The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A Conceptual Reversal Twist comes as part of a work that lulls the viewer into believing that they are watching one type of story before an abrupt reversal that usually comes at the very end reveals that everything one assumed about what was happening is not the case at all.
The two most famous Conceptual Reversal Twists are those that come at the end of Planet of the Apes (1968) and The Sixth Sense (1999), which offer jolting surprise twists about the protagonist’s conception of the world around them or who they are.
A famous Conceptual Reversal twist is the Deathdream Ending where the protagonist discovers that they have been dead all along or are in the process of dying. This, along with other twists such as that everything that transpired is All a Dream or a Virtual Reality illusion, has become a cliche from overuse.
The success of The Sixth Sense gave the ghost story the seeming need to have to pull last minute twists in every film made since to the point of frequent tedium. Such twists have also been popular in science-fiction works or Psycho-Thrillers that reveal characters are split personalities or imaginary.
The Conceptual Reversal Twist is very similar to the Conceptual Breakthrough Story where the protagonist comes to a new understanding of themselves or the world they live in, although not all Conceptual Breakthrough stories come with a Conceptual Reversal Twist. The crucial difference in the stories listed here it is the audience rather than the protagonist who makes a discovery about what they believe to be true.
An excellent underrated science-fiction film that was way ahead of its time about a class of androids in a future fighting for their rights as they gain increasing self-awareness
The film that started it all. This takes what could have been a jokey premise and delivers it in bold, exciting stokes. What elevates the film is Rod Serling’s script. filled with embittered soliloquies that become a biting commentary on the human condition, before the film reaches one of the great cinematic twist endings
Classic horror film about good and evil twins that creates a good deal of sinister effect and arrives at a much imitated twist
Unexpectedly good film with Madolyn Smith as a woman living alone in a cabin in the woods and Malcolm McDowell as a caller where the two engage in a series of cat and mouse games where nothing is what it seems
One of the better 80s attempts to copy A Nightmare on Elm Street from an old Charles Beaumont script in which Bill Pullman is a neurologist who becomes involved in an increasingly wilder series of reality bendings
Adrian Lyne became one of the most visually exciting directors of the 1980s. Here he makes an afterlife film that swings between moments of greatness and a script that seems very confused about what is happening
A film that mostly consists of amnesiac Air Force pilot James B. Sikking being questioned by psychologist Hector Elizondo. The film constantly hints at a big revelation before settling for one of the corniest twist endings
Quiet a remarkable film – on one level ostensibly a psycho-thriller about a killer targeting blind women before conducting a unique reversal of perception to reveal something else altogether
Psycho-thriller with Gregory Hines as a radio talkback host dealing with a psychopathic caller who plays a series of taunting games with him
Gerard Depardieu is being interrogated by police inspector Roman Polanski over a murder he cannot remember. Solid, well constructed drama that is turned on its head with a surprise ending
An old fashioned Victorian ghost story based on a James Herbert novel, this suffers a very laidback pace but is redeemed by its left field twist ending. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola
What seems a routine low-budget action film is propelled into the decidedly watchable by a bizarre Philip K. Dick-ian twist that comes mid-film
Excellent film from Alejandro Amenabar in which a handsome playboy finds himself in the midst of a baffling series of reality flips before arriving at an SF twist ending
The film that made the name of M. Night Shyamalan and still a strong and spooky story despite the variability of Shyamalan’s offerings since then. What made the film a classic was its twist ending, something that has been relentlessly copied by numerous genre films since
David Fincher tackles Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about secret brawling clubs. Maybe the only major studio film with an openly anarchist manifesto. Brilliant, incendiary, all over the map plotwise and thoroughly unique
A directorial outing from Bill Paxton, a strikingly original film quite unlike anything else where Paxton plays a man who has religious visions and invokes his sons to murder what he calls demon
Indie SF film where Denis Leary wakes up as patient in a psychiatric institution while he insists he has been awoken from cryogenic suspension in a future where he is awaiting execution
This is essentially The Sixth Sense rehashed as a teen horror film and conducted without any finesse – here you can see the twist ending coming miles in advance
Borrowing the Blair Witch aesthetic, Brad Anderson makes a highly effective minimalist horror film about a group of working men encountering something during the clean-up operation of an abandoned asylum
The English-language remake of Open Your Eyes, starring Tom Cruise. The Spanish version is still the superior of the two but this stays surprisingly faithful to the original
