A dark truth behind ‘the scariest film on Netflix’


I am woken at dawn by the noise. A piercing, diabolical howl possesses me. Some other-dimensional spirit-being crying for its lost life. A demonic scourge from the nether realm. In a semi-conscious dread, I open my eyes and behold the source – a far more rational terror, not so much spawned of el diablo than of a Dyson: my girlfriend is using her hairdryer not two metres from my head. She is still annoyed that I made her watch the new Spanish horror flick Verónica the night before, and now is the hour of her retribution.

Directed by Paco Plaza, Verónica has been described as ‘the scariest film ever on Netflix’ and even ‘the scariest horror film ever made’. Based on a ‘true story’ of demonic possession, it’s pretty scary. The stuff of sleepless nights, I suppose, and sleepless mornings. When the hair-drying is done, I plead with my sleep saboteur. ‘Demons aren’t real,’ I say. She shoots me a death glare. ‘The film is based on Spanish police reports, Sam [emphasis hers]. How do you explain that, Sam?’ She claps her hands with the words to send them home. ‘How (clap)… do you (clap)… explain that (clap clap)?’ Sceptic that she is, she wants answers. In a desperate attempt to restore sanity to the situation, I roll my eyes back in my head, fake a seizure, and start ranting in Latin. She’s unimpressed.

But this is no time for jokes. There is something sinister about Verónica’s assertion that the film is based on reality. It seems it was inspired by events that occurred in Madrid in 1991 – its major claim to truth is that it uses an actual police report from the incident, in which an officer reports something to the effect that ‘inexplicable phenomena’ occurred at the house where events occurred. Apparently, residents of the house were equally convinced of the supernatural. A Google search brings up a growing number of articles scrambling to reveal the ‘true story’ of the haunting. They all cite each other, or cite the film, or cite hearsay, or cite nothing. My Spanish is patchy, and everything becomes confusing.

Obviously, a Spanish family went through something difficult in 1991. That won’t be denied here. But one does have to make the obvious point: there are no such things as ghosts. Odd and unusual circumstances can be found surrounding any phenomenon if looked for closely enough. All sorts of events in the world are ‘inexplicable’. But not once, ever, has there been a scientifically documented case of ghosts, or spirits, or demons, or anything like it. Sceptical societies in countries around the world offer huge sums of money each year to anyone who can provide evidence of the paranormal, demons included. But it has never happened.

So how do these films – these terrifying horror films in the vein of our worst nightmares – get away with claiming that they’re based on real events?

As in the case of Verónica, it seems that the best horror film is the one that can be marketed as being based on truth. On the topic of demonic possession alone, the practice is rampant – Verónica is one of many films to be marketed as portraying a ‘true’ account of the subject. Others include The Exorcist, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Amityville Horror, The Haunting in Connecticut, The Rite, The Possession, The Conjuring, Deliver Us from Evil and The Conjuring 2. All are touted as based on reality. All of the ‘true stories’ behind them have been debunked, discounted, discredited and exposed as anything but true. And let us come again to the pith: there are no such things as demons.

But each one of these films actively promotes as ‘true’ the events that it portrays. True is always scarier, and scarier tends to sell.

Another film currently in cinemas is Winchester, based on the widowed heir to the Winchester rifle fortune and her mansion. In the film’s official trailer, scenes of people levitating cut to images of horrifying monsters, to a child with no eyeballs, to words in bold text that read ‘Inspired by Actual Events’, and back to someone being levitated across a room.

You might say: well maybe these things are true from the perspective of the people who experienced them. But the films aren’t promoted as being exercises in theories of truth. There is nothing subtle about their representation of fantasy as fact. And this seems to pass without issue.

Occasionally, a particularly bad apple creates a sour taste. The 2009 alien-horror film, The Fourth Kind, opens with a direct address to the audience by actress Mila Jovovich, who portrays the protagonist:

I am actress Mila Jovovich, and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler in The Fourth Kind. This film is a dramatisation of events that occurred October 1st through the 9th of 2000 in the Northern Alaskan town of Nome. To better explain the events of the story, the directors included actual archival footage throughout the film. This footage was provided from Nome psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler who has personally documented over sixty-five hours of video and audio material …

What follows is a film in which aliens abduct people from their beds, experiment on them, torture them and harass them from the windows of their flying saucers. Of course, none of these events actually occurred, none of the ‘archival footage’ was real, and Dr. Abigail Taylor has never existed. So keen had Universal Pictures been to present the film as a ‘true story’ that it created a fake website, ran fake newspaper articles and other reports of alien abductions in Nome, and basically embarked on a sophisticated campaign to possess the public mind. Universal was sued by Alaskan news media for misrepresenting them, and residents of Nome were outraged that the film had used the tragic deaths and disappearances of their friends and family members to sell a movie.

