10 Horror Movie Villains KILLED Before The End

Among the most basic expectations of the horror genre is that the character who is clearly identified to audiences as the main villain - or one of the main villains, at least - isn't killed until the very end of the movie.

But that's not always the case, and sometimes genre filmmakers like to throw audience a curveball, where the operating antagonist is taken out of the frame 10, 20, 30, or even 40 minutes before the rest of the movie wraps up.

Now, tension is a necessary component of any horror film, so this will typically result in the dead villain being replaced by... something, but all the same, it can throw viewers off balance in a majorly unexpected way, leaving them feeling that anything can happen for the remainder.

Despite these villains all being teed up to get their comeuppance in the film's final moments, they all ended up ducking out a while earlier, at which point the movie shifted gears and focused on another Big Bad for what time was left.

It's a tricky rug-pull to pull off, but when it works, it really works...

10 Cloverfield Lane was basically sold as a kitchen sink riff on the original found footage monster movie, focused instead on a group of survivors residing in an underground bunker while the Earth above them is decimated by the alien invasion.

With no apparent presence of the monster from Cloverfield, however, crazed survivalist Howard Stambler (a brilliant John Goodman) turns out to be the movie's prevailing antagonist; a man who effectively keeps fellow survivors Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) as hostages.

That is until he kills Emmett, of course.

This all appears to provide plenty of conflict to sustain this tightly wound chamber piece all the way to the finish, but Howard actually ends up shuffling off his mortal coil a little earlier than expected. He's killed when Michelle horribly maims him with a vat of acid, leaving him unable to escape the bunker as it catches fire and explodes.

Much as this might appear to be a logical end-point for the story, the film ends up going on for another 10-or-so minutes, as Michelle encounters an alien spacecraft and is then forced to battle it.

It's often mentioned that the final sequence feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie, and given that 10 Cloverfield Lane was adapted from an unrelated spec script called The Cellar, it's easy to believe that the story originally ended when Michelle killed Howard and left the bunker.