Warning! SPOILERS for Pilgrim ahead
Into The Dark finally delivered an incredible Thanksgiving horror story that sticks to the tradition of the First Thanksgiving and boasts a relentless, brutal ending that deserves to be talked about.
Fed up with her family's communication struggles, particularly concerning her strained relationship with stepdaughter, Cody (Reign Edwards), Anna Baker (Courtney Henggeler) decides to hire Pilgrim re-enactors to stay with her family before and during the Thanksgiving holiday. According to Anna, she found the acting troupe online through various recommendations from other people who couldn't praise them enough for how much good they'd done to help bring broken families back together. Her husband, Shane (Kerr Smith), and son Tate (Antonio Raul Corbo) seem intrigued and interested when Ethan (Peter Giles) and Patience (Elyse Levesque) show up at their door, but Cody isn't thrilled, particularly when she learns Ethan will be sharing their home.
Though everything seems odd, but reasonably innocent on the surface with the family's new houseguest, who lives by his Bible and has a very plain, yet gracious manner about him, things start to unravel quickly in the Baker home, making each frame of the feature rush by in a blink. Pilgrim grows increasingly wilder by the second and never lets up once the ball gets rolling.
Pilgrim's Ending Shows The Darker Side Of Gratitude
While the Baker family is playing host to Ethan, Anna has elected to gift Patience to a neighboring family since the mother, Katherine (Beth Curry), has been struggling to make ends meet while raising her son, Finn (Taj Speights). Early in the film, Patience poisons Katherine's drink, promising that it will soothe her, and ends up pounding chunks of her body into a pulp with an old-school butter churn. Finn discovers this and ends up falling victim to Patience as well, while their neighbors are none the wiser. Soon after, Cody realizes that Ethan has managed to raise a shed in their yard within a day, seemingly by himself. He takes her brother berry-picking, warning him about the dangers of Jerusalem cherries and teaching him foraging tactics, and everyone seems charmed by him.
As they get closer to Thanksgiving, Ethan starts to gather more friends who descend upon the Baker home like a foreign invasion, all under the guise of being helpful. They volunteer to help Shane fix his garage and do chores. Patience returns to stay with the Bakers, claiming that Katherine and Finn ran away in the middle of the night. Nobody questions them except Cody. After all, they're only actors; immersion is all part of the charade. During the actual feast, the family is placed under attack. First, the children go missing, which sets off an alarm with Shane and Anna, who try to make a getaway under the guise of taking the family to the store after Patience, who is working with the other women to cook the family's holiday meal, asks them to get more rosemary. After demanding to see their children, Anna and Shane are knocked unconscious and wake up in the stocks, which have been newly erected in their yard with a blacksmith's area and a small little village set-up out of nowhere.
As they are being whipped senseless, Ethan starts to talk rather aggressively about gratitude and how they want to make people realize how much they potentially have to lose so they can appreciate it and learn to count their blessings. Cody comes to her dad and stepmom's rescue and, together, they manage to kill one of the Pilgrims, but not before they're caught. Shane meets a horrible end, and his head acts at the centerpiece of the family's table, in a scene with parallels to Texas Chainsaw Massacre's iconic dinner sequence. As the Pilgrims gorge themselves, they soon discover that Cody has pulled a fast one, poisoning their cranberry sauce with many of the Jerusalem cherries that Ethan and Tate picked before. The Pilgrims start vomiting blood everywhere, and many of them die. Patience and Ethan meet their own brutal demise and, despite being short one family member, the Bakers finally realize what it's like to be thankful for life, limb, and each other.