12 Brilliant Movies That Completely Lied What They Were About

9. The Cabin In The Woods

The Lie: The advertising for this horror comedy for the most part sold the film as a straight-up horror, leaning into its generic premise and absurdly lazy title, in order to lure in audiences who just wanted a dumb horror film with a familiar premise.

The Reality: In actual fact, the film is a satire of horror movie tropes and the film industry as a whole, what with the workers in the "facility" who manipulate the central scenario acting as a substitute for filmmakers, while the Old Gods who threaten to destroy the world are the movie-going audience, who demand that the situation play out according to the familiar tropes of the horror genre.

Though the actual sci-fi aspect of the movie becomes totally apparent to even lowest common denominator audiences early on, they still might not appreciate that the movie is ribbing moviemaking as an enterprise, specifically how template-driven Hollywood horror tends to be, and how audiences themselves only encourage this by how they vote with their wallets. And ironically, in choosing to see this film under the pretense that it's just generic shlock, they're proving the movie's point while inadvertently giving an original horror vision some well-earned box office dough. Win win.