10 Horror Movies That Don't Start As Horror Movies
These horror movies crept up on you, alright.
Generally speaking, most movies give the audience more or less what they're expecting, because time and time again, studies have shown that most people don't like to be bamboozled with something wildly out of left field. However, every now and then, filmmakers like to do something a little different and experiment around with genre, such that their horror movie perhaps doesn't start as horror at all.
Maybe the horror is more of a slow burn, which only creeps into the story later, showing up in earnest in the second or possibly even third act. And so, inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the very subject, here are 10 horror movies that don't actually start as horror movies.
These horror films all began as something else entirely; perhaps they were more of a straight drama, a seemingly typical action film, or an adjacent genre like a thriller, only to take a hard turn into horror at one distinct point.
It's a bold move that doesn't always pay off, though in the case of the following 10 horror movies, it absolutely did, even if perhaps not everyone fully appreciated the genre shifts.
10. Sinners
Let's kick things off with the most recent movie on this list.
Ryan Coogler's Sinners was unambiguously marketed as a vampire film, enough that many were surprised to see how relatively subdued the film's horror elements ultimately were.
Coogler spends a long, long time introducing viewers to his world and the characters within it, all of it so utterly engrossing that you're unlikely to get impatient waiting for the blood-suckers to show up. Even so, vampires are only barely glimpsed at the end of the first act, while the second act is all about building suspense, before Sinners finally morphs into an outright horror movie in the grisly final reel.
Sinners is such a captivating stew of a movie, and between the mesmerising visuals, stunning music, and phenomenal performances, few are likely to feel short-changed by how little horror there actually is in the first half. Ryan Coogler masterfully trojan-horsed horror into a film that really owes just as much to Westerns and musicals.