Summary
- Horror movies typically rely on their premise alone, but some great films have successfully abandoned their original premises to subvert audience expectations.
- Movies like "Audition," "The Tall Man," and "Hereditary" take unexpected turns midway through the story, delivering unforgettable and genre-defying twists.
- "Psycho" and "Malignant" are prime examples of films that dismiss their initial plotlines to reveal more shocking and horrifying narratives, ultimately enhancing the overall viewing experience.
Some horror movies take a wild left turn at the midpoint, suddenly becoming scarier, funnier, and sometimes more original. Traditionally, horror movies live or die based on their premise alone. Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street, for instance, may have benefited from superb performances from Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, and a young Johnny Depp, but the idea of a serial killer who can attack his victims in their dreams was the movie’s real selling point. Before viewers got to see a second of Craven’s masterful direction and smart, inventive scares, A Nightmare On Elm Street won over audiences with its guiding premise.
With this in mind, it's surprising when horror movies abandon their plot midway through the story. While successful TV shows drop their original premises all the time, this works because television writers have much more screen time at their disposal. Horror movies need to be quick, tense, and impactful, and nothing slows momentum worse than switching gears in the midst of a two-hour film. However, there are exeptions to nearly every rule, as some great horror movies have abandoned their original premises - and were better for it. By unexpectedly changing stories, these horror movies proved the genre can use narrative conventions to subvert audience expectations.
10 Audition
Takashi Miike is a Japanese director famous for disturbing, often gruesome cult movies such as Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer. However, Miike’s versatile career proves he is much more than just a horror director and, for the first half of 1999’s Audition, viewers may well have thought they were watching a playful rom-com from the veteran director. Audition’s first half saw a lonely old widower, Shigeharu Aoyama, and his friend set up an audition to find him a new romantic partner. Later, the seemingly perfect candidate turned out to have a dark secret, turning this sweet romance into an unforgettably gruesome nightmare.
9 I Came By
While Audition is a rare Japanese horror movie Hollywood never remade, 2022’s I Came By is an English Netflix thriller that feels like a remake even though it's actually an original effort. This Hitchcock homage stuck close to its inspiration with I Came By’s story of a graffiti artist running into trouble when he tagged a rich man’s mansion. I Came By doubled down on its creative debt to Hitchcock (specifically Psycho) when the movie shockingly killed off its biggest star and its main character halfway through the story before starting over with a new, more successful hero.
8 The Tall Man
For the first half of its runtime, 2012’s The Tall Man felt like a supernatural horror movie akin to 2018’s Slender Man or 2017’s The Bye Bye Man. However, when Jessica Biel’s Julia looked into the eponymous entity that kidnapped her young son, she soon discovered that the Tall Man was a much more human foe than originally thought. As befits Martyrs director Pascal Laugier, The Tall Man was actually a dark drama about human trafficking disguised as a horror movie for its opening act.
7 The Midnight Meat Train
2008’s The Midnight Meat Train took the opposite approach. The dark psychological thriller felt like a gruesome serial killer story at first, but eventually evolved into a story packed with supernatural elements. When the hero discovered that the serial killer he pursued was secretly performing human sacrifices for a race of subterranean lizard people, The Midnight Meat Train became a wild, surreal Lovecraftian monster movie rather than another Se7en ripoff.
6 Hereditary
At times, the first half of director Ari Aster’s Hereditary felt like an extremely grim domestic drama. Although it was d as a nail-biting horror movie, the creepy kid from the Hereditary’s trailer was dead less than an hour into the story and the drama that ensued was mostly a maudlin exploration of grief and alienation within a crumbling suburban family. Then, Toni Colette’s Annie Graham started messing with the occult, which resulted in Hereditary becoming the full-blown gothic horror viewers had simultaneously expected and dreaded.
5 The Guest
Long before he played the recast Solar Opposites hero Korvo, Dan Stevens impressed in an earlier sci-if role as the title character of The Guest. This mystery started off as a psychological thriller as the disarmingly charming Stevens showed up at a grieving small-town family’s home and claimed to have served alongside their late son in the army. Before too long, The Guest took a wild swerve into sci-fi horror after the guest turned out to be a partially-human super soldier bent on violent vengeance against his creators.
4 I See You
Like The Guest, I See You was centered on mysterious figures with seeming nefarious intentions. But after misleading audiences into assuming the worst about these characters in the first half, I See You revealed that the squatters lurking around a family's own home weren't anything close to villains. Shockingly, I See You broke some major horror movie taboos when the real child killers were closer to home all along, vindicating the original suspects.
3 Barbarian
2022’s Barbarian is another film driven by a sudden change in directions. For its opening act, Barbarian seemed like a tense, grounded film about a resourceful heroine working out whether she should trust a mysterious man who double-booked her Air B+B. Interestingly, the movie was not that at all, as evidenced by a wild midway plot twist that killed off the apparent villain, introduced a terrifying monster, and abruptly cut to a seemingly unrelated character’s story.
2 Psycho
The greatest example of a movie abandoning its main premise in film history comes from Hitchcock's seminal horror film, Psycho. Nowadays, it's no secret that Psycho is the story of a troubled motel owner with murderous tendencies. However, the movie’s opening act focused entirely on Marion Crane’s decision to steal thousands of dollars from her boss, and, when Psycho was originally released, it was easy to assume that Marion's plan was the focus of the story. It was only halfway through the movie’s runtime that Psycho suddenly (and brutally) dismissed this plot and revealed its real story, killing off Marion in the process.
1 Malignant
For its two acts, James Wan's Malignant comes across as a possession movie in the vein of the director's earlier efforts, like The Conjuring and Insidious. Rather than take the same route, Malignant leaned heavily into body horror territory when the movie suddenly revealed that its heroine had a coned twin who was masterminding Malignant’s murders from inside the back of her skull. Absurd and undeniably inventive, Malignant is a horror movie that undoubtedly improved after changing its premise.
