10 More Horror Movies That Cleverly START With Huge Twists
5. I Saw The Devil
Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil revolves around intelligence agent Kim Soo-hyun (Lee), who seeks to track down the serial killer who murdered his fiancee.
Per genre convention, we as the audience expect that the showdown between Soo-hyun and killer Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) will be saved for the very end of the movie, but that's not true at all.
Rather, in an unexpected twist, Soo-hyun ends up catching and subduing Kyung-chul barely one-third of the way through the story. But it gets twistier still - Soo-hyun forces him to swallow a tracker and then just... lets him go.
Soo-hyun repeatedly captures and releases his nemesis throughout the rest of the film in an attempt to prolong his torture, though the grim flip-side is that this also allows Kyung-chul to continue his killing.
It's a total 180 from what most were surely expecting from the movie's opening minutes, ensuring that I Saw the Devil remains a daring and provocative horror-thriller all the way to its catharsis-denying conclusion.