in the spike pit, although there wasn't much he could do to save her.
- Gory Discretion Shot:
- Played with. Most deaths occur off-screen, but the aftermath is often shown in full detail.
- Played straighter with Milla's death - while her injuries have a detailed depiction, she doesn't appear on-screen after her death and the arrow that kills her is only seen swinging from her off-screen corpse.
- I Choose to Stay: Darius decides to stay with the Foundation.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The result of Milla falling into the Spikes of Doom.
- I Surrender, Suckers: Jen agrees to go back with Venable on the condition that they leave her family alone after realizing he could murder them before she could kill him. It's actually just a ploy to get him safely out of the house and away from her family as well as find out how many there are and kill them. Which she does as they drive away.
- Mercy Kill: Jen kills Luis when she finds him in a Troubled Fetal Position in the "Darkness".
- Mythology Gag: Jen mentions that her younger half-brothers keep picking movies about "inbred cannibals" for movie night, referencing the theme of the first six Wrong Turn movies.
- Poor Communication Kills: Possibly. If the hunter's account at "trial" is true, the Foundation wasn't trying to abduct Adam, but rather rescue him from one of their game traps without him knowing what happened. When Jen, Luis, and Darius confront them, the hunters are not hostile but apparently can't understand English - the situation only escalates out of hand when Adam kills one of the hunters. That said, the Foundation was already stalking them and may have tried to kill them already.
- Rape and Revenge: Subverted. Jen is clearly traumatized by her forced marriage to Venable and hates him for what he did to her, but she shows no interest in taking revenge on him or even trying to have him arrested, instead putting the ordeal behind her and focusing on rebuilding her life. However, nevertheless, she keeps a bowie knife in her room in case he ever comes back for her, and when he does she uses it to great effect, killing him and the men he brought with him.
- "Ray of Hope" Ending: As Jen visits her stepmother, it's revealed that Venable, Ruthie and several other men from the cult have followed Jen and Venable, noticing that Jen is now pregnant with his child due to having sex with him before, insists on Jen returning with him back to the Cult's settlement. Jen initially agrees, at first, but then, as she drives away with the Cult members in an RV, the vehicle suddenly veers off of the road and crashes into another car (presumably killing some of the Cult members inside), and as the end credits roll, Jen exits the vehicle while stabbing Venable to death alongside killing another Cultist. Jen then takes Ruthie by the hand and proceeds back to her (Jen's) family home.
- Take a Third Option: Faced with the choice of Venable murdering her family or going back, she chooses a third option. See I Surrender, Suckers.