Of the millions of people who may have viewed The Fourth Kind, and who may still view it, it is impossible to estimate how many are left believing its lies. As one psychologist put it, ‘The reason I found this film so “disturbing” was because experience shows that no matter how obvious a hoax may be to those capable of critical thinking, there will always be many who will accept at face value the film’s claim to be based on true events.’

There are indications that he was dead right. A recurring theme in the film is that characters abducted by aliens see a ‘white owl’ in their dreams. Since the film, numerous articles have been written about the (suddenly legitimate) link between owls and aliens. A book has been written about owls and aliens. Described as ‘a classic by one of the most exciting new authors in the UFO field today’, The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee (2015) is based on ‘a wealth of first-hand accounts.’ ‘As strange as this might seem,’ reads a synopsis, ‘owls are showing up in conjunction with the UFO experience’. No doubt they are. Scattered reports suggest that more people than ever before might believe that extraterrestrials have visited the earth – as many as forty-five percent of Americans.

Other films have been less concerned with generating mass lies as they have been with feeding existing ones. Consider the film 2012 (released in 2009), in which, in fulfilment of an alleged Mayan prophecy, the world ends in a fiery cataclysm on 21 December 2012. To promote the film, producers established a phoney website, complete with phoney news reports and science, all promoting the idea that world would end in December of 2012. The film’s original trailer carried the words: ‘Find out the truth. Google 2012’, and anyone who did found screeds of articles, books, journals, interviews, and video rants devoted to the theory that the world would end in that year. National Geographic reported that, ‘Survival kits, documentaries, and nearly 200 books presenting the “real” 2012 story are all on offer. And you could probably surf the Web from now until Armageddon – tentatively slated for December 21, 2012 – and still see just a fraction of the Web sites and products devoted to the topic.’ Such was the hysteria that NASA warned against scaremongering, believing that fears of impending doom were elevating the risk of suicide. Not only this, but Mayan representatives in Guatemala roundly rejected any notion that their ancestors had ever prophesied the end of the world in 2012. Few listened to them. 2012 went on to be the fourth-highest grossing disaster film of all time.

Films like Verónica may seem like a bit of harmless fun. It is tempting to agree with one review of The Conjuring series: ‘There is some doubt about the truth of these case files, but really, as long as the movies are scary, who cares?’ The social impact of marketed-as-true-but-actually-completely-fake films remains mostly in the realm of speculation. But consider the present context. There has been a drastic increase in the demand for exorcisms in the US and elsewhere over the last two decades. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of US-based exorcists increased by a factor of seven. The Vatican now recognises an ‘International Association of Exorcists’, and 250 priests attended its convention last year. Private contractors are making good money performing exorcisms in France. Recently The Guardian ran an article with the headline, ‘Exorcists are back – and people are getting hurt’. It reported that 1500 child abuses cases a year in the UK are linked to cases of alleged witchcraft and demonic possession, and that half a million demonic possessions are reported to Italian priests annually. Half a million. Around the world, people involved in exorcisms are being beaten, maimed, starved and poisoned in these rituals.

There has also been a distinct popular turn (return?) to occultist practices across the West in recent decades. Like Verónica and her ouija board, people are practicing necromancy, consulting crystals, reading tarot, conversing with invisible entities and, of course, exorcising demons. The Guardian interviews a popular YouTuber who ‘has been practising the Wicca religion for about four years and has been sharing her beliefs with her 300,000-plus subscribers for just over a year. […] In one video, Nice explains how she uses tarot cards. In another she presents samples from her crystal collection. She’s also covered Wiccan altars, rune stones’, and so on. The Financial Times reports on ‘a wave of entrepreneurs who have swapped clothes for metaphysical geology’ and seized on ‘the belief that crystals have therapeutic powers – fairly mainstream in LA’. Ironically (and perhaps sickeningly given the Church’s historic treatment of pagans), an Italian exorcist recently blamed this resurgent occultism for ‘opening the door to the Devil’, thus necessitating the training of more exorcists.

