8 Worst Horror Movie Twists of All Time, or When Scripts Get Scary Bad
We sympathize with horror filmmakers — it must be hard coming up with an original twist, considering the laughable, ridiculous excuses for plot pivots below. Even M. Night Shyamalan, who so thoroughly awed moviegoers with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, took a turn for the ludicrous in three films on this list. Here are our nominees for the worst twists in horror movie history.
8. Signs: Water kills the aliens
The letdown of a twist in this Shyamalan film isn’t that aliens have arrived and are using cornfields as artistic canvases. It’s that these extraterrestrial invaders are thwarted by water and yet came to a planet that is 71 percent H₂O-covered. Maybe intelligent life really doesn’t exist out there.
7. Halloween: The doctor freed the killer
All of the bloodshed of 2018’s Halloween reboot could have been avoided if it weren’t for Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), the psychiatrist so intrigued by Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) that he frees the serial killer to study him in the wild. Turns out Michael wanted to get inside Sartain’s head, too… and did so with a boot to the doc’s cranium.
6. The Village: The elders are the monsters
The 19th-century Pennsylvania village surrounded by monsters in this Shyamalan film is — surprise, surprise — actually a 21st-century village in which the society-shunning elders are faking the monster threat to keep their youth from discovering the modern-day world. In a one-star review of the film, Roger Ebert decried the twist: “To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.”
5. I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer: The killer is undead
I Know What You Did Last Summer has a group of people picked off one by one by the fisherman they thought they’d killed in a hit-and-run. Sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer has a group of people picked off one by one by that fisherman and his son. And this threequel — mercifully sent straight to video — has a group of young of people picked off one by one by the undead version of the fisherman (a zombie? a ghost?) as the franchise takes an ill-advised descent into the supernatural.
4. The Happening: The plants are out to get us
In perhaps the most laughable Shyamalan twist, the big twist of this film is that the neurotoxins causing mass suicides is being released by plants who have apparently had it up to here with humanity. Cut to: Mark Wahlberg’s character talking to a ficus, asking it to spare his life. (Walhberg regrets the whole affair, saying at a 2010 press conference, “It is what it is. F***ing trees, man. The plants. F*** it.”)
3. Texas Chainsaw 3D: Heather and Leather team up
Never mind that the slasher Leatherface (Dan Yeager) is responsible for the deaths of her boyfriend, her best friend, and her best friend’s boyfriend: When Heather (Alexandra Daddario) discovers she and Leatherface are kin in this film, all is forgiven. In fact, Heather even helps Leatherface chainsaw up a couple of adversaries. (She even says, “Do your thing, cuz!”)
2. The Devil Inside: A car crash abruptly ends the film
The Devil Inside presents the story of a woman named Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) who’s researching her mother’s demonic possession with the help of documentarian Michael (Ionut Grama). But then the demons take over them both, and Michael drives them into oncoming traffic. That scene — plus a title card directing viewers to a website (that no longer exists) for more information on the supposed case — is how this film’s ending crashes and burns.
1. High Tension: The killer was Marie all along
Widely cited as the worst-ever twist of the horror genre, this French slasher pic follows two women, Alex (Maïwenn) and Marie (Cécile de France), as they try to escape a killer who murdered Alex’s family. The twist, however, is that Marie is romantically obsessed with Alex and carried out the murders in a dissociative state — a twist that seems at once homophobic, ableist, and cheap.
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I have seen all of these movies, except #2. I'm so proud! But if you really want bad horror, endings and all, fall down the rabbit hole of the horror category on the FAST services. Making my way through Tubi now.
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