Greatest Movie Twists, Spoilers, and Surprise Endings: Avid filmgoers often speak about seeking rare movie surprises in the movie-going experience, such as discovering films that have cunning plot twists, a shocking surprise ending, a surprise revelation about a particular character, or some other unknown or unsuspected narrative element. Compiled here in this comprehensive collection is a detailed set of films with the greatest movie twists, spoilers, and surprise endings.

Note: The films that are marked with a yellow star are the films that
"The Greatest Films" site has selected as the "100 Greatest Films".

Halloween (1978)

Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

Masked-serial killer Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur) returned in this fourth film in the series, set 10 years after the original film in 1988 (see above), in pursuit of his sister Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) daughter Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris), his eight year-old niece ("He's here to kill that little girl and anybody who gets in his way"). The film ended with an astounding plot twist - psychically-linked Jamie was possessed by Michael's murderous instincts, and stabbed her foster mother Darlene (Karen Alston) to death, in a sequence reminiscent and similar to the opening of the first film. She wore her clown costume and stood with bloody scissors at the top of the stairs, just like young Michael had done 25 years earlier

Hancock (2008)

In this fantasy super-hero film set in present-day Los Angeles, hard-drinking amnesiac, unfocused and misunderstood superhero 'John Hancock' (Will Smith) learned to his disbelief from Mary Embrey (Charlize Theron), the wife of his struggling public relations agent Ray (Jason Bateman), about their origins; after Hancock confessed that he was lonely and unloved at dinner ("What kind of bastard must I have been that nobody was there to claim me?") and then later kissed Mary in her kitchen (after which she superhumanly tossed him out her front door onto the windshield of a parked neighborhood car!), she explained how both of them were superheroes (or "Gods, angels...Different cultures call us by different names"); he was further surprised to find out that Mary was actually the stronger of the two (illustrated in a gargantuan struggle between them on an LA street when she unleashed the forces of nature with a tornado); she described how they were created in pairs and were the sole survivors of an ancient race of angels ("They all died. It's just the two of us"), but they could not be together, for if they paired up, they would die: ("It can't work, it always ends the same way - Persia, Greece, Brooklyn"); Mary explained how they were technically 'husband' and 'wife' for thousands of years ("We're drawn to each other"), but had to be separated in order to give each other strength and prevent weakness or mortality ("It's us being close to each other. It's never happened this fast before"); after her relationship with Hancock ended 80 years earlier in 1931 (when they were mugged going to the premiere of Frankenstein (1931) with Boris Karloff), Mary had tried to live a quiet normal, human life by marrying Ray ("Finally I am happy. You are not gonna mess with that!...Love, connect, grow old, die"); Hancock realized that he was becoming mortal, human and vulnerable when he was bruised and then shot during a liquor store robbery, drawing blood; as he laid dying in a hospital bed, she told how the 3-4 past relationships with Hancock all ended destructively ("Summer of 4 BC. We were becoming mortal, like now. They came after me with swords. But you saved me. 1850. They set our house on fire. You pulled me out of the flames. (Eighty years ago) We were living in Miami and a new movie was playing in town...And after we walked down Flagler Street and you took my hand and you held it so tight. And they attacked us in an alley. They hit you so hard. There was so much blood...By the time I got to the hospital...but you didn't know me so I left. Every time we're together, they come after you through me"); when they were last together in the 1930s, Hancock lost his memory when he was struck in the head - and that's when Mary decided to disappear from his life; now to sacrifice herself for him ("You're built to save people more than the rest of us. That's who you are. You're a hero. The insurance policy of the gods. Keep one alive. You. To protect this world"), she took a bullet from one-armed bad-guy Kenneth "Red" Parker, Jr. (Eddie Marsan), and as a result of her 'death', she gave him enough power to defeat the criminals, and to fly away to be a superhero - and also save herself as a mortal (as she earlier told him: "You have to leave. The further you get from me, the better you're gonna feel. You'll start getting your powers back"); in the epilogue, a month later, Hancock revealed by a phone call from New York that he had been on the moon, painting it with Ray's logo - the "AllHeart Symbol" representing world-changing charitable giving; he called Ray (and family) and told him: "You're gonna change the world. Good job, Ray," as the loving couple kissed, and Ray asked himself about the defacement: "Will I get in trouble for that?"

