10 Horror Movies Which Broke The Fourth Wall To Scare You
This time, you can't just tell yourself, "It's only a movie, it's only a movie"...
Some horror films will do anything to scare an audience. Not just the bad ones, either.
All is fair in love and genre cinema, and even many great horror filmmakers like Scream's Wes Craven or Halloween's John Carpenter aren't above using dirty tricks like jump scares and "he's behind you" moments to spook their viewers.
One of horror's longest-standing cheap tricks, however, is the undeniably effective gambit of breaking the fourth wall. Nothing is scarier (and occasionally funnier) than when a film acknowledges that it's just a movie, only for its monster to then threaten the viewers themselves instead of the movie's characters.
It can be as as small and comparatively subtle as an evil figure turning to stare right into the camera lens, or as dramatic and ambitious as an entirely meta movie which knows it's a movie, but there's one thing which the ten films listed here have in common. They are all horror films which turned on you, the viewer, (and their camera man) to scare audiences senseless.
Also, trying to keep the found footage cheating to a minimum here, so there's only one film on this list where the director opted to use that cop-out sort-of-meta framework.
10. The Woman in Black
Released in 2012, The Woman in Black was a terrifying piece of period horror from the thought-to-be-defunct British genre stalwart, Hammer Studios. Starring Harry Potter himself Daniel Radcliffe as a grieving father tasked with taking an inventory of a supposedly haunted remote manor, the film's creepy story saw a string of gruesome accidents befall local children after the unassuming protagonist's arrival.
This bleak flick was a tonal departure from director James Watkins' bloodier previous film, 2008's hoodie horror Eden Lake. However, despite earning a 12 rating in its home country, The Woman in Black managed to be more memorably dark than a lot of gorier entries into the genre.
The film's scary simplicity is best epitomised in the closing moments of this chilling horror.
Radcliffe's hero may be dead, but he's reunited with his son and wife in the afterlife, so at least it's not totally terrifying...
That is, until the eponymous evil turns to face you, the unsuspecting viewer, in the film's unexpected and blood-freezing final shot.