10 Horror Movies That Aren’t About What You Think

Horror is all about illusions.

The entire genre is built around smoke and mirrors, whether that's to deliver surprising death scenes, keep the identity of a killer secret or simply make the audience feel unsafe. Audiences are supposed to feel powerless in order to elicit genuine fear, and as a result directors strive to subvert their expectations at every step, constantly keeping them on their toes and refusing to let them have too much of a grip on what's going on.

As the old saying goes, we fear most what we don't know, and some movies take that to heart. The following films gained a reputation - either through their own fault or the fault of audiences - as being about one thing, when really they're about something completely different.

Marketing, of course, plays a big part in a film being perceived as something it isn't. Sometimes a trailer is cut in a way which plays up marketable elements that don't get much screen time in the movie itself, whereas other times a movie's advertising purposefully hides a twist that recontextualises the whole story.

Either way, audiences got more than they bargained for with these horror flicks.

If you were a police officer and everyone was trying to tell you that the local murders in your town were actually being carried out by a werewolf, you'd think you were the only sane person left.

Luckily for you, you're not a police officer, and when you're watching a horror movie literally called 'The Wolf of Snow Hollow' and gory murders are being attributed to a lycanthrope, you're probably not going to hesitate in assuming the case has been cracked - especially when a big, wolfy figure is is seen in the shadows.

Consequently, you spend the runtime assuming you're watching a pretty effective modern werewolf flick, but the final act reveals this isn't the case at all. It turns out the murders aren't supernatural, but they are still technically caused by a 'werewolf'. Confused? Bear with me.

The very human serial killer committing the crimes does so while dressing up in a gigantic werewolf costume, ripping his victims' bodies apart while indulging in his cosplaying hobby every full moon.

So it wasn't a werewolf movie at all, just an extremely twisted crime drama.