There is a darker side to all this still. At a gravely serious time for our species, fantasy is making a comeback. David Harvey notes in his Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005):

Stripped of the protective cover of lively democratic institutions and threatened with all manner of social dislocations, a disposable workforce inevitably turns to other institutional forms […] Secular cults and religious sects proliferate. […] The marked turn to religion is in this regard of interest.

Deron Boyles makes a similar point in The Corporate Assault on Youth (2008):

The surging culture of religious right-wing populism, irrational new age mysticism, and endless conspiracy theorizing appear to symptomatize a cultural climate in which neoliberal market fundamentalism has come into crisis as both economic doctrine and ideology. Within this climate, private for-profit knowledge-making institutions including schools and media are institutionally incapable of providing a language and criticism that would enable rational interpretation necessary for political intervention. Irrationalism is the consequence.

The world is heading in dark directions. Unprecedented levels of wealth inequality, war, the threat of nuclear annihilation and catastrophic global warming – I won’t bore the reader. This is not to say that everyone who goes to a medium is nursing a subconscious fear of carbon emissions. But there has been a definite trend towards these individualised, mysticised systems of belief in the past thirty years, simultaneous to the ascendance of neoliberalism.

Like many challenges that confront humanity in the digital age, it is difficult to find clear solutions. Verónica is a good film. Nobody wants to be the grouch who boycotts fiction because it’s fake. But perhaps companies that go out of their way to promote paranormal films as ‘true’ should be held accountable in some way. Disclaimers reminding audiences that content is false might go too far – and yet, they may not be out of the question. In the UK, psychic mediums have for the last decade been required to advertise their services as ‘for entertainment purposes only’. Why are films about them not held similarly accountable? In the 1990s, sceptics and scientists lobbied the producers of The X-Files to introduce disclaimers before each episode of their television series after belief in earth-dwelling aliens surged among the show’s audience. Consider Richard Dawkins’ 1996 response to the controversy:

Soap operas, cop series and the like are justly criticised if, week after week, they ram home the same prejudice or bias. Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses.

Maybe Dawkins was being a fun-hating stiff, or maybe he was onto something. What is clear is that the entertainment industry has moved far beyond The X-Files in its attempts to portray the paranormal as real. What it was once asked to disclaim, it now actively proclaims, embraces, endorses, and gleefully exploits. At this point, it’s a free-for-all, and all sorts of hocus is being fed to the public as ‘true’. At such a pivotal moment, we need to develop a strong intellectual self defence in response to it all, and we might have to interrogate our own beliefs in the process.

 

Image: Still from Verónica / Boom Howdy

Sam Oldham

Sam Oldham is a postgraduate student of history at Monash University. He lives in Melbourne.

More by Sam Oldham ›

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

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  1. I have been visited since I was young also nobody would believe me especially my family they put you in this trance where you can’t even move just your eyeballs are there until finally you pass out did you try to pull up your arm can’t do it move your head shakes that’s it I believe her story

      1. Lol, yes sleep paralysis explains away some experiences but you can’t just used that as a blanket statement for every situation. I lived in a house and my daughter woke up in a panic the first night in her room. She would not even play in her room. To prove a point I decided to sleep in her room. The blanket was pulled up over my head and held there making it hard to breathe. I could move but couldn’t get the blanket off my face because it was being forced down. Not sleep paralysis.

        1. When I was lil I kept waking up at night and would be scared for no reason. One night I woke up my door was open and I could see directly into the living room where the arm chair was kiddie cornered next to the door frame leading towards kitchen. There was a big black figure sitting in the chair. I freaked and pulled the covers over my head and stayed like that til I dozed off. The next morning I was in the kitchen eating cereal staring at the chair very creeped out cuz there was nothing on the chair that could cause the shadow I saw the night before. Then my mom’s roommate walked into the kitchen and asked why my cousin (who would sometimes stay over) was sleeping in the arm chair instead of the big couch. I almost fell off the chair and was like what are u talking about he didn’t stay here last night. And then I freaked and was like omg u saw it too. And she was like what?!?! That wasn’t your cousin?!?!. And no it was not. So call me crazy but I do believe in ghosts and demons. I also believe that aliens are just ghosts or demons. I mean if u believe in God u have to believe that the devil exists and so do his demons.

