10 Horror Movies That Don't Start As Horror Movies
6. From Dusk Till Dawn
There are few better examples of a slow-creep horror film than Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, which for its first hour doesn't feel like a horror movie at all.
Instead, it begins as a neo-noir thriller, in which fugitive brothers Seth and Richie Gecko (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) take a family hostage in order to cross over the Mexican border to freedom.
The group then heads to a strip club, The Titty Twister, where the Geckos will rendezvous with a contact who will escort them to a safe haven, only for said strip club to actually be infested with vampires. And so, more than half-way through the movie, it shifts completely from a seemingly grounded, pulpy thriller into a brilliantly unhinged action-horror flick.
Some of the marketing played this pretty coy at the time of the film's release, and if you just so happened to stumble upon From Dusk Till Dawn on TV one night, you probably had no idea that it was going to transform so dramatically out of nowhere. However, it's such an expertly executed shift and the mayhem that follows is so damn fun, that few have ever complained about it.