However Patricia doesn’t cease there. Having realized her lesson, she walks as much as the Boogeyman and retains the shotgun educated at his head. Subsequent, we’re handled to a montage of the Boogeyman being loaded into an ambulance, being pronounced useless by a medical expert, after which loaded right into a cremation oven, all with Patricia holding the shotgun to his head. Solely when the oven opens to disclose the killer’s ashes does she lastly decrease her weapon.
It’s an unimaginable joke, an ideal instance of the realizing, character-based humor that has made Widow’s Bay such a delight. Additional, the scene challenges the standard knowledge round horror films, that too usually assume folks have to make dumb selections for scary scenes to occur.
The paradigmatic instance is, after all, Halloween, the place Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) repeatedly drops her guard and turns her again to Michael Meyers, even after he’s recovered from a seemingly-fatal harm. However Laurie has had simply as many imitators: the Camp Crystal Lake counselors in Friday the thirteenth, the Woodsboro teenagers in Scream, the residents of Elm Avenue. Again and again, even the ultimate lady survives not by their wits or ingenuity, however by luck and dedication to lastly beat the killer in the long run.
After all, Widow’s Bay is each an homage and a comedy, and thus doesn’t have the identical calls for as an easy horror film. Whereas the present can typically be scary (bear in mind the possessed folks within the final Patricia episode?), viewers come to it primarily to giggle and to determine the way in which it performs with horror tropes. Laurie and Sidney don’t have that luxurious.
Nonetheless, the joke on the finish of “Your Baggage” exhibits that horror writers have too usually relied on stupidity as an excuse to place their characters at risk, and it’s simply as tiresome as tropes about dropping cellphone service. Widow’s Bay points a problem for horror writers: let your characters be good. Or else Patricia will come for them.
