Neil Marshall’s survival horror film “ The Descent” plays up the paranoia of being trapped in an underground maze while adding in slasher creature-feature elements thanks to a vampire-esque brood of hybrid humans dubbed Crawlers. Six friends climb into a cave, but only one comes out. “ The Descent” (2005) “The Descent” ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection An alternate ending made available on the DVD release shows Rachel placing a copy of the tape on a video store shelf - though Verbinski and test audiences must’ve figured out we hardly needed an epilogue so literal to leave the theater completely rattled. Rachel finally discovers the videotape’s true sinister force: The only way to rid yourself of the curse is to make a copy of the tape and pass it on to someone else. In a scene most terrifying for its lack of musical overtures to instruct our emotions, Samara climbs out of Noah’s TV and does…whatever it is she does to her victims, which is scaring them to literal death. The film frantically careens off course as it’s revealed Samara is most definitely not at all OK, and that her next victim is Rachel’s ex, video expert Noah (Martin Henderson), whom Rachel gave the tape in the film’s first act. But she’s dead wrong because, as her all-too-sentient, cold-eyed child Aidan (David Dorfman) tells her, Samara never sleeps. She thinks she’s cracked the mystery of the viral videotape that’s been killing teenagers and serving as Samara’s vehicle of vengeance upon the world. Rachel (a perfectly shivery post-“Mulholland Drive” Naomi Watts) thinks she’s put the curse of Samara to rest after freeing her purgatory-bound ghost from the bottom of a well, where Samara was tossed off as a little girl by her tormented mother. Just when you thought it was over… “The Ring” shocked American audiences with its left-field climax that, while lifted directly from the 1998 J-horror original, loses known of its power when refashioned by director Gore Verbinski. “The Ring” (2002) “The Ring” ©DreamWorks/Courtesy Everett Collection For a film like “Malignant” where the main aim is to take the audience on a ride, anything less wouldn’t be quite so entertaining. The reveal lands like a firecracker, provoking a baffled “what the hell” reaction more than any other twist in recent memory. But his brain remained inside Madison’s head, and he’s been controlling her body (backwards) to commit the murders. But the film ups itself completely when the actual reveal of what’s going on occurs: Gabriel was Madison’s parasitic twin brother, who was removed from her body at infancy. The initial explanation - that Gabriel was Madison’s childhood imaginary friend - would be wacky enough. For the first act of the following movie, it’s unclear how the scene connects to the meat of the plot, about the desperate attempts of pregnant Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis) to unearth the meaning behind her visions that seem to portend real-world murders.

James Wan’s Giallo pastiche opens on a mental hospital rampage of Gabriel (voiced by Ray Chase), a disturbed mental patient who can control electricity. “Malignant” (2021) “ Malignant“ Warner Bros.ĭelightfully and proudly gonzo, “Malignant” commits to the nonsense completely with some of the most outlandish, unbelievable, and totally awesome plot turns in recent memory. A good twist doesn’t need to make you rethink everything you saw before: it can just be the introduction of something totally and completely new.

Instead, the film’s conflict turns out to crib a little from “Parasite,” when Tess discovers a hidden bunker in the rental’s basement, unearthing a hidden tragic history of the house’s former (and current subterranean) residents that has nothing to do with either her or Keith. But Zach Cregger’s horror film delights in fake outs, and it turns out that Keith is just some dude: a nerdy and awkward but harmless jazz dork.

When Tess (Georgina Campbell), a young woman in Detroit for a job interview, finds out that her Airbnb has been double-booked, it’s easy to assume that Keith (Bill Skarsgård) - the man she ends up spending the night in the house with - has sinister intentions. Probably the biggest surprise of “Barbarian” is that everyone in the film is more or less exactly who they say they are. “Barbarian” (2022) “ Barbarian” ©20th Century Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection Samantha Bergeson, Christian Blauvelt, Jude Dry, William Earl, David Ehrlich, Ryan Lattanzio, Jenna Marotta, Noel Murray, Chris O’Falt, Jamie Righetti, Christian Zilko, and Zack Sharf also contributed to this list.

Mystery movies with twist endings