10 Horror Movie Scenes Filmmakers Regret
9. The Twist - High Tension
On just about any list of terrible horror movie plot twists, Alexandre Aja's High Tension will at least get an honourable mention.
Aja's gut-wrenchingly brutal slasher flick collapses completely in the third act when it's revealed that the male trucker serial killer stalking protagonists Marie (Cécile de France) and Alexia (Maïwenn) doesn't actually exist.
Rather, the killer is Marie herself, with the trucker simply being a dissociated personality in her mind.
It's an absolute clanger of a twist that's needlessly thrown into the mix in the final 10 minutes and causes the movie to implode in on itself through its lack of internal logic.
But director and co-writer Aja wasn't a fan of the scene either, for while the twist was always in the script, his original version was considerably more modest, yet a producer ultimately forced him to make it more involved. In an interview with Chud.com, he said:
"The first draft of the script, the script we wanted to do, had the same twist but just in the final minutes. You started the movie in the hospital room and she's telling the story and then you come back to the hospital room in the end, so you have the feeling that the killer was the killer, but then the doctor brought a VCR into the room, watching the security video from the gas station and you realize she axes the guy. That was the final twist, and the twist was only saying, 'OK what you saw was her vision of the story and the truth is another movie.'
The producer, unfortunately, asked us to give up the last scene in the last reel, and I think that's where everything became more fragile. I understand the question of the viewers with the twist coming that way, which is not like the perfect way to bring it. I regret that we didn't have the time or the budget to shoot the two different endings and be able to, at least on the DVD, have the two different endings."
It certainly sounds like Aja's original version of the ending would've been better, placing less emphasis on the big reveal by saving it for the movie's final seconds.