10 Horror Movie Scenes That Totally Trolled Everyone
These horror movie scenes had fun at our expense.
While we as moviegoers willingly subject ourselves to manipulation when we watch a film, sometimes filmmakers decide to test the bounds of that permissiveness and take things way further than anyone expected.
Sometimes they like to keenly toy with our expectations in order to deliver something we'd never see coming, whether ultimately for better or worse.
Perhaps they employed clever editing to mess with our understanding of a scene, got insanely meta totally out of nowhere, or served up a total non-event of an ending.
Whatever the outcome, and whether it was good or bad, these movie scenes all left viewers feeling just a little bit trolled.
Some of these cinematic trolls were well worth the deceit, because they gave audiences something better than they expected, while others unfortunately indicated sheer laziness on the part of the filmmakers, and so viewers simply felt underserved by what they witnessed.
With horror being such a playful and adventurous genre, it's perhaps little surprise that it offers filmmakers more latitude than basically any other genre to get one over on the audience and thoroughly mess with them.
How it made us all feel, though, is another story altogether...
10. The Buffalo Bill Switcheroo - The Silence Of The Lambs
Parallel editing is one of the oldest filmmaking tricks in the book, to cross-cut between two different scenarios to heighten audience suspense.
But The Silence of the Lambs ingeniously employed the technique without letting viewers in on it, when the FBI readies to raid serial killer Buffalo Bill's (Ted Levine) house, while agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) visits someone who knew his first victim.
The FBI rings the doorbell of what we believe to be Bill's house, but as he answers the door, he's met by Clarice. Subsequent shots confirm that the FBI got the wrong house and Clarice has inadvertently found herself in the belly of the beast without backup.
It's one of cinema's all-timer "holy s**t!" moments, using the magic of editing to mess with the audience in a way that leaves them leaning forward in nervous anticipation.
It's a tough trick to pull off without feeling cheap, but in this case director Jonathan Demme absolutely nailed it, and editor Craig McKay went on to receive a well-earned Best Film Editing Oscar nomination for his outstanding work.