The Mist's shocking ending played us all like a damn fiddle.
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00:00While horror is frequently dismissed as one of the most predictable and least imaginative
00:04of all film genres, that's really not true at all, as is proven beyond any doubt by these
00:10ten movies alone.
00:12Satisfaction often stems from our expectations being subverted in clever and creative ways,
00:17and that's certainly what happened in these films, which dared to fake audiences out in
00:21devilishly deceptive fashion.
00:24So with that in mind then, I'm Ellie with WhatCulture here with ten horror movie fake
00:28outs we all fell for.
00:30Number 10.
00:31The cops arrive at the end in Get Out.
00:34Jordan Peele's masterful, Oscar-winning horror satire Get Out climaxes with embattled black
00:40man Chris fighting off the racist, brainwash-happy Armitage family, and finally facing off against
00:46his own ex-girlfriend Rose.
00:48Despite Rose's attempts to kill him, Chris finds himself unable to strangle her to death,
00:53and just as he relinquishes his grip on her throat, the sirens of a police car blare out
00:58behind them both.
00:59The cops are here, and they're about to stumble upon the sight of a black man knelt over a
01:03horribly wounded white woman.
01:05How exactly does anyone expect this situation to go?
01:09But Peele then cuts to the door of the police car, where the word airport is visible.
01:13As it turns out, this isn't a patrol unit, but Chris's airport police officer pal, Rod.
01:19Peele so brilliantly exploits our understandably cynical expectations for any situation where
01:24a black individual is flagged down by the police, only to flip it so ecstatically on its head
01:29with the revelation that the siren and flashing lights are actually a safe haven for Chris.
01:34Number 9.
01:35The double opening fake-out in Scream 4.
01:37The sequel begins with two young women being slaughtered by Ghostface in standard Scream fashion.
01:43But as they die their ultra-gory deaths, Wes Craven pulls back to reveal that we're actually
01:48watching the opening sequence of Stab 6, a sequel in Scream's movie-within-a-movie franchise,
01:54based on the events of the Scream series itself, no less.
01:57The real start of Scream 4 involves two friends, played by Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, watching
02:03Stab 6 and disparaging the state of contemporary horror movies, before Bell's character suddenly
02:09stabs Paquin with a knife, and Craven pulls out again to reveal that this is really the
02:13start of Stab 7.
02:15Craven then finally proceeds with the movie's actual prologue, as Jenny and Marnie watch Stab
02:217 and are subsequently murdered by the new Ghostface killer.
02:25Craven went full meta here, and for better or worse, nobody saw either of the fake-outs
02:30coming.
02:31Number 8.
02:32Marion Crane is the protagonist in Psycho.
02:35While it's one of horror cinema's worst-kept secrets these days, you have to respect the
02:39ambition of Alfred Hitchcock to execute such a daring audience fake-out way back in 1960.
02:46Though Psycho's marketing made it abundantly clear that Janet Leigh would be starring as
02:50protagonist Marion Crane, this was all part of Hitchcock's master plan to catch
02:55audiences off guard.
02:57Just before the film's midway point, Marion is suddenly killed off by the knife-wielding
03:01killer while taking a shower, completely upending our expectation of where the story is going
03:07and who the protagonist is.
03:09At this point, the perspective shifts to Bates Motel owner Norman Bates, and because
03:13one fake-out apparently wasn't enough, Hitchcock then builds up Norman's mother to be the killer,
03:18only to reveal that it's actually a mentally ill Norman himself.
03:21As it turns out, Norman has developed an alternate personality in his mind in the vein of his
03:27mother, who he himself killed many years earlier.
03:30Number 7.
03:31Zepp is Jigsaw in Saw.
03:34Saw boasts not only one of the most ingenious plot twists in the history of the horror genre,
03:39but really cinema period.
03:41And a big part of the twist's success lies in how ingeniously it misdirects viewers with
03:45a fake-out villain reveal.
03:47In the third act, we learn that the serial killer known as Jigsaw appears to be Zepp Hindle,
03:52an orderly who works at the same hospital as Dr. Gordon.
