10 Horror Movies That Subtly Spoil The Ending Early

Foreshadowing is a key part of most works of fiction, from most genres. And while literature generally offers either the opportunity to bury foreshadowing in themes or to basically spoil the whole thing by spelling it out on the page, the visual and multi-sensory nature of films provides the platform to marry subtlety with plot spoilers right under our noses.

Only some directors do this, and few of them work in horror, but those who do have a number of clever ways of signposting their finale or twist before it happens.

The smallest scene details can give away the ending ahead of time, clever foreshadowing can be achieved with throwaway actions, and sometimes directors even have their characters just outright say the ending or big reveal, but in such a way that nobody really takes notice - or we think it means something else. 

Once you know this, you can go back and spot the ways that the following movies quietly spoil things: Saw, The Lost Boys, Last Night in Soho - they've all got that little something extra waiting for you to see.

Horror aficionado Jordan Peele builds his films in response to generic conventions, using his knowledge of the wider horror landscape to subvert narrative and loading small, significant details into every scene. And his first feature, Get Out, is an exemplar of precisely this approach.

The film follows Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a young black man, on his journey to meet his white girlfriend Rose Armitage’s (Allison Williams) family for the first time, in their waspy town in upstate New York. Once there, Chris finds them hospitable but with a sinister edge, their comments and behaviours all building towards a nightmarish revelation: Chris is the next candidate in the Armitage and their white, elderly community’s plan to transplant their brains into black bodies and live long beyond their natural years. Needless to say, Peele quietly tees this up long before the movie’s final act arrives.

When Chris is packing at the beginning of the film, Rose tells his dog she wants to “pry something out of your dad". On a call with Chris’ friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery) on the way to the Armitage’s, Rod - an airport worker - tells Chris that the next terrorist attack will be conducted by the elderly. And when family patriarch Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) is telling Chris about his mother on arrival, he says “we keep a piece of her in here”, before Peele pans the camera to Georgina - the black body containing Dean’s supposedly departed mother. Nuff said.