Alejandro Amenabar directed ghost story made not longer after The Sixth Sense that works with nicely subtle effect and arrives at an unexpected twist ending that turn the standard haunted house tale on its head
Psycho-thriller that should have gotten better notice than it did. Katie Holmes plays an A-student at an Ivy League college who is stalked by a missing ex. Slick and coolly written, before arriving at an effective twist ending
An adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story in which Gary Sinise plays a man who is dragged away by security accused of being an android replacement that has a bomb implanted inside him
Vincent Gallo’s muchly ridiculed directorial effort is an unbelievably indulgent film consisting of long, tedium-inducing scenes where nothing happens. It does arrive at a a surprise left field ending that travels into genre territory
A South Korean ghost story that achieves quite a degree of spookiness, albeit influenced by the Japanese Ring phenomenon, although things fall apart at a confusing twist ending
John Cusack leads a star cast line-up in what appears to be a slasher where a group of people gathered at a motel are being killed by someone among their number. Big conceptual twists then ensue
The film that made the world take notice of Alexandre Aja. Aja serves up a brutal and gore-drenched variant on the Backwoods Brutality film, although things fall apart in an absurd twist ending
Stephen King adaptation with Johnny Depp as a writer in a cabin in the woods harassed by mysterious stranger John Turturro. Screenwriter David Koepp directs a marvellously chill Turturro with lots of twisty surprises
M. Night Shyamalan creates three-quarters of a tense and eerie film about a 19th Century village under siege from mysterious creatures only for it to fall apart when he produces a damp squib of a twist ending
South Korean ghost story that has borrowed most of its moves from the J-horror cycle – Ring, The Grudge et al. A relatively anodyne treatment is enlivened by a twist ending that draws heavily on The Sixth Sense
Fascinating film from Brad Anderson where Christian Bale is subject to a series of reality blurrings. What hangs over the show most of all is Bale’s intensely physical performance for which he lost a third of his body weight to turn himself into an anorexic shell of a human
Filipino ghost story inspired by The Ring and Ju-on films that generates a reasonable haunted atmosphere in its story about mysterious happenings in an apartment building. This later underwent an English-language remake
A variant on the sinister child’s invisible companion theme. A fine cast has been assembled but the film goes and kills itself with a lame twist ending
Incomprehensible New Zealand film about a group of camp counselors being haunted by something as they run through the woods
Marc Forster film that starts in with a beautifully filmed sense of disquiet mood and eerie reality disjuncts but loses it when it opts for another M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
Japanese director Shion Sono has emerged as an increasingly worthwhile name in recent years. This is an admirably twisted and perverse work that leaves you quite flabbergasted
An early film from The Asylum set in a hospital for alien abductees, which director Eric Forsberg evokes with some paranoia and a great ending
Solid offering from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason that takes more than a few leaves from Hellraiser with a ghostsbusting team investigating occult happenings in an abandoned asylum
A film from the Pang Brothers in which a heroine enters into an extraordinarily conceived fantasy world that would appear to be taking place in her own imagination
This starts out as a seeming ghost story without creating much tension then features Tom Sizemore going psycho, before arriving at one of the most confusing of all attempts to conduct an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
Quite evidently modelled on Se7en even to the lookalike title, this is the novelty of a Christian serial killer thriller. The results are quite strange to say the least
Extremely confusing film in which Mike Vogel keeps waking up in different lives where he is pursued by creatures. Sort of like Dark City reconceived as a horror film.
A group of friends travel to Ireland and go on a tour searching for magic mushrooms. In between assorted drug hallucinations, someone or thing begins slaughtering the group
Thai ghost story about a woman haunted by the ghost of her dead conjoined twin sister. This produces a mix of jumps that fall between the effective and routine but falls apart in a contrived twist ending
Pascal Laugier makes one of the most horrific films to emerge from France in the 00s. Scenes of grim torture sit alongside a plot that twists like a pretzel and messes with almost everything we take for granted
A film about a couple who break down on a country road and seek help at a sinister farmhouse, before everything turns into Torture Porn territory. And then things get weird
A fascinating series of interwoven stories, one of which is set in a religion-dominated dystopian future. An intriguing puzzle that arrives at a surprise left field ending
Rare cinematic treatment of the generation ship story that conducts it with a modest degree of affectiveness. Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson.
