this is not a movie that i would watch twice, so i'm sorry if some things are inaccurate.
Sometimes she will think of herself as a monster. She watches them come in and knows they will not leave, and the first few nights she waits in the shadows behind the trees, just next to them, breathing with the forest and the swell of the darkness. She will bite the inside of her cheek as one flicks cigarette butts over the dead leaves, she thinks, this is mine, mine, mine. But it's too early to act. She picks them up after they've gone to sleep, weaves sticks together and listens to their even breaths.
When it rains she sits on her doorstep and lights candles in the windows, she prays to everything, to the dark clouds, the damp underbrush and the moon's faint shadow. She will craft her straw dolls and rearrange her stone graves, mine mine mine mine mine.
They are loud, too loud, they disrupt her morning prayers and mumblings and she walks through the leaves with her hood pulled over her head. She is in plain sight. They do not notice.
She does not chase them. They scream and cry and run through the trees while she watches, wondering why everyone who comes here does this, why they scare themselves so much. Grown men and women. Terrified of a monster in the woods.
She takes their clothes one night, and the next night she gathers him up while he sleeps, warm and quiet and heavy in her arms.
He struggles, but she is patient. His breath is stale and his tears are hot, he screams for his friends and spits out insults like they're poisonous. But it does not bother her. She has become used to this, and knows how people are. His teeth are like smooth marble. His hair is the color of straw. She leaves him after a while, knowing how dark it is in the basement. The air is too thick to move in.
They find it by themselves. It's not like the map, which she has, or when she shook the tent. It's different because she has not caused anything.
They are hysterical with fear, they do not know that their friend is already dead. She faces them in the corner like it has always been done.
They die as quickly as everyone else. Their bodies burn and the cameras are left on the edge of the woods.
She alone thinks of herself as a monster, sometimes. Nobody else has ever known enough to wonder.