10 Horror Movies That Forced You To Answer Impossible Questions

Cutting off your foot to survive is easier said than done.

Saw movie
Lionsgate

As much as horror movies are often fondly remembered for their larger-than-life masked antagonists, over-the-top gore, and fantastical terror, horror is typically also a reflection of real world concerns.

The genre frequently holds the mirror up to humanity's collective morbid curiosity, exploring ideas of death and bodily destruction in an accessible, entertaining forum.

But great horror films may also force viewers to consider how they themselves would act in a given situation, such as tackling a brutal moral dilemma or deciding whether or not to commit a terrifying act for the greater good.

These 10 horror films all asked audiences to look at the options and make their own decision - it might be the total opposite of what the protagonist did, or even something the movie itself hadn't really considered.

Each of these questions has no right or wrong answer, and so viewers are encouraged to ponder whether the answer they pick would really be so easy to carry out in reality.

After all, screaming at a slasher movie character from the comfort of your own TV is one thing, but if you were in the situation yourself, you probably wouldn't be a whole lot more useful...

10. Would You Kill Your Loved Ones To Spare Them A Worse Fate? - The Mist

Saw movie
MGM

Frank Darabont's The Mist chronicles the efforts of David Drayton (Thomas Jane) to survive amid an invasion of Lovecraftian monsters upon Earth.

The film ends with David and a small band of fellow survivors, including his eight-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble), left utterly hopeless when their car runs out of gas shortly after driving past a gigantic, skyscraper-sized monster.

Humanity seems doomed to fall to the aliens, and so David and his fellow adult survivors agree to a suicide pact, to be spared the horror of being ripped apart by the creatures.

David ends up shooting the three other adults dead, but most agonisingly of all also kills his son.

Though the outcome for David is even worse - as before he can do himself in, he finds out that the military were literally minutes away from taking control of the invasion - the ending still offers provocative food-for-thought.

In a dire situation, could you bring yourself to spare your loved ones a potentially horrific death by "euthanising" them at your own hand, or would you rather wait for them to be torn apart by aliens?

Even with all hope abandoned, it's an absolutely impossible choice, and one likely to haunt you either way.

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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.