The Hollywood remake of the South Korean ghost story A Tale of Two Sisters that waters down and reduces the effectiveness of the original to generic shocks
David Twohy has shown himself a standout screenwriter and director with the Riddick films but came unstuck with this effort where tourists in Hawaii come to believe their traveling companions are wanted killers. A film killed by far-fetched twists
Unique venture into meta-fiction by Wai Ka Fai that creates fascinatingly wound layers of fiction and reality that eventually become so complex that one gets lost
Micheal Bafaro is a justifiably obscure director whose entire career has been built on recycling other horror films. This is his version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is passable until a Sixth Sense-styled twist ending
Martin Scorsese and an impressive A-list cast make a 1940s-styled psycho-thriller about a sinister asylum that soon starts into a series of major reality bending turns
John Carpenter returned to the director’s chair after more than a decade but failed to light the world on fire. Carpenter makes what you could call a ghost story version of Girl, Interrupted. The scares are tame and the film is hamstrung by an improbable M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
Low-budget UFO/alien abduction film that mostly this just retreads familiar material, although it does evince a certain interesting state of rubber reality about what is happening
Powerful film from Christopher Smith set during the Middle Ages about a group on a journey to a village where a priestess can purportedly raise the dead. The film’s skewering of faith in an unforgettable ending is stunning
Award-winning Darren Aronofsky film about the rivalry between two ballerinas. At heart though, this is no more than a Brian De Palma psycho-thriller with pretensions
A family try to make it through the woods in the aftermath of a mysterious catastrophe while hunted by something unseen. Sort of a zombie apocalypse film without any zombies where the terrors are psychological
Maybe one of the worst cases of a trailer ruining the film by giving away the big mid-film surprise. The film itself is an absurdly contrived Shutter Island copy that has nothing else up its sleeve beyond its big surprise
A classic British ghost story that produces an exceedingly haunted atmosphere at times, although falls apart in a highly contrived M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
Pål Sletaune is a Norwegian director who deserves more attention for his reality-bending surrealism. Here mother Noomi Rapace moves into new apartment where ghostly screams come through the baby monitor and she soon finds that she cannot be sure what is real
The film that made Ben Wheatley’s reputation, this starts as a kitchen sink drama about the domestic lives of two hitmen before taking a bizarre left field turn into horror territory
Haunted house film that comes with the novelty of being shot entirely in one take. This delivers some okay but never standout jumps but in the end you appreciate it more for its technical novelty than producing scares
Rue Morgue magazine editor Rodrigo Gudiño makes his directorial debut with an old-fashioned ghost story that is a slow, moody ambiguous single-person drama
A rare Indian venture into the horror film, this is a haunted house film of modest effect that suddenly becomes a whole lot more watchable when it pulls a major M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist on us
Psycho-thriller that plays out like a creaky old deranged relative in the cellar film retooled as a teen romance until an absurd mid-film conceptual twist irredeemably kills the film off
Australian effort that seems to follow the path of Aliens/Resident Evil with soldiers venturing into a laboratory of amok monsters before a Philip K. Dick-ian twist on what we think is happening
Pascal Laugier returns with this fascinating effort about a small town subject to child abductions by a possible boogieman. A film that is as blatantly manipulative as it is ingenious in its way-out twists and turns where everything we assume is going on at the outset is eventually turned completely on its head
A low-budget film about a journalist’s modern-day investigation into a secret village located near Salem, Massachusetts that results in paranoia and suspicious treatment by the locals
Hideo Nakata will always be known as the director of the original Ring. Here he revisits the kaidan eiga in the story of a haunted apartment but the show falls apart after a confusing Sixth Sense-type twist mid-film
A Japanese-made variant on the dream incursion theme of Inception. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is noted for his bafflingly surrealistic horror films but in working in a genre like science-fiction that requires an implied explainability, he makes a far less interesting film
Bollywood remake of a ghost story that comes with one of the cleverer M. Night Shyamalan conceptual reversal twists
