10 Recent Horror Movie Deaths Nobody Saw Coming
3. Katherine West - The Exorcist: Believer
Kids are typically off limits for all but the most transgressive and boundary-pushing of horror films - looking at you, Terrifier 3 - but The Exorcist: Believer pulled a cruel, sneaky fast one on audiences in its tricky climax. Yet it's also proof-perfect that shocking does not a good death scene make.
During the climax when the heroes are attempting to perform an exorcism on possessed children Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia O'Neill), they're given a choice by the demon - pick one child to live and one to die.
Katherine's father Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) instinctively picks his daughter, after which the demon reveals its ruse, that he didn't choose the child to live - he chose the child to die.
And so at that moment, Angela is revived while Katherine is killed and dragged to Hell. A cruel and unexpected outcome, admittedly, albeit one that doesn't fit at all with the strangely hopeful note that the movie swiftly ends on.