The closest examples I can think of are movies like Full Metal Jacket, Million Dollar Baby, Skeleton Crew, Behind the Mask; the Rise of Leslie Vernon, the recent French film Martyrs… things like that, except I’m hoping someone can recommend something that *really *flips a switch midway through, something where maybe the first 40 minutes or so plays like a romantic comedy, then BOOM it turns into full-on horror movie. Not like a “mixed genre” thing where it’s a horror-comedy, but where the audience is set up for a particular kind of experience then gets suckerpunched just as they’re getting comfortable.
Psycho. By now, it’s not shocking, but when the woman who was ostensibly the star of the movie is killed about a half-hour in, the movie drastically shifts course.
The poster boy for this is From Dusk Till Dawn. Starts as a standard 90s Tarantino wise-cracking bad guy flick and then turns into a vampire movie after about 40 minutes.
The Crying Game fits this, I think. The first half being all about the IRA and the relationship between Stephen Rea and Forest Whitaker’s characters, and then midway through the movie it turns into a thriller involving Whitaker’s “girlfriend.”
The best movie example I can think of is Heathers, which starts as a deep black comedy, then 180s into a kind of chase caper that tries to make you feel apologetic for finding the first two thirds so uproariously funny.
As to books, Huckleberry Finn moves smoothly along, right up to the point where Huck tries to pray and resolves to just consign himself to Hell–then veers off into all that screwball nonsense with Tom Sawyer.
In both cases, I’d say there was a great idea that the authors couldn’t figure out how to end.
Exactly! It’s the reason I loved this film when it came out and I suspect it’s the reason it got such mixed reviews. (Also 1980’s Melanie Griffin in a black wig was really hot.)
I think the movie Barton Fink is maybe a better example than Dusk Till Dawn. But I pretty much prefer the Coen Brothers to Tarantino, so maybe I’d be expected to say that.
Doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose to ask for recommendations of movies that are supposed to surprise you half-way through?
Oh well, they didn’t turn into full-out horror movies, but a couple that come to mind as taking a very surprising turn are “Straw Dogs” (the Dustin Hoffman version; I haven’t seen the new one), and “Pretty Poison,” an old Tony Perkins-Tuesday Weld movie.
Moby Dick starts off as a chatty, often humorous, first-hand narrative of a whaling voyage. By mid-book the narrator, the chit-chat, and the humor are gone as the story converges on the Captain and the title whale. Ishmael I believe never speaks or interacts with the other characters for the last 200 pages. A single-page postscript explains his survival, by which time you’ve forgotten who he is.
Hugo starts out following an orphaned boy living in a train station befriending a young girl who set out on and adventure/mystery.
The mystery is solved rather quicky and switches focus to Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley) and his life making movies.