10 Horror Movie Fakeouts We All Fell For
3. Esther Is A Satanic Child - Orphan
The marketing for 2009's Orphan was centered around the fact that Kate and John Coleman's (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) adopted nine-year-old daughter Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) had a secret of some kind.
"There's something wrong with Esther," the posters told us, and so audiences were led to believe that Orphan was basically a contemporary riff on The Omen, with Esther being the devilishly inclined spawn of Satan - or something like that, anyway.
But the film's climactic reveal is that Esther isn't actually a child at all - she's a 33-year-old woman suffering from a rare hormone disorder that stunts her growth and gives her the appearance of a child, which she also accentuates with elaborate makeup.
Ultimately though Orphan's story is ridiculous, it's fundamentally "realistic" in that there's nothing supernatural about it, as surely nobody saw coming.
Casting a child in the role of Esther and ageing her up for the final stretch was really the masterstroke that prevented most people from figuring out what was going on. What a ride this movie is.
Even though Esther dies at the end, we'll get to see more of her later this year with the impending release of the prequel Orphan: First Kill, with Fuhrman returning to portray the character once again.