From surprise ghosts, to vengeful spouses, and a whole lot of doppelgangers,
these movies delivered the most shocking twists we've ever seen.
This goes without saying, but spoilers ahead.
"It's us."
Two years after terrifying audiences with "Get Out," Jordan Peele frightened everyone
again with "Us," a freakish horror film with a genuinely shocking ending. The film opens in 1986,
when a young Adelaide Thomas wanders into a hall of mirrors and meets her diabolical doppelganger.
Flash forward a couple of decades and adult Adelaide is confronting her evil twin yet
again. Only this time, the doppelganger — known as Red — has brought an army of scissor-wielding
clones up from their underground lair, with each assigned to kill their real-world counterpart.
Throughout the film, Adelaide and her family manage to outwit and defeat their doubles,
and in the climactic sequence, our hero finally confronts her twisted doppelganger. But in a
stunning flashback, we suddenly realize we might be rooting for the wrong person. As it turns out,
Adelaide is actually the grinning doppelganger from the opening scene. When she encountered
the real Adelaide in the fun house, she strangled the girl unconscious,
dragged her down into an underworld of mute monsters, and then took the real Adelaide's place.
So Adelaide is really Red, and Red is the real Adelaide, and this whole
creepy scheme has been about getting revenge for having her life taken away. Ultimately,
the twist works as commentary on issues like privilege and nature vs. nurture,
but in the moment, all you can really think about is picking your jaw up off the floor.
The twist ending of "The Usual Suspects" is almost more famous than the movie itself.
The entire film is narrated by Verbal Kint, sole survivor of a heist-gone-wrong. Verbal is a timid
thug who suffers from cerebral palsy, and as he's being interrogated by Customs agent Dave Kujan,
Verbal spins a story of how he and his crew were drafted by the world's most notorious criminal,
an underworld bogeyman named Keyser Soze. As Verbal tells his crazy story,
Kujan suspects Verbal's BFF, Dean Keaton, was secretly Soze,
and that he betrayed all his buddies during their bloody caper. Convinced he's solved the crime,
he lets Verbal walk and takes a minute to revel in his detective skills.
And that's when he notices the bulletin board. Shocked, Kujan realizes that Verbal's story was
complete nonsense, and that he assembled his wild tale by pulling keywords and details from
the papers and wanted posters tacked on the wall. And as Kujan figures out he let
a guilty man walk free, we see Verbal Kint morph into a new man. His limp disappears,
his gnarled hand straightens out, and he starts walking with the confidence of a crook who beat
the system for the millionth time. This little nobody is actually Keyser Soze,
and then, like that, he's gone. It might be the greatest trick a movie's ever pulled,
and it's the kind of twist that will make you drop your coffee mug in shock.
Even with hits like "Memories of Murder" and "Snowpiercer" already under his belt,
Bong Joon-Ho stunned audiences with "Parasite," a subtle examination of the relationship between one
family that has nothing, the Kims, and another that has everything, the Parks. After a friend
of the young Ki-Woo invites him to lie his way into the wealthy Park home to act as a tutor,
Ki-Woo goes one step further by getting his entire family jobs. This quickly spins a
web of deception that we sense won't end well, but it's the carefully calculated
deterioration of everyone's lives that makes this film the wild ride it is.
"Parasite" is full of commentary on the toxicity of the super-rich, but the societal con that sees
underprivileged people fighting each other for scraps is the glue that holds the whole
mess together. When the Kims begin feeling confident in the Park family's dependency,
they have an audacious living room gathering while the family is away. While we expect
them to be found out by the Parks, what actually happens is even more jarring.
Moon-gwang, whose life they ruined by getting her fired to protect their own deceit, returns,
begging to be let inside. We discover she's been keeping her husband in the basement of the Park
family home for years, unknown to the Parks. This is just one of the developments that signifies
imminent disaster for all, and is one of the most surprising moments in a film full of reveals.
