- 05/06/2025
The Mist's shocking ending played us all like a damn fiddle.
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00:00While horror is frequently dismissed as one of the most predictable and least imaginative
00:04of all film genres, that's really not true at all, as is proven beyond any doubt by these
00:10ten movies alone.
00:12Satisfaction often stems from our expectations being subverted in clever and creative ways,
00:17and that's certainly what happened in these films, which dared to fake audiences out in
00:21devilishly deceptive fashion.
00:24So with that in mind then, I'm Ellie with WhatCulture here with ten horror movie fake
00:28outs we all fell for.
00:30Number 10.
00:31The cops arrive at the end in Get Out.
00:34Jordan Peele's masterful, Oscar-winning horror satire Get Out climaxes with embattled black
00:40man Chris fighting off the racist, brainwash-happy Armitage family, and finally facing off against
00:46his own ex-girlfriend Rose.
00:48Despite Rose's attempts to kill him, Chris finds himself unable to strangle her to death,
00:53and just as he relinquishes his grip on her throat, the sirens of a police car blare out
00:58behind them both.
00:59The cops are here, and they're about to stumble upon the sight of a black man knelt over a
01:03horribly wounded white woman.
01:05How exactly does anyone expect this situation to go?
01:09But Peele then cuts to the door of the police car, where the word airport is visible.
01:13As it turns out, this isn't a patrol unit, but Chris's airport police officer pal Rod.
01:18Peele so brilliantly exploits our understandably cynical expectations for any situation where a
01:24black individual is flagged down by the police, only to flip it so ecstatically on its head
01:29with the revelation that the siren and flashing lights are actually a safe haven for Chris.
01:339.
01:34The Double Opening Fake Out in Scream 4
01:37The sequel begins with two young women being slaughtered by Ghostface in standard Scream
01:43fashion.
01:44But as they die their ultra-gory deaths, Wes Craven pulls back to reveal that we're actually
01:48watching the opening sequence of Stab 6, a sequel in Scream's Movie Within a Movie franchise,
01:54based on the events of the Scream series itself, no less.
01:57The real start of Scream 4 involves two friends, played by Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, watching
02:03Stab 6 and disparaging the state of contemporary horror movies, before Bell's character suddenly
02:08stabs Paquin with a knife, and Craven pulls out again to reveal that this is really the
02:13start of Stab 7.
02:14Craven then finally proceeds with the movie's actual prologue, as Jenny and Marnie watch
02:21Stab 7 and are subsequently murdered by the new Ghostface killer.
02:24Craven went full meta here, and for better or worse, nobody saw either of the fake-outs
02:30coming.
02:318.
02:32Marion Crane is the protagonist in Psycho
02:35While it's one of horror cinema's worst-kept secrets these days, you have to respect the
02:39ambition of Alfred Hitchcock to execute such a daring audience fake-out way back in 1960.
02:46Though Psycho's marketing made it abundantly clear that Janet Leigh would be starring as
02:50protagonist Marion Crane, this was all part of Hitchcock's master plan to
02:54catch audiences off-guard.
02:57Just before the film's midway point, Marion is suddenly killed off by the knife-wielding
03:01killer while taking a shower, completely upending our expectation of where the story is going
03:07and who the protagonist is.
03:09At this point, the perspective shifts to Bates Motel owner Norman Bates, and because one fake-out
03:14apparently wasn't enough, Hitchcock then builds up Norman's mother to be the killer,
03:18only to reveal that it's actually a mentally ill Norman himself.
03:21As it turns out, Norman has developed an alternate personality in his mind in the vein of his
03:27mother, who he himself killed many years earlier.
03:307.
03:31Zepp is Jigsaw in Saw
03:33Saw boasts not only one of the most ingenious plot twists in the history of the horror genre,
03:39but really cinema period. And a big part of the twist's success lies in how ingeniously it
03:44misdirects viewers with a fake-out villain reveal. In the third act, we learn that the serial killer
03:49known as Jigsaw appears to be Zepp Hindle, an orderly who works at the same hospital as Dr. Gordon.
