10 Best Horror Movie Misdirections Ever
8. The Game Has Already Happened - Saw II
Saw II was saddled with the extremely unenviable task of living up to the original film's mind-blowing final plot twist, and to the filmmakers' credit, they got pretty damn close.
The movie begins with Detective Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) learning that his son Daniel (Erik Knudsen) has been kidnapped by Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) and placed inside his latest game alongside a group of fellow ex-cons.
A nerve agent will kill everyone participating in the game within two hours, but Jigsaw tells Matthews of one simple rule to save his son:
"All you have to do is talk to me, listen to me. If you do that long enough you will find your son in a safe and secure state."
And boy, that turned out to be so much truer than anyone ever anticipated.
Saw II's climax reveals that the game actually took place several days prior, and so the "live" video feed was pre-recorded. As such, when the two-hour countdown hits zero, a safe inside Jigsaw's compound opens up, revealing an unharmed Daniel inside.
Basically, Jigsaw was being far more literal than Matthews or the audience could've believed, which is unfortunate given that Matthews desperately heads off to find Daniel prior to the big reveal, resulting in him being kidnapped before he can find out the truth.
Though the final twist, that Amanda (Shawnee Smith) is Jigsaw's secret apprentice, is a far more meaningful reveal in the scope of the series, the timeline misdirect was a genius rug-pull that just about nobody saw coming.
The eight film in the series, Jigsaw, attempted to pull off a similar timeline-jigging misdirect, albeit with considerably lesser impact.