I think what It Feeds was trying to say is that one’s trauma will continue growing if, instead of facing it, one keeps running away from it. Chad Archibald’s horror film is centered around a widowed mother, Cynthia Winstone, and her daughter, Jordan, whose peaceful lives are turned upside down when a young girl named Riley Harris pays them a visit seeking Cynthia’s help to get rid of a supernatural entity that has latched on to her. Well, you see, Cynthia isn’t your regular therapist. She has the psychic ability to enter people’s minds and look into the dark corners of their consciousness to help them overcome their worst nightmares. But even though Cynthia sounds like a very sorted person, she has demons of her own, which, you see, is the conflict that complicates the matter. She refused to help Riley because she didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes as her husband, but it led to a falling out between the mother and daughter, and Jordan impulsively opened a whole can of worms. So, with that said, allow me to break down It Feeds’ ending while trying to answer all the questions you may have in mind after watching the film.
Spoiler Alert
How Did Riley Die?
When Riley first visited Cynthia’s house, Jordan noticed some scars on her limbs, which Riley explained were left by a hungry demon. However, before she could speak any further, her father, Randall Harris, came looking for her and took his daughter away, as he didn’t want Riley to consult a shrink or a doctor. The reason behind his skepticism was that Randall had lost his wife, Samantha Harris, to the same entity that, after his wife’s death, had now attached itself to the young girl. The starving creature, like a malevolent parasite, had been feeding upon the young girl, and Randall had found a way to save his daughter’s life. He abducted women from the neighborhood and asked Riley to let her monster feed upon them so it wouldn’t cause her any harm.
Jordan obviously didn’t know any of that, which was why, following her instincts, she went straight to Randall’s house to save Riley so she could get the proper treatment. However, as she sneaked into the house, she saw a locked wooden door inside Randall’s wardrobe, which led her to the basement where Randall kept his victims. And before Jordan could call her mother for help, Randall hit her hard on the head and rendered her unconscious.
The thing is, Riley never wanted her father to go to such extremes to save her life. She didn’t want him to keep feeding her demon so she could survive, and when she saw Jordan trapped inside the basement, she decided not to be an accomplice to her father’s gruesome crime anymore. She tried to help Jordan escape, but things went south, and Randall accidentally shot Riley dead. The young girl died in Jordan’s arms and transferred her demon to her, starting a new cycle. After his daughter’s death, Randall fled the scene, while Cynthia arrived at the house with the police, who later found remains at Randall’s house suggesting he had killed a whole lot of people after his wife’s death. In the past, Randall had taken Samantha to the hospital, but the conventional treatment failed to save her life, which made Randall believe no doctor or psychiatrist could treat his daughter’s illness, and the only way to keep her alive was to keep on feeding the monster inside her.
How Did Riley’s Mother Die?
After Cynthia found out that her daughter had been possessed by the same creature as Riley, she decided to find out more about the demon’s origin so she could figure out a way to save her daughter from his grasp. Cynthia paid a visit to the retired Doctor Whitaker, the one who had treated Samantha, and found out that Samantha had worked as a humanitarian nurse overseas, which means she might have inherited the demon from a dying patient, just like Riley picked it up from her and later transferred it to Jordan. I know many of you might be interested in finding the origins of this monster, but the way it had been getting transferred from one person to another, and likely getting stronger with each new host, I think it might be impossible to track down its source. The creature, however, could be seen as an accumulation of the traumas of various individuals throughout the years, which had manifested into a hungry, malicious demon. Whenever it comes across a person, it latches on to them and hides in the weakest part of their mind, where they hold most of their pain. In Jordan’s case, it was the death of her father, who, after a tragic incident in Elmsboro, hanged himself in the attic.
Why Did Jordan’s Father Kill Himself?
Both Jordan’s father, Daniel, and her mother, Cynthia, had mastered the art of supernatural psychotherapy, through which they tried to help patients who couldn’t be treated by normal psychiatrists. However, this particular ability came with a cost. The medium will bleed, get wounded, or die in real life if they somehow get attacked or hurt inside someone’s mind. It Feeds revealed that Daniel had been treating a patient named Emily, possessed by an extremely powerful monster. Daniel tried his best to save Emily from the demon inside her head, but something went wrong, and Emily took her life. The film didn’t explain whether it was Emily who gave up or if it was the monster who attacked her and killed her in her subconscious. Whatever the case might be, the townsfolk of Elmsboro blamed Daniel for Emily’s death. The family tried to do their best to cope with the verbal and physical attacks, but Daniel couldn’t take it anymore and hanged himself in the attic. It was suggested that it was young Jordan who first found her father hanging, the very sight that traumatized her to the core. And even though Cynthia and Jordan switched towns to escape the trauma of Daniel’s death, Jordan never really recovered from the horrifying incident and kept having nightmares of that tragic night. Cynthia could have helped Jordan to face her nightmares, but Cynthia herself couldn’t gather the courage to revisit her husband’s death. Well, in the end, the spiteful creature hid itself in the same dark corner of Jordan’s mind that Cynthia was too scared to visit. The monster was living in the attic where Daniel had killed himself, and Cynthia had no other option than to relive those memories once again if she wanted to save her daughter’s life.
