10 Horror Movies That Switch Villains
Sometimes the bad guy isn't Dracula, Jigsaw or Psycho Goreman - but maybe it ought to be!
Do you know the real villain of Saw X? Or the dual terrors in Halloween Ends? How about the prevailing evil of the men at the core of 28 Days Later?
These are horror movies that pull the ol' bait and switch on audiences, trading the obvious villain for something, someone totally different. And this isn't about the whodunnit line a lot of modern slashers take (looking at you, Scream), but films that set up one villain, in the trailers, on the posters and in our dark hearts, before leading with another.
In some cases, audiences were falsely promised a certain big bad by the marketing material, in others, the film itself leads us up one path only to send us sliding down a tangent, and in all cases, there is something of a tension between who could have been the main villain and who ultimately is.
While you don't always know what you're going to get with horror films, stick with us and you can be certain of 10 horror movies that switch their villains right under our noses.
10. The Platform (2019)
The rich elite are set up as the antagonists of Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's class-conscious Spanish horror The Platform, in which people are trapped inside a vertical prison through which a smorgasbord of food descends, serving each level until those at the bottom are left with nothing. And yet they wind up playing second fiddle to that most classic of all evils: human nature.
Political commentary aside, the people who make the food and run the building are never seen, and in fact many of the prisoners trapped inside this structure have chosen to be there in exchange for something they need - in protagonist Goreng's (Ivan Massague) case, a university diploma. As such, it is these very prisoners who end up being the worst part of the whole experience, terrorising and cannibalising and assaulting each other, making no effort to unify against their supposed oppressors but actively creating an unliveable situation for so many.
Big brother may be watching, but in terms of actual and expected villainy, it spends the film on the sidelines.