The best horror movies with twist endings, from Psycho to Get Out

Best horror movies with twist endings: the classics

These films set the template that later twists still follow.

• Diabolique (1955): a wife and a mistress plot to kill the cruel headmaster they both despise. Henri-Georges Clouzot's final reveal is one of the earliest great horror twists, and it famously asked audiences not to spoil it.
• Psycho (1960): Alfred Hitchcock kills off his apparent lead early and then delivers a final explanation at the Bates Motel that changed horror. Few twists have been copied more often.
• The Wicker Man (1973): a devout police sergeant travels to a remote Scottish island to search for a missing girl. The final act turns a mystery into one of British cinema's most chilling endings.
• The Vanishing (1988): a Dutch man spends years searching for his girlfriend, who disappeared at a petrol station. Fangoria calls its ending one of the most upsetting of its kind.

1990s and 2000s twist horror

The late 1990s made the twist ending a box office event.

• Jacob's Ladder (1990): a Vietnam veteran in New York is haunted by visions he cannot explain. Adrian Lyne's film keeps you unsure what is real until its last scene.
• Cure (1997): Kiyoshi Kurosawa's detective story follows a string of murders by people who cannot explain why they killed. Its ending is less a reveal than a slow, deeply unsettling realisation.
• The Sixth Sense (1999): a child psychologist tries to help a boy who says he sees dead people. M. Night Shyamalan's final reveal became one of the most famous in film history.
• The Others (2001): Nicole Kidman plays a mother guarding her light-sensitive children in a dark island mansion. Alejandro Amenábar builds a gothic ghost story with an ending that recasts every scene.
• Identity (2003): ten strangers trapped at a motel in a storm are killed one by one. The film plays fair with its clues, even when the answer seems impossible.
• A Tale of Two Sisters (2003): two sisters return home to their father and cold stepmother after a stay in hospital. Kim Jee-woon's Korean horror film uses its twist to turn a ghost story into a tragedy.
• Saw (2004): two men wake up chained in a filthy bathroom with a body between them. The final minutes of James Wan's debut launched a long-running franchise.
• Orphan (2009): a grieving couple adopt a nine-year-old girl named Esther, and strange things start to happen. Its central reveal became so well known that the series made a prequel around it.

Modern twist horror

Recent horror uses the twist to make a point as well as a shock.

• Get Out (2017): a Black photographer visits his white girlfriend's family for the weekend. Jordan Peele hides the truth behind small social discomforts, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

What makes a great horror twist

The best twists are planted, not invented. On a second watch you can see the clues in plain sight, and the film still works. A weak twist cancels what came before, while a strong one deepens it.

The other test is meaning. The Sixth Sense, The Others and A Tale of Two Sisters all use their reveals to say something about grief. Get Out uses its reveal to make an argument about race. That is why they last.

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