Marion Crane yearns to settle down with her boyfriend Sam, but his debts are preventing
them from finding happiness together. Stealing the money he needs from her job and going on the lam,
she is forced to take overnight refuge at the isolated Bates Motel. There she meets what she
assumes to be an overall harmless weirdo named Norman Bates, who shows her to her room. Sadly,
Marion has caught the attention of his mother Norma. Marion will never leave the hotel,
while Norman is forced to cover for his "mother's" crimes.
"Psycho" is easily one of director Alfred Hitchcock's most notorious thrillers,
and even decades later, it's easy to see why. Though best remembered for its more shocking
scenes, those only succeed due to the incredible tension-building of the "quieter" moments. Sure,
it's terrifying that women are going missing at this mysterious hotel on a lonely highway,
but "relaxed" moments where Norman Bates casually explains
his interest in taxidermy are arguably more frightening, if only in retrospect.
Still, "Psycho" has two major twists, with the first being the surprise death of Marion,
the film's point of view character, within the first half hour. Additionally,
the reveal that Norman's mother has been dead all along,
and that Norman is channeling her in his own mind, is still scary today.
"Friday the 13th" has a unique place in film history, being an independent production that
gained major distribution at a time when that was essentially unheard of. Not only spawning a huge
franchise in its own right but also helping to herald in a new era of slashers, "Friday the 13th"
is sometimes referred to as a surface-level response to "Halloween." But there is a fair
amount of social commentary at play in the script. Though it would be a stretch to call it nuanced,
the lack of accountability at summer camps during the time is a catalyst for much of what occurs,
as is the cruelty and neglect toward a disabled boy named Jason Voorhees that it allows.
Though we are told that Jason drowned in the lake, the heavy boots and bulky jacket of the
masked killer lead us to believe that he continues to stalk the campgrounds,
killing the new teen counselors. However, it turns out that Pamela Voorhees is in fact the killer,
seeking vengeance for her son's horrible death. Even if this is seldom mentioned
in the franchise's many sequels, it is nonetheless a part of horror history.
"Name the killer in 'Friday the 13th.'"
"Jason! Jason! Jason!"
"I'm sorry, that's the wrong answer."
Years down the line, this twist was used as a "gotcha" in the opening sequence of "Scream," in
which the doomed Casey Becker desperately insists that the killer in "Friday the 13th" was Jason,
only to be rudely corrected that it was in fact Mrs. Voorhees in the first film.
In Miguel's home, music is banned due to his great-grandmother Imelda having been
abandoned by a wayward musician many years before. The daughter of this tryst, Coco,
is Miguel's elderly grandmother, her life having been in many ways decided by her
father's disappearance. Miguel has a natural knack for music, but his responsibility to
his family weighs heavily upon him. Idolizing the musician Ernesto de la
Cruz , Miguel becomes convinced that Ernesto was his great-grandfather. This leads Miguel
to announce his intention to become a musician, but his grandmother wrecks his guitar. Obtaining
Ernesto's mythical guitar, Miguel gains the ability to converse with his dead relatives.
Miguel forms an alliance with a ghost named Hector,
renouncing his great-grandmother's blessings in favor of finding Ernesto. Though Ernesto
initially welcomes Miguel as family, his deceptions are soon revealed. Indeed,
Hector was actually Miguel's great-grandfather all along, and he only abandoned his family
because he was poisoned to death by his jealous musical partner Ernesto.
Naturally, this leads to a bittersweet conclusion, with Hector finally honored for
his musical genius and reunited with Imelda and Coco, albeit in the land of the dead. The family
ends the ban against music, allowing Miguel to finally pursue his dream and honor his family.
Chuck Palahniuk's novel "Fight Club" inspired one of the best-loved cult classics of the last
25 years with the 1999 movie version starring Edward Norton as a Narrator disillusioned with
the mundanity of his life. The more flamboyant Tyler Durden appears to echo his own long-held
criticisms against his capitalist lifestyle, giving a mouthpiece to his anger. Together,
they start Fight Club, which is exactly what it sounds like. Amassing a cult-like following
of men desperately seeking something to lash out at, it's a pretty short
road to extreme criminal behavior and increasingly bizarre acts of vandalism.
