Yeah, you didn’t watch it. While the company that runs the rituals is a mockery of Hollywood, and the cliches of horror genre are all satirized, the Ancient Ones represent the audiences. Specifically the genre snobs like you, who simultaneously demand contradictory expectations and confuse genre with their personal taste. At the end of the day, these are capricious gods who want the film makers to do exactly what the genre, but something new, kind of the opposite but not quite, but also mix it, but at the same time don’t mix it too much so its familiar, and when ultimately displeased and dissatisfied, they will figuratively destroy the world that the film exists in with their damning “I don’t like it when…” just because the ritual (film) didn’t fit into their ephemeral mold of expectations.

The point of the film is that at the end of the day genre is just a marketing label, just shut up and watch the film, whether you liked it or not as a insert-genre-here film doesn’t ultimately matters to the film and their makers. It matters to you. But any platitudes or futile attempts to define, judge or evaluate a film based on genre will always devolve into waste of breath arguments that all they’ll achieve is one thing: anger the Ancient Ones. Make everyone in the room mad. Because at the end of the day movie genres have no objective definitions. For every formula that defines a genre, there’s dozens of films, widely regarded as part of that genre, that break the formula.