20 Horror Movies That Weren't What Anyone Expected

8. Funny Games

Funny Games is basically 109 minutes of legendary director Michael Haneke effing with his own audience. 

This film, apparently about two young men who commit a break-in and torture a family at their vacation home, is really an exercise in cinematic finger-wagging as Haneke confronts the audience about the entertainment value they find in such stories.

Our central antagonist, Paul (Arno Frisch), regularly breaks the fourth wall to draw attention to the story's own artifice and underline that the audience, by observing, is tacitly complicit in the atrocities committed.

Paul is entirely aware of the fact he's in a film and regularly comments on cinematic plot structure, at one point even using a remote control to resurrect his slain partner in crime, Peter (Frank Giering).

Anyone banking on a straight-forward home invasion movie certainly got something far more confronting and polarising. 

If nothing else, it's one hell of a swing from one of our finest living filmmakers, who dared to redirect the on-screen violence towards the audience itself.