10 Horror Reveals Nobody Was Ready For

When done well, few things can be as impactful in the horror genre as a good reveal.

Having had an audience on a gripping rollercoaster of a ride, a smart and clever twist can take an average film and make it a great one. Of course, the opposite can happen, with a fist-chewing, forehead-slapping twist easily having the ability to completely ruin the solid groundwork that's gone before it.

There's plentiful different sorts of horror reveals, mind, for a shocking reveal could be a major plot-changing twist, but it could also be an unexpected change to an established franchise, or it maybe even it could involve simply seeing something on screen that we never thought we'd ever see.

Either way, if used in the right way - or even the wrong way - a reveal can leave an audience reeling, as they struggle to fully take in what they've just experienced. Prime examples are offerings such as The Sixth Sense, Saw, and the jaw-dropping finale of The Mist, of course, but this time out we're leaving some of the more established classics in the shadows in order to shine a spotlight on certain other horror mind-blowers.

Here, then, are ten such horror reveals that none of us were particularly ready for, and that are even still hard-hitting when revisited for multiple viewings.

For the most part, The Skeleton Key is a movie that seems to play it safe, rolling along at a steady pace and exploring a few elements of voodoo - or hoodoo, as it's referred to here.

What The Skeleton Key does have going for it, though, is the sort of reveal that can make a film be forever remembered.

By the time all is said and done with this 2005 picture, Kate Hudson's Caroline has been body-switched with old and frail Violet Deveraux. That was all done by an ancient ritual called Conjure of Sacrifice, with the form of Violet having actually been housing the spirit of hoodoo expert Mama Cecile.

The painstaking irony here, of course, is that the only way that Mama Cecile was able to take control of Caroline's body was to wait for Hudson's character to start believing in hoodoo. As Caroline begins to think that John Hurt's Ben is being affected by hoodoo, her research into this leads to her becoming a believer in this dark art - and thus, her own demise is sealed, as this now makes her susceptible to the powers and spells of hoodoo.

The gut punch of The Skeleton Key, is that you now realise that Caroline has to spend the rest of her days as a partly-paralysed mute trapped in someone else's body, unable to tell the world or warn the next potential victims of Mama Cecile and her long-time partner Papa Justify.