10 Horror Movies That Lied To You In The Title

While it often pays to toe the straightforwardly descriptive line to sell your movie -- where would Cocaine Bear or Snakes on a Plane be if not for their titles -- that doesn't make it a hard and fast rule. And many horror films have made their names on obscure, irrelevant and misleading titles that coax audiences in one direction before flipping 180 and sending them hurtling back in the other.

Granted, the more arthouse things get, the less the title tends to relate to the physical action of what we see onscreen. But this isn't the only reason writers, directors, producers and production companies produce obscure or misleading names for their flicks. No, motives abound when it comes to naming conventions. Sometimes the creative powers-that-be intentionally want to wave a red herring at the audience from the off, sometimes unexpected or unwarranted future sequels put egg on the face of their boldly titled predecessors, and sometimes the whole thing is just one big joke.

Whatever the rhyme or reason, there are plenty horror films waiting to ensnare us with their lies, and it's time to name and shame 10 of them, and maybe figure out a few reasons why!

Riding high on the mid-late noughties wave of found footage features that began with Paranormal Activity (2007), The Last Exorcism promised a new breed of exorcism cinema, with an impressive future-star cast in Caleb Landry Jones and Patrick Fabian.

The film follows the story of cleric Cotton Marcus (Fabian), who is riddled with remorse after years of conning the devout. Cotton decides to expose his own work on film, captured by a pair of documentarians, and travels to a Louisiana farm, where a young woman -- Nell (Ashley Bell) -- is apparently possessed by a demonic entity. No points for guessing whether this one's real or not.

Cotton has to draw upon his faith in order to try and protect Nell and himself from the onslaught of a bona fide demonic presence, the documentarians are killed, and a hellspawn is, well, spawned. The End.

Except it's not -- The Last Exorcism was followed by the unironically titled The Last Exorcism Part II in 2013. Ditching the found footage format, the film dragged itself over everything that made the previous movie good and proved that studios will make anything if they think audiences will buy it. And they kind of did -- with $25 million made at the box office against a $5 million budget -- but thankfully not enough for a third "last" exorcism.