8 Horror Movies That Tricked You Into Rooting For The Villain
3. Leatherface
By the time you get to the eighth (!) instalment in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, you're pretty familiar with Leatherface. The dude's love of carving human meat and making himself up pretty new face grafts has been well established, and you know going into these movies that he'll play a major role in one way or another.
Consequently, going into prequel flick Leatherface - all about the character's rise from disturbed child to insane serial killer - you're not expecting anything more than what it says on the tin.
However, despite the horror putting its villain right there in the title, it does manage to pull the rug out from even die-hard fans.
That's because throughout the movie the young lad we assume to be the future Leatherface, Bud, isn't actually him. You can't blame audiences for making this assumption though, as the writers purposefully draw our attention to the similarities between the two characters: they're both heavy built, both have long scraggly hair, and both have little in the way of social skills.
This makes it a huge surprise, then, when the seemingly good-natured Jackson, who we previously thought to be the movie's protagonist, turns out to be the iconic villain. After a bullet tears through his face and a violent chase snaps something in his mind, the flick ends with him donning the familiar mask made of human flesh.