03:55At film's end, Zepp attempts to kill Gordon in the iconic grotty bathroom where Gordon and
04:00Adam's deadly game is being played out, only for Adam to catch Zepp off-guard and beat him
04:05to death with a toilet tank lid. Game over, right? Not quite.
04:09Gordon, who'd just sawn his foot off, then crawls away to summon help for a still-chained
04:14Adam, just as Adam searches Zepp's corpse and finds a tape. The tape reveals that Zepp wasn't
04:20actually Jigsaw all along, but simply another pawn in the game, with Jigsaw's identity then
04:25revealed to be John Kramer, one of Gordon's terminal cancer patients. Zepp was simply doing
04:30as Jigsaw instructed in order to receive an antidote to the slow-acting poison coursing
04:35through his own veins. And because this isn't wild enough, the dead body that's been laying
04:40in the middle of the bathroom since the game started suddenly stands up, alive.
04:44The not-corpse is in fact Kramer himself, who has evidently been observing the entire game
04:49unfold with a front row seat.
04:516. Ripley destroys the Nostromo in Alien
04:55Ridley Scott's Alien may be a deliberate, methodically paced sci-fi horror movie for the
05:00most part, but it certainly gives audiences plenty of bang for their buck during its action-packed finale.
05:06Near the end of the film, Ripley seemingly kills the Xenomorph when she activates the
05:10Nostromo's self-destruct sequence and evacuates the vessel in an escape shuttle.
05:15The ship explodes and Ripley prepares to enter stasis for the trek home,
05:18but at that moment she realises that there's a stowaway on board the shuttle,
05:23the damn Xenomorph. And so Ripley dons a space suit as she prepares to battle with the alien
05:28creature once more, eventually culminating in the Xeno being blasted out into the cold,
05:33uncaring vacuum of space.
05:35Only then, with the alien threat categorically dealt with, is Ripley able to safely enter stasis with
05:41the mission's only other survivor, the cruise cat Jones.
05:44Ripley's scuttling the Nostromo would have been a sufficiently exciting climax for such a
05:49consistently restrained film, but Scott ultimately decided to go all out with a delirious two-pronged finale.
05:56Number 5. The FBI raids Buffalo Bill's house in The Silence of the Lambs.
06:02The Silence of the Lambs surely earned its Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing for one brilliantly
06:07executed moment during the movie's climax, when the FBI prepares to raid serial killer Buffalo Bill's home,
06:13all while agent Clarice Starling pays a visit to someone who knew Bill's first victim.
06:18As the FBI ring the bell on Bill's home, he goes to answer the door and is greeted by Clarice.
06:24As director Jonathan Demme cuts back and forth between the FBI breaking into an empty house and
06:29Clarice talking to Buffalo Bill, it's clear that the FBI got the wrong house and Clarice has wound up in
06:35Bill's company all by herself. It's one of cinema's all-time greatest WTF moments, ensuring that most
06:42anyone watching for the first time takes a sharp involuntary intake of breath as they process the
06:47dangerous situation Clarice has found herself in. The scene is such an outstanding example of parallel
06:53editing that it's regularly shown in film schools around the globe. If you want to get one over on
06:58your audience without making it feel massively cheap, this is how you do it.
07:02Number 4. Brahms is a possessed doll in The Boy
07:062016's The Boy was sold to audiences as yet another possessed doll movie, albeit having more in common
07:13with Annabelle than, say, the campy theatrics of child's play. The story follows Greta, who is hired
07:19by a wealthy old couple to act as the nanny for Brahms, a porcelain doll serving as a stand-in for their real
07:25son of the same name, who apparently died in a house fire two decades prior.
07:30Like Annabelle, we never see Brahms move around on screen, but then the third act delivers a wildly
07:35unexpected and ludicrously entertaining twist, the doll isn't possessed at all. As it turns out,
07:41Brahms survived the fire 20 years earlier and has been living in the walls of his parents' mansion
07:46ever since. It was him who was moving the doll throughout the film, offering up an amusingly
07:51grounded subversion of the typical possessed doll shtick. Sadly, 2020's sequel Brahms The Boy 2
07:58effectively retconned this clever upending of expectations by revealing that the doll
08:02is actually possessed, while the flesh-and-blood Brahms from this movie is bafflingly nowhere to be found.