  2. The fourth kind real footage seemed real. The rest of the movie falls apart without the belief of the “real” footage
    Thank you for enlightening the gullible…me.

  3. You claim that there is absolutely no proof of aliens, demons, ghosts, and do on? Although it is not scientifically proven there is evidence that these things do exist. Explain to me how children remember details of past lives ever though Reincarnation can’t be proven. Just because science can’t prove or disprove something does not mean it is not real. There are many things around you every day that you don’t see but that doesn’t make them less real.

    IF A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST AND NOBODY’S THERE TO HEAR IT DOES IT MAKE A SOUND.

    Think about it!!!!

    1. Yes. They need to prove that it is Not real. So easy to say that people are crazy. Unless you experience something yourself, do not judge too many people have experienced the same things; around the world,

  4. I seen a UFO in Rocky Point, Mexico in 1982 I was 10 years old sitting outside in my grandparents porch when a bright light just came over us like huge light bulb and when I looked up it was a silver saucer like in the movies with a bunch of bright lights under it at that time there was no airport in Rocky Point so it was not a plane. I do believe they are out there.

  5. me and 3 friends had an expierience like this a few years before this film came out. we thaught we must have seen a ghost, Im not going to go through the story now, but we all felt that absolute terror you see in the film, it was put into us somehow, there was no reason for us to feel that way. i mean absolute fucking terror, cant move, couldent even reach my hand up to lock the car door, never felt anything remotely close to that, it was unwordly. my friends in the back of the car were fucking screaming. then we all saw the same thing. every time i think about it all my hairs stand up and i feel sick. even now writing this. so for me this film gave me an answer. its the only thing ive ever seen even that comes close to what happened to us, it dosent just come close, its fucking bang on. im fucking shaking now, dont like to think about it very often – an owl just woke me up outside my window, and it was only after seeing it fly away i realised ive seen an owl like 4 times in the last week, ive never seen one in the wild my entire life until this week. it reminded me of this so ive just googled the film and here i am. 10000% real story, even spoke to that nick pope guy about it.

    1. I had to comment here because when I was maybe 8 or something and I was watching cartoons in my nans house, she was at bingo but my papa was upstairs laying down watching TV also, we lived on a main road, no woods in sight, and I looked out the living room window, and I didnt know anything about aliens or nothing of the sort at the time, and the fence outside was 3 ft tall, but this thing was huge, all I could explain was an owl but I ran upstairs to my papa crying, freaking out, and she he asked me what happend I said there was a big owl outside, now I am 32 and I been thinking about this for years bc even if it was an owl why would I have freaked out so bad? I can see it in my head still td and now I know it wasn’t an owl it was too big but It was dark I don’t have the best image, all I know is that it was VERY terrifying. So ppl who don’t think this stuff is real, think again bc it happend to me and has been ever since that night. I never seen the “owl” again but strange things been happening ever since that night

  6. I had seen The Fourth Kind once before and just watched it again with my husband b/c he hadn’t watched it with me last time. It’s pretty freaky the first time around and basically as freaky the second time. I feel like a complete fool! I check things out a lot more than I used to so here I am. I despise being taken in that way. I am a Christian who believes in God and the Bible does speak of demons. I believe surely they abound on the planet today for the simple fact there’s so much evil present with us. Next time I watch a flick like this though I’ll do so out of an abundance of caution while using my brain a trifle more.

  7. I dont believe universal meant to just sell. I think that they make movies because the news only releases what they WANT the public to know. They made a movie to show people whats really being hidden out there. Yes they changed a lot of the truth but it was to protect the people that actually went through those tragic experiences.

