10 Horror Movies That Aren’t About What You Think

As the old saying goes, we fear most what we don't know, but some movies take that to heart

Consequently, the following films all gained a reputation, whether through bad marketing or simply audience expectations being completely wrong

as being about one thing when they're really about something completely different

I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are horror movies that aren't about what you think

The Wolf of Snow Hollow If you were a police officer and everyone was trying to tell you that the local murders in your town

were actually being carried out by a werewolf, well, you'd probably think you were the only sane person left

Luckily for you, though, you're probably not this police officer, and when you're watching a horror movie literally called The Wolf of Snow Hollow

and gory murders are being attributed to a lycanthrope, you're probably not going to hesitate in assuming that the case has been cracked

no matter how daft it may sound, especially when a big bad wolfy figure is seen lurking in the shadows

Consequently, you spend most of the runtime of The Wolf of Snow Hollow assuming you're watching a pretty effective modern werewolf flick

But the final act reveals that this isn't the case at all. It turns out that the murders aren't supernatural

but they're still technically kinda caused by a werewolf. Confused? Well, bear with me

It turns out that the very human serial killer committing the crimes does so while dressing up in a gigantic werewolf costume

ripping his victims' bodies apart while indulging in his cosplaying hobby every full moon

So it wasn't really a werewolf movie at all, just an extremely twisted crime drama. Filming TV is cool, but you know what else is cool

Protecting your privacy online. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description and get up to

76% off a two-year NordVPN plan, plus three months free if you sign up today. I'd make that deal

Damn good deal. It Comes at Night. It Comes at Night was a victim of misjudged expectations when

it first released. It was marketed as something of a creature feature, and as such, fans took the

title quite literally. It was presumed that this movie would be about something haunting a cast of

heroes in the night, as a result of a virus that had otherwise eliminated humanity. When it came

out though and fans finally got to the bottom of this mystery established in the marketing

the film revealed that the something wasn't actually a monster or a creature at all. It was

actually just the paranoia of the human characters. Ultimately, It Comes at Night is as much of a

family drama as it is a horror movie. It follows a small family who survived the virus by keeping

isolated, coming into contact with another family in need, and the stresses of the two living

together each thinking that the other is a threat. What comes at night then is the worry for each

character. The worry that putting their trust in other people will result in the death of the people

that they supposed to protect Ultimately it a great film but not quite the straight creature feature some fans wanted Come to Daddy Come to Daddy is one of the most delightfully surprising horror movies in recent years Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood has always been drawn to weird eccentric genre

pics since hanging up his hairy feet as Frodo Baggins, but this 2020 effort is easily his

strangest project yet. Ostensibly, it's about a young man, played by Wood, who attempts to

reconnect with his father after not seeing him for decades. The thing is, even this whole setup

is steeped in mystery, as it's unclear why Wood's character was contacted out of the blue and why

his father, who constantly berates him when he arrives, is so hostile towards his son

You expect then the movie to explore this dynamic, and have some kind of sinister reveal explaining

why the two needed to reconnect or why the father was missing in the first place. However

the father actually dies from a heart attack before the end of the first act. It then becomes

a film about the son having to live with the body of his dead dad as the morgue is too busy to pick

it up, all the while strange noises keep him up at night. Is the father haunting the house

or is something else supernatural afoot? Well, no. It turns out that his real father is actually

alive and being held hostage in the basement, and consequently is in a bit of a predicament

Come to Daddy then has twists within twists, and the movie that you think you're in for at the

beginning resembles nothing of the one you're stuck with at the end, The Strangers Prayer Night

Fans waited a decade for a sequel to The Strangers, and when it finally arrived, it was

far from what they expected, but not in a bad way. Initially, the second movie seems like the natural

continuation of the first, with the titular family of strangers hunting down a series of victims

in a trailer park. Though not a home invasion in the regular sense, all the beats are still hit here

Phones are destroyed, people are stalked, and characters are killed in brutal ways

After this though, the sequel shifts focus entirely and becomes less a movie about the

villains killing a band of hapless victims, but rather the victims fighting back and taking out

each member of the murderous family. It inverts the slasher trope completely, as the remaining

heroes kill off their tormentors one by one. I mean, that's one way to get fans from spending

years begging for another sequel, I suppose. Piercing. For the first act of piercing, you think

you can pretty much sketch out where the story is going. In the very first scene, the movie

introduces you to Reed, a family man with a wife and newborn child. The thing is, the guy is a total

Psycho, and in this first scene, he's shown standing over his kid's crib with an ice pick

From here, the audience is quickly informed that he's a wannabe serial killer, and is using the

cover of a business trip to rent a hotel room and indulge in his bloodlust by inviting over a sex

worker. If you've seen American Psycho, it seems pretty cut and dry where this one's going. However

if you ever read a book by Ryu Murakami the author who provided the source material for this movie then you know to never expect a straightforward story Consequently things take a turn when Jackie the sex worker turns up and understands exactly what this dude plans to do