As our Narrator realizes that he's completely losing control to Tyler's
chaotic vision for their "Project Mayhem," Durden's girlfriend, Marla,
drops the bomb by calling him "Tyler." That's right, the Narrator was actually Tyler Durden
all along. Though he makes harried attempts at preventing Durden's plan of "erasing debt
by bombing buildings," even he is unable to stop Project Mayhem. On the plus side,
he seems to expel the Durden presence from his mind, although the film wraps on a fairly
ambiguous note in that regard. Either way, he realizes what a jerk he's been to Marla,
and together, they watch the buildings fall to the tune of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind."
Taking place in what was then the far-flung futuristic year of 2022,
"Soylent Green" has a twist so well-known that, even if you haven't seen the film,
chances are that you know its most famous line. At first, we are only told that Soylent is a cheap,
nutritious food staple that comes in several flavorful varieties, such as Soylent Red,
Soylent Yellow, and the new Soylent Green. The narrative predicts a world on the verge
of climate collapse that we assure you in no way resembles the actual Earth of 2022.
Detective Robert Thorn is investigating the murder of a Soylent board member who appears
to have been assassinated. Spoiler alert: it really does not work out great for him.
Thorn's elderly friend Sol Roth discovers that Soylent Green, once made of plankton,
is no longer possible to manufacture due to the effect of pollution and global warming
on the ocean. Naturally, the Soylent board opts for the next best thing to plankton,
human corpses. Roth dies by assisted suicide,
using his last words to tell Thorn the truth. This leads to the famous final scene.
"Soylent Green is people"
It's easy to take for granted what a huge deal "Saw" was for horror fans when it was first
released. That is due in no small part to the twist ending, but the set-up is where all the
magic happens. It opens on a photographer named Adam and a doctor named Gordon,
each chained to pipes in a room with a dead body lying face down between them. Each has a
microcassette in their pockets, with Adam's urging him to survive while Gordon's orders him to kill
Adam by 6 o'clock. This leads Gordon to realize that they are in the hands of the so-called
"Jigsaw killer," known for kidnapping victims and forcing them to participate in elaborate "games."
It turns out that Gordon is a major suspect in the Jigsaw case, having attracted the attention
of Detective Tapp, who sent Adam to spy on him. This leads to a series of reveals that
has the audience believing that just about every character in the film could possibly
be the real Jigsaw at one point or another. Ultimately, a desperate Gordon frees himself,
but only by sawing off his own foot. This in turn comes with the realization that they got
everything about Jigsaw's true identity wrong. Adam looks on in horror as the corpse on the
floor rises to its feet, revealing himself to be Gordon's patient, John Kramer, the real Jigsaw.
"Game over."
This sleek neo-noir takes a dive back into 1950s America, introducing us to Detective Teddy Daniels
and his new partner Chuck. Together, they are investigating a psychiatric institute located on,
you guessed it, Shutter Island. An inmate, Rachel Solando, who had drowned her three children,
has gone missing, and the hospital staff is unhelpful. Daniels becomes convinced
that everyone on the grounds is part of a plot to misdirect the investigation,
including Chuck. This is all made worse by his constant migraines and blackouts,
possibly caused by his memories of serving in the military and witnessing the atrocities at Dachau.
When Rachel Solando reappears, she asserts that
she's actually a psychiatrist working to develop mind control. Meanwhile,
senior psychiatrist Cawley tells Daniels that he never arrived with a partner at all. Eventually,
the man we knew as Chuck introduces himself as another doctor at the facility, Doctor Sheehan,
informing us that Daniels is actually Andrew, a patient under their care.
After Andrew failed to seek treatment for his manic-depressive wife Dolores,
she killed their children, and he killed her. This left him with overwhelming guilt,
and his delusions have, as such, made him a prime candidate for lobotomization. Yet
even as Sheehan gives the order, he is left to wonder how powerful Andrew's delusions truly are,
as he calls him by the name Teddy and Andrew does not respond.
"What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?"
If ever there was a film that is more a cascading series of twists than a linear narrative story,
that would be "Gone Girl," but it starts with a basic murder mystery. When his wife Amy goes
missing, Nick's general disinterest in the subject raises red flags for pretty much
everyone. He and Amy had an unhappy union after relocating from New York to small town Missouri,
which in turn saw him beginning an affair with a student named Andie.
