Top 20 Horror Movie Unmasking Moments

“Saw III” (2006)
When we last left Jigsaw’s victim turned apprentice, she had gone from hero to villain in mere minutes. “Saw III” opens with the standard set-up. Jigsaw kidnaps a person he has deemed unworthy of life, and brings them to his dingy lair to play his game. But when Dr. Lynn’s abductor is revealed, it’s not John Kramer under the hood. It’s Amanda Young. She actually has the dying Kramer lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines. Having now entered her villain phase, Amanda’s sadistic tendencies are on full display here. She’s not the same character we came to empathize with in the previous movie.

“The Prowler” (1981)
Donning combat fatigues and a gaiter, the title villain spends the majority of this movie trying to impale young coeds with his pitchfork and bayonet. “The Prowler” has some killer makeup work from Tom Savini, so you know the gore is good. We’re talking bayonets through heads, pitchforks to the gut, shotguns, even hunting knives. This man came equipped for battle. When he’s finally unmasked in a struggle with the movie’s final girl, it’s almost too wild to believe the folksy town sheriff was behind it all. Sheriff George Fraser is played by former Hitchcock actor Farley Granger, so it’s doubly uncomfortable to watch a classic Hollywood star in a homicidal rage at the end of the movie.

“Strait-Jacket” (1964)
When “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” became an unexpected runaway hit, Joan Crawford quickly signed on to play a villainous older woman of her own. She stars as Lucy Harbin, a woman recently released from a mental institution after murdering her husband and her lover. She goes to live with her grown daughter, Carol, a gifted sculptor. This will be important later. A series of ax murders begins, and Lucy is implicated. In the climax, it’s revealed that her daughter has been carrying out the killings in a mask she made of her mother’s likeness. There’s something extra freaky about watching Joan Crawford wrestle Joan Crawford into submission.

“The Funhouse” (1981)
Traveling carnival workers get a bad rap. Tobe Hooper’s underrated slasher didn’t do much to help with that. For some reason, four teens decide to spend the night in a funhouse ride. They encounter Gunther, a mysterious, and as it turns out, murderous, member of the carnival staff. We first see him in a Frankenstein’s monster mask, but during an argument with his father, the abusive carnival barker, Gunther yanks the mask off, revealing a deformed face. The moment is shocking for first-time viewers, who likely assume he wears the mask to scare people, but it turns out he’s much scarier without it.

“House of Wax” (1953)
Vincent Price, the king of schlock and awe, stars in this 3D thriller about a mysterious new wax museum whose opening just happens to coincide with a string of murders. And did we mention his figures are so lifelike! He is the wax sculptor, Professor Jarrod, who was injured in the fire that destroyed his last museum. His identity as the murderer is uncovered once actress Phyllis Kirk hits him in the face. His wax mask falls away, revealing the scarred face of the man who murdered her friend and tried to murder her. It’s a testament to just how lifelike Jarrod’s waxwork really is.

“The Invisible Man” (2020)
Universal’s reboot of a classic monster took a whole lot of modernizing, with enough twists and turns to keep up with the nearly 90 years of movie history since the original. Elisabeth Moss plays Cecilia, a woman hunted by her abusive, rich ex, Adrian Griffin, who has mastered the power of near-total invisibility. Late in the film, the Invisible Man launches another attack. Cecilia finally manages to shoot him down. But when she pulls off his mask, it reveals Adrian’s brother, Tom, instead. It’s a twist, for sure. For the police, it’s an open and shut case, exonerating Adrian. Of course, Cecilia rightly realizes Adrian has just framed his brother for his own crimes.

“Terror Train” (1980)
This locomotive-bound slasher is all about misdirection. The killer changes costumes several times throughout, always assuming the identity of his last victim. There are layers to this unmasking, but his last disguise, a conductor’s uniform and translucent face mask, might just be the creepiest. Once Jamie Lee Curtis is left alone with the man she thinks is the train conductor, the killer finally reveals himself. Not only is he Kenny Hampson, the social outcast she and her friends once bullied, but he was hiding in plain sight the whole time. He was disguised in drag as a magician’s assistant.

“My Bloody Valentine” (1981)
The citizens of a working class mining town are stalked by a murderer in a coal miner’s uniform and gas mask, carrying a pickaxe. He’s assumed to be Harry Warden, the killer who preyed on the town twenty years before. Having cornered the last two potential victims in the caverns, the killer’s gas mask is pulled off, revealing him to be one of the new crop of miners, Axel. After seeing his father murdered by Warden years before, Axel went insane, and took up the killer’s cause. There was something so haunting about the costume, that seeing a person we’d come to know behind that mask made it way more shocking than your usual slasher whodunit.

“The Phantom of the Opera” (1925)
Starring Lon Chaney, a film star famous for his dramatic transformations, Universal’s adaptation of this French novel was a true shocker. Early in the film, an opera singer is abducted by the Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House. She tries to see the identity of her creepy admirer. After a suspenseful back and forth, she removes his mask to reveal the horrific, skeletal face underneath. Chaney’s own meticulous makeup design for the Phantom was extremely painful. Luckily, it paid off big time. The sequence was reported to have made silent era audiences scream in terror.

“Predator” (1987)
While it was clearly an attempt to cash in on the fame of post-“Terminator” Arnold Schwarzenegger and his famous one-liners, “Predator” turned out to have true staying power. It has one of the most incredible and unique villains ever on screen. The Predator alien is a grotesque and vicious movie monster. The climactic battle scene sees the creature taking off its helmet to reveal its true face. The result is a spectacular, if horrific, feat of makeup and production design. Of course, Schwarzenegger’s iconic response made sure this unmasking would go down as a great movie moment.

