In-Depth Analysis: The Reflecting Skin (CONTAINS SPOILERS APLENTY)

Alright, I just re-watched this movie and it’s so amazing, I felt the need to write a much more comprehensive review, more of an interpretation I suppose. Like the title states, this will be filled with spoilers, I intend to go into plenty of detail and discuss the whole plot, so if you haven’t seen it, this is going to “ruin” it for you…at least in the sense that, should you ever watch it in the future, your interpretation will likely be coloured by my own. I think a big reason why I wanted to detail and discuss the whole plot, is that I fear so few people will ever actually watch this masterpiece, it may not be THAT old (1990, it’s only as old as I am!) but with it being set in the 50’s I feel it is so much more likely to be overlooked; dismissed as a relic… I don’t know if anyone will ever even read this, but if you have no intention of actually watching this amazing movie, you may as well…

Here we go! This is gonna be long….

The Reflecting Skin is an agonizing coming of age film, Seth Dove is our “almost nine” year old protagonist. Seth is growing up in America, in the country, sometime during the 1950s. He spends his days playing with his two friends, Eben and Kim, and helping out his father at the gas station that their family owns and runs.
The opening scene shows Seth and his friends, they’re enjoying what I understand to be a fairly typical childhood pastime for the decade…They’ve found a big frog, they proceed to blow it up like a balloon and leave it on the path, eagerly exclaiming, “Quick, she’s coming! she’s coming!”, the boys hide in the fields as a woman, enveloped all in black, like the widow at a funeral, approaches the poor distended frog. And as she gets her face right up close to it, Seth gets out his sling shot and shoots a rock at the frog, bursting it in a revolting bloody mess all over the poor woman’s face. As she screams in horror, the boys all run off laughing and cheering, but Seth looks back a moment, and we see the guilt on his face before he turns to catch up with his friends.
Next we see the boys hiding in a barn, one tells the others that his mother said that exploding frogs is wrong, that it’s a sin to kill something. The others insist that it’s just a frog, then Eben points out that his mother is dead and the boys begin a childish discussion of the afterlife, Eben is sure his mother is an angel, Kim says she’s just in a box in the ground. Eben begins to cry and the other two make fun of him. These boys are just being boys, yes from our point of view, the things they do might seem shocking and awful, but, especially taking into consideration that this movie is set 65 years in the past, it’s actually pretty typical, in fact, later we’ll hear another story of what kids used to do for fun in the early 1900s, and I’d say it tops exploding frogs…

Anyway though, now we see a bit of Seth’s home-life, from what we see, his mother is quite a mess, she seems very distraught and, at this point in the movie, it is unclear why. Later, however, we will learn that Seth’s father is, in his heart, a gay man. Of course, in the 50s this was unacceptable. We learn later that Seth’s father was once caught, at least 20+ years ago, kissing a young man, and, from what I can gather, Seth’s mother was so in love with him that she quickly married him in an effort to save his reputation. But of course, being married to a man who is not only gay, but who also has been forced to feel such shame and disgust about his own sexuality and who he really is…I imagine neither person wins in a marriage like that…especially since Seth’s mother must have been so in love with him, with a man who could never truly love her the way she needed him to… Yes, Seth’s mother is the very picture of a woman pushed so far to the edge by her life. All the rumours and gossip she has had to endure her whole life about her husband, and the knowledge that there is truth to what the people say…that would destroy anyone. So now, she spends her time nagging and fretting and fussing, complaining non-stop about how the smell of gasoline is everywhere. Really though, she’s just complaining about her husband and I’d say the stench of gasoline she obsesses over is more of a metaphor, that’s not to say the whole house doesn’t stink of it, I’m sure it does, but she’s not complaining about the smell, she’s complaining about what her husband is, and what he did all those years ago, what he did to her and to their family, because, as we see later on, no one has ever forgotten and nor will they ever let it go. She also mentions their older son, Cameron, she says that he’s on the “pretty sea”, with the “pretty islands” and basically that he deserves better than to come home to a place like this.

