The next play includes soft spoilers for “The Invisible Man” and major spoilers for five previously released films.
Like many horror fans, it’s hard to scare me with manic killers of garden varieties and gruesome dead.
But there was a halfway point in the new movie “The Invisible Man” that shocked me so much, I did something I never did in a horror movie: I shot out of my seat and I screamed. As the scene continued, I couldn’t move. The woman next to me also screamed uncontrollably. It was paradise.
(To avoid compromising the integrity of fear, let’s just say it’s a good restaurant, a big knife, and Elisabeth Moss.)
What makes the scene so amazing is not how surprising and bloody it is. (It’s both.) This is how the moment deeply and completely confuses the spectator’s expectations. Unlike a plot or a killer revealed in the last moments of a horror film, an unexpected shock early or halfway in a film redirects the story and confuses the viewer. Just when you think the movie is this, it actually becomes this. It’s like living two films for the price of one.
Here are five other horror movies with carpet extractors that will make you say: wait what?