  8. Anyone who thinks we are the only ones in the universe don’t have the brain power for logical thinking there’s 200 billion stars in OUR galaxy and 200 billion galaxies in the universe there’s a giant probability of life everywhere our species has only been around for a 150,000 yrs give or take and we can barely take care of ourselves thez species that have been around for a million years or even a billion who’s to say what they can or can’t do

  9. I agree with so much of what is said in this article, but I disagree that a disclaimer or the entertainment industry shoukd be held responsible when the abilities for critical thinking should be developed in school. To search in different sources, to double check facts that seem doubtful and to regard logic and instinct as parts of a same whole that needs to be applied thouroughly when presented with any “truth”. I love horror movies. The most ridiculous, the better. But education should deliver the tools we need to distiguish dact from fiction (sorry about my English. I’m from Latin America and not a native speaker)

    1. Education isnt a magic crystal ball. There’s no reason why people should automatically disbelieve things that have been discredited by some as ridiculous. Since most of these comments the US govt has released a statement making it very clear that there is an abundance of ufo sightings – including those from US air force pilots confirming that the crafts seen possess tech currently unknown to humans.

  10. Would have been totally with you if I read this a few years ago. But when something that defies rational explanation happens to you then all of a sudden things aren’t as black and white anymore. Totally agree that people should be way more critical when it comes to movies, but it would be a mistake to discount everything just because you have faith it’s not true. That’s the thing, when it happens to you you all of a sudden realize that everything you thought you knew was simply faith, a religion you believed in. And when that religion goes away you’re lost at sea again, forced to reexamine everything. I was sure aliens, occultism, the supernatural, that it was all fake or delusions or simply stupidity. But now that I know I was so profoundly wrong about one thing then I can’t know for sure what’s true anymore. If it’s just a little thing like seeing a light flash into the sky that wouldn’t change anything. I’ve seen that, and I just went “meh, probably nothing”. But once something truly undeniable happens, well, then you just have to adapt.

  11. Check out Age of Deceit Fallen Angels and the New World Order on Amazon and YouTube. It’s 10 years old. Not a lot of bells and whistles but It’s right on. You should know how to protect yourselves from misleading and false info that’s rampant all over today and into the future.

    1. Well, mathematically speaking we might say that the laws of induction imply that there is no more chance of finding life on the next planet than there was on the one before it – and with millions and millions of such disappointments – we must eventually draw a line to this foolish proposition. I love Sci-fi and ghost stories, but they are a literary and not an empirical phenomenon.

      1. You are patently close minded and seem oddly unintellectual for someone as articulate and well versed as you. I guess you’re a phony who tries way too hard to affect to be enlightened/educated, you cringey dork. There is no worse combination than ignorance and arrogance, and you are exactly that. Such a pitiful shame. Science cannot explain virtually everything you weak minded mongoloid, some things are just simply inexplicable. I genuinely have sympathy for people like you and feel bad. Everyone should live life with an open mind and open eyes. Your eyes are wide shut, guy. Seeing isn’t believing, believing is seeing.

        1. My comments are directed at Anonymous – 1 may @ 10:17pm:

          Your insults revealed much about yourself in your commentary, perhaps even in respect to your own capacity for intellectual, refined discourse. When is it ever ok to move away from reasoned and respectful argument and hurl childish, unevolved insults at another?

          I do not offer you an insult, just a statement of fact: You – who hides behind the title of “anonymous” – are little more than a TROLL….

          In relation to the current topic, I think that it is way too early to be making any conclusions about the possibility of life in our universe.

          Ultimately fascinating discussing it, though.

  12. Thanks for the back-up James ( I am presuming Anonymous was directing his comments at me rather than the author of the original article), but I have been called worse. Actually it is quite illustrative of the passion with which such irrational beliefs are held and how they stem from an emotional rather than a rational basis. The late, great Carl Sagan devoted an entire chapter of his book “The Demon-haunted World” to sad tales of people who not only entertained such absurdities, but allowed them to dominate their way of being in the world that rendered them quite disfunctional. I am sorry Anonymous, but life is too short for this sort of thing.

    1. When I was 5 or so, I was sitting watching TV in my room. I had sudden fright and extreme panic. I criex out for my mom, then I cried in desperation. Because the feeling of this unexplainable sudden surge of fear, comes shock! I was shaking I was desperate. I felt like something had be right in front of me. Invisible, transparent but it gives off the most powerful feeling of ultimate fear. Not sure what it was. Never been the same, never will be. I fear the feeling I experienced. Im terrified of it. I feel the exact same levels of fear a I did when it happened. Simple and honest. I dont know what happened 31years ago. I can’t explain it I live with a I never ever make fun or mock those who experienced like me. It doesn’t matter to me about having anyone
      believe me. Unexplained isn’t(fake)! It’s Unexplained for a reason. I think about if every day because nothing can be more true than feeling and knowing experiencing terror from within without reason. Maybe I’m crazy, or not. I can’t explain it. No one can! However I’m a believer because it’s real even if it’s unexplainable. So those who talk down on those who admit and share experiences like these, are inexperienced. To those I say, not for long. You won’t need evidence either, you simply become different and that if forever.