03:55At film's end, Zepp attempts to kill Gordon in the iconic grotty bathroom where Gordon
04:00and Adam's deadly game is being played out, only for Adam to catch Zepp off guard and beat
04:05him to death with a toilet tank lid.
04:07Game over, right?
04:08Not quite.
04:09Gordon, who'd just sawn his foot off, then crawls away to summon help for a still-chained
04:14Adam, just as Adam searches Zepp's corpse and finds a tape.
04:18The tape reveals that Zepp wasn't actually Jigsaw all along, but simply another pawn in
04:23the game, with Jigsaw's identity then revealed to be John Kramer, one of Gordon's terminal
04:28cancer patients.
04:29Zepp was simply doing as Jigsaw instructed in order to receive an antidote to the slow-acting
04:34poison coursing through his own veins.
04:37And because this isn't wild enough, the dead body that's been laying in the middle of
04:41the bathroom since the game started suddenly stands up, alive.
04:45The not-corpse is in fact Kramer himself, who has evidently been observing the entire
04:49game unfold with a front row seat.
04:51Number 6.
04:52Ripley destroys the Nostromo in Alien.
04:55Ridley Scott's Alien may be a deliberate, methodically paced sci-fi horror movie for the
05:00most part, but it certainly gives audiences plenty of bang for their buck during its action-packed
05:05finale.
05:06Near the end of the film, Ripley seemingly kills the Xenomorph when she activates the Nostromo's
05:11self-destruct sequence and evacuates the vessel in an escape shuttle.
05:15The ship explodes and Ripley prepares to enter stasis for the trek home, but at that moment,
05:20she realises that there's a stowaway on board the shuttle.
05:23The damn Xenomorph!
05:24And so Ripley dons a spacesuit as she prepares to battle with the alien creature once more,
05:29eventually culminating in the Xeno being blasted out into the cold, uncaring vacuum of space.
05:35Only then, with the alien threat categorically dealt with, is Ripley able to safely enter
05:40stasis with the mission's only other survivor, the cruise cat Jones.
05:44Ripley's scuttling the Nostromo would have been a sufficiently exciting climax for such
05:49a consistently restrained film, but Scott ultimately decided to go all out with a delirious,
05:54two-pronged finale.
05:56Number 5 – The FBI raids Buffalo Bill's house in The Silence of the Lambs
06:02The Silence of the Lambs surely earned its Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing for
06:06one brilliantly executed moment during the movie's climax, when the FBI prepares to raid serial
06:12killer Buffalo Bill's home, all while agent Clarice Starling pays a visit to someone who
06:17knew Bill's first victim.
06:19As the FBI ring the bell on Bill's home, he goes to answer the door and is greeted by Clarice.
06:24As director Jonathan Demme cuts back and forth between the FBI breaking into an empty house
06:29and Clarice talking to Buffalo Bill, it's clear that the FBI got the wrong house and
06:33Clarice has wound up in Bill's company all by herself.
06:37It's one of cinema's all-time greatest WTF moments, ensuring that most anyone watching
06:43for the first time takes a sharp, involuntary intake of breath as they process the dangerous
06:48situation Clarice has found herself in.
06:50The scene is such an outstanding example of parallel editing that it's regularly shown
06:55in film schools around the globe.
06:57If you want to get one over on your audience without making it feel massively cheap, this
07:01is how you do it.
07:03Number 4 – Brahms is a possessed doll in The Boy
07:062016's The Boy was sold to audiences as yet another possessed doll movie, albeit having
07:12more in common with Annabelle than, say, the campy theatrics of child's play.
07:17The story follows Greta, who is hired by a wealthy old couple to act as the nanny for
07:21Brahms, a porcelain doll serving as a stand-in for their real son of the same name, who apparently
07:27died in a house fire two decades prior.
07:30Like Annabelle, we never see Brahms move around on screen, but then the third act delivers
07:34a wildly unexpected and ludicrously entertaining twist – the doll isn't possessed at all.
07:40As it turns out, Brahms survived the fire 20 years earlier and has been living in the walls
07:45of his parents' mansion ever since.
07:47It was him who was moving the doll throughout the film, offering up an amusingly grounded
07:52subversion of the typical possessed doll shtick.
