8 Horror Movies That Told The Audience Too Much
Did anyone really need to see Michael Myers' childhood in the Halloween reboot?
When looking across the many genres of film out there, the 'less is more' mantra is one that is particularly applicable to horror.
By drip-feeding the audience small, timely nuggets of information in a nuanced manner, a filmmaker can carve up something brilliant within the confines of horror. But go the other way, and give too much information to your audience, or deliver that information too quickly, and you can easily sour what was once a promising picture.
It takes a special sort of talent to balance what to tell its audience and when to tell it, and that's why names like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Dario Argento are all held in such high regard by horror hounds - for these are just three such names who masterfully crafted their horror tales over the decades.
Not everybody can be a Carpenter, a Craven, or an Argento, mind, and that is why those filmmakers are the gold standard of horror movie-making and beyond. Still, in some cases, you don't have to be an all-time great of the industry to know that certain films are slapping audiences around the face with far too much information.
For various reasons, then, here are eight such horror films that simply told us all too much.
8. Switchblade Romance - The Twist Ending
By now, any horror hound worth their salt will be well aware of Switchblade Romance, aka Haute Tension, aka High Tension.
A truly phenomenal, pulse-racing horror movie for 80 minutes of its 95-minute run time, the film is one of the most gripping of its generation. When it comes down to it, though, Switchblade Romance didn't need to tell us that the real killer was Marie.
In giving the audience this information, that rendered the rest of the movie completely and utterly irrelevant. For a film to spend so long being so great, to then have that reveal? That was something that was better left unsaid or maybe even simply insinuated.
The majority of the tense, taught, seat-gripping moments we'd just witnessed? So many of them just would not be at all possible if Marie was the one carrying out those acts.
Switchblade Romance famously has one of the most disappointing twists in modern horror history, and if Alexandre Aja's picture had stayed away from telling us the real truth about one of its central protagonists being the villain of the piece, the film would've made so much more sense.
Hell, even just a more ambiguous ending that Marie might have been the killer would've been better than outright telling us this information.