  13. My biggest concern is for the Owls now. They are one of my favorite animals and never in my entire life had I heard about them being connected to aliens. The movie The Fourth Kind wreaked of demonic possession. I don’t really know what to think about the messages. I think if God was trying to communicate, don’t ya think He would in a language that is relevant in today’s world that people could understand? It’s not God. Ok. Simply because the messages were confusing and unclear and God is not the Author of confusion. The devil seeks to devour. Seeks to steal, kill and destroy. Just pointing out facts.

  14. I want to believe in things such as Ghosts, demons, aliens etc. But I haven’t seen anything myself that supports the existence of any. Pretty sure alien life exists somewhere out there, might not be complex, might be smarter than we are. Either way it most certainly hasn’t visited earth (in my opinion that is).

    Ghosts are a bit of a strange one, ‘evidence’ exists, sometimes from fairly credible sources and the thought of some sort of life beyond death is comforting to me. But most of its pretty explainable and the unexplained stuff is just that… Unexplained. We don’t understand everything about the human mind or about the world around us, it’s just as possible that ghosts are a strange natural phenomenon we just haven’t sussed out yet.

    For me, demons is even stranger. For me to believe in demons, I’d have to acknowledge the existence of angels, a god and a devil. As an Agnostic that’s a complicated miss match I’m still mentally tackling. It gets more complicated when I bring in the this god would have created everything, and formed the laws of the universe including weird s**t like blackholes and antimatter. If something happened tomorrow that proved an all powerful being actually did do all that, then cool beans, I’m down for that. But right now I’m still walking that tightrope. So yh, demons are complicated for me.

    Either way, to each their own. Belief is subjective and highly personal to each person so (as long as it’s not harmful to anyone) you do you and all that.

    Unrelated to the above wall of text (sorry about that) I think it’s pretty cool that we can all share our opinions and thoughts, all brought around by some pretty freaky movies.

    Keep safe everyone ?

  15. It’s difficult for me to not believe in such “unexplained” anomalies being that me and my boyfriend both experienced quite a very intense, terrorizing 12-hour straight period have something entirely otherworldly. Before that incident I had never had any encounter with evil, or darkness, or something so devouring such as this. We both changed that night, into something else, something came into our lives and was trying to destroy us. I only remember bits and pieces of that night and I drove for 45 minutes with him in the car. We had to keep stopping because he kept flipping out in the weird thing was that I knew exactly what was going to happen just moments before (this happened the whole 12-hour period, I could see what was going to happen before it happened and try to stop him) and then the exact thing I saw unfolded before my eyes, terrifying confusion. It’s like it went back and forth between us. I remember driving but only being able to see the road in front of me and nothing but blackness all around me. I remember pulling over somewhere and I don’t even remember how I got there, when I got out of the car there was nothing around us but blackness. I felt like I was drugged, everything was happening in pieces and I had no clear line of thought at all. When I finally got to his house with him we sat in the car and he wouldn’t look at me when I was talking to him and he later told me why he wouldn’t look at me, he said that my face changed and it morphed into something terribly evil.. it gave me goosebumps when he said that. It scared me. He wouldn’t tell me until the next day. When I got into the house we tried talking for a bit but nothing could come out right, but I finally started to feel whatever it was leaving and I told him that it’s almost over it’s going to be gone in a few minutes.. I got so tired I felt like I was drugged, again I couldn’t even speak anymore, then I literally collapsed and when I woke up everything was clear and normal again. I have no idea what happened that night and neither does he, but something dark happened and for whatever reason it chose us.

