10 Awful Twists That Ruined Awesome Horror Movies
It was all going so well.
When it comes to things that can make or break a movie, few devices rank as highly as the plot twist.
Good ones can elevate a great movie to legendary status. See The Sixth Sense, Planet of the Apes, and Empire Strikes Back for reference.
On the other hand, a bad twist can turn a promising narrative into a twisted disaster.
Want an example? How about ten.
The following horror movies were all pootling along nicely when, all of a sudden, somebody turned the wheel and sent them careening off a cliff. Their stories were thrown completely out of whack, their characters ended up tripping over their own motivations, and the whole thing just collapsed in on itself like a sad bouncy castle.
Clearly, some of these filmmakers were trying to capture the lightning in a bottle that so many of their forebears had done. They tried to come up with new inventive twists to make their films stand out, only to get them in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Nobody saw these moments coming, although looking back, we wished we'd never seen them at all.
10. Identity
This murder-fest from 2003 begins as two parallel stories - one is about a group of people trying to outwit a killer in a motel, the other is a man on trial as a psychiatrist tries to prove his insanity.
What could possibly link these two unrelated events? Bad writing, that's what!
It becomes aparent that the events in the motel are actually playing out in the man on trial's head. Malcolm Rivers, a convicted murderer by the way, suffers from dissociative identity disorder and the different characters inside the motel represent his multiple personalities.
It's up to Ed, the "good" personality, to root out the murderous one before it can strike again in the real world.
Not a bad idea at all, but it all gets very complicated very quickly. The conflict between killer and victims inside Malcolm's mind is meant to represent his internal struggle, but how could we possible feel for a character we know has committed such heinous acts?
Identity starts off fairly promising, has a twist that could have been something, but ultimately ends up as a morally confused mess.