8 Horror Movies Built On A Lie

A story woven around a narrative lie, this one is a big old spoiler if you haven't seen the movie. Jacob's Ladder is the story of a man coming to terms with PTSD after the Vietnam war, seeing nightmarish hallucinations around the city after returning home from his deployment.

Or at least that's what you're lead to believe until the end of the film. Actually a whole representation of purgatory - or at least, some space between life and death that Jacob finds himself stuck in - Jacob's Ladder is really a rumination on moving on into the afterlife, with Jacob himself succumbing to his battle wounds after desperately fighting to live for most of the film's runtime.

Much like The Sixth Sense, this is a film that focusses its lie on viewer experience - pulling the rug out at the last moment to change the movie into an entirely new beast by the time the credits roll. It's the most common type of horror movie lie there is, but Jacob's Ladder is a great one to use as a blanket example for the concept here.