10 Great Horror Movies Ruined By Their Twists
1. Haute Tension (High Tension) (2003)
While Haute Tension deserves the banner image, the number one spot should really be a five-way tie between this film, Hide And Seek, Secret Garden, Pandorum, The Ward, and any other film that employs this completely derivative and dried up plot device: the protagonist has dissociative identity (aka multiple personality) disorder and is also the antagonist.
Just as The Sixth Sense set off a wave of horror movies with overly ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful twists (many by Shyamalan's own hand), so too did 1999s Fight Club instigate an extended era of fascination with DID in popular culture. Unfortunately, the vast majority of multiple-personality thrillers that followed fell completely flat. The shtick felt tired and played out, something the audience had seen in better-crafted movies far too recently. 2002's Adaptation even poked fun at the trend by having Nic Cage's character Donald sell a ridiculously low-brow and clichéd DID thriller on spec for six or seven figures, much to his twin brother's (the real screenwriter) contempt.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a movie bearing more than a passing resemblance to this fake script was actually produced in 2006 (it was met with commercial and critical abhorrence). Haute Tension locked down the number one entry because it was such a great movie until those last moments. Its plot was generic (two young women evade a hillbilly murderer whilst vacationing at a family home) but the hyper-visceral violence was unforgettable and the overall execution was near flawless. Without the twist, Haute Tension would stand tall amongst the great slashers of recent memory; with the twist it can barely be taken seriously.
The aforementioned list should serve as a warning to filmmakers of all stripes: you must be very confident that your aha moment isn't destroying the rest of your work before you ever lay ink to paper, much less commit it to celluloid.
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