50+ Canonical Twist Ending Movies

The twist ending is a device that’s used throughout fiction and appears to be especially prevalent in true-crime novels. It works by surprising the audience through leading them one way and then pulling the rug out from under their feet at the end. If it’s done well, audience members will appreciate the extra thrill and shock to their system. If it’s done ineptly, the audience may feel cheated.

Common twist-ending tropes include:

• Identity Reversal. The protagonist either turns out to be the killer, or the narrator turns out to be far from the neutral observer we originally thought he or she was. 
• It Was all a Dream. One of the most common twist endings—so common that fiction teachers tell students never to use it.
• Dead Hero. Either the narrator or the protagonist turns out to have been dead all along.
• Return to Earth. What we were tricked into thinking was a dystopian alien planet has been Earth all along. This also works with a film that was secretly in an unexpected time period.

The following horror movies are notable because they all involve twist endings.

Spoiler Alert! This entire article consists of spoilers.

Best Twist Ending Movies

Rebecca (1940)

Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca tells the story of an unnamed young woman who falls in love with a wealthy widower, Maxim de Winter, while on vacation. The two marry and return to Maxim’s famously beautiful estate, Manderley. Maxim’s deceased wife, Rebecca, had been close to the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who maintains loyalty to first Mrs. de Winter and is rude to her employer. Based on all the reminders of Rebecca, the woman believes Maxim is not over her death. However, the film’s twist ending reveals that Rebecca never loved Maxim and the two fought viciously. During their final fight Rebecca fell, hit her head and died. Maxim covered her death up and made it look like a drowning.

Rebecca was remade by Netflix in 2020 but while the original was a critical and commercial success, the remake was panned.

Psycho (1960)

Throughout most of Alfred Hitchcock’s horror meisterwerk, we are led to believe that Norman Bates is a mother’s boy who tends to her hotel, completely unaware that she’s been murdering tenants for years. It isn’t until the end that we learn Norman killed his mother and her boyfriend a decade ago. All along, he’s been dressing up as her to commit the murders. We find this out in the creepiest of ways—when an investigator walks down into the basement of their house and sees Mrs. Bates’s rotting corpse sitting in a rocking chair. In trailers for the film, Alfred Hitchcock pleaded with audience members not to spoil the ending for others since “it’s the only one we have.”

Carnival of Souls (1962)

In the opening scene, a woman named Mary and her friends get drawn into a drag race that ends with their car hurtling over a bridge. Everyone else dies, but Mary is able to rescue herself from the car and swim to land. She then moves to Utah and works as a church organist. Mary finds herself drawn to an abandoned carnival on the outskirts of town, where she is tormented by the souls of the dead. It isn’t until the film’s end that we learn Mary has also been dead all along, which is what makes her able to see other dead people. Carnival of Souls is considered to be the first usage of the “Dead Hero” twist ending in the annals of horror.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

In a film that was released at the peak of 1960s social turmoil, director George Romero took a chance by casting a black man as the hero. The character, Ben, helps a group of people survive a night of terror as flesh-crazed zombies roam the Pennsylvania countryside looking for prey. Due to his quick wits and survival instincts, Ben is the only human in the house who survives throughout the night because he had to good sense to lock himself in the basement. But as morning dawns and Ben walks out of the house to be greeted by what he assumes are a human rescue team, they mistake him for a zombie and shoot him dead.

Soylent Green (1973)

Unlike so many futuristic sci-fi movies of the time, Soylent Green does not paint a picture of a progressive utopia. Instead, the world in the year 2022 is an overpopulated mess where the elites control everything—even including the food supply. Most of humanity survives on allegedly protein-rich crackers, the latest of which is called Soylent Green because it’s supposedly based on a mix of soybeans and lentils. But it takes Charlton Heston to visit the Soylent factory and realize to his terror what he screams out for everyone to hear as company guards are taking him away—“Soylent Green is people!”

The Wicker Man (1973)

A devout Christian cop from the English mainland is sent to a remote British isle to investigate a young girl’s disappearance. He discovers the island is inhabited by a pagan cult and becomes increasingly suspicious they plan to offer the missing girl as a sacrifice. The film’s title refers to a giant “man” made of wicker that someone is burned alive inside of during a festival. As the film ends, the cop realizes he has fallen into a trap—there never was a missing girl. The cult wanted to sacrifice him all along. He realizes this as he is already trapped inside the giant Wicker Man and it’s becoming engulfed by flames.

