10 Horror Movies Where The Monster Is Revealed Almost Immediately
Sometimes the big ugly isn't content to skulk in the shadows for long.
Monsters, aliens, creatures and things of every shape and size are the backbone of horror cinema, as essential to the foundations of our big picture scares as red lighting, smoke machines, Christopher Lee and the music of John Carpenter. And the payoff so often lies in the reveal, when the director gets to ditch the theatrics and bring us face to face with our worst fears.
But just because this moment carries so much weight doesn't mean your average filmmaker is keen to hold onto it until the end. Sure, some directors get off on scaring the bejesus out of us with brief glimpses, fake-outs and all the special effects one can rack up without sending out the man in the bigfoot suit (looking at you, M. Night Shyamalan), but others like to let audiences know what we're dealing with from the off.
This is Andy Muschietti making nightmares of Pennywise's sewer antics in It, John Krasinski sending aliens to eat his kids in A Quiet Place or Alfred Hitchcock peppering every scene with birds in... well, you fill in the blank. Not one of them is willing to make you wait to see their uglies, and why should they?
So, it's time to get stuck in to ten horror movies where the monster is revealed just about almost immediately.
10. Splinter (2008)
When young couple Seth and Polly (Paul Constanzo and Jill Wagner) fall for a confidence trick and get carjacked on the way to a romantic camping holiday, it seems like things can only go one way. Except they don't. A flat tyre leads Seth, Polly and the carjackers - escaped convict Dennis and his drug-addicted girlfriend Lacey (Shea Wigham and Rachel Kerbs) - to an abandoned petrol station, and things go from bad to worse in a way nobody who hadn't seen the trailer or the film title could have predicted.
This is the setup for Toby Wilkins' Splinter, a viral-monster horror movie that goes from road trip to chamber piece in a matter of minutes. And it isn't long until the creepy crawly makes itself known. Never mind that the very thing which blew out the group's tyre in the first place was an infected animal, the petrol station is quickly crawling with infected hosts and body parts, all controlled by a splintery fungus that isn't shy about putting itself out there.
What does it want? To multiply. Why does it want this? Who knows.