08:08Number 3. Esther is a satanic child in Orphan.
08:13The marketing for 2009's Orphan was centred around the fact that Kate and John Coleman's
08:18adopted nine-year-old daughter Esther had a secret of some kind.
08:21There's something wrong with Esther, the posters told us, and so audiences were led to believe that
08:26Orphan was basically a contemporary riff on The Omen, with Esther being the devilishly inclined
08:31spawn of Satan, or something like that anyway. But the film's climactic reveal is that Esther isn't
08:36actually a child at all. She's a 33-year-old woman suffering from a rare hormone disorder
08:41that stunts her growth and gives her the appearance of a child, which she also accentuates with elaborate
08:47makeup. Ultimately, though, Orphan's story is ridiculous. It's fundamentally realistic in that
08:52there's nothing supernatural about it, as surely nobody saw coming. Casting a child in the role of
08:58Esther and ageing her up for the final stretch was really the masterstroke that prevented most people
09:03from figuring out what was going on. What a ride this movie is! Even though Esther dies at the end,
09:09we'll get to see more of her later this year with the impending release of the prequel Orphan First
09:14Kill, with Isabelle Fuhrman returning to portray the character once again.
09:192. The Monsters in the Mist in The Mist
09:23Frank Darabont's terrific adaptation of Stephen King's novella The Mist ends on a note that's
09:28paradoxically hopeful for humanity and absolutely horrifying on a more personal, intimate level.
09:343. In the film's third act, survivor David drives through the mist-strewn city streets
09:39and catches sight of a gigantic skyscraper-sized six-legged beast, seemingly confirming to him that
09:44there's no hope for humanity to fend off the alien invasion. And so, David enters a suicide
09:50patch with his fellow survivors, culminating in him shooting each of them dead, including his own son,
09:56Billy. But David doesn't have enough bullets to do himself in, and so willingly steps out into
10:01the mist to be consumed by the monsters, only to see a tank emerge from the mist to his absolute
10:07confusion. A convoy follows the tank, revealing that the army has managed to turn the tide against
10:12the aliens and successfully repel them, basically making the euthanasia of four people, including
10:18his son, completely pointless. Had they waited two more minutes, they would have all been saved.
10:231. Samantha kills herself in the House of the Devil
10:27Ty West's expertly crafted 2009 cult horror flick, The House of the Devil, centres around
10:33Samantha, a cash-strapped college student who takes a babysitting job only to end up facing
10:38off against a family who have malevolent designs on her. During her first night working at the house,
10:43Samantha is drugged and wakes up to find herself part of an occult ritual. She eventually manages to
10:49make a violent escape, all while being chased by the family's deranged patriarch, Mr. Ullman.
10:54The two eventually face off in a graveyard, where Ullman suggests that Samantha is about to become
10:59the vessel for an entity referred to only as him, and so rather than shoot Ullman, Samantha decides to
11:04turn the gun around on herself. To Ullman's horror, Samantha shoots herself point-blank in the head,
11:10and the screen abruptly cuts to black. For a few seconds, this seems like the movie's emphatic,
11:15bleak ending, only for West to serve up one final scene. In a hospital, we learn that Samantha
11:21actually survived her self-inflicted gunshot, just as a nurse enters the room, pats her stomach and
11:26says, both of you will be fine. Through means that are just too damn horrifying to linger on,
11:31Samantha is now pregnant with what may or may not be the spawn of Satan, because Ty West wanted to
11:37ensure everyone went home feeling like absolute trash. And that concludes our list, if you can think
11:42of any we missed, then do let us know in the comments below, and while you're there, don't
11:45forget to like, and subscribe, and tap that notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter
11:50and follow us there, and I can be found across various social medias just by searching Ellie
11:54Littlechild. I've been Ellie with WhatCulture, I hope you have a magical day, and I'll see you real soon.
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