The only thing I can come up with is it’s heaven, him in his afterlife? So did he die? Did his dad kill him when he kicked his dad into the closet? Did the titular “Closet Monster” (i.e., his dad) kill him, not his hamster, Buffy? Was Buffy dying really him dying? Or did he OD at that party and die? Or when he vomited up all those screws into the sink at the part, screws they’d shown earlier at the hardware store where he worked and that he apparently ate, did we find out he had pica and had been swallowing metal in order to physically manifest the psychological manifestation of that rebar and that’s what killed him, some kind of hemorrhage from giving himself all those stomach pains we kept seeing throughout, which weren’t imagined but were real, by eating metal? Was there a point where he died and everything after that point was prologue to his life and prelude to that idyllic, if tumultuous, if impossible, afterlife?

Also, the rebar. The boy at the beginning wasn’t paralyzed by the rebar. He was paralyzed by those boys kicking him. It was clear that those boys used the rebar to anally rape him with, not beat him with. We saw the one boy gripping the rebar and thrusting it back and forth. Then we saw the rebar get dropped and the blood dripping from just the end. My feeling was that the movie, for whatever reason, softened this aspect, made it less obvious. But when the rebar started coming through Oscar’s stomach, with how long it was, to me it was obvious that it was coming through from his anus, like how that rebar when used to rape the boy may have gone in so far that it might’ve been similarly visible pressing out from his stomach had anyone been looking. So that seen where Oscar pulls it out of his stomach, I did have expect him to reach back and pull it out of his backside, maybe that being how Stephen Dunn originally conceived it happening but movie studios, focus groups, etc. really not on board with a teenage boy pulling a giant piece of rebar out of his butt.

I felt the same way about him attacking his dad with the rebar, that same feeling you get when you can tell a movie studio has switched from the ending you just know a movie was heading towards all to make the movie more appealing to a broader audience. I felt like the scene really went that he beat his dad with it, maybe even to death, thus killing the monster in the closet, though not really since I think maybe he himself was dead at that point, meaning he was really only killing what his father represented (i.e., homophobia, insanity (his name is “Madly” after all), immaturity, etc.), but that the studio or whatever said no, so we got switched to this Pollyanna version where they walk it back and he only beats that birdhouse or whatever it was next to his dad.

So, anyway, the end makes no sense at all, the house, the crag, the waves, sending Buffy off Frodo-style, unless he’s dead and that’s the afterlife. And if that’s the afterlife, then him getting picked up by Wilder off the bathroom floor, him being taken care of by Wilder, and Wilder being unusually clued in and guiding him through him finally facing and accepting his sexuality and then going from there to seeing his life destroyed in that room, to then having his abandoning mother most unexpectedly unabandon him by most unexpectedly showing up to save him from his dad, the Closet Monster, and then facing down that Closet Monster in battle, I think slaying him, but softened for viewers to merely imprisoning him by chasing him into the house and sealing him inside by threading the rebar through the doorhandle and twisting it like a twist-tie, something else that leads me to believe it wasn’t real since that would’ve required Superman strength. I’ve worked with rebar. Rebar flexes a bit, but it doesn’t bend and it certainly doesn’t twist. It’s used to reinforce concrete with the thousands and thousands of pounds of torsion strength required to keep skyscrapers from tumbling to the ground. There’s no way in hell a 17-year-old boy bent it and twisted it like that. But if I’m completely off base, I’d love to have you email me and tell me what you think the ending meant, what all this stuff meant (i.e., from dream to vomit screws to impossible house).

Oh, and another thing I’d like explained is the moment he picks up the wooden stake at the end, the stake to kill the imaginary vampires in the graveyard in the dream his father gave him and the stake he fell short of using to kill the real vampires in the graveyard that paralyzed that boy, which dream you say is what the movie is entirely about or framed by, he puts it back down and uses the rebar instead? Also, if the movie really is entirely framed from beginning to end by the first scene and the dream his father gave him of killing vampires in the graveyard, why wasn’t it call Graveyard Vampires instead of Closet Monster?