10 Horror Movies That Judge You For Watching
These horror movies all gave audience members the side-eye.
What are movies if not an escape from the craziness of reality? And while many films will simply allow audiences to forget their real-life problems and be transported to another world for two hours, not all works of cinema have quite the same agenda.
Sometimes movies want to draw attention to their own conception as fiction or, further still, force the viewer to consider their own role while watching the movie.
These 10 horror films, for instance, all threw some unsubtle shade at the audience for even daring to watch.
From lamenting their unimaginative viewing choices to critiquing their insatiable desire for "popcorn" entertainment, and even mocking them for expecting what the marketing sold them on, these films all judged the hell out of you for pressing play.
In some cases it absolutely worked in the film's favour and only accentuated its amusingly satirical, self-aware tone, while in others you'd be understood for feeling excessively trolled.
After all, if you're giving a movie your time and your hard-earned money, do you really want to be lectured or perhaps even insulted for doing so? That's not usually good business...
10. Jason X
By the time any horror movie franchise takes the action to space, it's clearly out of genuinely good ideas, so Jason X decided to swing for the fences and take a cheeky shot at its own over-eager fans who kept pouring their hard-earned cash into the Friday the 13th series.
Mid-way through the movie, protagonist Rowan (Lexa Doig) explains that she headed up a task force that experimented with ways to kill Jason (Kane Hodder) once and for all, and when they realised he couldn't be killed, they simply put him in cryogenic stasis.
It's not difficult to see parallels between this and the movie franchise itself, a shambling, unkillable beast of an IP that was ultimately put on ice for almost an entire decade after the release of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday before Jason X was made.
But the kicker comes when Rowan takes a thinly-veiled crack at both studio executives and the audience themselves:
"Unfortunately, some people who were too smart for their own good felt that a creature that couldn't be killed was simply too valuable to just file away. In the end, it always comes down to money."
The fact that Rowan didn't stare directly in the camera lens while she said it passes for restraint, basically.