8 Horror Movies That Broke All The Rules

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.