8 Shocking Plot Twists Cut From Movies

Nothing beats the gut punch feeling of a really good twist. Movies like Seven, The Usual Suspects or Saw are all engineered around clever twists in their plotting. And so long as a movie comes to a major twist organically – and not just for the sake of having one – then the audience won’t feel cheated.

Organic is the keyword here since not every story requires a twist. In fact, some movies have wisely dropped “shocking” revelations because they felt too forced or contrived, and they worked a lot better without them. In these cases, filmmakers were smart enough to realise that while a certain twist might sound good on paper, they would just be distracting in the final product. Just imagine how much better Star Trek Into Darkness or Spectre could have been, without their "mysterious" villain nonsense.

So let’s take a look at a few movies that elected not to go for the “shock” twist route, and instead focused on making the best movie possible; in most cases, anyway.

In the original Friday The 13th timeline there were eleven films – including Freddy Vs Jason – so you’d think at some point, the issue of Jason’s father would have come up. After all, we met his stab happy mother in the original, and it’s not like the franchise is overburdened with story, so exploring his origins a little more makes sense.

Surprisingly this never happened, and the idea was only flirted with for the sixth entry. The film as is ends with Jason chained at the bottom of Crystal Lake, but the ending as scripted featured an epilogue where Jason’s dad Elias visits his grave. It turns out Elias was the one secretly paying for Jason’s grave to be maintained, and he visits the tombstone knowing full well Jason’s not in it.

This scene was meant to be teaser setting up the next movie, but the producer felt exploring the story of an old man the audience had never met before was a creative dead-end, so the scene was dropped before it was filmed.