8 Horror Movies That Broke All The Rules
Conventions mean nothing when you already know you're in a horror film.
Horror movies are ruled by genre conventions. Whether it's abandoned ghost towns that come to life at night, run down psychiatric hospitals with one patient that never quite went away, or woodland monsters intent on giving campers an evening they'll never forget - there's plenty of familiar tropes that rule our movie experiences.
Whilst they're fun enough to begin with, in the end, we become bored knowing that the chesty blonde woman is inevitably going to get done in with a pick axe as she gets ready to have an excessively steamy bath. If only she'd run the water cooler and seen the message written in blood on the mirror!
Every now and then though, something's got to give, and a film comes along that challenges everything we thought we knew about the industry to create a whole new variant of horror. Truly throwing the mentos straight into our diet coke, these movies are the ones we never even knew that we needed, tearing up the rulebook and making history in the process.
Conventions might be the foundations that the genre stands on, but hey, rules were made to be broken, after all.
8. The Extended Slow Burn - It Comes At Night
One of the most recent additions to rule-breaking in modern filmmaking, It Comes At Night was a great example of the power of marketing - offering up a terrifying horror film in its trailers and delivering a slow, measured think-piece when it came to the actual release. It Comes At Night broke the usual rules set out by a movie to deliver a truthful representation of its content in its advertising by playing up something it wasn't - and then continued to eschew expectations by not essentially being a particularly horrific movie at all.
It Comes At Night was one of the first in the wave of 'post-horror' movies, films that look at conventional out-there spooky movies and work around them to deposit just a FEELING of fear in its atmosphere, rather than any outright attempt to scare the audience. The Witch is another great example, as are many of A24's other releases, bringing about a new realisation of the horror movie that looks at uncertainty and the incompleteness of human experience objectively rather than holding an audience's collective hand.
Themes of this have spun out into lots more cinematic efforts in recent years, but this feels like one of the more popular and poignant examples in memory.