Carrie (1976)

A supernatural horror movie about a bullied girl named Carrie (Sissy Spacek) who discovers she has the power of telekinesis. On the night of her prom Carrie realizes a cruel joke has been played on her when she is voted prom queen and then humiliated in front of the entire school when a bucket of pig’s blood is dropped on her. In a rage, Carrie murders students and teachers indiscriminately and then continues punishing the town as she walks home to confront her abusive mother. She dies after fighting with her mother and destroying their home. The twist doesn’t come until the very, very end of the movie. When Sue Snell, a classmate who had been kind to Carrie, visits her grave Carrie’s hand burst through the earth before the scene is revealed as Sue’s nightmare.

Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th has two major twists in it. The first comes when it is revealed that the camp counselors aren’t victims of the ghost of drowning victim Jason Voorhees, his mother has actually been killing everyone as revenge for the counselors who let her son drown decades earlier. The second comes at the very end of the film when the final girl is resting in a canoe on the lake and an undead Jason suddenly emerges from the water to pull her in. Although it’s just a dream, it’s considered one of the scariest endings in horror.

April Fool’s Day (1986)

A woman named Muffy St. John invites her friends out to her remote island estate for a planned week of fun over spring break. But once they arrive, her friends start dying one by one in brutal slasher movie fashion. With only one survivor left and living in extreme fear, Muffy reveals it was all a joke—an April Fool’s prank! The entire time Muffy and each of her friends in turn has been helping pull off the murder mystery. Muffy plans to open up a murder mystery attraction on the island and that’s why the deaths were so realistic.

Angel Heart (1987)

In this steamy satanic horror tale set in Harlem and Louisiana, Mickey Rourke stars as Harry Angel, a private investigator who is tasked with finding a singer named Johnny Favorite, a World War II soldier who vanished shortly after the war’s end. His investigation takes him up into Harlem, where he meets a sinister-looking man named Louis Cypher, who is actually Lucifer played by Robert De Niro. It’s not until the end that we find out that “Harry” himself is really Johnny Favorite, who killed the real Harry and then assumed his identity. And Harry hasn’t been sincerely investigating any of the murders that are happening in rural Louisiana—he’s been the killer the whole time.

Body Snatchers (1994)

Based on the novel The Body Snatchers published in 1955, Body Snatchers is about Pod People who take over human bodies on a military base and seem to be human, except for their utter lack of emotion. Meg Tilly stars as one of only two survivors who seem to escape the Pod People and make it to safety. But the film leaves subtle hints that the Pod People have actually taken over the entire world and that Tilly’s character is simply another Pod Person. Waxing poetic on Body Snatchers, Roger Ebert wrote, “Sometimes I’ll be looking at someone I know, and a wave of uncertainty will sweep over me. I’ll see them in a cold, objective light: “Who is this person – really?” Everything I know about others is based on trust, on the assumption that a “person” is inside them, just as a person clearly seems to be inside me. But what if everybody else only looks normal? What if, inside, they’re something else altogether, and my world is a laboratory, and I am a specimen? These spells do not come often, nor do they stay long, nor do I take them seriously. But they reflect a shadowy feeling which many people have from time to time. And the classic story of the body snatchers taps into those fears at an elemental level.”

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Kevin Spacey stars in this neo-noir mystery thriller as Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint, the sole survivor of a gun battle between five criminals aboard a boat. A small-time criminal with cerebral palsy and a slight limp, Kint tells of Keyser Söze, the criminal mastermind behind the whole foiled scheme. But once he’s outside the law’s clutches, his limp disappears and we realize that “Roger Kint” is actually Keyser Söze—the ultimate unreliable narrator. The Independent wrote, “The whole movie plays back in your mind in perfect clarity — and turns out to be a completely different movie to the one you’ve been watching (rather better, in fact).” Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie explains, “A lot of the film can be left open to interpretation, the entire thing could be a lie, parts of it could be true….The film would not work if it answered all of your questions. I have heard many theories about what happened and some of them are so good I wish I had written them. To me, a film that answers all of your questions is pointless.”

Primal Fear (1996)

Richard Gere stars in this legal thriller about a shy man with a stutter (Aaron Stampler, played by Edward Norton) who is accused of murdering an Archbishop. A big reveal in the film happens when Gere’s character discovers that Stampler suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID) and has a violent alter-ego named Roy. Gere successfully gets Stampler off for the crime, he will be remanded to a psychiatric hospital only until he gets better. The chilling final scene reveals that the DID was faked, and that “Aaron” wasn’t Aaron’s real personality, the sadistic Roy was.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Who does a twist ending better than M. Night Shyamalan? In the first directorial outing from Shyamalan, a child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) takes on the case of a boy named Cole (Haley Joel Osment) who claims that he has the ability to see dead people. Over time, Malcolm starts believing that Cole actually is able to see dead people. It isn’t until very end that we realize Malcolm himself is one of the dead people that Cole is able to see.