  16. This movie was very disturbing to me and the fact it made it look so real made mi mind go nuts. So like I understand why people would believe in the film. But besides the film, after reading all these comments, I have to say I’m impressed and I can’t judge wether they are real or not since I haven’t experienced anything close to an alien abduction.
    However, I remember that when I was 6 something strange happened to me and is not like people would 100% believe me because I know I wouldn’t believe it 100% either if someone else told it to me. But I would like to share my story because to this day I don’t know why it happened and I’m curious about what others think.
    So enough talking and let me get to the point. One night, I was watching tv and my parents were asleep. My mom had told me to go to sleep and I didn’t care therefore I stayed till like more than 1 am. Probably it was 3am by the time the incident happen. So, I heard the jingle bell song ( it may sound funny but just keep reading) it was about Christmas time and I believed in Santa Claus back then. I can’t remember exactly but I’m pretty sure it was like a day before Christmas. So like I was saying … I heard the song and I looked out through my window( I was in my room.. I slept alone) but I saw nothing and I started thinking if maybe the neighbors had put the song but seriously everyone was asleep. Then, since the song didn’t go away I was curious I thought Santa had come LOL. So I decided to go down the stairs to the first floor were the sound became more closer. Luckily, I stopped half way and I didn’t reach the bottom of the stairs. The reason i didn’t continue was because I was scared since it was very dark. To this day, I don’t know what was going on in my house that night. I also remember that before going downstairs I knocked my mom’s door several times but she didn’t woke up so that’s when I chose to go downstairs.

    I felt like whatever that was that.. it was trying to get me… the noise was loud and clear in my house.. I’m very sure that it was from downstairs and nobody was awake that night.. just me. The fact that it was around Christmas time is the craziest so yea I wanted to share this cuz I wanted your thoughts on this. I have researched about this and never came close to something that related to my experience.

    Anyways.. people shouldn’t be believing others 100% .. bc I know I wouldn’t. So, what are your thoughts?

    1. Doesn’t matter how much evidence is presented, like someone higher up in this comment section said, if it’s not in your realm of belief then you’re just not going to believe it. Sucks a ton! Aliens are such an easy thing to talk about, but it’s the people who make it hard to do so seriously. Plenty of real people who were dismissed by institutions they either worked at or graduated from that later had to change their story once documentation came up. It goes to show we’re still very frightened of discovering anything bigger than ourselves, because when presented the opportunity, we drag our feet. For years humans believed they were the center of the universe, then when confronted with reality, people were forced to adapt. Same thing here, except the only issue is that humans have a hard time adapting when they’re no longer special in their minds. The logic we use is also hypocritical as hell. How is it we can abduct animals and sea creatures for our experiments and no one else can do the same to us? How is it we’re the only intelligent beings allowed to exist, while discrediting all accounts of there being others? It’s clear we like the spotlight, and when pointed at someone else, it becomes a dick measuring contest. Big oof.

  17. I was 14 years old I live in Scotland on May 19th I was playing football hitting my ball at a fence that is fenced along the woods by my house for years my mother used to go mad at me for going through so many footballs she thought I lost them over the fence I told my mother that the fence was taking my footballs but she just said I was making excuses but every second month or so I would lose a football to the fence I don’t no mabe I was thinking this is what happens but when I was practice shooting the ball the ball would just disappear in to the fence I was 14 and thought I hit the ball so hard it went straight through the fence as the years went on I forgot about it but coincidentally I bought my mothers house and now have a 9 year old son now and the same thing now happens to him ?

    But no one believes my story or my son but I no the truth it’s crazy this shit happens and still no one believes anyway that’s my 2 cents on the subject

    1. What part of Scotland? I know inondon there is a place where people have sworn that they’ve suddenly been transported back to the 1970’s when they were just walking down the road or stopping to look at their phone and then something happens; they look around and they’re seeing an environment that has suddenly changed and looked like the 1970’s. It’s very fascinating, but my point is that maybe somehow you have a similar thing happening there like a vortex or something. I’d start putting out a camera and recording while kicking the ball in that direction and also when no one is there. Just to see what you get. Somewhere in time there’s a person saying, ” why do I have all these balls coming from nowhere?” Maybe it’s a Lake House situation. It’s very intriguing, maybe make reddit thread or youtube channel out of it. You may not be alone with this “lost ball” thing.

  18. So what’s the deal with the daughter? If it’s not real you think someone would randomly put some little girls pictures at the end of the movie to make it seem authentic? Idk ?

  19. How innocent you are Sam to proclaim there are no such things as demons. I help people overcome demons of mental health every day. They are real, malevolent and destructive. There are pathogens (demons) in the spiritual realm just as there are pathogens in the physical realm. Real life is not as neat and tidy as you may think! Rosa

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