The Empty Mans Twist Ending Explained (What Are Tulpas)

The Empty Man’s Twist Ending Explained (What Are Tulpas?)

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What is going on in the bizarre ending of cult horror The Empty Man, and what does the big twist have to do with the concept of tulpas?

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The Empty Mans Twist Ending Explained (What Are Tulpas)

2020’s The Empty Man features a hard-to-decipher twist ending, so what is going on in the finale of his new cult favorite? The Empty Man was originally shot in 2017 but shelved for a few years when its distributor was worried about the movie’s potentially confusing content. Sure enough, when The Empty Man did arrive in October 2020 – where it was dumped with little to no marketing – most reviewers dismissed the psychological horror as a convoluted yet paradoxically over-familiar facsimile of The Bye Bye Man, PG-13 dud Slender Man, and numerous (supposedly) similar genre efforts.

However, in the year since its release, the film has been the subject of debate online as fans began arguing for its bizarre, hard-to-follow story. The plot is complex, but according to the movie’s defenders, this only adds to the paranoid atmosphere conjured up by The Empty Man, which has been favorably compared to works of David Lynch or John Carpenter. Critics and viewers are now divided over whether the film is an unheralded horror classic or merely a confusing pseudo-philosophical genre outing, prompting many horror fans to check it and decide for themselves.

To explain any horror movie’s twist ending requires a quick rundown of its story, which is as follows for The Empty Man. A group of friends goes hiking, whereupon one of them stumbles (quite literally) across a bizarre, misshapen skeleton in a cave. Soon after, all of the group’s members kill one another thanks to some mind-controlling trickery, leaving only one survivor, Paul. Fast forward over twenty years and a troubled former detective, James, is hot on the trail of a missing girl, Amanda. James tracks down Amanda’s friends who point him to the Pontifex Institute, while James sees a slew of references to the eponymous monster along the way and is haunted by the creepy, long-limbed being in his dreams. Eventually, the movie’s M Night Shyamalan-style twist reveals that James’ investigation has been a long con on the part of the cult. Here’s the movie’s complex finale broken down.

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The Empty Man’s Cult & Their Goals

The Empty Mans Twist Ending Explained (What Are Tulpas)

The Pontifex Institute explains their intentions early on in The Empty Man (and repeatedly throughout the movie), but their plan is strange and existentially loaded enough that most viewers may have trouble deciphering their intentions on first viewing. Essentially, the group is a cult devoted to bringing the titular urban legend to life. Until now, they have been able to use Paul as a vessel ever since the unfortunate hiker accidentally found the Empty Man’s body back in the ‘90s. However, Paul is dying after years of existing as little more than a host for the monster, meaning the Scientology-parodying cult need to make a new conduit for the Empty Man—and quickly.

Aware that any new vessel will be just as mortal (and therefore temporary) as poor Paul, The Pontifex Institute start to research tulpas as an alternative, self-renewing way of bringing the Empty Man to life. The cult members do offer all this information to James when he investigates them, but the question of how this works remains a mystery to him. That is because James has no idea what a tulpa is—and even less of a clue that he is one himself.

The Empty Man’s Tulpas Explained

The Empty Mans Twist Ending Explained (What Are Tulpas)

As if to reaffirm the movie’s cult potential and just how legitimately strange the story is, The Empty Man’s tulpas have not been seen in much popular fiction outside of the third season of Twin Peaks. The horror movie explains that tulpas are a shared idea that is believed in by so many with such immense intensity that it transcends imagination and becomes a flesh and blood reality, with the Empty Man being an example of this phenomenon. A comparable cultural institution that may help horror fans make sense of the premise is Freddy Krueger or Candyman, both of whom derived their power from people believing in them.

However, while viewers aren’t unfamiliar with the concept of a tulpa being a villain as outlined above (although, to be pedantic, those two monsters did exist before people imagined them), The Empty Man goes a step further. The twist ending reveals that its hero is also a tulpa unbeknownst to himself. The cult’s members created a tulpa in the form of James to be the new host of the Empty Man, with the 2020 movie’s bleak ending’s showing them devoting all their mental power to creating a tragic but believable backstory that ensured James would accept his role as the monster’s human form.

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The Empty’s Man Ending Explained

The eerie final scene of The Empty Man may be the movie’s most confusing, but the events all add up once explained. First, James finally finds Amanda in a hospital, only to discover she faked her disappearance as part of the Pontifex Institute’s grand plan. She notes the Empty Man has invaded James’ thoughts, describing his presence as an “itch on the brain,” and tells him to accept his fate. This fate, Amanda reveals, is for James to replace Paul as the Empty Man’s vessel. The villain reveals that James exists as a tulpa, a figment of the collective imagination of the cult.

However, viewers have seen James interact with all manner of people, and watched him sit at home alone in plenty of scenes while thinking back on his tragic life. Was all that imaginary, too? Yes and no is the simplest answer. When Amanda reveals the truth to James, he calls her mother Nora who hired him—and although she is a real person, she’s never heard of James. He is then transported to his home, and although it is a real house, it’s empty and uninhabited. At this point, it becomes clear some of James’ interactions with other characters were “real,” but others were part of the backstory invented for him.

In classic Lovecraftian horror fashion, this revelation is too much for James who voluntarily accepts the murky figure of the Empty Man into his body once he learns his true purpose. In the closing shots, James shoots the ailing Paul in the head, having replaced him as the eponymous creature’s human host—and the hospital staff around him bow, thus proving that the cult’s influence spreads further than the members seen earlier in the Pontifex Institute. That’s how The Empty Man ends, with the hero discovering he never existed outside of his connection to the titular monster and willingly becoming its human host.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/empty-man-movie-twist-ending-tulpas-explained/

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