10 Horror Movie Moments More Important Than You Realised

Movies are effectively the act of firing 24 images in front of your eyes per second in the attempt to convey meaning - such is the magic of cinema.

But the sheer sensory assault of a movie can often prevent audiences from failing to pick up on the wider importance that's basically hidden in plain sight.

This is certainly true in the horror genre, which with its tendency to bamboozle audiences with disturbing imagery and brutal scenes of death, doesn't always suggests it's got subtle storytelling to offer.

But that's absolutely not true, as skilled filmmakers have managed to slyly sneak massively meaningful shots into scenes that might otherwise seem totally innocuous.

Most of these moments pass so fleetingly, and without much fanfare at all in fact, that you couldn't be blamed for missing them, yet it's clear that the filmmakers left these nuggets of meaning in plain sight for the most studious, switched-on viewers to notice.

From subtle Easter eggs that actually change the world of the movie in a major way, to seemingly benign images that might reshape how you view the entire story, these horror movie moments were all way more meaning-loaded than anyone first realised...

Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon is such a dizzying trip of a sci-fi horror movie that nobody could blame you for failing to pick up on one of its more unexpectedly meaningful details.

Case in point, you probably didn't notice that the Australian flag on protagonist Dr. William Weir's (Sam Neill) uniform is different from the nation's current flag.

The real flag is a blue field with six stars on it and the British Union Jack flag situated in the top-left corner, but in Event Horizon the flag on Weir's jacket contains a different flag altogether.

This is actually the Australian Aboriginal flag, and suggests that in the film's fast-approaching future of 2047, Australia reckoned with its colonial past by renouncing its status as a British constitutional monarchy.

It's a fascinating and weirdly wholesome piece of low-key world-building in an otherwise horrific movie, and one that was apparently suggested by Sam Neill himself, who wished to pay tribute to Australia's original settlers.

Considering that there have been increasing calls in recent years to change Australia's flag in reality, it's entirely possible that Event Horizon ends up being totally on the money.