21 Days of Spooky: This Is the End (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, 2013)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's This Is the End. Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: A bunch of famous actors are hanging out at a big-ass mansion when the end of the world strikes, and it's up for them to survive in what's now a chaotic wasteland.

Most of you readers are Pop Culture regulars who know that kind of weirdo I am, so it may not come as a surprise to you that, in the midst of tragic, psychologically scary, thought-provoking films and television episodes, I go out and make an article about a silly comedy with iconic masterpiece scenes such as Michael Cera getting blown while he drinks from a juice carton. Yet, I promise it's the only comedy here, and I swear it has a reason to exist other than me really resisting to post a gif of Danny McBride yelling that he'll jizz all over everywhere. I've watched this film a lot, and I know its themes very well.

Because, you see, this movie is about the end of the world. Not your average end of the world, but a Rapture-level end of the world. And we follow the events from the point of view of those left behind, sort of like a jizz-covered version of The Leftovers. It's not an easy topic to process, and it gets even more fucked up when you realize that the main group are all close friends and, therefore, the thought of watching your friends die, the thought of protecting both yourself and others, is the first thing that springs to mind. Who do you hold on to when the world is crumbling down and you don't know if there's a tomorrow?

Everyone who's raptured away is obviously taken for being a nice person... but why aren't you there with them, and most especially, why aren't your friends up there? We, as mildly thinking people, realize we may not be saints and we wouldn't deserve to be saved, but you always believe that your friends are good people, and that your judgement is proper enough to have chosen to surround yourself with the good ones, right? Alas, the end of the world has just shown you that you suck, your friends suck, and now you're stuck in between flames not knowing what's happened to your family, distanced acquaintances, and others.

But well, you're here with your friends and that's all that matters. Except that all it remains is danger and dangerous people, yet you don't feel identified with that, so what's exactly the cutoff in a Rapture event? Silly selfish folks get to be threatened around by severe criminals, a dude who once stole an apple having to play skip the massive ground opening, narcissists duking it out with dictators for a loaf of bread. And what happens with animals? Is there a way to thrive and survive in a world collapsed by crumbling buildings, trees set on fire, and infested with the worst of the worst people?

As the film shows us, there will be a collective post-Rapture that will dedicate itself square to evil, making everyone else's life a living hell. That is a bit of a hollow task, isn't it? Because let's say that, if everyone remaining is as evil as to not get taken away by the shiny ray of light, what's the point of committing heinous acts towards them? It would be like a snake eating its own tail. Or like "an eye for an eye", everyone eventually destroys each other until only one person remains in the damn wasteland. Wouldn't it be super fucked up for someone to have its whole family raptured, but not said person?

And sometimes it's that despair what takes us into being worse people than we imagine. Most of the characters eventually succumb to their worse selves, the reasons why they were left behind in the first place, but weren't those actions triggered by the isolation and desperation of not knowing what's out there or why they were there in the first place? A dude who wasn't taken because he once stepped on a caterpillar might end up resorting to kill a jacked-up cannibal coming after him, making the dude a worse person than he once was. There's no reason for a Rapture unless you sacrifice yourself and hope for the best.

Who knows, maybe you sacrifice yourself and that still changes nothing. And you die, surrounded by disaster and confused to why you were left behind, as you're never explained why and you're supposed to reason it with the help and guidance of very horrible, very fucked up people. Oh well, let's get back to enjoying celebrity jokes and to guffawing at the sight of a demon with a huge dong.

Tomorrow: Hang out with Philip K. Dick's short story "The Hanging Stranger".