10 Clever Tricks You Didn’t Realise Movies Played On You

The movie business is famously one brimming with movie magic.

While that phrase can relate to the glitz and glamour of the silver screen, or to how feature films can drum up plentiful emotions amongst audiences, there are some features that very much use movie magic to play tricks on those watching their tales unravel and play out.

Given how people usually go into a film with the full intention to be invested in whatever story they're viewing, that often means we miss the quirky tricks certain filmmakers are playing on us. And to be honest, even if we were aware of certain tricks of the trade, chances are we'd be none the wiser upon realising how easily we'd be duped whilst taking in the antics of any given feature film.

With that in mind, it's on those sneaky, often ingenious filmmaking techniques on which the attention is on for this list.

Here, then, are ten such examples of films which absolutely tricked you into seeing something that you thought you may have seen - or messed with you subliminally - but in reality, this was all just some sort of swanky movie magic.

Mirror scenes have forever caused headaches for filmmakers over the decades, with those involved having to come up with numerous ways of shooting a mirror sequence without actually having their filming equipment visible in said mirror.

One of the very best ways such a problem was dealt with, was in James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

There, in one of the sequel's most memorable moments, Sarah Connor is seen operating on the T-800's head. Of course, this all takes place in front of a mirror as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator unit talks Connor through the process.

How did Cameron and his crew manage to pull off this sequence without having cameras and other tech gear visible in the mirror? Why, that's because there was no actual mirror.

Instead, the 'mirror' is in reality a window. The T-800 visible in the 'mirror' is indeed Das Arnold, but the T-800 who Sarah is tinkering with is merely a dummy. As for Sarah, it is actress Linda Hamilton who is stood next to the dummy, and, in a stroke of fortune/genius, it's Hamilton's twin sister Leslie who can be seen in the 'mirror' next to Schwarzenegger.

Hopefully that all makes sense, but if not, Insider.com has the fantastic below video to break all of this down further.