Things just get messier from there, with a scavenger hunt leading authorities to discover
a partially burnt diary in which Amy discloses her apparent fear of Nick. We soon find out,
however, that Amy has been alive all this time and is simply hiding out in the Ozarks,
getting her kicks by messing with everyone from afar.
Considering that we were pretty ready to say "goodbye" to Nick for killing his wife,
this is a stunning moment, but with Amy, the twists never end. Hapless exes are caught in
her crossfire, as is an increasingly lost Nick. Though he and his allies get to the
bottom of Amy's revenge plot eventually, they are never able to prove anything
and are all well aware of her status as a master manipulator. In the end,
Nick is powerless to escape her. Even as her crimes escalate, he ultimately agrees
to stay with her, and the two of them face the press together... exactly as Amy wants.
"Barbarian" writer and director Zach Cregger apparently loves twists so much that he decided
to make a whole movie of them. The story begins with the nightmare scenario of hero
Tess showing up to an Airbnb only to discover that a stranger named Keith is already staying
there. This makes it seem like we're in for a fairly straightforward horror movie,
yet the danger that Keith might pose goes on the back burner as Tess discovers a literal torture
dungeon downstairs. When Keith is brutally killed by a naked, screaming woman covered in grime,
it's clear that "Barbarian" is not going to follow the story we expect it to.
The story flips over to the homeowner, an actor named AJ, whose career is derailed
when his costar comes forward with sexual assault allegations. Though he denies this,
it's clear that he did something very wrong. Returning to his property in hopes of rebuilding,
he comically fails to see the danger he's in and ends up trapped in the basement with Tess.
Taking a trip back in time, we see that the standard stoic conservative man who
previously owned the house still lives in the tunnels below. He spent decades dragging women
into the basement to torture them, with the naked woman being his offspring. There
are actually still more twists in this film, but we're running out of breath,
so we'll just say that "Barbarian" is a great reason to skip the apps and book a hotel room.
Samuel Bell is hanging out on the moon alone, operating a mining facility with
the assistance of a very anthropomorphized AI named GERTY. Almost right off the bat,
Sam experiences delusions and nearly dies when he crashes his lunar rover. However,
he has no memories of this, and begins to suspect that GERTY is deceiving him.
This is correct, and he discovers a doppelganger of himself at the site of the crash. Dragging his
other self back to the base, he confronts GERTY, who explains that they are actually
both clones. Though they are there to keep the station functional, their occasional deaths
are expected by the company, which has granted GERTY the freedom to awaken new clones at will.
This is a pretty huge twist in and of itself, but the film is not done with
us yet. The company the Sams work for has intentionally jammed signals to prevent him
from ever successfully calling for help, meaning he is trapped there indefinitely. The two Sams
work together to create an escape plan, with the older version agreeing to stay behind as
the younger escapes back to Earth. Though he's able to expose the company that doomed him,
this ends on a fairly bittersweet note for Sam, whose wife died on Earth several years
before and whose other selves begin to die at around their third year of life.
Director Henri-Georges Clouzot has often been referred to as the "French Hitchcock," which
should tell you what to expect from his most famous films. A pioneer in the realm
of the thriller, Clouzot's masterwork may very well be "Les Diaboliques." Christina,
a Venezuelan immigrant, is the owner of a troubled boarding school that's
run by her tyrannical husband, Michel Delassalle.
Christina suffers from a heart condition that leaves her physically somewhat frail, making
it difficult for her to manage either with or without her husband. Enter Nicole, a teacher with
whom Michel is having an affair, who bonds with Christina due to their mutual abuse at his hands.
Together, they decide that the only way to rid themselves of Michel is to kill him. However,
when his body goes missing, Christina begins to suspect that Michel is still alive,
haunting the grounds and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. This ends in a startling
conclusion as we realize that Christina's ally Nicole truly never intended to kill Michel.
Indeed, they wanted to shock Christina into a fatal heart attack,
which is just what happens when Michel comes lumbering toward her one night.