Sick of the nagging, Seth’s father goes outside to read a trashy vampire book… Seth follows him, and gets his father a drink of water from the cistern, then he asks his father about his book. His father casually/distractedly informs Seth all about vampires according to his book. But his father fails to tell Seth that vampires are just make believe, in fact, quite the opposite, his father seems to believe that vampires really are real. He tells Seth that vampires suck blood and that they do it to keep themselves young, but that, once bitten, the victims begin to age quickly and then they die. He tells Seth that vampires are hundreds of years old, that they hate the sunlight and can turn into bats if they feel like it. Seth takes all this in and then we see his eyes go to neighbouring house, and the woman who lives there. The same woman they got with the exploding frog, and it becomes clear that Seth suspects that she may be a vampire.
Then a shiny black car filled with roughly 4 teenage boys pulls up at the gas pump, Seth’s father asks Seth to take care of them for him. Seth fills up the car and, we see in the reflection in the side mirror that the boy behind the wheel can’t take his eyes off Seth. He asks Seth his name and when Seth comes up to the window, the teenager touches his face in an intimate fashion. It’s pretty clear what the movie is trying to tell us.
In the next scene, Seth’s mother has heard about what Seth and his friends did to that poor woman (her name is “Dolphin Blue”) and she demands that Seth go over to her house and apologize to her, what follows is one of the most breathtaking acting performances (especially by an actress I have never seen in anything else before or since…). Seth goes over the woman’s house, she tells him to come in, that she “won’t bite.” She tells him that she actually didn’t mind that they hurt/killed the frog, but that she was most worried about getting blood on her new dress. She tells him that she did far worse than that as a child, she tells him that she and her friends used to tie fireworks to cat’s tails and light them… Seth notices a large harpoon on the table, when she sees him looking at it, she tells him that this house was the house that her husband grew up in, and that his family were whalers. She tells him that he can take the harpoon, so he takes it onto his lap, then he notices a photo of a young man, and here’s where her hauntingly beautiful monologue really begins.

Dolphin Blue tells Seth that that was her husband, that they were happy for one week before he hung himself… (It is never confirmed, but, given the timeline and the proximity of the homes, I do believe that the man Seth’s father was caught kissing, and Dolphin’s husband, were one in the same, and that’s why he hung himself.) Dolphin never recovered from the loss of her husband, she was so truly in love with him. She proceeds to tell Seth how it feels to lose your love. She explains, through much metaphor, how much pain she’s in, how depressed she is and how old and tired she feels. But Seth is a child and he doesn’t understand. She asks Seth how old he thinks she is, he guesses 50 and she tells him she’s much older, she tells him she is 200 years old and Seth takes this literally, thinking that this confirms his fears that she is a vampire. Of course, she’s not 200, she’s probably not even 50, but she FEELS so old, and she’s a very sad woman, she speaks very poetically. She sums things up by telling Seth that “Sometimes, terrible things happen, quite naturally”, this is one of my favourite lines and she delivers it so painfully beautifully. She goes on to tell him that she hates sunshine, and, of course he thinks he knows why, but really it’s just because sunshine reminds her that she’s miserable, that she used to love sunny days, but now, she doesn’t love anything and so sunshine just reminds her of all the things she can no longer enjoy. Also because her husband used to sing “You Are My Sunshine” to her. She tells him that she hates looking into the mirror and that she feels like “bits” of her “fall off”, and that when she gets up in the morning, half of her stays in bed… he of course takes all these things literally and becomes only more convinced that she’s a vampire.
She then gets a small box from a closet and shows him the contents, she says it’s all that’s left of her husband. She has one of his teeth, a bit of his hair, a comb, a few other personal belongings, and a small bottle of Bay Rum. She smells the rum and her voice fills with pain and emotion, she says that it’s “the smell of him” and begins to weep uncontrollably, she holds her hands out to Seth in such a gesture of hopeless agony and urges him to “smell her dead love”…Seth becomes very frightened, he thinks that the rum is her husband’s sweat and she’s really scaring him, so he runs away, taking the whaling harpoon with him…
I feel like when we see Dolphin and Seth’s mother, we are being shown another effect of not accepting people’s sexual orientation. It doesn’t just affect the men who are not allowed to love freely, but also the women that they choose to pretend with. These women can’t help who they love anymore than the men can, but it’s as if they’ve been tricked… We see what it does to a woman to love a man that is not only gay, but that the whole town finds deplorable, and we see what it does to a woman when she doesn’t know who her husband really is, when she’s allowed the bittersweet bliss of ignorance…In Dolphin’s case, she was head over heels for her husband, but he either couldn’t live with the lie or he couldn’t live with the shame that he has been made to feel about who he really was, so he kills himself and she was left with nothing, she moved to America for him and one week later he leaves her forever, I’m not sure she ever knew that he was gay, she never suggests that she does.

