- 12 minutes ago
From werewolves that aren't real to monsters that are all in your head, we're counting down the horror movies that masterfully subvert audience expectations. These films used clever marketing and surprising plot twists to deliver something completely different from what was promised.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00As the old saying goes, we fear most what we don't know, but some movies take that to heart.
00:05Consequently, the following films all gained a reputation, whether through bad marketing or simply audience expectations being completely wrong,
00:12as being about one thing when they're really about something completely different.
00:17I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are horror movies that aren't about what you think.
00:21The Wolf of Snow Hollow
00:22If you were a police officer and everyone was trying to tell you that the local murders in your town
00:27were actually being carried out by a werewolf,
00:30well, you'd probably think you were the only sane person left.
00:33Luckily for you, though, you're probably not this police officer,
00:35and when you're watching a horror movie literally called The Wolf of Snow Hollow,
00:40and gory murders are being attributed to a lycanthrope,
00:42you're probably not going to hesitate in assuming that the case has been cracked,
00:47no matter how daft it may sound,
00:49especially when a big, bad, wolfy figure is seen lurking in the shadows.
00:53Consequently, you spend most of the runtime of The Wolf of Snow Hollow
00:56assuming you're watching a pretty effective modern werewolf flick,
00:59but the final act reveals that this isn't the case at all.
01:02It turns out that the murders aren't supernatural,
01:05but they're still technically kinda caused by a werewolf.
01:08Confused? Well, bear with me.
01:10It turns out that the very human serial killer committing the crimes
01:14does so while dressing up in a gigantic werewolf costume,
01:18ripping his victims' bodies apart while indulging in his cosplaying hobby every full noon.
01:23So it wasn't really a werewolf movie at all,
01:26just an extremely twisted crime drama.
01:28Film and TV is cool, but you know what else is cool?
01:31Protecting your privacy online.
01:33Scan the QR code or click the link in the description
01:35and get up to 76% off a two-year NordVPN plan,
01:39plus three months free if you sign up today.
01:42I'd make that deal. Damn good deal.
01:45It Comes at Night
01:46It Comes at Night was a victim of misjudged expectations when it first released.
01:50It was marketed as something of a creature feature,
01:53and as such, fans took the title quite literally.
01:56It was presumed that this movie would be about something haunting a cast of heroes in the night,
02:01as a result of a virus that had otherwise eliminated humanity.
02:05When it came out though,
02:06and fans finally got to the bottom of this mystery established in the marketing,
02:09the film revealed that the something wasn't actually a monster or a creature at all.
02:14It was actually just the paranoia of the human characters.
02:17Ultimately, It Comes at Night is as much of a family drama as it is a horror movie.
02:21It follows a small family who survived the virus by keeping isolated,
02:25coming into contact with another family in need,
02:28and the stresses of the two living together,
02:30each thinking that the other is a threat.
02:32What comes at night then is the worry for each character.
02:35The worry that putting their trust in other people will result in the death of the people
02:39that they're supposed to protect.
02:41Ultimately, it's a great film,
02:42but not quite the straight creature feature some fans wanted.
02:45Come to Daddy.
02:46Come to Daddy is one of the most delightfully surprising horror movies in recent years.
02:50Lord of the Ring star Elijah Wood has always been drawn to weird,
02:54eccentric genre picks since hanging up his hairy feet as Frodo Baggins,
02:58but this 2020 effort is easily his strangest project yet.
03:01Ostensibly, it's about a young man, played by Wood,
03:04who attempts to reconnect with his father after not seeing him for decades.
03:08The thing is, even this whole setup is steeped in mystery,
03:11as it's unclear why Wood's character was contacted out of the blue,
03:15and why his father, who constantly berates him when he arrives,
03:18is so hostile towards his son.
03:20You expect, then, the movie to explore this dynamic,
03:23and have some kind of sinister reveal explaining why the two needed to reconnect,
03:26or why the father was missing in the first place.
03:29However, the father actually dies from a heart attack before the end of the first act.
03:33It then becomes a film about the son having to live with the body of his dead dad,
03:38as the morgue is too busy to pick it up,
03:40all the while strange noises keep him up at night.
03:42Is the father haunting the house, or is something else supernatural afoot?
03:46Well, no.
03:47It turns out that his real father is actually alive,
03:50and being held hostage in the basement,
03:52and consequently is in a bit of a predicament.
03:54Come to Daddy, then, has twists within twists,
03:57and the movie that you think you're in for at the beginning
03:59resembles nothing of the one you're stuck with at the end,
04:02The Stranger's Prayer Night.
04:04Fans waited a decade for a sequel to The Strangers,
04:07and when it finally arrived, it was far from what they expected,
04:10but not in a bad way.
04:11Initially, the second movie seems like the natural continuation of the first,
04:15with the titular family of strangers hunting down a series of victims in a trailer park.
04:20Though not a home invasion in the regular sense,
04:22all the beats are still hit here.
04:24Phones are destroyed, people are stalked,
04:26and characters are killed in brutal ways.
04:29After this, though, the sequel shifts focus entirely,
04:32and becomes less a movie about the villains killing a band of hapless victims,
04:36but rather the victims fighting back,
04:38and taking out each member of the murderous family.
04:40It inverts the slasher trope completely,
04:43as the remaining heroes kill off their tormentors one by one.
04:46I mean, that's one way to get fans from spending years begging for another sequel, I suppose.
04:51Piercing.
04:51For the first act of piercing,
04:53you think you can pretty much sketch out where the story is going.
04:56In the very first scene, the movie introduces you to Reed,
04:59a family man with a wife and newborn child.
05:02The thing is, the guy is a total psycho,
05:04and in this first scene,
05:05he's shown standing over his kid's crib with an ice pick.
05:09From here, the audience is quickly informed that he's a wannabe serial killer,
05:12and is using the cover of a business trip to rent a hotel room and indulge in his bloodlust
05:17by inviting over a sex worker.
05:19If you've seen American Psycho, it seems pretty cut and dry where this one's going.
05:23However, if you've ever read a book by Ryu Murakami,
05:26the author who provided the source material for this movie,
05:29then you know to never expect a straightforward story.
05:32Consequently, things take a turn when Jackie, the sex worker,
05:35turns up and understands exactly what this dude plans to do.
05:38It turns out that she's a little twisted as well,
05:41and the power dynamic is then inverted,
05:43resulting in one of the strangest psychosexual horrors in recent memory.
05:47Reed turns from the predator into the prey,
05:49and things only get stranger from there on out.
05:52Henry portrait of a serial killer, this is not.
05:55Antebellum.
05:56Now, a lot of you might already understand exactly what Antebellum is about,
06:00but that's because the trailers for it, for whatever reason,
06:03decided to just outright spoil the big twist that the entire movie is built around.
06:08Which is a huge shame,
06:10because the film itself does so much work to hide the big mid-movie reveal,
06:15and only really has any suspense at all if you don't know what's coming.
06:18But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me first explain.
06:21Antebellum opens on Eden,
06:23a Civil War Eva slave who recently attempted to escape a plantation in Louisiana,
06:27resulting in a bunch of her fellow slaves being murdered.
06:30The first act essentially follows her daily life,
06:32as she's forced to work,
06:34is routinely assaulted by Confederate soldiers,
06:36and slowly hatches a plot to escape.
06:39Well, that is, until one night,
06:40when she suddenly hears a modern phone ringing outside,
06:44and then the flick flashes back a few weeks prior.
06:46Here, it turns out that Antebellum isn't a period piece at all,
06:50but rather takes place in the present day.
06:52Eden, really a beloved author called Veronica,
06:55has been kidnapped along with a bunch of other black people
06:57by the white owners of a Civil War reenactment center.
07:00It is absolutely bonkers,
07:02and doesn't totally work,
07:04but it's certainly not what you expect from the first half an hour.
07:07The Empty Man.
07:08The Empty Man has received a whole bunch of buzz with writers and fans alike,
07:11praising it as an overlooked gem from 2020.
07:14However, after watching it,
07:15it is pretty clear why this didn't make much of a dent,
07:18and that's because it's impossible to market.
07:21A horror movie that runs an epic two and a half hours is already a tough sell,
07:24but it doesn't help when it also blends completely different subgenres
07:28and tells a story that's intentionally designed to keep you in the dark.
07:32So if you read the synopsis,
07:33you might go into it expecting something like The Bye Bye Man,
07:36where a bunch of kids are being haunted by a supernatural entity
07:39who only grows stronger the more you think about them.
07:42And that is what the movie is about for around 20 minutes.
07:46See, the thing about The Empty Man is that it's essentially three movies in one.
07:50The prologue essentially acts as its own short horror film
07:53set in the snowy mountains,
07:55then we get the teen slasher,
07:56and finally we stumble into a cult conspiracy and doomsday prophecy.
08:01Consequently, as soon as you start thinking you know what the movie is going to be about,
08:04it switches gears and turns into something else.
08:07One Cut of the Dead.
08:08Just when you think the zombie subgenre has no new ideas to offer,
08:12something like One Cut of the Dead comes along.
08:14Now, this movie is a regular on the WhatCulture Horror channel,
08:17but it simply couldn't be left off a list about movies that aren't about what you think.
08:21That's because One Cut of the Dead is three different movies in one,
08:24but it pulls each one off better than The Empty Man does.
08:27Initially, it starts out like a regular low-budget zombie flick,
08:30but it's quickly revealed that this is actually a movie being filmed within the movie.
08:35The real story is about a zombie outbreak happening,
08:37while this camera crew is recording their fictional zombie movie,
08:41and the confusion and chaos that comes from that situation.
08:44However, the film pivots yet again halfway through to show that this story isn't real either,
08:49by flashing back and showing how this apparently realistic zombie outbreak
08:53is also part of a fictional film.
08:55So, we're actually watching a movie about how a bunch of fictional people made a zombie movie
09:01about a group of people making a zombie movie.
09:04It sounds much more confusing when I say it than it is in motion, I promise.
09:08Crimson Peak.
09:09I mentioned briefly in the introduction how marketing plays a huge role in setting audience expectations,
09:14and Crimson Peak is one of the best examples of a movie's advertising completely misrepresenting
09:19its actual content.
09:20Guillermo del Toro's gothic romance is certainly steeped in horror.
09:24There are supernatural creatures ready to deliver jump scares and plenty of gore to go around,
09:28but it's far from a conventional horror movie,
09:31which makes it so weird, then, that the trailers sold it as your regular multiplex fare,
09:35a horror closer to The Conjuring or Ouija.
09:38Now, there's nothing wrong with those kinds of movies, of course,
09:40but it meant that audiences going into Crimson Peak were expecting a straightforward ghost tale,
09:45and were left with few scares and mainly a family melodrama and a lengthy opening
09:50that keeps the horror elements to the minimum.
09:52As one character makes clear, this isn't a ghost story,
09:55it's more a story with a ghost in it.
09:57The ghost is just a metaphor.
09:59The boy.
10:00After Annabelle reminded everyone that horror movies about killer dolls can bring in stacks and stacks of cash,
10:05it was unsurprising when similar films were quickly put into the works.
10:08One of these was the unimaginatively titled The Boy,
10:12a horror that swapped out the disheveled Annabelle for an eerily well-dressed doll called Brams.
10:17The trailers promised the kind of scares that act as this subgenre's bread and butter.
10:21You know the ones.
10:22The little doll kicking back in a rocking chair,
10:24very slowly turning his head when people aren't looking,
10:27and returning unharmed when his own is thrown away.
10:30And for the majority of the movie, this is exactly what it delivered.
10:33Audiences got to see the killer doll tropes played straight,
10:36as a family move into a house and become wary of Brams,
10:40until a late reveal throws all that on its head.
10:43That's because, as it turns out, this isn't a killer doll movie at all,
10:46but rather a movie about a human killer who lives in the walls of the house.
10:50Brams the doll had no supernatural properties at all.
10:53Well, not until he was given some via a sequel retcon,
10:57and the real Brams was a disturbed man living in secret passageways the whole time.
11:01Brams the doll's main character was a little bit of a
Comments