10 More Horror Movie Characters Who Didn't Know They Were The Victim

It's a pretty basic expectation of horror movies that most victims have a decent idea of what's happening to them, whether being pursued by a masked slasher or battling a supernatural presence in their home. They don't need to know everything, but the broad details? For sure.

Yet some adventurous filmmakers like to toy with conventions in order to challenge audiences, by centering their movies around characters who, believe it or not, aren't quite aware they were victims all along.

Particularly where supernatural horror is concerned, it's far more common for characters to not quite grasp the full extent of their predicament, whether they've literally been dead the whole damn time or are at least on death's door and circling the drain throughout.

It's a tough trick to pull off well these days, given how horror and other genres have been wildly oversaturated with this sort of plot twist, yet these 10 movies all more-or-less pulled it off.

Following up our prior article on the subject, these characters were left to accept that, believe it or not, they were card-carrying victims after all...

Dead End takes place on Christmas Eve as Frank Harrington (Ray Wise) drives his family to his in-laws' home, and out of apparent boredom decides to take a shortcut through a remote forest area.

Later, Frank falls asleep at the wheel and very nearly crashes the car into an oncoming vehicle, after which the family finds themselves trapped on a seemingly never-ending road.

Throughout the rest of the movie, the family end up being brutally killed one-by-one while experiencing a bevy of bizarre sights, including a hearse driving down the road.

Only Frank's daughter Marion (Alexandra Holden) is left alive at film's end, and surprise surprise, she subsequently wakes up in a hospital, where it's revealed that she's been in a coma after her father crashed their car, in turn killing every other member of the family.

And so, the gruesome deaths suffered by the family members throughout the movie precisely mirror how they died in the actual car crash.

Granted, a credits stinger does cast some doubt on what's truly real, given that a note Frank wrote during Marion's comatose dream is recovered from the road in real life, suggesting it wasn't entirely cooked up by Marion's brain.

All the same, Marion had no earthly idea what was happening to her until she finally woke up in that hospital.