So Seth has gotten himself all worked up about Dolphin and so later that night, in bed, he breaks his sling shot and refashions it into a cross, which he feels will protect him if the vampire comes for him. Then his mother comes in and tells him it’s lights out and time to sleep, he weakly protests and she threatens him with “the water”, he relents, she leaves and he almost immediately strikes a match for light…only to look up and see his mother has come right back. She tells him that that’s it, “water”. The next scene is a little hard to watch, I am assuming that this was a somewhat traditional punishment in the 50s, but it wouldn’t be acceptable now. Seth is forced to drink an unspecified, but clearly inordinate, amount of water. He is choking it back, pleading with his mother to let him stop, begging to use the bathroom and saying he’s going to be sick. She ignores all of this, insisting that he keep drinking…
Then he is “saved” by a his father coming home with a man that turns out to be Eben’s father. Eben has gone missing and his father is worried that God is punishing him for “impure thoughts” by taking away his family (his wife already having passed on). Seth isn’t forced to drink anymore water, but when the man grabs Seth and asks him if he knows anything about what’s happened to Eben, he won’t let Seth go and Seth ends up wetting himself…

So, Seth is now fully convinced that Dolphin is a vampire, he tells his friend, Kim, everything that he thinks she said, that she’s 200 hundred, that she hates the sun and that she doesn’t have a reflection to look at in the mirror anymore. He tells them that she killed her husband and keeps his remnants in a box and his sweat in a bottle. They both become convinced that Dolphin is the one who killed Eben, so they decide to go over to her house while she isn’t home and search for evidence that she’s a vampire. They end up excitedly destroying her bedroom to pay her back for taking Eben, then she comes home and, not knowing she isn’t alone, begins a sad, anguished masturbation session. She doesn’t get very far (all above clothing) before she notices the two boys in her house and then they all start screaming, the level of violation that she feels (on top of how tortured and miserable she already feels her life to be) is so evident in her furious screams; she’s a wonderful actress, truly. The boys run from the house, but once again, Seth stops to look back, Dolphin has come out of the house and the two look at each other, there’s a fair distance between them but you still get the sense that she is almost pleading with him to stop his harassment of her, to just let her be… Then Seth sees the shiny black car with the teenagers in it, it just drives by but you can see that he fears it, he probably doesn’t know why, but he fears it. The next little scene is the strangest in the movie… on his way back to his house, he walks by a set of middle aged twins, dressed the same(black dresses), same hairdo(buns)…one is carrying a dead seagull and both of them look at him bizarrely and make strange chattering noises as they walk by him…The only explanation I can come up with for this scene is that we are seeing everything through Seth’s eyes, and he has just been through a series of somewhat traumatic events and things just aren’t making sense to him. I can only speculate that we are being shown how confusing and difficult it can be to be a child, almost like those bizarre random, squeaking twins with the dead bird were just supposed to sum up how confused Seth feels at that moment…

Seth gets home and talks to his father, he goes to get his father a drink of water…and is shocked to find Eben’s dead body concealed inside their water cistern… Now the police are the ones to visit Seth’s father, and this is where we actually find out that Seth’s father is gay, and as far as the townsfolk are concerned, if Seth’s father was caught kissing a 17 year old “boy” 20 years ago (he wouldn’t have been much older than 17, himself then!) then he is the most likely suspect now that an 8 year old boy has been found dead and with evidence of sexual abuse. Seth’s mother weakly attempts to stick up for her husband, but after the policeman leaves, she turns on him, attacking him physically as he pathetically cowers…she insists that she cannot go through this again, the gossip and the stares… And Seth’s father blubbers and cowers, then he seems to get a look of deliberation… He gets up and walks outside, Seth follows him and watches as his father goes to the gas pump, and, sobbing, strokes it lovingly… Then he takes out a pack of matches and places them on top of the pump… Seth continues to just watch, never saying a word, as his father takes the nozzle and put it into his mouth. He drinks as much as he can stomach and proceeds to douse himself in gasoline. Seth watches, as his father takes the matches, and he flinches each time his father strikes and the match doesn’t light…then the final time, Seth calls out once for his “pa”… we see his father realize, seconds before he goes up in flames, that his son is watching him. Then Seth covers his eyes and the movie skips a bit, when his fingers come away from his face, the whole station is up in flames and his mother runs out. She begins screaming, repeatedly, at the fire, “Coward!! Coward!!”, more people come to watch and no one comes to Seth, no one comforts him or tells him to stop watching… And Seth doesn’t even seem too badly affected by what’s happened, he watches the fire burn with fascination and even the hint of smile on his face…then he begins blowing at the whirling embers… There’s still a child left inside him for now..

