Netflix’s latest horror No One Gets Out Alive features an inventively weird monster, but what is the ancient Itzpapalotl and what powers does it possess? Adapted from The Ritual author Adam Nevill’s 2014 horror novel of the same name, Netflix’s No One Gets Out Alive is a tense psychological horror. The adaptation traps immigrant heroine Ambar in a run-down boarding house where she is plagued by visions of ghosts—although these specters eventually turn out to be the least of her problems.
Both the original novel and movie initially seem to tell the story of a human trafficking ring, only to reveal bizarre supernatural villains near their respective endings. However, No One Gets Out Alive changes the book’s monster massively, with the source material’s ageless spirit Black Maggie nowhere to be found in Netflix’s movie. Instead, Ambar discovers that a gigantic moth-human hybrid lives in the stone box that has been haunting her dreams, and it is this monstrosity that is revealed to be behind the many deaths in the house.
No One Gets Out Alive makes it clear that landlords/brothers Red and Becker have been sacrificing vulnerable immigrant women to this beast for years, ever since their father discovered the grotesque being decades earlier. However, the movie does not explain much of the mythos behind the monster, which can only be gleaned from a careful re-watch. No One Gets Out Alive’s ending explains that Red and Becker sacrifice people to the beast to gain health and prosperity, as their father did before them. However, when Ambar snoops around their father’s office earlier in the story, she sees a sketch depicting Itzpapalotl, an Aztec religious myth with butterfly wings, emerging from a stone box to consume a human sacrifice.
Itzpapalotl is a real figure in Aztec mythology, and their depiction in the movie is not entirely inaccurate. Drawn as a tall skeleton with a pair of knife-pointed wings and a set of claws, Itzpapalotl is seemingly able to heal the injured according to the ending of No One Gets Out Alive. Red claims his father sacrificed people in exchange for good fortune while the hulking Becker continued this work to regain his health. These abilities are confirmed when the gory climax of No One Gets Out Alive leaves Ambar with a broken foot.
A wounded Ambar drags an injured Red to the basement and sacrifices him to Itzpapalotl as revenge, resulting in her broken bones miraculously healing. The version of Itzpapalotl seen in the film also has the power to mentally entrap victims, as the beast is seen subduing Ambar with a false memory before attempting to eat her. When Ambar recognizes the memory as fake, the monster retreats, meaning Itzpapalotl’s ability to create false memories may not work on everyone. Despite this weakness, though, the monster of No One Gets Out Alive remains an inventive and genuinely creepy antagonist.