10 MORE Horror Movies That Broke All The Rules

It's not often that a film can tell you exactly what it's going to do and still manage to flip it and reverse it on your expectations. The Witch is one of those powerful horror films that doesn't need to rely on any genre gimmickry, instead straight up telling the audience from the outset that the mystery of who the real witch is and whether there is one at all is already solved.

Of course, there's a thick vein of ambiguity as to what we can believe thanks to the family's arguments and accusations between each other that colour the audience's experience, but The Witch plays its hand as soon as it shows baby Sam's fate at the mercy of a witch in the woods. Throughout the film, we're treated to the odd shot of this outlier to the Puritan family - such as when she's seducing son Caleb or potentially taking on the form of a rabbit that crops up continuously - clearly showing us exactly what's going down whether we believe it or not.

It should come as no surprise that Black Philip is particularly devilish at the end of the movie, yet it does because we're so hesitant to take a film on face value.