10 Horror Movies That Cleverly START With Huge Twists
When the big surprise comes at the beginning.
It's of course incredibly damn common for horror movies to conclude with jaw-dropping plot twists which completely flip the script and change the whole game.
A great climactic rug-pull can entirely change how audiences perceive the story, characters, and movie as a whole, either for better or worse.
What's less common, though, is for filmmakers to get bold and deliver an Earth-shattering twist right at the start of the story - one which immediately subverts expectations and assures the audience that they're on a different ride than they were expecting.
It's a tough trick to pull off and an undeniable creative gamble that presents a ton of risks, but when it works, it really works.
And that's absolutely the case in these 10 movies, which got their biggest surprises out of the way in one of their very first scenes. This resulted in viewers being thrown totally off and having basically no idea what the rest of the film would entail.
For a movie to kick off with a startling surprise is one thing, but for it to be enticing rather than accidentally offputting is another matter altogether...
10. Bones & All
The marketing for Luca Guadagnino's masterful romantic horror film Bones and All was oddly shy about confirming that its starcrossed central characters are in fact cannibals, instead implying them to be mere serial killers.
It was evidently a calculated approach by distributor MGM to get more butts in seats, enough that many lured to the film by the presence of Timothée Chalamet were in for a rather grisly surprise in the opening minutes.
In the story's establishing scene, we observe teenage girl Maren (Taylor Russell) sneaking out of her house at night to go hang out with her friends - a totally ordinary scene for any teenager in a movie, right?
Except, while laying next to one of her pals, Maren suddenly takes a bite out of her finger, much to the group's collective horror.
Maren flees the chaotic scene and returns to her home, where her father Frank (André Holland) - evidently having dealt with Maren's cannibalistic urges before - arranges for the pair to skip town, setting the rest of the movie's events in motion.
Needless to say, for anyone who thought Bones and All would simply be a Bonnie and Clyde-esque crime flick, watching one of the principal characters orgiastically suck flesh off her friend's finger made for quite the alarming rug-pull.