Of course, we all know that Seth’s father was not to blame, and neither is Dolphin a vampire, the movie never tries to hide that the teenagers are the murderers. Quite the opposite, actually, the director wants to make sure that we understand what’s really happening, even though the characters in the movie have no clue and always come up with the wrong suspect. The reason for this is that the movie was made in the 90s, so it’s a commentary on the misconceptions of the past, mostly, but not entirely, centering around the stigma of homosexuality. We are shown the effects of forcing a person to deny/repress their sexual identity, and we are shown the effects of a person being caught refusing to do so. We are shown how Dolphin was destroyed by not knowing that her husband was gay and by his resulting choice to leave her; and we are shown how Seth’s mother is affected, having a husband that she knows is gay. All the resentment that has built up inside her over the years because a life like that isn’t fair on either of them. We are also shown some of the more sinister possible effects of forcing people to feel shame for who they are, especially when they’re young and confused, angry and guilty… I’m speaking of course of the roaming gang of “pedophilic” teenage boys… This is quite an extreme, but the movie is simply trying to show why people need to be free to be themselves and how damaging it can be, to society on a whole, to stifle people and make them feel ashamed of who they are and how they feel.

So, with Seth’s father dead, Seth’s older brother Cameron, (played by a young Viggo Mortenson!) comes home to help out the family. Cameron has been in the military, and when he arrives, Seth is there to greet him wearing a big American flag wrapped around his shoulders. Cameron is instantly irritable and seems annoyed about Seth’s flag, Seth tells him that he wore this for him and Cameron says he doesn’t want it. Seth says he thought Cameron was a hero, Cameron says that he’s not one. Then Seth tells Cameron, almost excitedly, about how their father “exploded” and how is skin turned funny… Cameron tells him not think about it and Seth tells him, casually, that he dreams about it. They get home and their mother, upon seeing that her first born (probably her favourite by the ‘seems’ of it..) has come home. They exchange what might be one of the most heartbreakingly awkward hugs I’ve ever witnessed. She holds him too long and Cameron pulls away, asking, irritably what she wants from him…Not having received the comfort she was hoping for, his mother snaps at him, seemingly embarrassed at her rejected show of vulnerability. She tells him to “mind himself” and smacks at him with a cloth, she then begins frantically cleaning, saying that their father would be home any minute. Cameron angrily points out that he is dead and buried, and this is the last that we really see of Seth’s mother. She is still there, but has little, if any, more lines; she mainly is seen in the background.

Next Cameron takes Seth to lay flowers at their father’s burial site, neither boy seems too badly upset about their father’s death, we saw how little he interacted with Seth, and here Cameron talks about how he never said one word to him when he was growing up. Then a man, with an eye patch comes up behind them, he lays an artificial hand on Seth’s shoulder and tells them that he’s investigating Eben’s death and that he wants to talk to Seth alone. He walks Seth a fair distance from Cameron and tells Seth that he lost his hand to a large snapping turtle, then he turns and shows him what’s left of one of his ears, saying that a dog nearly chewed it off, then he explains that wasp stung out his eye. He claims that in all his years on this job he has only ever had to contend with vicious animals, but that now there’s a whole new animal, one he’s never come across. The kind of animal that “does things” to children. He goes on to ask Seth if his father ever “touched” him, Seth doesn’t understand, after the man makes it clear the kind of “touching” he’s referring to, Seth tells him that his father never touched him. The man seems to believe that Seth’s father is not actually dead and he still considers him the prime suspect in Eben’s death, but he let’s Seth go. Meanwhile, Dolphin has come over to put flowers at her husband’s grave, we can see that there must once have been an angel statue there, but all that is left now are the feet and two wings laid at each side of them. When Cameron asks what happened to the angel, she tells him, simply, that it was the work of time. Cameron is clearly immediately interested in Dolphin, the two talk, and Cameron remarks that her accent seems to make everything sound better, especially his name. Dolphin extends her condolences about Cameron’s father, and goes on to say that she saw the light of the fire from her house, she says that she wondered what it was, but that it actually appeared to be quite beautiful… Seth, seeing Cameron and Dolphin talking/flirting, rushes over and tries to get Cameron to come home with him, but it’s too late, Cameron might as well already be in love with her and he pushes Seth away, shouting at him to leave.

