If you haven’t seen In Shadow, I’ll post the video here in a second. It’s essentially a short film exposing all of the horrible and scary things going on in our society that we’re all either too blind or too afraid to talk about.
This is my take on the short film, and what the different parts of it meant to me. You’re welcome to interpret it for yourself, but here’s what I think it all meant!
In Shadow short film meaning and analysis
Firstly, to avoid confusion, here’s the full short film:
The first section: Employee mindset and being trapped
The first section starts by introducing the dystopian feel that everything twisted and wrong. It begins by showing how corporations keep people slaves with the little red boxes over peoples heads. This is showing how employees are always kept too busy to make any real money and are never free.
The red box means how when people are employees they’re always trapped and find themselves living paycheck to paycheck, but never having enough. This is how companies maintain control over you. It then goes on to show how big material possessions become your bigger trap, like houses and cars.
Often people buy houses and cars that they can’t really afford, and this means that when things go wrong they find themselves ‘underwater’ or unable to escape the debt they’re taken on, meaning they always have to work.
We then see the disturbing scene of people hanging upside down and the clock spinning round indicating hours and hours just passing, while the people (employees and trapped masses) are just hanging there, going NOWHERE.
Flawed education system and reliance on drugs
This is where we really start to get into In Shadow and the darker, deeper meanings come out. It shows how the education system, right from birth is flawed and designed to REDUCE creativity and make people more like robots, to make big companies money and keep us trapped.
It then goes to show that we’ve become massively reliant on healthcare and drugs to treat our illnesses, even though MOST of our modern illnesses come from eating the wrong shit.
Eating meat and dairy has been proven time and time again to CAUSE and worsen almost every medical condition we suffer from (Cancer, diabetes, depression etc) yet we’ve been BRAINWASHED into eating it, and then buying the ‘treatment pill’ from the same evil companies and people.
The mask we all put on
Now we’re getting into it. We see from here on a lot of masks on peoples faces. This is to show how we’ve become blinded and brainwashed to everything that’s going on, and we put on a mask to hide our TRUE feelings of unhappiness and discontent.
Most people, more than 80% of people alive today aren’t happy in their jobs. They feel like something is missing, and it’s like a splinter in their minds that they just can’t shake. They go out on the weekends and get drunk, but they’re not really happy, and they’re certainly not living the best life they could be living.
We often seek validation from others and when we see everyone else going out and drinking, we think it’s maybe okay and that everything’s fine. We put on a mask, especially in most modern relationships where we’re just scared to be lonely.
We see an image of crushed pigs and twisted, obese humans eating meat. This is to show that eating meat is of course, wrong. It’s not only wrong morally and ethically, (it’s destroying the planet) but it’s incredibly bad for you.
Drugs and meat are bad for you!
We now start to see how people turn to doctors and drugs to fix them, not realising that it’s THEMSELVES that are causing the issues. Today if you go to the doctors, they’ll advise you to eat a balanced diet containing meat, dairy eggs etc, EVEN THOUGH it’s been proven those foods cause Cancer, Diabetes and many other horrible things. Why? Money
We then see how politicians are looked to as leaders, whereas they’re just all controlled by the same puppetmaster. It’s all the same thing, like two sides of the same coin, designed to give us the illusion of control and choice.
The wall of masks and illusion
Towards the end we see that the ones REALLY in control are behind a dome of masks and illusions, held up by dead bodies and the military etc. This is a powerful image as it shows where the real control actually is.
Then we see what looks like the end of the world. I think here, In Shadow is saying that we’ll only really see the truth and realise we’ve made mistakes when it’s all too late, and the world is dying or dead.
We see the masks shatter, and the woman in tears beneath it, as she’s falling down into the earth indicating the worlds coming to an end. This shows how if we’re not careful, the love of money and control/power/greed will destroy everyone.
Now we get towards the end and we see how just opening your heart and eyes up can help you rise above all of the problems we’ve spoken about. You can transcend them all and become better, and help the whole world.
Right at the end we see the most haunting pair of eyes ever, which are basically saying ‘Look, look at yourself and the world around you. You know this is true. You know this is happening, deep down. fucking do something about it, wake up’.
How to fix it all?
A lot of the issues in this short film can actually be cured almost instantly by just doing the following:
- Show love to every other human being and animal
- Go Vegan and eat a plant based diet
- Be aware, open your eyes and THINK CRITICALLY about things going on around you
- Don’t trap yourself (with a job you hate, house or car you can’t afford etc)
If you’ve enjoyed this short film or my breakdown of it, please go and donate to the artists, as this was one of the best short films made for a LONG time. Leave a like and comment on their video, donate a little bit to them and open your eyes.
The world can change but first, you have to change. It’s no good thinking the world will change around you without you doing anything because if everyone has that mindset (which most of the do right now) then nothing changes.
Open your eyes.