Common Sense Note

Parents need to know that this film is too violent for children. The storyline takes the form of a nightmare, so connections between scenes and events are sometimes hard to follow. The town is ostensibly located over an ongoing coalmine fire, and the general mythos has to do with a cult that accuses and burns witches in order to maintain the group's "purity." Characters burn, stab, shoot, and throw rocks at each other; the film includes a couple of vehicle crashes, frequent scenes where the mother and/or her daughter scream in terror. Men in miners' gear appear to threaten Rose, mainly because they look scary in goggles and overalls. Various monsters are misshapen and zombie-like human-types, able to shape-shift in bad-dreamy fashion. The monsters attack with swords, the cop shoots until she's out of ammo and then submits to a dire beating. Characters are burned to death, with skin melting, bubbling, and charring.

Sexual Content

References to woman's pregnancy (she won't identify the father); suggestion that a janitor abuses a girl (rendered in a brief visual innuendo, not explicit); villainess suffers barbed wire tentacles going up inside her dress, then splitting her apart.

Violence

Some of the child's drawings are gruesome (black chalk showing violence to bodies); car and motorcycle accidents; grotesque ghost-like figures who appear variously to be burned/charred, gooey, flayed, misshapen, bloody, and scarred; a cut throat spews blood; a nightmare creature gushes something like acid at the policewoman, whose helmet burns; weapons include guns, a gigantic sword that cuts through doors; penetration and whomping with poles, barbed wire seems sentient, winding around limbs and penetrating bodies.

Language

Several uses of f-word; an s-word, plus repeated uses of "hell," "damn," and "ass."

Social Behavior

Nothing you would want your kid to emulate.

Consumerism

Coke vending machine at a gas station

Drugs / Tobacco / Alcohol

A character smokes in the background of a scene.