10 Toughest Dilemmas In Horror Movies
These horror movie characters had some tricky choices to make.
Horror movies love to make audiences squirm through their unbearable levels of suspense and gut-wrenching gore, but sometimes they also want to make viewers think long and hard about the morality of what they're watching.
There's nothing quite like a film that posits an urgent dilemma for a major character, and in turn forces the audience to consider how they'd act in their shoes.
As much as the horror genre might often be about heightened escapism, these movies all made viewers reckon with the content of their own character in one way or another.
These films presented agonising dilemmas and tricky choices for viewers to make sense of.
Could you sacrifice a stranger to save yourself or those you love? Would you dare rescue those who've wronged you? And when death is guaranteed, who would you save?
The answers aren't easy because there's no clear-cut "right" choice in most cases - you're forced to balance your own desires with what your brain tells you you "should" do, and then act accordingly.
Thankfully at least most of these scenarios are insane enough that you'll never have to live them for real. Here's hoping, anyway...
10. Would You Kill An Innocent Person To Save A Dying Family Member? - Would You Rather
2012's Would You Rather follows Iris (Brittany Snow), a young woman who takes part in a philanthropist's parlour game, because if she wins, the philanthropist will pay for her brother's (Logan Miller) life-saving leukaemia treatment and place him on the shortlist for a bone marrow donor.
But Iris soon comes to realise the "game" is actually a deadly version of "Would You Rather?", with Iris and the other contestants being forced to choose between two grim, potentially deadly options with each passing round. The goal? To be the last "contestant" left.
Iris makes it to the final round with Lucas (Enver Gjokaj), where she's given a choice: shoot Lucas dead to win the game, or spare his life and they both get to leave alive, albeit without any money.
Basically, Iris can avoid murdering Lucas, an innocent fellow player, or kill him and save her dying brother.
But as much as blood might be thicker than water, actively taking somebody else's life to save a terminally ill relative is a massively weighty decision and one that could haunt you forever more.
If you kill Lucas, you're trading one life for another, whereas if you refuse, it's simply a sad reality of the American healthcare system that your loved one will die. One actively condemns someone to death, while the other is a passive refusal to make a trade.
Ultimately in Iris' case, she decides to kill Lucas, but the ironic final twist reveals that her brother committed suicide while she was playing the game, feeling that he was a burden on his sister. And so, the whole game - namely, Iris killing Lucas - was all for nought.