How Did Cynthia and Jordan Kill the Creature?
During It Feeds’ ending, Randall, who had previously run away from town, returned and kidnapped Jordan from her house. He locked her inside a wooden coffin and buried her deep in the ground so that the evil creature inside her would starve to death and Jordan wouldn’t be able to transfer the parasite to anyone else. Yes, he knew that by doing so, the creature would get extremely aggressive and end up killing Jordan as well, but he couldn’t have cared less about it. He had lost his wife and his daughter to the monster, and he didn’t mind sacrificing one more person in order to break the cycle. Thankfully, Cynthia located her daughter before the creature could take her life. Cynthia quickly entered Jordan’s head and revisited the old house and the old attic where Daniel had killed himself. It was in the attic that she confronted the demon and let it hurt her so she could enter the creature’s mind and destroy it from the roots. Well, things didn’t pan out as Cynthia had planned, and in the end, it was Jordan herself who conquered her worst nightmare and ventured up the ladder to once again witness her father’s corpse, the sight that she had been trying to forget since childhood. In the attic, she found her mother still locked inside the creature’s head. You may remember that in the beginning of the film, Jordan had told one of Cynthia’s patients, Larry, that she too had been practicing hypnosis like her parents, to someday become a therapist like them. Well, I guess she mastered some of these supernatural abilities, because of which she was able to invade the creature’s mind and help her mother kill the demon. In a symbolic way, the mother and daughter overcame the shared trauma that they had been running away from for a long time. They finally accepted Daniel’s suicide and found the much-needed closure.
In It Feeds’ ending, which took place some six months later, Cynthia entered Jordan’s head, which was now a much brighter place than it had been before. She saw a young Jordan sitting outside the house, with no planks on the window, suggesting Jordan didn’t want to hold on to her past trauma anymore, and wanted to let it go. Cynthia took young Jordan and entered the house, where she went up the ladder and reached the attic. Jordan loosened the rope from which Daniel was hanging, suggesting she got rid of the thread between her and the traumatic incident. She was no longer “tied” to it, and as soon as she brought her dad’s corpse down, Daniel’s dead body disappeared into thin air, implying Jordan had finally broken the cycle of trauma and doesn’t dwell in the past anymore. And as you can see, there’s no monster in the attic, which means the creature is gone too and likely won’t return. But yes, given Cynthia’s line of work, it wouldn’t be the last evil creature that she will have to deal with, and considering Jordan has taken up her parents’ profession, she will be facing these demons as well.
Will Larry Recover?
It Feeds began with Cynthia entering a patient, Larry’s, mind where she came across a monster who had caged a young Larry inside his office. Later, it was revealed that when Larry was in school, he was physically and sexually assaulted by a physics teacher named Doug Ferry. At Commongrove Elementary School, Doug usually taught children between 8 and 12, which means Larry might have been somewhere in this age bracket when he was abused by his teacher. In Larry’s story, Doug was the malevolent creature… the wolf who abducted the boy and had been living inside his head since Larry was young. Likely out of fear, he never filed a complaint against his perpetrator, which was why he was struggling with these traumatic memories his whole life. When Cynthia visited the dark corner of Larry’s mind, she connected the dots and figured out that the roots of Larry’s trauma stem from his time in school. With Jordan’s help, she tracked down Doug’s whereabouts and informed her friend in the police force, Officer John Otis, requesting him to put Doug on surveillance.
The police found some evidence against Doug and brought him to the station for further interrogation, where he confessed to the murder of the Sawyer kids, who had disappeared last year. I am sure he might have committed other crimes as well, and these will unravel as the police start a full-fledged investigation against him. However, speaking of Larry, I think he’ll finally find some closure and be able to overcome his trauma when he finds out that his assaulter had been arrested and put behind bars. And judging by the nature of his crimes, I guess Doug is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, which I guess will ease some of Larry’s emotional pain.
