“Knowing the ending ahead of time destroyed this movie for me. I gather it’s not that way for everyone, but for me, knowing exactly what was happening the whole time makes this one kind of a slog (albeit with some great makeup effects and what I would call a very good performance from a cast of actual young people as opposed to people in their mid-20’s pretending to be kids).
I’m in the camp (get it? Because summer camp…never mind) of folks who don’t really see this as a treatise or meaningful discussion of a topic, just a twist that, especially at the time, would have been well-obscured.
We could argue forever about that, but arguing about the thoughtfulness of things that are, in my estimation, not super thoughtful, is not a good use of everyone’s time.
The best thing everyone can do for this movie is to avoid spoiling it for anyone else who hasn’t seen it. Which is, in my opinion, the most interesting way to look at a movie like this: The only way a movie could be spoiled for you in 1983 would be if someone straight-up just told you. Someone you knew who’d seen it already. And even then, chances are you’d only have a vague memory of a movie someone told you about one time, and maybe you’d describe it to someone working at a video store or something.
This sort of device, on its on, was so effective at this time because the build-up of the shock would be genuinely powerful. But today, it’s almost impossible for a movie to make its way in the last 10 minutes with a powerful shock. “