10 Horror Movie Scenes You Didn’t Realise Were Tricking You

Nowadays with everyone being so aware of tropes and cliches in horror, one of the best things you can do to elevate your movie is to show awareness of this and use it to your advantage.

It Follows uses a bunch of typical horror techniques and does them all incredibly well, but one tiny little scene that actively weaponises our awareness against us is what we’re gonna talk about here.

Part-way through the film Jay is fleeing from It (if you don’t know, ‘It’ is a sexually transmitted demon entity who follows you until It reaches you, at which point It kills you horribly). She runs into a room and hunches down, looking out for the demon she knows is following her.

We see a shot of the doorway to the room, with her friend standing in the doorframe. Like many other shots, this one uses negative space effectively. It’s framed just so that our brain fills in the empty spaces, looking for what we think should be there.

The genius of this precise beat though is that we get double-bluffed. We stare at the shot expecting a monster in the space, with all the dread building up, only to see nothing. We allow ourselves to calm down, thinking that we had just been tricked into fear by the trope being cleverly subverted. Then, at the exact moment we were tricked into feeling safe: the negative space fulfils its promise and a ghoulish, tall man emerges in the doorway.

If you can see this scene for the first time and not jump out of your skin, you’re a stronger person than I!