B-Movie

I saw an awesome B-movie last night.  An old man invites his two sons up to a remote cabin in the mountains for a relaxing weekend, and each brings his wife.

After dinner, the father sits everyone down and spins a yarn about their so-called ancient familial curse, and how they must fulfill a ritual pact that their ancestors made to protect their tiny village centuries ago.  The village no longer exists, but the curse laid on the family remains.  A shadowy, half-seen beast that flits in and out of the corners of their vision, and it slowly makes itself known with increasing twisting and vanishing shadows in the corners of the cabin.

As the movie progresses, we learn that the story is true, and that the beast is real.  Black, angular shadows bolt through the cabin, upsetting the table as the father talks louder and more aggressively.  The women freak out, and beg him to stop.  He refuses, and tells them the real reason they’re there: the beast feeds on blood, powerful emotion, and life.  And it’s time for the last sons of the village to sacrifice their beloveds in order to slate the beast’s thirst and send it back to wherever it came from.  The same way the old man and his brother sacrificed their own wives twenty-five years ago.

Both sons go slack, blank, and stare numbly.  Their wives scream for them as they fight an extended battle for their lives with the old man and the beast, and lose.  The women are pulled, bloody and screaming into a hole torn in the world by the beast.

The next morning, the sun rises on the idyllic scene of the old man cooking breakfast for his two bachelor sons.  They have no memory of the last night’s events or their wives.  One glances down at the fork in his hand as he eats, and notices a tan line around his left ring finger.  He frowns at it vaguely for a second, then crams another forkful of eggs in his mouth, unconcerned.  The old man thanks them for coming up to see him, and they leave.

After he stands out on the porch waving as they drive away, he goes back into the house and reaches deep into the back of a dusty cabinet.  He pulls out two tin cans, each one labeled with a son’s name.  He carefully lifts up the jagged metal lids, pulls two wedding bands out of his pocket, and tosses one ring into each can.  As the camera fades to black, it pushes in until we see that both cans are half full of battered, scarred wedding rings.

Sounds like a great B-movie, right?  It’s classic.  The cabin in the woods, the ancient evil, the half-seen monster, the hint that something darker is happening and will happen again.  There’s just one problem: this movie played in my head last night.  It was a dream.

What in the fuck is wrong with my subconscious?