The Hangover (2009)

The highest-grossing (domestic) R-rated film of all time, this vulgar, obscenity-filled quasi-comedy/bromance caper, told the outlandish story of four guys in Las Vegas for a bachelor party for soon-to-be married Doug (Justin Bartha) to Tracy (Sasha Barrese). After occupying a spacious villa at Caesar's Palace for the night, they awoke the following morning with no memory of the night before, because the bride's perverted and bearded brother Alan (Zach Galifianakis) had offered them, during a toast on the roof of Caesar's Palace at the beginning of the evening, what he thought was ecstasy, but in fact was Rohypnol (the date-rape drug) causing total memory loss. They found themselves in their wrecked hotel villa, with a burned couch, a baby, a tiger, a chicken, and more... As they tried to piece together their long night together, they also searched for the missing Doug. At the end of the film after they had just made it back to LA in time for the wedding (with tuxedoes delivered to them 'on the road' by The Tux Shop), Jewish dentist Stu (Ed Helms) found his digital camera in the backseat of their car, with candid snapshots of their long evening together. They learned from the collage of photos and retracing their steps, the following: (1) married schoolteacher Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper) had a hospital wrist bracelet - he had been briefly admitted with bruises in the middle of the night, (2) before that, Stu had participated in a marriage ceremony in Vegas' THE BEST LITTLE CHAPEL (run by Eddie), hitching up with a stripper/escort named Jade (Heather Graham) who was the single mother of baby Tyler left in their villa's closet, (3) the group had 'borrowed' a police car, and after they were arrested and released from a police station after being subjects in a taser demonstration, they retrieved their own prized Mercedes from the impound lot, (4) a strange naked and gay Asian gangster (named Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong)) locked in the trunk beat them up with a crowbar, (5) they also had taken boxer Mike Tyson's (Himself) Bengal tiger from his mansion (found in their villa's bathroom) and were threatened with harm if it wasn't returned, (6) Chow later returned with gang members to demand $80,000 he claimed was stolen from him (satchels were accidentally switched) at the Bellagio in exchange for kidnapped Doug, although when the exchange was made (after the trio played blackjack and Alan counted cards to win over $80,000), they discovered that they had mistakenly ransomed a "black Doug" (Mike Epps) (the drug dealer who had sold Alan the roofies), (7) Doug was found severely sunburned, trapped for a day and a half on the roof of Caesar's Palace - where he had tried to signal his whereabouts by throwing his mattress from the rooftop onto a statue below, (8) it was revealed that Stu pulled out his own front tooth with a pair of pliers as part of a dare from Alan, (9) on the way home, Doug found Chow's $80,000 in Bellagio chips in his pocket, (10) Stu broke up with his controlling fiancee Melissa (Rachael Harris) at the wedding, and planned on returning to Vegas to take Jade out to dinner

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

The Happening (2008)

Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's first R-rated film was this apocalyptic horror-thriller film, generally considered less effective than many of his other plot-twisting tales; it posited the idea of a wave of mass suicides sweeping across the populated northeastern part of the United States (first in Central Park in New York, then the Philadelphia area, Boston, Princeton, New Jersey and then into rural areas) for a period of approximately one day; the deaths were marked by screams, people standing still, whistling wind across grass surfaces or in the trees, disoriented speech, power outages, incomplete radio transmissions, and other outward signs; immediately after the appearance of those signs, an infected individual would find a convenient means to kill him/herself (by impaling one's jugular vein with a hair-bun needle, shooting oneself with a gun, jumping off a roof or building, a zookeeper offering his arms to a lion, slitting one's wrist with glass shards, hanging oneself from a tree, crashing one's vehicle into a tree, lying down in front of a giant lawnmower, smashing one's head through a window, etc.); there were numerous speculative explanations for the epidemic (none definitive), such as bioterrorism, secret government experiments with drugs having psychotropic properties as a defense against terrorist chemical weapons, toxic airborne plant emissions, a strange virus, the effects of nuclear power plants, or nature turning against humanity - or forces at work beyond our understanding; one opinionated scientist, Dr. William Ross (Stephen Singer) - from the Department of Botanical Toxocology at the University of Chicago predicted on television that the happening was only a "prelude, a warning, like the first spot of a rash - we have become a threat to this planet"; after a three-month lull, the same pandemic wave began to occur in the Louvre's Tuileries Gardens in Paris, France as dark clouds gathered, when the film ended

