12 Greatest Red Herring Movie Endings

2. Malcolm Was Dead The Entire Time - The Sixth Sense

Everybody knows how The Sixth Sense ends, but if you were lucky enough to see M. Night Shyamalan's classic horror film before it became a pop-culture staple, you'll remember just how most of a shock the film's final plot twist truly was.

The bulk of the film's focus is on child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) attempting to help Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a young boy who can see and communicate with the dead. This is all while assuaging his own guilt over a previous patient he was unable to help who eventually committed suicide (Donnie Wahlberg).

It's a restrained, brilliantly-acted character study for the standards of the genre, and while Malcolm and Cole's mission holds true until the very end of the film, the big catch is that, as it turns out, Malcolm is himself a dead man with unfinished business.

Though the twist has been imitated by literally dozens of major movies over the years, Shyamalan's expert misdirection makes this a red herring ending that never once feels cheap or unearned.

Rather the invalidate what came before, the surprise ending only lends further emotional weight to those earlier sequences (especially Malcolm's shooting, which initially appears to be non-fatal).