Welcome To The Blumhouse: Black Box Ending Explained

WARNING! Major spoilers for Black Box ahead

In Welcome to the Blumhouse‘s Black Box, the ending leaves the fate of a major character without a clear explanation, but it’s heavily implied that he lives on. This intense movie about the nature of memory follows amnesiac Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) as he embarks on a quest to cure his amnesia with the help of the seemingly benevolent Dr. Brooks (Phylicia Rashad). The movie starts out with Nolan struggling to put his life back together after losing his wife, Rachel (Najah Bradley), as well as his memories in a car accident. His young daughter Ava (Amanda Christine) tries to help him, and throughout the movie, she tests his memory with their secret handshake. His friend Gary (Tosin Morohunfola) also tries to help, but Nolan simply cannot regain his memories. To make matters worse, he exhibits uncharacteristic behavior, like smoking cigarettes and losing his temper.

Nolan’s struggles lead him to seek the help of Dr. Brooks, who, unlike all the other doctors he’s visited, seems to think he has an excellent chance of regaining his memories. After an initial consultation in which Brooks uses hypnosis to determine Nolan’s eligibility for her experimental treatment, Brooks employs a technology of her own design—the Black Box—to help him regain his memories. As promised, Nolan immediately begins to recall his memories thanks to the dreamlike virtual environment of the Black Box. However, the memories that do return are unsettling and unfamiliar, and the people who inhabit them are faceless. The worst part is that, while connected to the Black Box, a twisted humanoid creature chases him in a grotesque way that seems like a cross between Regan’s spider walk in The Exorcist and Samara’s crackling contortion in The Ring.

As Nolan begins to recall more and more memories using the Black Box, he finds clues that they are not his own and seemingly belong to some abusive family man. He investigates the baffling clues in real life, and when he finally sees people’s faces within his memories, he is amazed to discover that he isn’t Nolan—he’s Thomas (Donald Elise Watkins), Dr. Brooks’ son, who died in an accidental fall two years earlier. When Thomas disconnects from the Black Box, his mother explains that she downloaded the data of an EEG taken of his brain on the night he died. She then waited two years to find the right patient—Nolan, who she claims was brain dead—into whom she could upload his consciousness. She tells him that he’s not an amnesiac and that his memory loss was simply his consciousness adjusting to its new body.

What Happens In Black Box’s Ending

Once Thomas has full control of Nolan’s body, he quickly begins to display his own personality traits, which differ greatly from Nolan’s. He is a bad-tempered, selfish, and abusive husband and father, almost the exact opposite of Nolan. Under the guidance of his mother—who turns out to be anything but the benevolent doctor she seemed to be—Thomas tries to take back his old life. He abandons Nolan’s daughter to Gary and visits his ex-wife, Miranda (Charmaine Bingwa), and their child, Ashley (Nyah Marie Johnson), pretending to be an old friend of Thomas’. Miranda attempts to kick him out after he tells her who he really is. When he realizes that she has erased him from their lives, he attacks her. Miranda is able to get the upper hand when his back is turned, and she knocks him out as he approaches their daughter.

Thomas wakes up later, standing in front of Ava on the street in front of Gary’s house. He has no idea how he got there, and when he flees, he sees the twisted creature from the Black Box in the window of his car. Afraid of what the creature’s appearance while disconnected from the Black Box means, he runs back to his mother. She convinces him that once he destroys the creature while connected to the Black Box, he will no longer have such problems. Meanwhile, Gary unravels the twisted plot of Dr. Brooks, who he learns stole Nolan’s body so that she could revive her son. While connected to the Black Box, Thomas fights the creature, which turns out to be Nolan, who is still there, fighting to take his body back. Before Thomas is able to kill the Nolan creature, Ava and Gary break into Dr. Brooks’ lab and call out to Nolan.

Thomas hears Ava’s scream, and in the midst of beating Nolan, he remembers his own daughter’s screams the night he died. He realizes how truly horrible he was to his family and that the fall that killed him was no accident—Miranda pushed him down the stairs in self defense during one of his vicious attacks on her and Ashley. Thomas has a change of heart and decides to let Nolan live and to give himself the punishment he deserves by walking out of the memory into the darkness, leaving Nolan alone in his own body. When Nolan disconnects from the Black Box, he reaches out to Ava and finally does their secret handshake, proving it’s him. The movie’s final scene shows the disgraced and unemployed Dr. Brooks repairing the Black Box and loading Thomas’ EEG into it. She looks into the Black Box and says his name, overjoyed.

What Happens To Thomas In Black Box’s Ending

At the end of Black Box, it seems that Thomas realizes the error of his ways and accepts his original fate, which was to die at the hands of his victims. However, it is not clear exactly what happens to him as a result of this decision. The final scene of the movie shows his mother, Dr. Brooks, looking into the Black Box and saying his name, elated to “see” him inside the device. Previous to that, Thomas is shown stepping out of a memory, which had been uploaded to Nolan’s brain, into an unknown darkness. The darkness closes in around him until he is only visible by a small spot of light. That darkness could be the Black Box itself or it could simply be a metaphor for oblivion.

Most likely, the darkness into which Thomas disappears is not the Black Box, since at no other time in the movie was the Black Box used to host a consciousness. Instead, the Black Box was used as a tool to bring out Thomas’ memories which had already been uploaded into Nolan’s brain. Dr. Brooks clearly states this in the scene where Thomas takes full control of Nolan’s body and he asks what she has done. Therefore, by stepping out into the darkness, Thomas was not only leaving Nolan’s brain—he was committing suicide. This is also supported by the fact that when Dr. Brooks does load Thomas’ EEG file (also referred to as a “brainwave” file in the movie) at the movie’s end, she seems surprised to see him inside the Black Box.

Despite Thomas’ history of violence and his mother’s elaborate machinations, he essentially decides to atone for his evil ways instead of creating more pain and suffering in the world by taking Nolan’s body and depriving his daughter of her father. Thomas, unlike his mother, is repentant, and in his repentance, he chooses death. The “Thomas” that she loads at the movie’s end is not the same Thomas who made this ultimate decision; it’s just another copy of his consciousness. As a result, the only villain left at the end of Welcome to the Blumhouse‘s Black Box is Dr. Brooks, and it seems that she has devised a new way to revive her son—potentially an infinite number of times—by loading his consciousness not into a human host, but into the Black Box itself.

About The Author

Steven Cuffari
(107 Articles Published)

Steven Cuffari, aka “Steve,” is a fiction writer who mostly works in the horror genre, but also in other forms of speculative fiction. As a movie and TV features writer for Screen Rant, he translates his passion for fiction into commentary and analysis. Check out his podcast at voicesfromthedark.com.

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