Happy Birthday to Me (1981)

Hard Candy (2005)

In this thought-provoking, exploitative female revenge thriller, the debut feature film of director David Slade, seemingly-innocent 14 year old femme fatale Hayley Stark (Ellen Page) (screenname Thonggrrrrrl14) - who had met 32 year old photographer Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) (screenname Lensman319) in an Internet chat room, went to the potential jail-bait predator's Hollywood Hills home with premeditated determination to seek revenge; she drugged his drink, tied him up, and then threatened to castrate him (as "preventative maintenance") with a scalpel and anesthetic ice, as he both berated her and pleaded with his raging and sadistic captor; she told him: "I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed"; she forced her repentant victim to confess to a murder that he may/may not have committed of a young model named Donna Mauer that he once photographed; there were a few key plot twists: (1) she faked Jeff's castration although it was gruesomely performed (off-screen), (2) it was revealed that Hayley had already kidnapped and tortured another pedophile named Aaron, Jeff's partner-in-crime during the murder of Donna (Hayley admitted: "Aaron told me you killed her, before he killed himself"), and (3) as Jeff's ex-girlfriend Janelle Rogers (Jennifer Holmes) arrived at the house, Hayley and Jeff were on the roof, where she had strung a rope off the side. She offered to clean up incriminating evidence of him as a sexual predator in his home (he would also avoid prosecution and clear his name with Janelle) if he jumped and committed suicide, but at the last second after he stepped off the roof and the rope went taut, she promised with a caveat: "I'll take care of it all - or not!"

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Hide and Seek (2005)

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

House of Games (1987)

House of Wax (1953)

In this classic horror film that was originally shown in 3-D (it was the first 3D film from a major studio (Warner Brothers)), Vincent Price starred in the lead role as deranged wax figure sculptor-curator Professor Henry Jarrod, who was presumed dead after his early 20th century NY wax museum was burned down; however, he survived and opened a new museum that showcased famous crimes and murders through wax figures; the plot twist was that the vengeful Jarrod (wearing a mask to hide his melted face) - with scarred and useless hands - had been murdering people and then coating them with molten wax to produce very life-like statues from their corpses for his waxworks exhibits; in the surprise ending, and in one of the film's most startling scenes, Jarrod was unmasked by heroine Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), and he wound up in the burning cauldron of tallow - his apt and richly-deserved fate

The House on 92nd Street (1945)

In the Company of Men (1997)

