10 Great Horror Movies Ruined By Their Twists
2. The Village (2004)
Poor, poor M. Night Shyamalan. With The Sixth Sense the budding filmmaker dropped a startlingly impressive debut feature with one of the most earth-shattering twists in all of cinema history. From there his movies declined in an almost perfectly linear fashion (at least according to aggregate ratings) with each story becoming increasingly more stiff and generally less watchable. His first four features (Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village) all end in a twist because his first one made him known as the twist guy (and likely helped propagate the idea that all great horror movies need to end with a big turn). Going into a Shyamalan movie meant you had to keep your eyes peeled for clues lest you get blindsided in the closing act.
The only problem was by the fourth feature (and beyond) the Shyamalan brand had morphed from awe-inspiring reveals into inadequate motion picture experience. The Village's twist is not only not-good, it's not even original; the idea of a town of old-timey people who are actually living in the modern day is the subject of a YA novel called Running Out Of Time.
The publishers alleged that the author's ideas were plagiarised but that might be a disservice to the book. In all honesty, this penultimate entry could have been on Signs or (shudder) The Happening but it was always going to be Shyamalan. He wasn't the first to make people expect a big twist in horror (Psycho for example beat him by decades) but his subsequent outputs repeated downturn in quality was a phenomenal disappointment; indeed it was a shock in its own right.
This particular movie made Roger Eberts Worst Ever List and he summarises it nicely: "To call the movie an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the narrative ladder from it was all a dream."