Alexandra Daddario’s ‘The Attic’ (2007) — Wait, is the ending actually a masterpiece or a total cop-out?

Alexandra Daddario’s ‘The Attic’ (2007) — Wait, is the ending actually a masterpiece or a total cop-out?

I went into this expecting a typical haunted house jump-scare flick with Alexandra Daddario (who plays Emma Callen), but holy crap… the real horror wasn’t a ghost at all.

Can we talk about the massive plot twist at the end? Emma develops extreme agoraphobia (fear of leaving the house) after moving in. She starts seeing her ‘dead twin sister Beth’ in the attic, finding Wiccan symbols, and getting helped by this charming county detective named John Trevor. But in the final 10 minutes… [MASSIVE SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT]

It turns out her twin sister died 12 days after birth. There is no ghost. There is no evil witchcraft. Emma killed her brother Frankie. She hallucinates the entire thing. The photos she took of ‘Beth’ were just empty rooms. And the craziest part? Detective John Trevor didn’t even exist! She completely imagined him based on a paramedic she briefly met on night one and a TV show name. She literally hallucinated a whole romance sub-plot to cope with her own breaking mind!

What did you guys think of the ending? Does the house actually possess people, or was it purely psychological?”

💬 Community Responses (1,204 Comments)

@CinematicSoul (Top Contributor)

“That twist absolutely broke my brain. When the paramedic walks in at the end and says ‘My name’s Brad Howard… who is Trevor?’ I got literal chills. It changes the entire context of the movie on a rewatch. Every time she was talking to Trevor, she was literally arguing or kissing thin air. Daddario’s performance as a dissolving mind is so underrated here.”

@WiccanWatchdog

“I loved how the film played with occult tropes. The whole time she’s finding the pentacle, the horned god, and the triple goddess symbols in the attic dust, you think the parents are trying to use witchcraft to switch her soul with her dead twin. But it was just her own subconscious lashing out at her family because of her severe paralysis and mental break. Brilliant misdirection.”

@TheAtticPhantom

“Hold on, don’t overlook the final scene! The movie ends years later with a new family moving in. A new teenage girl goes up to the attic and meets a ‘real estate agent’ who tells her ‘Let that be our little secret.’ And the therapist at the end mentions that 30 years ago, another woman died mysteriously in that exact house. Houses don’t kill people, but this one did. I think the house is an entity that actively triggers schizophrenia or psychosis in whoever lives there!”

@JumpScareJunkie

“Honestly, the middle section dragged a bit with all the therapy sessions, but the tragedy of Frankie’s death hits so hard once you realize Emma did it herself while completely detached from reality. A genuinely tragic psychological horror.”

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Watch the full piece of early 2000s psychological horror and see the clues for yourself: