Horrormovies rely on viewers' fear of the unknown and their instinct to trust what they perceive on the screen or even off it, and these films did just that. Films heavy on jumpscares attempt to catch audiences off guard, but many horror movies wait until the climax to introduce a game-changing twist or concept. While this is more common in thriller movies, it works perfectly for horror films that have an element of mystery to them. Some of the mostshocking horror movie moments that elicit audible gaspsfrom viewers are unexpected twists that make them reassess everything.
One of the most iconichorror movie scenes that changed millennials' lives, perhaps the worst-kept secret in Hollywood horror cinema, is thefinal revelation inThe Sixth Sense. What Bruce Willis' character realizes changes the entire story’s experience as viewers try to recall moments of foreshadowing and make sense of everything. Watching a horror movie becomes even more thrilling when such a climactic revelation is about the movie’s villain. Manyhorror movies that will always be classicsfeature characters who you’d never guess were actually the villains all along.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
Orphan
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Orphan is a psychological horror film in which a couple adopt a mysterious 9-year-old girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), only to discover that she is not who she appears to be. Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard star as Kate and John, her adoptive parents.
Jaume Collet-Serra most recently directedCarry-On, one of thebest thriller movies of 2024. Long before that, he had started his career by directingHouse of Waxand the forgettable sequelGoal II: Living the Dreambefore breaking through as a director withOrphan, which is also Isabelle Fuhrman’s acting breakout movie. The movie follows a bereaved couple who adopt a 9-year-old orphan, Esther, after they lose their baby.
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While she doesn’t get along with their early adolescent older son, Esther doesn’t seem to struggle to blend into the family. She starts behaving in a few alarming ways, gradually raising suspicions about her innocence. Esther’s erratic behavior drives a wedge between the couple, and it becomes clear that she’s the movie’s villain. It is revealed in the third act thatEsther is an adult woman with proportional dwarfism caused by a hormonal deficiency. You never see the revelation coming, and it changes everything about the film up to that point.
Directed by Christopher Landon
Happy Death Day
Happy Death Day is a horror-comedy film directed by Christopher Landon. Released in 2017, it follows college student Tree Gelbman, played by Jessica Rothe, who is forced to relive the day of her murder repeatedly until she can identify her killer and stop her death. The film blends elements of slasher horror with dark humor, creating a unique entry in the genre.
Christopher Landon, who wrote threeParanormal Activitymovies and was slated to direct the newScreammovie before leaving that production, wrote and directed the slasher duologyHappy Death DayandHappy Death Day 2U. Both of them follow Theresa “Tree” Gelbman, who gets stuck, in the first movie, in aGroundhog Day-like time loop, and keeps getting murdered on her birthday. She has to figure out the identity of the killer to avoid them, and also learn to become a better person along the way.
The whodunnit format is executed perfectly, as possibilities get eliminated gradually and the stakes consistently ramp up because feasible suspects become personally closer to Tree. Moreover, the fact that there’s an actual serial killer at large makes the mystery even harder to solve. The best part is thatTree inevitably has to introspect to eliminate possible motives, and her character growth is directly linked to the mystery. By the time she figures out it’s her jealous roommate, viewers will feel frustrated along with her, at how many guesses were wrong, but the unexpected twist makes up for that.
Directed by William Brent Bell
The Boy
The Boy is a psychological horror film directed by William Brent Bell. It stars Lauren Cohan as Greta, a young American woman who is hired to care for a lifelike doll by an elderly couple in an English village. As Greta begins to suspect the doll may be alive, a series of unsettling events challenge her understanding of reality.
We all know her as Maggie Greene, a role thatThe Walking Deadactress reprised after season 11, butLauren Cohan has been working in the horror genre from even before the AMC zombie apocalypse showbegan. So, it’s not surprising that her sparse feature film career also includes at least one horror title. Cohan plays an unsuspecting nanny inThe Boy, who finds out, after taking the job, that she is to take care of a doll that her employers treat like their son.
The doll, called Brahms after the couple’s son, returns in the sequelBrahms: The Boy II, but that film follows unrelated people haunted by the doll.
It is later revealed that their actual son died 20 years ago as an 8-year-old in a house fire after a girl he was friends with was discovered with her skull bashed in. The nanny is given rules to follow while looking after the doll, but she doesn’t take them seriously until spooked by some inexplicable phenomena and realizes the doll only moves when she isn’t looking. However, it turns out that the boy hadn’t died 20 years ago, and isliving as an adult within the house’s walls. This twist left me with my jaw on the floor in shock.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Psycho
In this now-iconic Alfred Hitchcock thriller, a secretary embezzles forty thousand dollars from her employer’s client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel. The place is run by a young man under the domination of his mother – and he soon turns out to be far more threatening than he appeared at first.
Alfred Hitchcock has perhaps had the biggest impact on the horror genre in America than any other director before him. He introduced new camera angles, scoring techniques, blocking methods, and acting-focused writing in his films, which continue to influence filmmakers today. It’s hard to pick his best work, but his most notorious is an easy answer – the 1960 horror filmPsycho. That shower scene changed cinema forever by introducing the idea that such a safe space can host brutal violence and the trope of misleading people about who is the film’s protagonist.
Norman Bates is introduced as a soft-spoken gentlemanly motel owner inPsycho, who reveres his mother and respects his customers' boundaries. His mother sounds ungrateful and overtly suspicious. She doesn’t trust the motel’s guests, and it is heavily implied that she kills female customers Norman interacts with. No one expects to find out that Norman’s mother is long dead, and he dresses up as her and does what he imagines she would. While the explanation for his behavior has aged poorly,Psychois aclassic black-and-white horror movie that still holds up todaybecause the twist is timeless.
Directed by Jordan Peele
Us
Us is a horror film directed by Jordan Peele, depicting the unsettling vacation of the Wilson family, led by Lupita Nyong’o as Adelaide and Winston Duke as Gabe. Their beach house retreat turns sinister when unexpected guests, identical in appearance to the family members, disrupt their peaceful getaway.
2019 was one of thebest years in movie history, and for modern horror movie buffs, it was a particularly exciting year. Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jordan Peele released their sophomore directorial features that year. Jordan Peele deliveredUs, a horror movie that explores the nature and impact of privilege in America. It follows Adelaide Wilson, played by Lupita Nyong’o, a mute woman who lost her ability to speak after going through a harrowing experience at a funhouse years ago as a child when she encountered another girl who looked exactly like her.
I would never have guessed that the doppelgänger wasn’t the villain, and the current Adelaide was actually her Tethered version.
The two of them meet 33 years later when Adelaide, as an adult, goes on vacation with her family. Her doppelgänger has her own family, who all resemble her family, and they call themselves the Tethered. The Tethered characters try to kill their counterparts, but Adelaide is able to escape with her son. I would never have guessed that the doppelgänger wasn’t the villain, and the current Adelaide was actually her Tethered version. She’d replaced the original Adelaide years ago after attacking her, for the privilege of living above ground and having a fulfilling life.
Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
The Others
Alejandro Amenábar wrote and directed this cult-classic 2001 Horror film starring Nicole Kidman and Fionnula Flanagan. The premise follows a mother and her two young photosensitive children as they attempt to deal with a mysterious and possibly sinister presence in their New Jersey home.
Just a couple of years after M. Night Shyamalan hit audiences with the most spoiled plot twist of all time, it wasNicole Kidman’s turn to play an unsuspecting ghost. However, the two circumstances aren’t nearly as similar as this comparison might suggest because Kidman’s character, Grace, is actually a villain inThe Others. Grace lives in a remote house alone with her children and mourns her husband, who died in the war.
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After the family spots unwelcome visitors in their house, Grace becomes convinced they’re being haunted. She starts investigating, and to her shock, she realizes that the household help have all been long dead. It doesn’t take her long to realize that she and her children are the ghosts haunting the visitors, who are the current residents of their house. In a moment of hopelessness,Grace had smothered her children to death and killed herself in her griefafter she’d learned about her husband’s death. This horrifying and unexpected twist suddenly makes all the inexplicable details fall into place.
Directed by Wes Craven
Scream
1996’s Scream follows a teenage girl who is targeted by a masked killer a year after her mother’s murder who uses horror movies as a deadly game against her and her friends.
Right from his introduction in the first scene of the film, it’s clear that Ghostface is supernaturally fast because he goes from one door to another in next to no time. He runs through the house before claiming his second victim, the presumed protagonist played by Drew Barrymore.Clad in a black shroud and an iconic ghost mask, he terrorizes his victims by catching them unawares even after they have seemingly escaped him. Moreover, the most obvious suspects seem to have an airtight alibi for at least one kill.
