Game of Thrones: Here’s why the Dothraki charge in the Battle of Winterfell was so chilling.

"The charge of the Dothraki is something different: Director Miguel Sapochnik uses every trick in the history of cinema—and the history of Game of Thrones—to mislead the audience about what’s going to happen. The result is one of the most chilling and heartbreaking scenes in the entire run of the show.

But before you can subvert an audience’s expectations, the audience has to have expectations to begin with. In the case of “The Long Night,” Sapochnik draws from a cinematic principle that was once also a military principle: A wave of horses charging directly toward you is absolutely terrifying. The first filmmaker to really lean into the idea was Eisenstein, who got a solid five minutes of tension out of an army of Teutonic knights on horseback galloping toward Russian soldiers in his 1938 film Alexander Nevsky. Here’s the urtext for every other cinematic cavalry charge that followed:

Game of Thrones: Here’s why the Dothraki charge in the Battle of Winterfell was so chilling.