Writer/director Neil LaBute's disturbing drama (his debut film, a low-budget independent film) had as its thematic premise: "Let's hurt somebody" - a line spoken by corporate ex frat-boy Chad (Aaron Eckhart) out to seek premeditated, retributive revenge on women, after he claimed he had broken up with steady girlfriend Suzanne (Emily Cline) - and she had packed up, leaving him only a futon and his American Gigolo poster; Chad expressed his vile hatred of the fair sex: "Women. Nice ones, the most frigid of the race - it doesn't matter in the end. Inside, they're all the same: Meat and gristle and hatred, just simmering." As the handsome Chad and bespectacled business colleague/nice-guy college pal Howard (Matt Malloy) were traveling to a project in a branch office for a six-week stint, Howard described how his relationship with girlfriend Melanie fell apart (even after he gave her a ring); misogynistic Chad thought "we ought to do something about it" - referring to how women were "getting out of balance," and cruelly proposed that they find an unattractive woman, date her, and then unceremoniously dump her during their six week stint: "Say we were to find some gal...this person's just vulnerable as hell. You know, young thing, wallflower type, or whatever. Or like, disfigured in some way. Just some woman who is pretty sure that life, and I mean a full, healthy sexual life, romance, stuff like that, is lost to her forever...Anyhow, we take a girl of that type, just some corn-fed bitch who'd practically mess her pants if you sharpen a pencil for her, and we both hit her. Small talk, a dinner date, flowers...We just do it, you know, you and me, upping the ante all the time. And suddenly she's got two men. She's calling her mom. She's wearing makeup again. And on we play, and on and on. And then one day, out goes the rug, and us pulling it hard, and Jill - she just comes tumbling after...Trust me, she'll be reaching for the sleeping pills within a week, and we will laugh about this until we are very old men....Is that not ideal? Restore a little dignity to our lives?...It's really just the same crap we used to play in school, only it's better because we get a little payback on all this messy relationship s--t we're dealing with...I think it would be refreshing. I really do. And very therapeutic coming off the women we just have." In their office setting, Chad selected deaf and naive secretarial assistant temp worker Christine (Stacy Edwards), a dark-haired beauty, as their innocent, targeted female - and in week five, Chad slept with her (in his friend Howard's hotel room!); and then, in one of the film's most painful sequences, set in a restaurant and afterwards in a parked car, Howard confessed that he was genuinely falling in love with Christine (he told her: "I need you" using sign language); she was the one who replied with apology that she had two-timed him ("I've let this go too far...I shouldn't have dated both of you") and that she was in love with Chad ("I love someone else"). Howard decided to tell her (out of guilt, hurt, and jealousy) that Chad's love was a total sham and that they had planned the game together ("He doesn't like you. He loathes you. He detests you and your pathetic retard voice. That's what he calls it...You better wake up. You were used. It was a game"), but she had trouble believing him ("Chad would never do that"). He tried to force a ring upon her ("It's not a game to me anymore"), but she refused. In week six, Christine met Chad in the hotel room and asked: "Do you love me?" and then admitted that she knew about his duplicity in the game ("I know what's going on...You two were playing a game on me, right?"). Chad quickly attempted to explain his participation in a "contest" to date Christine, but then admitted he couldn't keep a "straight face" telling the excuse. When he asked how she felt, she slapped him hard across the face. He asked: "It only hurts that much?" and then promptly left the room, dumping her ("The deed's done"). He left her in the room where the emotionally-devastated Christine sobbed uncontrollably. A few weeks later, after they returned to their hometown, a sickened Howard visited Chad at about 1 am, and learned that Chad had no regrets about his actions, and that girlfriend Suzanne had NEVER left him ("She never left. She's always been right there") - the film's plot twist; he boldly and amorally declared why he had devised the game: "Because I could"; it seemed that all along, the motivation of the venomous and controlling Chad was a subtle hatred of the submissive and vulnerable Howard, who was appointed ineffectual team leader (on retrospect, Chad had cleverly sabotaged Howard's work throughout the film); when Howard left the building, he vomited on the staircase; later, Howard found Christine working as a secretary at a bank and approached her desk, shouting loudly at her: "Listen, listen, listen, Listen to me" - but she ignored him and wouldn't speak to him

In the Cut (2003)

Director Jane Campion's dark feminist sex film starred clean-imaged Meg Ryan as a mid-30s English writing teacher - an unattractive despairing divorcee named Francis Avery, who first met a tough, foul-mouthed NY detective named Giovanni "James" Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) when he was investigating a homicide in her neighborhood; a severed head (with a "disarticulated" body) was discovered in the garden outside her window; he had a questionable wrist tattoo of the three of spades, matching the tattoo she had seen on the wrist of a man (smoking cigarettes) she had witnessed receiving an explicit 'blow job' in The Red Turtle pool/bar club's darkened basement, performed by a blue-fingernailed female named Angela Sands (Heather Litteer) - who was the murdered woman; when Frannie masturbated face-down on her bed, she fantasized that Malloy was watching her, and that he was the man receiving fellatio; the exciting premise of the film was that the cop, a possible murderer, might kill her next, and she was mugged on the street and roughed up; with sexual tension building, she became engaged in a torrid, risky sexual liaison with the married (but estranged) cop after a date, although she was nervous about Malloy being the killer of Angela (and others), thinking that he was lying about the basement-sex incident and other aspects of his life; the serial killer also murdered and mutilated a medical student co-ed whose body parts were found in the school's laundry room, and toward the film's end, Frannie's half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who worked as a stripper/go-go girl at the Baby Doll Lounge, was found bloodied and decapitated in her apartment's bathroom; after straddling Malloy and making love to him with one wrist handcuffed to her apartment's radiator, Frannie found her missing charm bracelet trinkets (a carriage and baby) that she had last seen at Pauline's place in the cop's coat pocket, convincing her that he was the killer ("It was you") - his alibi was that he had found them on the street after her mugging; when Malloy's butchy, on-probation detective partner Ritchie Rodriguez (Nick Damici) drove her 'to the lighthouse' under the George Washington Bridge (coincidentally the name of a literature book that Frannie taught) to conceivably take her statement on Malloy, she saw that he had a matching three of spades tattoo - identifying him as the serial killer who had received the 'blow-job' and murdered the other women; when he proposed marriage: "Will you marry me, Frannie?" as he dangled a wedding ring on his knife (a wedding ring was his signature at each crime scene), she shot him at close range with Malloy's .38 in the pocket of his coat that she happened to be wearing; she shot him again as he forced a kiss from her; dazed, she then returned (drenched in blood) to Malloy where she had handcuffed him earlier, and laid down next to him in a spooning position, as the film ended; there were other red-herring characters/suspects, such as Frannie's troubled student Cornelius Webb (Sharrieff Pugh) who was obsessed with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and even Frannie's stalking, creepy, volatile scrubs-wearing former lover John Graham (Kevin Bacon)

