![]() House of Games, his first directorial outing, made quite a show of its con-men games, and the last act’s big reveal was so densely plotted that even the most hardcore nitpickers couldn’t find a way to poke a hole in it. If George Lucas made plot twists the purview of the proudly nerdy, David Mamet graced the style with some much-needed credibility. Knowing this spoils – and adds – absolutely nothing.) It’s a totally idiotic tradition that nerds wouldn’t give up for the world. The closely guarded secret that – uh, spoiler warning, we guess – Darth Vader was Luke’s father quickly passed into pop culture legend, and from that day forward the idea of going to a nerd movie like Star Wars became synonymous with finding out something mind-blowingly cool, from rushing to Blade Runner to learn that Harrison Ford was a robot all the way ( or was he?) to today, when half the fun of seeing the new Star Trek is discovering the name of the main villain. If you could pinpoint the moment that fanboy culture transformed itself from a niche pastime to a rabid obsession, it was the day that The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters in 1980. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) ![]() This established a long, irritating precedent of twists meant solely to piss off an audience. Oh, you just spent two hours rooting for Heston to somehow escape and make it back home alive? Well, screw you: he’s already home! It was a classic Twilight Zone move, but it hadn’t really been done in a feature film before. The genius thing about this twist was that, while it sure did pull the rug out from under unsuspecting audiences, it wasn’t made to seem like a punchline or an unfair gag-it was a last-second way to recast the whole movie as completely depressing. The Statue of Liberty! Broken up and floating on the beach! But that means…yes, it was earth all along, which is perhaps still the most memorable twist ending in movie history. So not only was Hitchcock mastering the art of the twist ending, he was giving birth to toilet humor. Everybody knows now that Norman Bates was dressing up as his mother and murdering guests with his split personality, but in 1960 the idea of killing off your lead actress halfway through the movie was as unthinkable as…well, showing a toilet flushing, actually, which also happened in Psycho for the first time in movie history. The end credits even featured a title card that warned people not to spoil the ending for anybody who hadn’t seen it, thus creating spoiler culture a good four decades before the Internet.Īlfred Hitchcock thought Clouzot was on to something with his no-late-admission policy, so he up and stole it wholesale for Psycho five years later. It was common practice in the early days of movie-going for audiences to waltz into the theater in the middle of a picture, but Clouzot, whose movie featured a shocking last-act revelation, forced places showing his Les Diaboliques to refuse entry to anybody after the lights went down. Movies had plot twists long before 1955, but that was the year French director Henri-Georges Clouzot completely changed the game. Warning: Half-century old spoilers follow! So let’s take a look back through film history to see where our interest in twists became a stupid, stupid obsession. Caligari, and when you revealed that the narrator of the movie was actually a mental patient, you really blew some minds. There was a time when you could, say, make a silent German horror film called The Cabinet of Dr. ![]() Twist endings used to be a huge surprise. If your movie has more than one character, someone needs to be a figment of someone else’s imagination. If your movie is about a detective hunting a serial killer, the detective had damn well better turn out to have been the killer with a split personality. The people want – nay, they need – things to get batshit crazy. Everybody is too cynical and too savvy nowadays, and those tidy little “it was all a dream” or “he was dead all along” endings just don’t cut it anymore. This probably just goes to show that Hollywood has no faith in their restless audiences, whom they assume demand bigger and stupider twist endings with every passing summer. In other words, this is a magic movie for people who thought the ending of The Prestige was a little too down-to-Earth. ![]() We won’t spoil the plot before anybody’s even had a chance to see it, but let’s just say that this movie’s twists make Citizen Kane look like The Happening. It may have had its release date pushed back on two separate occasions, but the Jesse Eisenberg-starring magician-heist epic Now You See Me finally materializes in theaters this weekend-and, seriously guys, it’s insane. Now You See Me is just the latest in a long line of endings that yell, “Surprise!”
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