8. Shocking Left-Field Twist Movies - The Sixth Sense (1999)
Annoying Examples:The Village, The Forgotten, The Number 23, Secret Window, Hide & Seek Movie twists existed well before M. Night Shyamalan threw that infamous curve ball at us back in '99 with the ending to his seminal psychological thriller
The Sixth Sense, but this was the movie that made twists mainstream - and God knows we've been suffering ever since. Sure, a lot of that suffering has arisen from Shyamalan himself, who saw himself as the unofficial genius of twists, but after a couple more cinematic successes, his star began to fade and he's since been reduced to nothing but a joke. So much for the next Steven Spielberg. But even without Shyamalan giving his own trend a bad name,
The Sixth Sense opened up the idea of this narrative switcharoo to the masses - from then on, we were all primed and looking for movies to give us a similar experience, so Hollywood gave us exactly what we asked for. But the thing with twists is that, for the most part, they don't work: for a twist to hit its mark you have to have never seen it coming, and the rest of the movie still has to make sense when you go back and look at it - alas, most filmmakers forgot that part.