It turns out that she's a little twisted as well, and the power dynamic is then inverted

resulting in one of the strangest psychosexual horrors in recent memory. Reed turns from the predator into the prey

and things only get stranger from there on out. Henry, portrait of a serial killer, this is not

Antebellum. Now, a lot of you might already understand exactly what Antebellum is about

but that's because the trailers for it, for whatever reason, decided to just outright spoil

the big twist that the entire movie is built around. Which is a huge shame, because the film

itself does so much work to hide the big mid-movie reveal, and only really has any suspense at all if

you don't know it's coming. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me first explain. Antebellum opens

on Eden, a Civil War Eva slave who recently attempted to escape a plantation in Louisiana

resulting in a bunch of her fellow slaves being murdered. The first act essentially follows her

daily life, as she's forced to work, is routinely assaulted by Confederate soldiers

and slowly hatches a plot to escape. Well, that is until one night when she suddenly hears a

modern phone ringing outside, and then the flick flashes back a few weeks prior. Here

it turns out that Antebellum isn't a period piece at all, but rather takes place in the present day

Eden, really a beloved author called Veronica, has been kidnapped along with a bunch of other black people by the white owners of a Civil War reenactment center

It is absolutely bonkers and doesn't totally work, but it's certainly not what you expect from the first half an hour

The Empty Man. The Empty Man has received a whole bunch of buzz with writers and fans alike, praising it as an overlooked gem from 2020

However, after watching it, it is pretty clear why this didn't make much of a dent, and that's because it's impossible to market

A horror movie that runs an epic two and a half hours is already a tough sell, but it doesn't help when it also blends completely different subgenres and tells a story that's intentionally designed to keep you in the dark

So if you read the synopsis, you might go into it expecting something like The Bye Bye Man, where a bunch of kids are being haunted by a supernatural entity who only grows stronger the more you think about them

And that is what the movie is about for around 20 minutes

See, the thing about The Empty Man is that it's essentially three movies in one

The prologue essentially acts as its own short horror film set in the snowy mountains

then we get the teen slasher, and finally we stumble into a cult conspiracy and doomsday prophecy

Consequently, as soon as you start thinking you know what the movie is going to be about, it switches gears and turns into something else

One Cut of the Dead. Just when you think the zombie subgenre has no new ideas to offer something like One Cut of the Dead comes along Now this movie is a regular on the WhatCultureHorror channel but it simply couldn be left off a list about movies that aren about what you think That because One Cut of the Dead is three different movies in one but it pulls

each one off better than The Empty Man does. Initially it starts out like a regular low-budget

zombie flick, but it's quickly revealed that this is actually a movie being filmed within the movie

The real story is about a zombie outbreak happening while this camera crew is recording their fictional

zombie movie, and the confusion and chaos that comes from that situation. However, the film

pivots yet again halfway through to show that this story isn't real either, by flashing back and

showing how this apparently realistic zombie outbreak is also part of a fictional film. So

we're actually watching a movie about how a bunch of fictional people made a zombie movie

about a group of people making a zombie movie. It sounds much more confusing when I say it than

is in motion, I promise. Crimson Peak. I mentioned briefly in the introduction how marketing plays a

huge role in setting audience expectations, and Crimson Peak is one of the best examples of a

movie's advertising completely misrepresenting its actual content. Guillermo del Toro's gothic romance is certainly steeped in horror. There are supernatural creatures ready to deliver jump

scares and plenty of gore to go around, but it's far from a conventional horror movie, which makes

it so weird then that the trailer sold it as your regular multiplex fare, a horror closer to the

Conjuring or Ouija. Now, there's nothing wrong with those kinds of movies, of course

but it meant that audiences going into Crimson Peak were expecting a straightforward ghost tale

and were left with few scares and mainly a family melodrama and a lengthy opening

that keeps the horror elements to the minimum. As one character makes clear, this isn't a ghost

story, it's more a story with a ghost in it. The ghost is just a metaphor. The boy

After Annabelle reminded everyone that horror movies about killer dolls can bring in stacks

and stacks of cash, it was unsurprising when similar films were quickly put into the works

One of these was the unimaginatively titled The Boy, a horror that swapped out the disheveled

Annabelle for an eerily well-dressed doll called Brams. The trailers promised the kind of scares

that act as this subgenre's bread and butter. You know the ones, the little doll kicking back in a

rocking chair, very slowly turning his head when people aren't looking, and returning unharmed when

his own is thrown away. And for the majority of the movie, this is exactly what it delivered

audiences got to see the killer doll tropes played straight, as a family move into a house and become wary of Brahms

until a late reveal throws all that on its head. That's because, as it turns out, this isn't a killer doll movie at all

but rather a movie about a human killer who lives in the walls of the house

Brahms the doll had no supernatural properties at all. Well, not until he was given some via a sequel retcon

and the real Brahms was a disturbed man living in secret passageways the whole time