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

Malignant has to employ a fair amount of clever workarounds and trickery in order to keep the big twist completely unpredictable. One that tricks you in a super subtle way by using a sort of ‘location aesthetic matching’ gimmick is the scene in which a tour-guide is kidnapped from the Seattle Underground tour.

The location has a distinct, recogniseable aesthetic: old brick, worn out wooden panelling, rusty metal pipes. We get an extended period of time to take it in as the tour-guide packs up her stuff, gets ready for the end of the day, has the lights on and off, et cetera.

So when Gabriel appears and kidnaps her - dropping down from the wooden support beams above - it seems a deliberate choice that the location he stores her in shares a similar aesthetic.

We see her tied up in a room with the very same appearance, and a big dusty fan that plays into the aged industrial look. Adding into this equation that Gabriel appeared from above, it seems a logical continuation in the audience’s head that the tour guide is being held in a location close by to where she was taken, maybe even in a building just above the Underground.

The mind definitely doesn’t stray as far as to think that this coincidentally similar-looking room may actually be the attic of our protagonist Madison, meaning that when the tour guide eventually comes barreling down from her entrapment in front of the detectives, we’re just as shocked as Maddy is.