10 Best REVERSE Horror Movies

The Cabin In The Woods is twistier than M Night Shayalaman on a rollercoaster, and what begins as a teen slasher cliché-fest soon develops into something considerably more meta.

The jock, prom queen, stoner, brainy hunk and virginal final girl (Kristen Connolly brilliantly disarms that stereotype with one raised eyebrow) make their way to, you guessed it, a cabin in the woods, inside a sealed biosphere, controlled from a subterranean lair by a group of office jocks.

They discover a series of objects, each one programmed to activate a specific method of execution, ranging from ghouls and ghosts, to a sadistic zombie murder family, who rise from the grave and begin slicing and dicing.

The remaining survivors, final girl Dana and reefer-fiend Marty figure out that the game is rigged. However, with the 'control centre' compromised, soon every imaginable horror movie villain is tearing the entire crew limb from limb.

Cue a wholly unexpected but very welcome Sigourney Weaver, who explains that the fate of all mankind rests on appeasing the 'old Gods' with regular human sacrifices, that play out all over the world in different ways, (Japan, for example, has a Ring/Grudge type demon).

So, clichéd horror victims are actually being manipulated (the first reverse), and those pushing the buttons are being controlled by an ancient evil (the second reverse). From standard horror to meta-post-modernism and back to conventional horror, in a film that, while not quite having the full courage of its convictions, qualifies as maybe the most original reverse horror film out so far.