10 More Moments That Literally Stopped Horror Movies
1. The Visible Cue Cards - Gozu
There's no filmmaker, horror or otherwise, like the great Takashi Miike - a singularly weird, twisted genius who evidently thrives on bucking cinematic convention.
Case in point, his genre-bending horror-comedy crime film Gozu features a brief aside which grinds the narrative to a halt to remind the audience that, yes, they're watching a movie.
Roughly half-way through the story, yakuza protagonist Minami's (Hideki Sone) bizarre odyssey leads him to a liquor store, where the Japanese owner's wife is an American woman with a demonstrably poor grasp of Japanese.
After a moment, Minami notices the woman staring up and reading something as she speaks, at which point he walks towards her and realises she's reading phonetic cue cards for the Japanese dialogue.
Legend dictates that the unnamed actress in question didn't know any Japanese and genuinely relied upon the cue cards for pronunciation, which Miike thought it would be hilarious to display in the scene itself.
It certainly doesn't feel that out of place in such a profoundly odd piece of cinema, but all the same, it does briefly bring the ongoing story slamming to a sudden, outrageous stop.