10 Horror Movie Plot Twists That Were Totally Pointless
Sometimes, keeping things simple is the way to go.
The horror genre is full of plot twists. In fact, what is widely regarded as cinema's first twist ending comes from 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which is one of the earliest horror movies. This device is a great way to frighten the audience and make them question everything, thus furthering the atmosphere of unease that this genre needs.
Furthermore, we all love a good plot twist; it's just an inescapable fact. If you look at the IMDb Top 250, you'll see that movies with a good twist are heavily over-represented there. So, it's easy to see why so many horror features - both modern and old - feature a twist, but that hasn't always been a good thing.
A twist should be there if it's organic and actually adds anything to the film. Unfortunately, quite a few horror pictures throw in a twist just for the sake of it, as if to say, "Look at me! I'm so clever!" This has dragged plenty of horror flicks down, including the following ten movies.
A lot of them are still good, but they would've been better had they not insisted on a distractingly shooed-in rug-pull that added nothing whatsoever...
10. The Call - Michael Is An Incestuous Serial Killer
This 2013 flick from The Machinist and Session 9 director Brad Anderson is an outlier on this list, as it doesn't actually start out as a horror film. For the first two-thirds, The Call is a straightforward thriller before a third-act twist morphs it into a horror, and not in a good way.
At first, this is a thoroughly tense low-budget thriller in which Jordan (Halle Berry), a 911 call operator, tries to save the life of Casey (Abigail Breslin), a young woman who's been kidnapped. It was all going so well, and then the movie insisted on taking a left turn into icky territory by revealing that the kidnapper, Michael (Michael Eklund), is a serial killer who scalps women who look like his late sister, who died of cancer, and whom he had incestuous feelings for.
This was just a bit weird, and it drove the story in a far more generic, mediocre direction, eventually culminating in a bog-standard killer's lair finale. Furthermore, at The Call's start, Jordan is traumatized because a teenage girl she was on the phone with was murdered by an assailant, and, in predictable fashion, it turns out that the man who's kidnapped Casey is that same killer.
If The Call had just carried on being the tense, grounded thriller that it initially was, it would've been seen as a success rather than the waste of potential that reviews generally deemed it as.