Now Seth and Kim are talking, Kim’s parent’s think that Seth’s father is a “pervert”, when Seth inquires what that is, Kim tells him it’s someone who likes children…Seth says that it doesn’t sound like his father was a “pervert” then, Kim agrees. They go back to the barn and remark that it smells bad, they start searching through the hay for the source of the odour and find a dead baby wrapped in newspaper…it’s strange though, because the baby seems to be preserved somehow…it seems to remain in a state of perpetual rigor… The boys think that they have found an angel, and they decide that this angel was once Eben. Seth uses his child logic to inform Kim that when a person is murdered they don’t get to stay as angels in Heaven, but rather have their wings ripped out and are thrown back to Earth. Seth claims that this is “just so” and the two argue over who gets to keep the “angel”. Seth ends up pushing Kim violently and callously informing him that HE will be keeping the “angel”. Then he leaves, taking the “angel” home with him and in the next scene we see Seth talking to the “angel”, treating it as though it’s Eben. Confiding in him all his fears about Dolphin wanting to kill his brother, like he believes she killed Eben.

The next scene in the film is a particularly important one, we’ve moved into the second half of the film and, now the film becomes more about the war. Cameron gives Seth a photograph, Cameron seems to think that the photo is cool. It shows a bandaged man holding a crying baby, the photo is black and white so it’s not very clear, but Cameron tells Seth that the baby’s skin had turned silver and shiny, like a mirror. Cameron only says that it happened because the baby lived in “a place called Japan”. Seth is very interested in this photo, asking Cameron lots of questions that he can’t answer. To Seth, the photo isn’t “cool”, he can see more in that photo that his brother can, and maybe his brother is just in denial because, as we learn later, his time on the “pretty sea” was spent blowing up the “pretty islands” to test radioactive bombs. Seth goes into Cameron’s wallet and inspects the two other photos in there. One is of a naked woman (she’s fairly tastefully positioned to show minimal nudity), and the other is of Cameron and Seth. Seth studies these pictures and Cameron tells him that if he wants to keep them then he can. Seth arranges the pictures in a specific order… now what’s strange about this scene is that originally we can see that Seth arranges them with the picture of himself and Cameron first, then the picture of the man and the baby, then, last, the picture of the naked woman. To me, this is the appropriate order, assuming we are to use the photos as a way of summing up Seth’s “coming of age”. First, we see his happy childhood, before his friend died and his father killed himself and before he realized that the lady next door was a vampire… then the photo of the baby represents the next half of the film, where we will learn the effects of “playing” around with nuclear bombs. Then, finally the naked woman, perhaps symbolizing Seth’s manhood that, with all the trauma he’s suffering, is, unfortunately, approaching quicker than it should. But then we see Seth study the sequence of photos a while, then he gets up and leaves. Now, while we do not see him rearrange them, the camera shows us that they are now in a different order… I can’t imagine that this was some sort of “oversight”… Now they are ordered with the naked woman first, then Cameron and Seth, then the picture of the baby… Honestly I can’t figure this one out… the only thing I can think is that we are seeing what Seth believes to be Cameron’s priorities, the first being women and specifically, Dolphin…

The next morning, Seth wakes up to Cameron shouting to him that he’s going out for a while. Seth frantically goes to the window and asks Cameron where he’s going, of course, Cameron is going to see Dolphin. Seth follows behind him and sneaks into Dolphin’s house again. He sneaks upstairs and he can hear his brother and Dolphin talking, he stays out of sight, so he can’t see them yet, but the camera shows us their conversation. They are discussing the war and the explosions, Dolphin confesses that she likes explosions and noise. Cameron tells her that he’s seen BIG explosions, he tells her that that’s where he’s been, blowing up islands. Dolphin is amazed at the prospect of explosions that are big enough to blow up whole islands…
This scene is the most horrifically beautiful scene, Cameron proceeds to tell Dolphin about how wonderful it was, how beautiful the explosions were “bright like you’ve never seen” and how it was “like a million fourth of July’s rolled into one”… and how, after an explosion there would be this “stuff”, he describes it as “silver snow”, he said it would fall so thickly on the ship that he and the others on the ship would roll it up and have snowball fights with it. He says that the sea around the island would boil and the boiled fish would float to the top, ready to eat. Cameron recounts all this as if it were the best time of his life, to him, it’s all beautiful and wonderful. Of course, given all that we now know about a-bombs, and radiation poisoning, we know that being so close to an explosion like that, not to mention playing with the ‘fall-out’ and even eating the fish, would be practically guaranteed to result in a slow drawn out death… But Cameron misses the “pretty islands” and longs for those experiences again. At this point, Dolphin comes over to Cameron and kisses him, she begins to undress him, and the two kiss and hold each other. Seth chooses this moment to sneak a peek at what they’re doing, and, as far as he’s concerned, he is witnessing Dolphin biting his brother’s neck and draining him. Seth panics and runs away, sure that his brother is going to die.

On his way home, Seth sees Kim playing in the fields with Seth’s discarded American flag. Then Seth sees the black car coming, you can see that some part of him knows what’s about to happen. Seth and Kim aren’t particularly close to each other, but Kim sees Seth and so do the boys in the car. Regardless of Seth, the teenagers drive their car up to Kim, they stop, they all get out and grab him. A little boy, wrapped up in the American flag. They put him in their car and drive away. Throughout all this, Seth doesn’t do anything but stand and watch with a horrified look on his face, remember that he’s not even nine years old yet, and it’s becoming fairly clear that he’s not learning wrong from right very well. He’s scared and he doesn’t know what to do, so he doesn’t even tell anyone what he saw. And later, when they realize that Kim is missing, Kim’s mother will scream at Seth, knowing that he knows something and won’t tell anyone. Unfortunately it will already be too late for Kim, moments later, his body will be discovered, still wrapped in the American flag.

In the next scene though, Seth wakes up and goes to wash his face, and he finds Cameron’s comb with tufts of hair caught in it. Just then he hears someone shouting and throwing things outside the house. He wakes up Cameron and the two go outside to find Eben’s father, drunk and shouting about Seth’s father, insisting that he’s still alive and they’re hiding him in the house. Cameron attempts to calm him down but it’s no use, and the two start to fight, it’s very one sided (of course favouring Cameron) until the old man spies the whaling harpoon that Seth got from Dolphin. He grabs the harpoon and very nearly impales Cameron a a few times, Cameron makes the mistake of trying to grab at the spear on the end and cuts his hands up pretty badly. Cameron manages a lucky punch and knocks the guy out and in the next scene Seth tends to his older brother’s wounds… Until Dolphin comes over, she’s heard that Cameron has been hurt and she was very worried, Cameron is so happy to see her and the two begin kissing. Seth, still cleaning his brother’s hands, intentionally hurts him to make them stop, Cameron is not impressed at all, but then, neither is Seth, he stares defiantly back at them..even as the two begin kissing again.
The next scene finds Seth at the kitchen table, Cameron comes home and asks Seth to look in his mouth, he says that he can taste blood. Seth informs him that it’s his gums, that they’re bleeding… Cameron looks at himself in the mirror, he tells Seth that he’s also lost weight, he’s down two notches on his belt… Then Seth tells him that he’s losing his hair too, tells him what he found in the comb, Cameron is very confused, and remarks that it’s like he’s falling apart…
Seth tries to tell Cameron that he knows why this is all happening, he tries to tell him about Dolphin, that she’s a vampire and that she’s killing him. Seth tells Cameron that that’s why he’s getting old and she’s getting younger. See, Seth thinks that Dolphin is getting younger because he’s always seen her looking sad and FEELING old. Now that she’s found Cameron, she’s happy again! She smiles and doesn’t shroud herself in black anymore, so she looks younger. Of course, Cameron doesn’t believe Seth for a minute, he gets up and heads over to Dolphin’s house. Seth follows him, begging him not to go, insisting that she’ll kill him…Cameron snaps and shakes Seth by the shoulder, and he shouts at him that he loves Dolphin, and that she loves him and that he’s going away with her and that he’s going to be happy and Seth can’t stop him! And he storms away. Seth watches him go, helpless and certain that his big brother is going to be killed…

