Never Let Go Thankfully Avoided Committing One Of The Worst Movie Sins

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Never Let Go

While Never Let Go did feature a few nasty surprises, the horror movie steered clear of one twist that no viewer wanted to see. Even the darkest horror movies rarely cross certain cultural taboos. It is unusual for slasher villains to kill children, for instance, since this is too gratuitously nasty for audiences who want to guiltily cheer the masked murderer. Although Never Let Go's twist ending was bleak, the movie’s story did manage to avoid this issue by sidestepping a particularly grim twist. Director Alexandre Aja’s psychological horror skirted close to a major taboo but backed down.

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Never Let Go follows Halle Berry’s unnamed mother, a survivalist eking out a grim, deprived existence in an isolated woodland with her two sons. According to her, the world was destroyed by an ambiguous evil that she could see, but her sons cannot. Now, the family will survive only by remaining tethered to their remote home. One of the mother's sons, Nolan, begins to question this version of events, while the other, Samuel, remains adamant that their mother can be trusted. Never Let Go’s largely unseen Evil is complicated, and its presence almost crosses a major horror genre taboo.

Never Let Go Backed Out Of Killing The Dog

Never Let Go Killed Off The Mother Before Its Animal Hero

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Midway through the movie’s story, Never Let Go’s heroes begin to run out of food. Reduced to eating the bark from trees, the family is forced to contend with an unthinkable option. The mother explains that they will need to kill and eat the family dog to survive, something Nolan refuses to accept. Nolan locks his mother in their shed in the hopes that she will come to her senses, stopping her from killing the dog in the process. Never Let Go’s big twist then reveals the mother really has been hallucinating the Evil, leading her to take her own life.

Pet death is a controversial twist in horror movies.

Never Let Go doesn’t go through with killing the family dog, despite how close the movie comes to breaking this unwritten horror taboo. While plenty of horror movies have killed off man’s best friends, it is not a coincidence that one of the most popular indexes for pop culture trigger warnings is a site called Does the Dog Die. Pet death is a controversial twist in horror movies, and plenty of classic horrors have cut scenes that broke this taboo for fear of alienating audiences. The original script for Gremlins killed the family dog before screenwriter Chris Columbus thought better.

Never Let Go Killing The Dog Wouldn't Have Even Been The Worst Part

Never Let Go’s Grim Plans For The Family Pet Only Got Nastier

The real reason that Never Let Go didn’t go through with the dog’s death is what would have come afterward, as this would have made the movie a far darker affair than it already was. Aja’s psychological horror operates as a sort of dark modern fairy tale wherein the Evil, whether imagined or not, exerts a supernatural power over this family. For most of its runtime, the movie is a blend of survival horror and strange, offbeat fantasy, but the reality of the family’s plans for their dog would have made it un-watchably grim.

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The mother planned to butcher and eat the family dog after killing it, since this was the only source of food she could find for her sons. While Never Let Go’s Polaroid is creepy, nothing in the movie could be called outright disturbing or realistically horrific thanks to its odd, fantasy-tinged tone. Depicting the family killing and eating the dog would have changed that tone completely, making Never Let Go feel more akin to a relentlessly downbeat horror drama like 2024’s The Devil’s Bath or 2017’s Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse.

Killing The Dog In Never Let Go Would've Hurt The Movie

This Death Wasn’t Right For Never Let Go’s Tone

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Broadly speaking, killing dogs is a twist that few movies can pull off successfully. The few examples of this shocking moment working well are usually outrageously dark comedies, like the absurdly tasteless The Toxic Avenger, or classics where the scene in question is brief, like Halloween’s revelation that Michael Myers killed a dog after escaping an asylum. For many more horrors, what is supposed to be a shocking twist ends up feeling gratuitously unpleasant and leaves viewers dispirited and disengaged.

There are a lot of movies wherein the death of a family dog serves little purpose beyond signposting that the movie is determined to leave viewers miserable.

From The Butterfly Effect to Hollow Man, too many horror movies use the death of a dog as a cheap shock tactic to upset viewers. For every exception to the rule, like 2023’s campy M3GAN, there are a lot of movies like Funny Games (both the original and the remake) wherein the death of a family dog serves little purpose beyond signposting that the movie is determined to leave viewers miserable. The twist is both predictable and less effective as a result, meaning Never Let Go was right to cleverly sidestep this tired reveal.

Never Let Go is currently playing in theaters.

Source: Does the Dog Die