The Others (2001)

Nicole Kidman stars as the mother of two children who live with three servants in a large estate where they constantly hear odd sounds that make them fear the house is haunted. We don’t realize until the very end that the house is definitely haunted—by Kidman and her children. All of the odd things they hear in the house are actually sounds from the world of the living.

Frailty (2002)

A man named Fenton Meeks (Matthew McConaughey) visits the FBI and tells them that his religious fanatic father received visions from God telling him to slay “demons” and now Fenton’s brother Adam is doing the same thing and is wanted by the FBI as the “God’s Hand Killer”. There are two great twists in this film, the first is that Matthew McConaughey is actually Adam, the second is that their father wasn’t crazy, the people he killed really were terrible people. It’s left up to the viewer to decide whether he got lucky or if he really was on a mission from God. As Screen Rant noted, Frailty might be the first movie that makes God the villain.

Identity (2003)

Ten strangers find themselves stuck in a monsoon-level rainstorm at a remote motel. One by one, they start disappearing. We don’t find out until the very end that none of the nine people that get murdered are real—they are all personalities within the killer’s head. It turns out he’s been receiving an experimental rehabilitative treatment designed to help him “kill” all of his alternate personalities.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

A crime thriller about a college professor (David Gale, played by Kevin Spacey) who is also a activist against the death penalty. Gale loses his career and social life after being accused of raping a former student, who had actually consented to the sex. Next, a fellow anti-death penalty activist friend of Gale’s is found raped and murdered with Gales semen inside her. Gale is convicted of this rape and murder and sentenced to death. He allows reporter Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet) to interview him for a story as he sits on death row.

Bitsey’s investigation discovers that Gale’s friend was suffering from terminal leukemia and had carried out an elaborate suicide in order to frame Gale for her death. She also videotaped the entire thing to exonerate Gale, but not until he had been put to death. The goal was to show how faulty the criminal justice system is.

Saw (2004)

Even viewers who aren’t a fan of this gory franchise have to admit they didn’t see the twist in the original coming. Two men wake up inside the bathroom of a moldy old warehouse to find themselves chained to the wall and unable to leave. Compounding their horror, a dead man is lying in a pool of blood in between them. As an unseen gamemaker forces the two men to compete to survive, it turns out that the “dead” man in the middle of the room is actually alive—and he’s the one who’s been putting his two captors through the motions of his sick, sadistic game.

Secret Window (2004)

Novelist Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) works on his writing at his cabin in upstate New York. A mysterious visitor named John Shooter (John Turturro) shows up at his door and accuses Rainey of plagiarism. Rainey must find a copy of one of his early short stories in order to prove to Shooter that he isn’t a plagiarist while also dealing with the fallout of his marriage to Amy, who has recently cheated on him. The twist comes at the very end of the film when it is revealed that there is no John Shooter. Rather, Rainey has dissociative identity disorder and used Shooter (“Shoot Her”) as a way to murder his ex-wife Amy and her new lover Ted.

Hide and Seek (2005)

Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning star as a father and daughter who relocate to Upstate New York from the city after a family tragedy. Daughter Emily is troubled and acts out, citing the influence of a new imaginary friend named Charlie. The twist ending occurs when it’s revealed that “Charlie” and Emily’s father are the same person. Suffering from dissociative identity disorder, he actually killed Emily’s mother and is now a danger to her as well.

The Skeleton Key (2005)

A woman named Caroline takes a job caring for a sickly elderly man and his wife on a remote Louisiana plantation. The house is allegedly haunted by the ghosts of two servants who’d been lynched for attempting to teach hoodoo to the owner’s children. Caroline begins to use hoodoo to protect herself from her creepy employer. Unfortunately this was all part of the plan and she loses out to the real villain in the movie. The lynched servant’s souls have been alive the entire time, first in the bodies of the owner’s children then by stealing Caroline and her lawyer’s bodies.

Them (2006)

Them is a terrifying French home invasion movie about a couple living in a large rural home who are suddenly attacked one night but unseen assailants. The film is horrifying for jumping right into the suspense of the home invasion, but the twist-ending makes it even scarier. At the very end it is revealed that the couple was being attacked by a gang of children, their only given motive is that they wanted to “play”.