Now, of course, once again, we all know that Dolphin isn’t a vampire and that she has nothing to do with what’s happening to Cameron. Cameron has radiation poisoning, so, yes, he IS dying, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it and it’s not happening because of a vampire bite…But Seth is a child and, if you think about it, being a child, he has every reason to believe what he believes. After all, his father basically told him that vampires were real, and then Dolphin basically confirmed that she was one. Then Cameron comes home, Seth sees what he perceives to be, Dolphin biting Cameron’s neck, now Cameron is exhibiting all the symptoms that his father said a vampire’s victim would…and Dolphin even appears to be getting younger! Not to mention, he has the angel form of Eben to confirm all his findings, after all, even though he saw the teenager’s take Kim, he’s still convinced that Dolphin killed Eben…He’s a child and he’s going to take whatever he can and use it to support what he believes to be true. Seth continues talking to the “angel”, telling him that he(Seth) HAS to do something, or Dolphin will kill Cameron…

So, we’re coming to the end of the movie, Seth is walking and he comes across Dolphin standing by the road, beautifully happy and dressed in white. She tells Seth that she’s waiting for a ride into town… She goes on to tell Seth that she really does love Cameron and she’ll take good care of him. She sees that Seth isn’t happy about this, and she remarks very seriously upon the nightmare of childhood, and goes on to say that, while it does end eventually, then it only gets worse. She tells him that one day he’ll be past it, but then, inevitably, his skin will wrinkle and his hair will fall out, she divulges all the horrors of old age to a little boy…but he’s watching something else. A shiny, black car is just becoming visible…as Dolphin is speaking of angina and incontinence, Seth just watches the car get closer and closer to them. Then she says that, when you get old, just pray that you still have someone to love you, she says that if your loved, you’ll still be young. She finishes by telling him that innocence can be hell, then she notices the car parking behind her. The teenager who always seems to drive addresses Seth, asks him if he wants a ride. Seth smiles knowingly and tells him, “not yet.” Dolphin smiles and asks where the boys are headed, they ask her where she wants to go and agree to take her to town. Seth watches her get in the car without a word, knowing her fate and happy about it. …well, at least that’s the obvious interpretation here, but I think that there’s a chance Seth wasn’t certain who was the biggest threat in that car, I feel like he figured, no matter what happened, things would be better for him somehow…

Next we see Seth’s family, sitting on the front porch, Cameron looks exhausted and annoyed, his mother is silent and glum, and Seth is rocking in a chair with the harpoon across his lap. He glances over at Cameron, Cameron seems to see a lot in that glance and he asks Seth what he wants, Seth replies “nothing”, but Cameron isn’t buying it. He tells Seth to go and play with his friends, Seth points out the truth that all his friends are dead. Then Cameron notices that the Sheriff’s car is parked not too far away, he gets up to go see what’s going on, Seth tries weakly to stop him, but Cameron needs to see what’s happened. He goes toward a small group of people surrounding something on the ground…as he gets closer, he knows it’s Dolphin. He breaks down beside her body, he hugs her and kisses her and screams and cries and Seth watches in horror.

Seth, unable to watch what he’s done to his brother, runs away into the fields. He can’t take it anymore. All his friends are dead, he found Eben’s body, he saw Kim be taken, he watched his father burn himself alive, he watched his brother be bitten and drained by a vampire and then he saw him aging so fast, and now he’s lead his brother’s love to her death and he sees how it’s destroying Cameron… As if ALL of that was not enough, he, of course, knows that those teenagers are going to be coming for him next… This movie ends with one of the most well-earned screaming scenes, I have ever seen.
Seth just screams furiously at the sunset over and over and over.