“The Purge” (2013)
In this world, for one night of the year, every crime is legal – including murder. And on the night of the Purge, it seems there are a lot more people out there who feel inclined to kill, rather than just loot or deface public property. For the Sandin family, the smart thing to do is to hunker down in their bomb-shelter of a house. However, when the doorbell rings they see a group of Purgers through their cameras. The leader politely requests to come in, and to show the seriousness of his request, he removes his mask. His chillingly innocent smile lets the audience know that he loves this night more than a kid loves Halloween.

“Hush” (2016)
In this inventive and suspenseful film, a woman is stalked in her home in the woods. To make matters worse, she is deaf, and can only rely on visuals when trying to keep the killer at bay. In a moment of desperation, Maddie pens a message to the killer, letting him know that he can still just walk away, she hasn’t seen his face, and she won’t call the police. Apparently amused, the killer casually removes his mask, making the point clear that it doesn’t matter to him if she sees him or not: to this killer, she’s already dead.

“Trick ‘r Treat” (2007)
Throughout this mid-aughts horror anthology, there’s one little character tying them all together: Sam. The physical embodiment of the spirit of Halloween, this child-sized goblin enjoys a good scare, spooky stories, and – of course – candy. With his face hidden beneath a burlap sack for the majority of the film, it’s not until the final installment that he’s finally exposed. And, while he may look like a little kid from the outside, this is a face not even a mother could love.

“The Orphanage” [aka “El Orfanato”] (2007)
After Laura buys and moves back to the orphanage where she grew up, her young son Simón makes friends with a boy named Tomás – who may or may not be real. But soon after, Simón goes missing. What’s weird is Laura herself begins to see the “imaginary” friend, who hides his face with a mask. That’s why she believes it’s her missing boy, OR the ghost of a social worker’s son who drowned. Her search finally leads her to a secret basement where she finds a body, which she originally thinks (or just hopes) belongs to Tomás. But sadly, when she removes the mask, she sees it’s actually her son. It’s a heartbreaking moment in an otherwise chilling film.

“You’re Next” (2011)
Having dinner with your dysfunctional family is bad enough – especially when they could be your future in-laws – but throw murder into the mix and it’s a whole new nightmare. When masked killers begin to pick off the feuding fam one by one, it seems there’s no stopping them. But when Erin begins to fight back, it becomes clear that the attack wasn’t so random after all. With each killer hiding behind a different animal mask, it’s finally revealed that the man in the lamb mask is a hired assassin, and that the younger Davison brother is responsible for the whole plot.

“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
Having bargained his way out of the Baltimore State Hospital and into the care of the Memphis police, the suave Hannibal the cannibal makes his bid for freedom. Alerted by gunshots, the officers below rush to the fifth floor and make a grisly discovery. With Hannibal escaped, Officer Boyle gutted, and Officer Pembry horribly disfigured, they rush Pembry off with paramedics as they initiate their hunt for Lecter. However, en route to the hospital, the audience is given a glimpse of just how far this cunning criminal is willing to go to get free.

“Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers” (1989)
Talk about a one-track mind. Back at his quest to kill off the remaining members of his family, Michael sets off to finally kill his niece Jamie, having failed the previous year. The girl seeks refuge from her crazed uncle in the attic, but when he finds her, the fact that he’s about to kill his own flesh and blood seems to hold him back. In a moment of pity, Michael takes off his mask, and is revealed to be crying, suggesting that he’s struggling with his inner demons and perhaps even feeling remorse.

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (2003)
Few horror movie antagonists are as viscerally frightening as Leatherface. And he’s not hitting up the local Walmart for a rubber mask – he’ll take yours… as in your face, that is. In the 1974 classic, while we get a load of the rest of the family, we never get to see the mad butcher’s actual face. But in the 2003 remake, we finally get a glimpse of the chainsaw-wielding cannibal. This classic horror villain is so-named because of the – ahem – “leather” he uses for his mask, so it’s safe to assume that he needs to change that mask semi-frequently. It’s while he’s sewing himself a new “leather face” that he briefly takes off his old mask in order to don the fresher one.

“Scream” (1996)
This classic 90s horror flick from the great Wes Craven leaves everyone guessing until the very end, in large part because of its brilliant twist. Turns out it isn’t just one killer stalking Sidney Prescott and the other teens of Woodsboro high school, but two. The joke is that, in horror films, it’s “always the boyfriend” … but it never is. Well, in this self-aware scare-fest, it ACTUALLY is – that catch is he’s been working alongside his best friend under the guise of Ghost Face. Together, they even fake Billy's death in a great twist that helped set the standard for modern horror. Frequently imitated, never duplicated, this was the (figurative) unmasking of the decade.

“Friday the 13th Part III” (1982)
One of the most famous masks in the cinematic horror canon belongs to one Jason Voorhees. However, it wasn’t until the third installment of the “Friday the 13th” franchise that this mask was introduced – before that, he just used a cloth sack to hide his features. Following the events of “Part 2,” Jason is back to finish off Chris Higgins. Donning the hockey mask to conceal his deformed face, he hunts down Chris and her friends. Ultimately, it’s during a fight to the death in the barn, when Jason needs to free himself from a rope that’s become tangled around his neck, that he unmasks and reveals his deformed face.