Atonement (2007)

In this dark drama, an aspiring 13-year-old writer named Briony accuses the housekeeper’s son (and her older sister Cecelia’s love interest) Robbie of raping her cousin Lola after a series of misunderstandings and witnessing someone commit the rape. Robbie’s life is destroyed beyond repair as the result of the misidentification. 5 years later during World War II Briony realizes that Lola’s rapist was actually Paul, a friend of her older brother who was visiting at the time. Briony regrets accusing Robbie and seeks to make things right with him and Cecelia. She visits the couple in London and promises to make up for what she has done. Again the film flashes forward and Briony is now a successful writer in her elderly years. She has published her last novel, titled Atonement. The audience realizes that both Robbie and Cecelia died in the war without ever reuniting and Briony’s Atonement is fiction.

Perfect Stranger (2007)

A reporter named Rowena Price (Halle Berry) goes undercover and poses as a temp to investigate a rich advertising exec (Bruce Willis) who she believes may be the killer of her childhood friend. When he catches her spying on him, she is fired. She then discovers the online account she thought was the ad exec (and was heavily flirting with) was actually her researcher Miles (Giovanni Ribisi) who is obsessed with her. The ad exec goes down for the murder of Rowena’s childhood friend, but then Miles tries to blackmail Rowena… the real killer.

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

Cliff (Steve Zahn) and Cydney (Milla Jovovich) are a newlywed couple spending their honeymoon in Hawaii. Even though they hear that two serial killers are on the loose, they still make plans to spend a few days hiking to a remote beach. Along the way they meet another couple they become friendly with, Nick (Timothy Olyphant) and Gina (Kiele Sanchez) as well as a couple they worry may be the killers, Kale (Chris Hemsworth) and Cleo (Marley Shelton). When they finally arrive to the isolated beach, it is revealed that Cliff and Cydney are actually the killers and Nick and Gina are their next targets.

The Last Exorcism (2010)

Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) is a second generation preacher from Louisiana who lost his faith after his son’s complicated birth. He agrees to perform one last exorcism with filmmakers Iris and Daniel in tow in order to expose the practice as a dangerous farce. However, his last subject proves to be a difficult case as the night after a “successful” exorcism his subject, Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell), shows up at his hotel room in a disturbed state. The deeper the trio digs into Nell’s “possession” the more secrets they stumble across. The final scene of The Last Exorcism is a total surprise and satisfyingly creepy.

Shutter Island (2010)

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Teddy Daniels, a US Marshal who is investigating a psychiatric hospital on a creepy remote island. It isn’t until the twist ending that we realize “Teddy” is actually a patient at the hospital named Andrew Laeddis, who’s been sentenced to the facility after he murdered his wife.

Side Effects (2013)

A Steven Soderbergh psychological thriller about a woman named Emily (Rooney Mara) who murders her husband (Channing Tatum) after being prescribed a new anti-depressant by her psychiatrist (Jude Law). Emily’s depression is well established and the audience is walked through how painful the disease is and how much it has affected the young couple’s relationship. It isn’t until the twist does the audience discover Emily never cared for her husband, she conspired with her girlfriend/psychiatrist (Catherine Zeta-Jones) to commit murder in order to profit from the falling stock price of the medication.

You’re Next (2013)

An extremely satisfying twist occurs about three-quarters of the way through this movie about a family being attacked by masked strangers at their cabin. As the family members get picked off one at a time, it is revealed that the attack is an inside job— two of the brothers staged the entire attack in order to collect insurance money from their parents. Another twist is that the main character, Erin, was raised in a survivalist cult and is able to outsmart the brothers and their hitmen-for-hire.

Before I Go to Sleep (2014)

Nicole Kidman stars as a woman who has damaged her memory and wakes up every day not knowing anything about her past. To help her heal her husband (Collin Firth) has helped her try to “remember” their life together and she also sees a psychologist and keeps a video diary. As she collects information in her video diary, the woman starts to wonder whether her “husband” is really her husband.

Gone Girl (2014)

A woman named Amy (Rosamund Pike) in an unhappy marriage disappears. A plot-twist early on in the film reveals that she faked her death to frame her husband as punishment for him cheating on her and generally being a crappy husband. However, once she’s on the run, suicide doesn’t look as glamorous as she thought it would. Amy fights her way back to the life she ran away from and searches for a new villain to blame.

