10 Best Movie Twists You Genuinely Never Saw Coming

Frank Darabont's The Mist delivers one of the all-time most brutal final gut-punches in cinema history, and considering it took a sharp left-turn from Stephen King's original novella, not even fans of the source material saw it coming.

Protagonist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) leads a small group of survivors attempting to escape the interdimensional Lovecraftian monsters that have materialised in the town of Bridgton, Maine.

At film's end, David and the three other adult survivors enter a suicide pact after driving past a gigantic, skyscraper-sized monster that understandably resigns them to believing that humanity has lost.

And so, in a deeply harrowing scene, David shoots not only the adult survivors in the car but also his own young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), in an attempt to spare him the horror of being killed by the monsters.

With no bullet left for himself, David walks out into the mist to be devoured by the monsters, just as a tank rolls through the mist, revealing that the Army has now taken control of the situation and defeated the creatures.

In short, had David and his group waited just a few minutes longer, they all would've survived. Instead, David is left to live with the knowledge that he just killed four people, including his son, for no good reason.

Though audiences probably expected that humanity would eventually prevail over the monsters, they surely didn't expect it to be framed in quite such bleak, soul-crushing fashion.