This doesn't work out for Nicole and Michel either, but it's impossible not
to feel Christina's horror in her last moments. The finale tells us that it's
possible that Christina has survived, or is at least haunting the school grounds herself.
Writer-director Frank Darabont waited many years for the chance to adapt Stephen King's
"The Mist," a novella about a town in Maine in which the residents are suddenly surrounded by
an all-encompassing fog. While this is ostensibly a simple creature feature,
complete with tentacled monsters lurking in the mist that pick off residents at random,
the behavior of everyday people in a crisis may be the true horror. David and his son
Billy are forced to take shelter with other townspeople in a supermarket as they attempt
to cope with the apparent apocalypse, although not everyone wants to work together to survive.
Darabont organizes an excellent ensemble cast to deliver a message decidedly more upsetting
than even the original Stephen King ending. In fact, that ending is exactly where the movie's
major twist comes in. When David and some of the other residents choose to take their
own lives rather than face the horror of the monsters lurking outside, he kills the others,
including his child, and prepares to walk into the mist to meet his fate.
But almost immediately, the mist dissipates as the military arrives and takes care of the threat
with little problem. Realizing that he killed his friends and loved ones for absolutely no reason,
David screams in despair — perhaps joined by some members of the audience.
*Screams*
M. Night Shyamalan is well-known for his twists, from "The Sixth Sense" to "The Village" and
beyond. One of his most precisely delivered shocks is in the film "Unbreakable," which
introduces us to a take on superheroes entrenched in day-to-day realism. Point of view character
David is traumatized, reeling due to being left as the sole survivor of a horrific train derailment
that killed 131 other passengers. Soon, he meets Elijah Price, known for his physical frailty,
who posits that David has superpowers and is, as such, the hero of the story.
Rather than donning a cape and tights, David insists that he is no hero. More true to life,
his attempts at crimefighting are messy and questionable,
leaving him in the midst of an existential crisis as he tries to cope with his new reality.
When he uses his powers of intuition on Price, he is stunned to find that the other man has actually
orchestrated a number of apparently accidental tragedies, including the trainwreck that
uncovered David's powers. Using his own theories of superheroes through much of the film to inspire
David, we are stunned to realize that Price is actually a supervillain. Taking on the moniker
Mr. Glass, he views David as his natural opposite as seen through the lens of comic book morality.
Shades of classic ghost stories like "The Turn of the Screw" can be found in writer-director
Alejandro Amenábar's eerie 2001 chiller "The Others." Nicole Kidman stars as Grace Stewart,
who lives in a vast mansion with her two young children in the aftermath of
World War II. Because the kids are painfully sensitive to light, Grace keeps the house in
darkness throughout the day. That makes it a perfect stomping ground for what appears
to be the spirits of a family who lived in the house previously — although it appears
that the servants who dutifully tend to Grace and the children may actually be dead as well.
"I see dead people."
The twist, coming just two years after "The Sixth Sense," is that it's Grace and her children who
are deceased — a despairing Grace smothered the children and took her own life when she learned
that her husband was killed in the war. The "others" they're seeing are actually the living
family that has bought the house following the tragedy. But even though the ghostly housekeeper,
Mrs. Mills, warns Grace that she'll have to learn to get along with the next occupants of the house,
Grace doesn't seem quite ready to make nice as "The Others" comes to its haunting close.
In the landmark 1968 sci-fi film "Planet of the Apes," Charlton Heston stars as Taylor,
an astronaut who joins a deep space mission not just to explore the galaxy, but to get away from
the fellow humans he's come to despise. A time warp sends Taylor and his crew barreling 2,000
years into the future, and they crash-land on a planet where evolution has flipped:
intelligent, talking apes are the dominant species and humans are mute savages.
Forced to defend his species and aided by sympathetic chimpanzees who discover evidence
of a human civilization that existed before that of the apes, Taylor escapes death at the hands of
the sinister Dr. Zaius — only to have his worst fears confirmed: he's been on Earth all along,
with the apes ascending after humankind wiped itself out in a nuclear war. The
image of Heston falling to his knees in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty is one of
the most powerful in cinematic history — and is easily one of its greatest twist endings.
"God damn you all to hell!"