There are always multiple people who become Ghostface in theScreammovies, except for Roman Bridger inScream III, who’s the only solo Ghostface to date.
It would never occur to anyone, but the moment it’s revealed that there are two different Ghostfaces, a lot of his seemingly unnatural abilities become understandable. Billy Loomis and Stu Macher would commonly go to hunt down their victims together and would take turns doing the killing, depending on who wanted to do it more and who had the better opportunity. Ghostface is a horrormovie character who helped reshape genre expectations, because he’s a long-running franchise villain who’s simply a placeholder, and is simultaneously his own character.
Directed by James Wan
Saw
Saw is the first installment in the horror franchise directed by James Wan. Released in 2004, the film follows two men who awake shackled in a derelict bathroom, discovering they are part of a sadistic game orchestrated by the enigmatic Jigsaw, requiring them to follow cryptic instructions to survive.
Written by Leigh Whannell, who also plays one of the protagonists in the film,Sawis agreat crime movie where the villain winsin the end. However, the nature of the victory changes the life of any first-timeSawviewer. The film follows two men who wake up in a dilapidated bathroom and are given a series of objects and a tape recording each, giving them instructions on what to do if they don’t want to incur horrible personal losses. While they seem to initially be strangers, the characters are slowly revealed to be connected to each other.
The characters decide to put their differences aside and investigate the corpse in the middle of the room so they can figure a way out. It’s clear that they’ve been caught by the Jigsaw Killer, who’s watching them. In the final scene, the corpse shockingly stands up and reveals himself to be John Kramer, the Jigsaw Killer. This insane twist introduces audiences to the meticulous mind of Kramer, who had made it impossible for him to intervene once things were set in motion because he’s that confident in his ability to read people.
Get Out
Jordan Peele made his directorial Horror debut with Get Out, a terrifying Psychological Horror film starring Daniel Kaluuya. In the 2017 release, Chris Washington heads to Upstate New York to meet the family of his girlfriend, Rose. What follows is a horrifying ordeal for the anxious photographer.
Jordan Peele, known for his series of skits with Keegan-Michael Key, as the comedy duoKey & Peele, broke through in Hollywood as a horror director withGet Out, arguably thebest horror movie in the past 10 years. Based on the collective anxieties about systemic racism in the USA, it uses a reference to the country’s history of slavery to tackle the issue.Get Outfollows Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris on a trip to his girlfriend’s house, where he meets considerably racist relatives during a social gathering.
It’s nigh impossible to predict she’s in on her family’s plan to kidnap Chris to be their personal servant.
Allison Williams, as his girlfriend, is so convincing in her role of being a supportive partner, that it’s almost impossible to predict she’s in on her family’s plan to kidnap Chris to be their personal servant.Peele masterfully uses this misdirection to voice a growing concern in today’s worldabout hidden conservative attitudes in people who present open-minded personas. The amount of mistrust in the country is so bad that one can never be sure if even the helpful and likable neighbor is secretly a racist.
Directed by Halina Reijn
Bodies Bodies Bodies
Bodies Bodies Bodies is a comedy/horror/thriller from 2 AM. When Bee (Maria Bakalova) travels to a hurricane party with her girlfriend Sophie (Amanda Stenberg), they find themselves surrounded by affluent 20-somethings with very different world views. When the party finally kicks off amidst the coming storm, the debauchery leads to a game of “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” However, when a power outage occurs during the game, and a murder occurs in its stead, the party takes a turn for the deadly.
The best horror movies address contemporary cultural norms and collective sources of fear. So,Bodies Bodies Bodiesexploring its Gen Z characters' paranoia about each other, feels like a commentary on the generation’s growing mistrust in a world where people are chronically online and frequently encounter misinformation. These characters are supposed to be close friends, but don’t have any faith in each other, and all secretly resent each other, based on the personas they project online.
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When one of them, played by Pete Davidson, is found stabbed with a sword, the group, despite initially trying, fails to present a united front and attack each other. The claustrophobic slasher seems impossible to solve as probable suspects all have alibis and get killed nonetheless. Who would have guessed that filming a TikTok is what led to Davidson’s character’s death when he failed to juggle a sword?Bodies Bodies Bodiespossibly features the best villain twist, in that there isn’t one. The real villain is their obsession with social media, and inability to ground themselves in reality.
