13 Totally WTF Horror Movie Plot Twists
8. Charlie Dies In The First Act - Hereditary
Ari Aster's sublime debut Hereditary touts an ingenious bait-and-switch which brilliantly fooled anyone who followed the movie's pre-release marketing.
The trailers focused on Annie (Toni Collette) and her family mourning the loss of her mother, while disguising the fact that Annie's daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is in fact suddenly and violently killed at the end of the movie's first act.
As Charlie attends a party with her brother Peter (Alex Wolff), she eats a cake containing nuts and goes into anaphylactic shock.
A stoned Peter frantically drives Charlie to the hospital, but when he swerves to avoid a deer, Charlie is promptly decapitated by a telephone pole.
The trailers did such a fantastic job of suggesting Charlie was alive for most of the movie that her early demise comes as a complete, dread-soaked surprise, drastically altering the mood of the movie and creating an "anything goes" vibe from that point onward.
To make it even more upsetting, Aster then spends the fallout of Charlie's death focused on Annie's anguished screams before cutting to a shot of Charlie's severed head being feasted upon by ants.