10 Horror Movie “Mistakes” That Were Totally Intentional

Mistakes are an inevitable part of any movie - producing a film requires so much collaboration between potentially hundreds of crew members that it's basically impossible for any single movie to be entirely free of mistakes.

But sometimes what's pawned off as a glaring mistake isn't really one at all - at least not in the way you think.

Sometimes filmmakers decide to eschew basic continuity for practical or storytelling reasons, because at the end of the day the overwhelming majority of audiences don't really care about tiny mistakes - they care about a compelling story.

These 10 movie "mistakes" all actually had very deliberate thought and intent put into them, no matter how many might quickly point to them being screw-ups the filmmakers never actually noticed.

But the directors knew exactly what they were doing in each case, willfully pressing on with their vision while fully aware that some viewers would unavoidably see these moments as overwhelming mistakes rather than mere considerations of the filmmaking process.

As much as we all love pointing out silly gaffes in movies, these ones aren't quite the gotchas you might first assume...

At the end of Ridley Scott's Alien, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) makes her escape from the soon-to-explode Nostromo, heading to the shuttle Narcissus while carrying the ship's cat, Jones, in a cat carrier.

But if you look closely during one shot, you'll see that there's very clearly no cat in the carrier - for a few seconds, light is shone through it and the carrier is obviously empty.

It's easy to assume this was simply a continuity gaffe, but there's actually a practical shooting reason for it.

Given that fire ends up shooting out of the hallway in front of Sigourney Weaver a few seconds later, Scott evidently didn't want to subject a cat to such a potentially traumatic experience, and so opted to shoot the shot without it.

Scott presumably assumed nobody would be paying that much attention to the carrier, but alas, in the era of Reddit and crystal clear freeze-frames, of course they did.

Once you know there's no cat in the carrier, though, you won't be able to un-see how roughly Weaver handles it, flinging the carrier around like, well, there's not a living thing in it.