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

In the Mouth of Madness (1995)

Director John Carpenter paid convoluted, warped homage to Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft in this film that blurred the boundaries of fantasy and reality, fact and fiction, sanity and insanity, and reality and cine-reality; the film's plot, told in flashback, was about insurance fraud investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) - now a violent and delusional asylum inmate in a padded cell ("I am not insane") - who told how he went searching for horror novelist/writer Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) after his sudden disappearance; he found him in the small town of Hobbs End in New Hampshire that resembled a place in Cane's latest novel In the Mouth of Madness for Arcane Publishing; it appeared to be a surrealistic gateway to another world of evil and madness, and Trent began to believe he was just a character in the book (called "the new Bible"); he learned that god-like Cane's latest book was so powerful that it could change people ("I think, therefore you are!") - even turning anyone who read it into a mutant like creature - and those who didn't like to read (or didn't read the book) could be converted by watching a movie adaptation of the book; when the film ended with a slaughter at the asylum by monstrous creatures, he wandered out into the world that was alarmingly empty after a bloody slaughter; the film ended by being folded back upon itself - he entered an abandoned movie theatre that was showing the latest movie adaptation of Sutter Cane's book - and slowly changed into a crazed, mutant creature that laughed maniacally as he sat down and watched himself on the silver screen; the film's open-ended conclusion let the viewer decide whether Trent was insane or whether what he experienced was actually reality

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

This fourth entry in the highly-successful franchise of Indiana Jones films set in the year 1957, starred an aged, 60-ish Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford); one of the side stories was that globe-trotting professor-archaeologist Indy had fathered a biker-son named Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) (aka Henry Jones III) by old lover Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), although Mutt thought his father was treasure-hunting explorer Dr. Harold Oxley (John Hurt) already in Peru; the plot revolved around an ancient legend that an elongated crystal skull of Akator (with powerful magnetic properties) had been stolen from a Mayan temple (in the legendary and lost city of gold called El Dorado) in the Amazonian jungles of South America (conquistador Francisco de Orellana also vainly searched for it in the 1540s), and the one who found it and returned it would be rewarded with "treasure"; in her maniacal quest for the sacred object (to be used as a cosmic mind weapon to rule the world), the lead psychic KGB operative Dr. Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) with a black page-boy haircut was aided by Indy's traitorous "triple agent" colleague George 'Mac' McHale (Ray Winstone) who kept Irina following close behind in Jones' journeys by dropping blinking tracking beacons; in the finale, they entered the Mayan temple's inner chamber where 13 aliens ("inter-dimensional beings") with crystal skeletons (arranged in a circle) were seated; presumably, the alien beings had been worshipped by the Mayans, who were taught advanced technology by the extra-terrestrials; once the retrieved crystal skull was restored onto the spinal cord of one of the aliens, Irina demanded the reward: "I want to know"; the supernatural being (the collective of all 13 aliens) overloaded her skull with knowledge, burning and disintegrating her brain (and eyesockets) with flames, and her remains and those of other henchmen were sucked up into a vortex that took them into a giant spaceship above (in another dimension?); after Indy and his friends escaped from the crumbling temple, they watched from afar as the temple collapsed, the whirling, spinning flying saucer created a vortex in its ascension, and the valley floor was covered over by Amazonian waters ("Like a broom to their footprints"); Oxley summarized where the saucer went: "Not into space. Into the space between spaces"; Indy also contributed this afterthought: "Their treasure wasn't gold - it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure"