10 Horror Movie Fakeouts We All Fell For
4. Brahms Is A Possessed Doll - The Boy
2016's The Boy was sold to audiences as yet another possessed doll movie, albeit having more in common with Annabelle than, say, the campy theatrics of Child's Play.
The story follows Greta (Lauren Cohan), who is hired by a wealthy old couple to act as the nanny for Brahms, a porcelain doll serving as a stand-in for their real son of the same name, who apparently died in a house fire two decades prior.
Like Annabelle we never see Brahms move around on-screen, but then the third act delivers a wildly unexpected and ludicrously entertaining twist: the doll isn't possessed at all.
As it turns out, Brahms survived the fire 20 years earlier and has been living in the walls of his parents' mansion ever since. It was him who was moving the doll throughout the film, offering up an amusingly "grounded" subversion of the typical possessed doll shtick.
Sadly 2020's sequel, Brahms: The Boy II, effectively retconned this clever upending of expectations by revealing that the doll is actually possessed, while the flesh-and-blood Brahms from this movie is bafflingly nowhere to be found.