10 Recent Horror Movie Deaths Nobody Saw Coming

Death is an integral part of just about every horror movie, just as it is life itself, and that's part of why the genre is so popular - it allows audiences to explore the notion of mortality in an accessible and entertaining way, whether consciously or not.

While we are therefore conditioned to expect deaths a-plenty in just about any horror film worth its salt, sometimes those demises can still catch us all unawares by killing off a character who seemed damn-near guaranteed to survive to the end. 

Or in the very least, we certainly expected each of these characters to last a little while longer before being shuffled off their respective mortal coils. And so, the following 10 recent horror movies all bamboozled audiences with shockingly insane death scenes that came wildly out of left field, challenging our preconceptions of the genre in the process.

Some may have been left unsatisfied or merely bewildered by some of these death scenes, but each was nevertheless bracingly effective in its jolting shock factor. 

Love 'em or hate 'em, they're the death scenes that'll linger in your brain for the foreseeable future.

While it wasn't exactly a surprise that Nicolas Cage's deranged titular serial killer was no more by the end of Osgood Perkins' surreal horror film Longlegs, it was a genuine shock to see him taken off the chess board so long before the climax.

During the much-hyped scene where FBI agent protagonist Lee (Maika Monroe) confronts a recently captured Longlegs in an interrogation room, he signs off their conversation by repeatedly slamming his face into the room's table until dying.

Given that audiences quite understandably expected Longlegs to escape ahead of a tense final standoff with Lee, it was a genuine shock to see him nope out of the climax entirely, at which point the plot pivots to focus on Longlegs' accomplice, Lee's mother Ruth (Alicia Witt).

Considering that Cage didn't exactly have a ton of screen time up to this point, seeing him take his leave 20 minutes before the end left some of the actor's die-hard fans a tad disappointed.