10 Horror Movie Fakeouts We All Fell For
7. Zepp Is Jigsaw - Saw
Saw boasts not only one of the most ingenious plot twists in the history of the horror genre, but really cinema period. And a big part of the twist's success lies in how ingeniously it misdirects viewers with a fakeout villain reveal.
In the third act, we learn that the serial killer known as Jigsaw appears to be Zep Hindle (Michael Emerson), an orderly who works at the same hospital as Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes).
At film's end Zep attempts to kill Gordon in the iconic grotty bathroom where Gordon and Adam's (Leigh Whannell) deadly "game" is being played out, only for Adam to catch Zep off-guard and beat him to death with a toilet tank lid. Game Over, right? Not quite.
Gordon, who'd just sawn his foot off, then crawls away to summon help for a still-chained Adam, just as Adam searches Zep's corpse and finds a tape.
The tape reveals that Zep wasn't actually Jigsaw all along but simply another pawn in the game, with Jigsaw's identity then revealed to be John Kramer (Tobin Bell), one of Gordon's terminal cancer patients.
Zep was simply doing as Jigsaw instructed in order to receive an antidote to the slow-acting poison coursing through his own veins, and because this isn't wild enough, the "dead" body that's been laying in the middle of the bathroom since the game started suddenly stands up, alive.
The not-corpse is in fact Kramer himself, who has evidently been observing the entire game unfold with a front-row seat.
Zep being Jigsaw would've been a fine enough reveal for a solid if ultimately unremarkable horror-thriller, but by pulling the rug out from under audiences so violently with this added twist, Saw instantly cemented itself as a bats**t genre classic.