A Creature Was Stirring Ending Explained- What Happened To Charm, Was She Ever Sick, And Was There Really A Creature?

Holiday horror, by and large, falls into two categories. It is either ridiculously cheesy or supernaturally adjacent, thanks to loosely drawn mythology. The original Krampus falls into the latter, while Blumhouse’s recent Thanksgiving falls into the former. Both can be enjoyable, but they can just as easily be incredibly dull hackneyed. Very few are genuinely scary, and even fewer deliver something surprising. For better or worse, Damien LeVeck’s A Creature Was Stirring is a complex film. What looks and feels like a creature feature morphs into something completely unexpected, if somewhat confounding. Here’s everything you need to know about that ambiguous ending.

In Leveck’s holiday horror, Chrissy Metz of This Is Us plays a nurse and mother trying to raise her teenage daughter Charm(Annalise Basso, Snowpiercer). It is Christmas time, and it is evident that as much as Faith(Metz) cares for Charm, something is very wrong. She medicates her and closely monitors her temperature, forcing her to take freezing-cold baths and control her temper. We are led to believe Charm could Hulk out at any moment and become something “other than” human. A couple of home invaders break in during the Christmas snowstorm, and the die is cast for tragedy.

Over the next hour, brother and sister Liz, Scout Taylor-Compton of Rob Zombie’s Halloween, and Kory, Revenge’s Connor Paola, navigate the tricky waters of a desperate mother and a potential monster outbreak. The set pieces and creature work are fantastic and help keep the audience off balance. Just as Liz and Kory wonder what they have wandered into, we begin to doubt what we see and believe about Faith and Charm. It culminates in a confusing ending that becomes clearer if you know the clues to look for.

The ending of A Creature Was Stirring explained

Addiction as horror has become as commonplace as grief and trauma as horror. Just because we should expect it doesn’t mean we do, however. However straightforward, the viewer is often surprised by what is happening. A Creature Was Stirring is not one of those obvious metaphors for addiction until the very end when everything turns on a dime and the events of the film change perspective drastically.

Charm becomes increasingly agitated, and Faith’s past comes back to haunt them all when she reveals that Charm is the product of an encounter with a porcupine accident. Faith used to be a drug addict and a terrible person. She feels intense guilt for her actions and lives in a heightened state of fear that her daughter will become a monster because of her past actions. We are led to believe the entire film that Liz and Connor found and are hunted by Charm’s father, a fabulous porcupine monster, and later by Charm, who becomes just like her father. In the film’s closing moments, Faith pulls Charm from inside the beast after Kory dies and Liz escapes.

Faith hums a beloved lullaby to Charm, who has completely transitioned into a porcupine creature and lays down her Negan bat. It is all a distraction, though, and Faith stabs the creature and reaches inside to pull Charm from inside the body. Faith pulls her out, and one week passes. We next see the pair sharing breakfast, and a news report says Spring has sprung in January, and it is seventy degrees. Charm thanks her mom for saving her, and Faith goes outside, where everything shifts into focus.

Faith finds a suitcase and a Polaroid of her and a boy from 1998 in the bushes. It turns out Faith has been the monster all along. She wasn’t just a drug addict. She was a murderer who killed Kory in 1998 after injecting him against his will with an overdose of some illegal substance. That is why Faith had a vision of her and Kory kissing on the bed. This was a memory of their relationship before his death.

None of what happened in the film happened the way we saw it. Everything was from Faith’s perspective, and she was an unreliable witness. Kory died in 1998, and Liz never broke into Faith’s house. Charm had no disease and wasn’t at risk of becoming a porcupine creature. All of that was the delusion of a psychotic mind. Faith could have been broken by her rampant drug use or by guilt over killing Kory. We have no way of knowing at what point she became unstable. Charm was not saved by Faith. She was killed by her.

She had been drugging and abusing Charm probably her entire childhood in some extreme version of Munchhausen by Proxy Syndrome. In a desperate attempt to save her own life, Charm tried to escape out of the widow. It wasn’t Liz who went out the window, but Charm. We have no way of knowing if she died of exposure or if Faith killed her. The version of events from Faith’s perspective makes it seem as if Charm was stabbed to death by her mother, however. Faith didn’t report it because she didn’t realize what had really happened, and her body wasn’t found until the snow melted and her body was discovered.

Faith was troubled by her past in A Creature Was Stirring. The demon of drug addiction and her identity created a guilt monster that haunted Faith. She was so worried about letting Charm become some mythical and impossible creature that she failed to see she was a danger to her daughter. Everything she did was to outrun her father when, in reality, she needed to save Charm from Faith. There never was a porcupine monster, only the specter of drug addiction and the delusions of a broken mind.

It’s possible that a minor incident happened at the zoo, but it’s unlikely. More plausible is that Faith inserted the idea of a porcupine monster because of the needle imagery. The symbolism of the needles and her drug use would make for a tidy addiction metaphor. It is also unlikely Faith was injecting Charm with antifreeze. It is more likely she was using morphine or methadone she stole from the hospital, assuming she was a nurse.

Like the fabulously trippy and hallucinogenic Braid, we can’t trust anything we see in A Creature Was Stirring because everything was filtered through Faith’s perspective. Faith’s delusion is so strong she may not ever be able to admit what happened. The roses that shouldn’t exist in January in her front yard prove that her story is so embedded in her mind that reality is impossible for her. The film’s graphic novel look and feel should have been a clue that nothing was real. LeVeck’s movie is not necessarily scary, but there are some tense moments, and the cinematography is gorgeous. Coupled with outstanding practical effects, this is a cult classic in the making. It is in select theaters now and on VOD everywhere.