How to reveal your villain

So much of horror is about the reveal, the moment when the characters realize they've stumbled into a very, very bad situation. That reveal can take a movie that seems to be in another genre into the realm of horror, or it can take an already scary movie to another level. For my money, the best single reveal in horror history is the moment when one poor guy gets his first look at Leatherface, the killer at the center of Tobe Hooper's masterful Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What's so brilliant about this scene is the way that it perfectly sets us up for the usual slow creep into a dangerous place. We know this house out in the country is bad news, through cues both subtle — the way the camera keeps its distance — and not so — that tooth that the poor kid finds. But just when things should slow down even more, as he enters the house, Hooper speeds up the pace, and we're suddenly lost in a world of disconcerting choices, as the kid runs toward a back room filled with skulls and meets his doom. And once Leatherface is done with him, he slams the door shut. What started out on familiar ground has become something very, very sick and wrong.