Question: Not sure this is a movie mistake. When the mom is sawing off her own head, wouldn't the sawing have stopped once she cut through her spinal cord? The muscles in her arms/hands would have gone limp and her head would not completely fall off - though it would fall forward. You don't actually see her head fall but you hear the bang on the floor and her head is missing at the end.
Answer: When she's sawing off her own head, she's also suspended about 12 feet in the air. Afterwards, you also see the headless mom's body levitating up to the treehouse. So, obviously, there were powerful demonic forces that suspended her in the air, sawed off her head, then carried her up into the treehouse.
Question: Was the daughter possessed the entire time before she died? I noticed at the end one of the cult members at the end said something about the demon being released from the female host.
Answer: As the film progresses, we learn that the mother's side of the family has a history of serious mental illness, and the maternal grandmother was a secret devil-worshipper who was trying to fulfill an evil prophecy (crowning one of The Eight Kings of Hell from her own family). The little girl, Charlie, did apparently suffer some sort of mental illness, and she was raised and heavily influenced for 13 years by her devil-worshipping grandmother. Near the end it is revealed that Charlie actually was, all her life, a temporary female host for one of The Eight Kings of Hell; but she had to die because the prophecy called for a male host to be crowned King. At the very end, Charlie's cursed soul migrates into her older brother Peter's body; whereupon, he is crowned one of The Eight Kings of Hell.
Question: After Peter is possessed by Charlie and he clicks his tongue for the first time after standing up, he starts to walk towards the tree house and heads off screen. The camera lingers though, and focuses in on something lying on the ground in the background. What is that on the ground? It almost looks like a dead dog or possibly the dead dear from earlier, but the shape isn't quite right. It does appear to be some sort of animal but I can't make it out. What is that the camera lingered on right then? And why? It's not shown again. (01:57:45)
Answer: Earlier in the film, Peter swerves the car to avoid hitting a dead animal in the road, resulting in Charlie's decapitation. That animal appears to be a goat (a ram) with slightly curled horns. Within the context of this movie, this is probably a Sabbatic Goat, alluding to Occult symbolism associated with the Mystic Pentagram and the Satanic deity Baphomet. The implication is that Satanic forces caused Peter to swerve off the road, killing Charlie in preparation for migrating her soul into Peter. The dead animal seen in the background at the end appears to be the Sabbatic Goat again, marking completion of Charlie's soul migration into Peter.
Answer: There were supernatural forces at work, so basic rules of human anatomy and physics don't really apply in the situation.
Phaneron ★