07:55Sadly, 2020's sequel Brahms' The Boy 2 effectively retconned this clever upending
08:00of expectations by revealing that the doll is actually possessed, while the flesh-and-blood
08:04Brahms from this movie is bafflingly nowhere to be found.
08:08Number 3 – Esther is a satanic child in Orphan
08:13The marketing for 2009's Orphan was centred around the fact that Kate and John Coleman's
08:18adopted nine-year-old daughter Esther had a secret of some kind.
08:21There's something wrong with Esther, the posters told us, and so audiences were led
08:25to believe that Orphan was basically a contemporary riff on The Omen, with Esther being the devilishly
08:30inclined scorn of Satan, or something like that anyway.
08:34But the film's climactic reveal is that Esther isn't actually a child at all.
08:38She's a 33-year-old woman suffering from a rare hormone disorder that stunts her growth,
08:43and gives her the appearance of a child, which she also accentuates with elaborate makeup.
08:48Ultimately, though, Orphan's story is ridiculous. It's fundamentally realistic in that there's
08:52nothing supernatural about it, as surely nobody saw coming.
08:56Casting a child in the role of Esther and ageing her up for the final stretch was really the
09:01masterstroke that prevented most people from figuring out what was going on.
09:05What a ride this movie is!
09:07Even though Esther dies at the end, we'll get to see more of her later this year with
09:11the impending release of the prequel Orphan First Kill, with Isabel Fuhrman returning to
09:16portray the character once again.
09:182. The Monsters in the Mist in the Mist
09:23Frank Darabont's terrific adaptation of Stephen King's novella The Mist ends on a note that's
09:28paradoxically hopeful for humanity and absolutely horrifying on a more personal, intimate level.
09:34In the film's third act, survivor David drives through the mist-strewn city streets and catches
09:39sight of a gigantic skyscraper-sized six-legged beast, seemingly confirming to him that there's
09:45no hope for humanity to fend off the alien invasion.
09:49And so, David enters a suicide pact with his fellow survivors, culminating in him shooting
09:54each of them dead, including his own son Billy.
09:57But David doesn't have enough bullets to do himself in, and so willingly steps out into
10:01the mist to be consumed by the monsters, only to see a tank emerge from the mist to his
10:07absolute confusion.
10:08A convoy follows the tank, revealing that the army has managed to turn the tide against
10:13the aliens and successfully repel them, basically making the euthanasia of four people, including
10:18his son, completely pointless.
10:20Had they waited two more minutes, they would have all been saved.
10:231. Samantha Kills Herself in the House of the Devil
10:28Ty West's expertly crafted 2009 cult horror flick, The House of the Devil, centres around
10:33Samantha, a cash-strapped college student who takes a babysitting job, only to end up
10:37facing off against a family who have malevolent designs on her.
10:42During her first night working at the house, Samantha is drugged and wakes up to find herself
10:46part of an occult ritual.
10:48She eventually manages to make a violent escape, all while being chased by the family's deranged
10:52patriarch, Mr. Ullman.
10:54The two eventually face off in a graveyard, where Ullman suggests that Samantha is about
10:58to become the vessel for an entity referred to only as him, and so rather than shoot Ullman,
11:04Samantha decides to turn the gun around on herself.
11:07To Ullman's horror, Samantha shoots herself point-blank in the head, and the screen abruptly
11:11cuts to black.
11:12For a few seconds, this seems like the movie's emphatic, bleak ending, only for Wes to serve
11:18up one final scene.
11:20In a hospital, we learn that Samantha actually survived her self-inflicted gunshot, just as
11:24a nurse enters the room, pats her stomach and says, both of you will be fine.
11:29Through means that are just too damn horrifying to linger on, Samantha is now pregnant with
11:33what may or may not be the spawn of Satan, because Ty West wanted to ensure everyone went
11:38home feeling like absolute trash.
11:41And that concludes our list, if you can think of any we missed, then do let us know in the
11:44comments below, and while you're there don't forget to like, and subscribe, and tap that
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11:49Also head over to Twitter and follow us there, and I can be found across various social medias
11:53just by searching Ellie Littlechild.
11:55I've been Ellie with WhatCulture, I hope you have a magical day, and I'll see you real soon.