Circle (2015)

A sci-fi psychological horror movie about a group of people who awaken in a strange room full of circles. The group quickly realizes that people are killed if they step off of their circle. Additionally, they learn that every two-minutes the group must vote on someone to die or one of them will be killed at random. The group splits into two main factions: those for and against saving a pregnant woman and a child to be the last two people in the game. In the final scene, one of the characters is revealed to be duplicitous and “wins” the game. He is released back to the streets of Los Angeles where spaceships hover in the air, sucking up humans to play a new game. The winner of the game we watched rushes forward, eager to play again.

The Visit (2015)

Two young siblings travel to meet their grandparents for the first time. At first it seems as if their grandparents live an idyllic country existence complete with cookie baking and long walks in the woods. The siblings are shocked, however, when their grandparents begin behaving erratically. It turns out that these were not their grandparents at all, but a pair of escaped mental patients.

Goodnight Mommy (2015)

This horror film revolves around twins named Elias and Lukas, who are isolated with their bizarre mother at a modern home in the middle of the forest. Throughout most of the film the boys become increasingly suspicious of their mother, who is recovering from plastic surgery. It isn’t until the end that we realize that there is nothing wrong with their mother at all. She was disfigured in a car accent that killed Lukas—Elias has been fantasizing that his twin brother has been alive the whole time.

Road Games (2015)

A British-French thriller with English subtitles, Road Games tells the story of two hitchhikers who have a chance meeting in an area of France where a serial killer is on the loose. The hitchers, Jack and Véronique are picked up by a local man, Grizard, who invites the two to dinner at his house. At dinner the group discuss the serial killer and Grizard insists they spend the night. Jack wakes to find Véronique missing with Grizard insisting she left early that morning to find a ride on her own.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Because this story is told from inside a bunker, there’s no way to tell if creepy Howard’s claim that the outside world is biohazardous and no longer safe is true — until the end. A woman named Michelle wakes up in the bunker after a car accident. Her “rescuer” tells her that there has been a chemical attack by aliens that has rendered all of the above-ground air unbreathable and that she’d be wise to stay in the bunker with him and another man sheltering there.. But Michelle senses this is only a ruse to keep her there with the men in the bunker. She escapes only to realize—the air is unbreathable and aliens have taken over the world.

The Boy (2016)

You will spend 90% of this movie thinking it is about a haunted doll. It’s not about the haunted doll. An American nanny takes on a job with an English family. To her shock, the family’s young “boy” is actually a life-sized doll. A series of strange events start to convince her that the doll is actually alive. But it’s not—their “boy” is actually a 28-year-old man named Brahms who has been living in crawlspaces behind the house’s walls since he was eight years old—according to an IMDb reviewer, Brahms is an “isolated and insane man who just wanted to be loved, and lived through the more lovable and accepted doll, and was murderous against anyone who rejected him.”

Don’t Breathe (2016)

In this home-invasion thriller, three teens break into the house of an old blind man, unaware that he’s a former Marine who is skilled at self-defense and is more than able to handle them physically. The twist here is that the old man is not some innocent victim—after a woman accidentally killed his daughter, he’s been keeping her in the basement as a sex slave. Game Spot says, “To double down on this, he has impregnated her in order for her to replace the child that she took from him. Inevitably, gets grimmer from there–let’s just say a turkey baster is involved. Eeewww.”

The Handmaiden (2016)

The Handmaiden has multiple twists throughout the movie. The film is told in three parts. In part one, a pickpocked named Sook-hee poses as a handmaiden for an heiress to help her friend Count Fujiwara seduce her and steal her money. This part ends with a double cross: instead of the heiress, Sook-hee herself is committed to a psychiatric hospital in her place. Parts 2 and 3 reveal even more twists in this shocking and beautiful story.

Get Out (2017)

In a reworking of the classic racial drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? from the 1960s, director Jordan Peele’s massively successful horror film tells the story of Chris, a young black man whose white girlfriend invites him to her family’s house to meet her parents. At first they seem overly solicitous and just a bit too nice in a way that Chris interprets as the discomfort of a racist white family. It’s not until much later that we realize the family kidnaps black people and steal their bodies.

Better Watch Out (2017)

On the surface this is just a regular babysitter vs. the scary man horror movie, but halfway through there is a delicious twist. A 12-year-old boy named Luke has a crush on his 17-year-old babysitter Ashley. While she’s babysitting him they are terrorized by an unseen assailant. The twist ending is that there is no intruder at all—Ashley’s babysitting charge is the “scary man”.

