It’s always immensely satisfying when a movie just comes together in the final stretch, ensuring the audience feels like their time was well spent. But in extreme cases, the movie just might not make much sense right up until that point.
Hinging the entirety of a film’s story around a climax that ties all the disparate strands together is certainly a risky creative gambit, but as these 10 horror films all prove, when it works it really works.
Each of these horror movies left audiences totally mystified for almost the entirety of their runtime, questioning the reality – or unreality – of everything they were watching, and doubting whether the protagonist was actually reliable at all.
But at the end each movie finally dropped the veil and played their hand, confirming the truth of the situation and bringing some semblance of logic to everything we’d witnessed up to that point.
As such, these films all likely had you rushing to revisit them with the knowledge of what it was all leading to, in turn making the second viewing an arguably even more rewarding one…
Nicolas Roeg’s masterful Don’t Look Now follows a grieving couple, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), in the wake of their young daughter’s accidental drowning death.
While in Venice for work, John begins to catch sightings of a small figure in a red coat resembling his daughter when she died, and things only get stranger from there.
John is warned that his life is in danger, is nearly killed in a scaffolding accident, and then witnesses a vision of Laura on a funeral cortege in Venice, despite her having flown home to England by this point.
At film’s end, John glimpses the red coat-wearing figure once again and gives chase, but when he catches up to his “daughter,” the horrific truth is revealed.
The figure is actually a female dwarf serial killer who has been terrorising the area, and who promptly kills John with a meat cleaver.
Only then do both a dying John and the audience realise that the increasingly strange and confusing sights encountered throughout the film were actually premonitions of John’s own future demise. Mind. Blown.