10 Horror Movies That Tricked You Into Rooting For The Monster
These horror movies got us all good.
Horror movies certainly love toying with audience expectations and even getting a fast one over on viewers, because when it really works, it can make the overall experience that much more entertaining and unforgettable.
And what better way to fool audiences than to persuade them, trick them, hoodwink them into rooting for one of the movie's monsters? Hell, perhaps even the monster.
It's admittedly a tough ruse to pull off, but there are a number of ways to do it - say, hiding the monster in plain sight in the guise of a human being, or cleverly remix what the very idea of a "monster" even is.
One way or another, these 10 films all had us cheering on the grotesque, the abominable, yes, the monstrous, until the penny dropped and we finally realised we'd been duped all along.
Whether audiences felt suitably bamboozled or pissed off at being cheekily manipulated, these movies all had audiences pulling hard for characters who, in the end, they probably shouldn't have been.
And such is the joy of great horror movies, to make us uncomfortable and have us questioning our own judgment, for better or worse...
10. The Faculty
An easy way to appeal to our most base biases? Take the monster and disguise them as a seemingly harmless, even adorable character. Furthermore, it's a doubly effective gambit if you make them an attractive woman.
And that's precisely what Robert Rodriguez did in The Faculty, as it's revealed in the third act that the monstrous alien queen has actually been hidden in plain sight the entire time, taking the guise of cute, naive high-schooler Marybeth Hutchinson (Laura Harris).
Her disarmingly affable demeanour led most audiences to immediately write her off the suspect list and actively root for her to survive, such that when she eventually disrobed and revealed her grotesque real form, it was a genuinely jaw-dropping surprise.
Marybeth's utterly non-threatening presence and apparent romantic interest in Zeke (Josh Hartnett) made her a total blind spot for most viewers, compelling them to cheer her on for most of the movie. Oops.