His House (2020)

A horror movie that follows two refugees, Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku), as they flee South Sudan with their daughter Nyagak. After losing their daughter on the dangerous journey to safety in England, they are granted temporary asylum in a dilapidated house. If the couple breaks any rules or draw attention to themselves, they will be forced to leave the country. They endure racism and discover the house they cannot leave is haunted. The twist-ending begins with a flashback in which it is revealed that Nyagak was not Bol and Rial’s daughter at all, they kidnapped her in order to be allowed on a bus to escape, which was only accepting people with children. Nyagak’s mother was likely killed by gunfire in the ensuing chaos while Bol and Rial escaped.

The Guilty (2021)

In this crime thriller, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a recently demoted police officer, Joe Baylor, working the lines at a 911 call center. A woman named Emily (voiced by Riley Keough) calls in and says she is being abducted in a white van. Joe is frustrated that California Highway Patrol is unable to help him before Emily is forced to hang up. He ignores other callers to investigate and talks to Emily’s daughter, Abby, who says that her estranged mom and dad left the house together. Joe learns that Abby’s dad has a record for assault and seeks his coworkers help in stopping a dangerous abduction and finding Emily. The film’s twist is that Emily’s estranged husband really was trying to help her by driving her to the psychiatric facility she had recently been released from.

More Movies With Twist Endings

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is a silent German Expressionist horror classic in which the ultimate horror is revealed at the end—the “neutral” narrator is actually a madman telling his story from inside an asylum.
• Les Diaboliques (1955) is a French masterpiece in which a man’s ex-wife and his mistress plot to kill him—or so it seems. The twist is that the man and his mistress hatched another plot—one in which his ex-wife dies of a heart attack when she sees him suddenly come to life.
• Black Christmas (1974) is thought to be the first movie ever with the plot twist of the killer living inside the house.
• When a Stranger Calls (1979) takes the same plot twist as Black Christmas, but in the context of a terrified babysitter (Carol Kane) who realizes to her terror that the guy who keeps harassing her by phone is actually upstairs in the bedroom.
• Sleepaway Camp (1983) seems like the typical 1980s “slasher at a summer camp” film until the ending twists in your guts like a knife—the bullied girl named Angela is actually her brother Peter, who was brought up as a girl after a boating accident killed the real Angela.
• Jacob’s Ladder (1990) is a nightmarish and hallucinatory fable that only makes sense when you realize that all the nightmares and hallucinations are in the lead character’s head.
• Seven (1995) revolves around a serial killer who stalks victims who break one of the seven deadly sins. But the killer purposely sets it up so that his own jealousy (sixth sin) leads to a husband’s wrath (seventh sin), completing the cycle when the killer gets murdered according to his own plan.
• Scream (1996) a girl realizes to her horror that the masked killer who’s been terrorizing her town is actually her boyfriend and her schoolmate, who conspired to start killing when the girl’s mother had an affair with the boyfriend’s father.
• Fallen (1998) waits until the end to reveal that the passive narrator is actually possessed by the soul of a dead serial killer, leading him to commit the murders he describes throughout the film.
• Arlington Road (1999) in this neo-noir, the person that pays the price is the wrong person. Let’s just say the villain wins in this one.
• Donnie Darko (2001) perhaps Donnie Darko has more of a confusing ending than a twist ending. Still, it’s a trip of a conclusion because it turns out that Donnie was time traveling and goes back in time to die and save the world.
• The Village (2004) one of M. Night Shyamalan’s more controversial twist endings where the time period is revealed to be not the distant past but a group of peers from the present day trying to escape the violence of modern life.
• High Tension (2005) two women bond emotionally because they’re being stalked by a psychopath—only it turns out that one of the women is the psychopath.
• The Orphanage (2007) a mother panics when she realizes her HIV-stricken son is missing; she doesn’t know that he fell to his death after she accidentally blocked his secret passageway in and out of the mansion.
• The Mist (2007) certain that fog monsters will kill them imminently, a father shoots his son and friends with his last bullets. When he exits his truck to face his fate, he almost immediately notices the fog lifting and rescue vehicles arriving.
• Orphan (2009) after their unborn baby dies, a couple adopts a little girl, not realizing she’s a psychopathic 33-year-old sex worker with a genetic abnormality.
• The Cabin in the Woods (2012) a seemingly random group of teens who meet together at a cabin have actually been selected for slaughter by the Ancient Ones, a group of super-elites who manipulate and torture people for their own pleasure.
• Us (2019) lets you believe that the main character is actually the main character until the very end, when you realize she’s only a doppelgänger of the real main character, who’s been trapped underground the whole time.