A film ostensibly about alien abductees that has rather pleasurably been construed as a series of wild head-spinning twists that are constantly pulling everything we think we know is going on from under the audience, even if it eventually provides more questions than it ever does answers
Brad Anderson adapts an Edgar Allan Poe story about an asylum where the inmates are posing as the staff. This is lush period piece with an amazing cast line-up – the only surprise is that it did no box-office
Ghost story that does an effective job of generating dread and eerieness while also existing in a place that leaves you unsure whether it is all not just occurring inside the lead character’s fraying sanity
Effective and disturbing work about two boys who begin to think that someone else might have taken their mother’s place after she returns in bandages. The film reaches a particularly chill and nasty climax
An exceptional time travel film, one of the best to emerge in some time. Adapted from a classic Robert Heinlein story, the pleasure of the film all comes in seeing its twists and turns come together into the most ingenious temporal paradox ever conceived
British-made film about an astronaut stranded on a world of robots. Made by a team of three people, this produces effects that rival Hollywood productions but is also a solid work of planetary survival that comes with some jaw-dropping mid-film twists
While the title suggests something of the classic The Hitcher, this reminds more of And Soon the Darkness with its image of tourists being stalked in the pastoral French countryside. Ravishingly photographed, creating a strong sense of dis-ease to arrive at a great twist ending
This gives all appearance to being another copy of Insidious – a ghost story with an evil-sounding adjective for a title. The film settles in in predictable ways; then throws the ghost story angle on its head with a surprise SF twist
This was made before Ex Machina and has a surprisingly similar plot – although takes it even further in many regards – where a woman journalist goes to interview a tech genius and ends up in a romantic triangle between him and his android creation
This seems a generic ghost story. The second half has the protagonist’s dead girlfriend trying to stop him seeing another woman and becomes a descent into obsession that works rather well
M. Night Shyamalan makes one of his best films in ages. He kicks back his heels and goes nuts – at the same time as he is spooking us he also has us laughing; he ventures into making a Found Footage film but at the same time is also deconstructing the process with hilarious results
James Wan has an exemplary track record in one’s opinion, you think this would extend to anything he produces. Here all we get are series of tired haunted house cliches before a twist ending that makes no real sense
Imagine a version of Fatal Attraction where the Glenn Close character is the protagonist, this also has an unnerving Repulsion-like quality where what we think is happening keeps blurring and shifting
A haunted house film from Andrew Jones, who makes an okay but very low key film – the spookiest it ever gets is a phantom record player. Things are lifted by a modest M. Shyamalan-esque twist
A film from Duffer Brothers creators of tv’s Stranger Things. This is a fallout shelter drama where the Duffers create a strong paranoid mood but kill the film with a ridiculous twist ending
This asks the question of what happens to the final girl after a slasher film. This is less a slasher film than a work about post-traumatic stress before reaching a jaw-dropping ending
Solid effort about two girls who venture into a storage facility only to unleash a creature. Filled with reasonable and effective tensions, not to mention a surprise mid-film twist that makes it into something else
A.I. film directed by Ridley Scott’s son. The set-up seems awfully similar to Ex Machina – unfortunately, this sidesteps any of that fascinating questions about A.I. that film dealt in, while the latter half just becomes The Terminator before reaching a frankly unbelievable twist ending that sinks the film
This feels as though the director, frustrated with lack of financing, grabbed a camera and shot a film around his home. This generates a modest creepiness but falls apart at a credibiity-stretching ending
For a reasonable part of the runtime, this plays as a wilderness survival drama about a woman abandoned in the woods. Somewhat directionless before being redeemed by its twist ending
This seems to be shaping up to be a modern variant on The Collector in which Dominic Monaghan abducts the object of his desire and locks her in a cage beneath the dog shelter where he works. From there the film starts to twist expectations on their head
An extremely good film that starts out seeming like a standard stalked babysitter effort before everything gets turned on its head with most pleasing results
For a long time, this effort about a girl experiencing nightmare visions on her family farm doesn’t seem to be doing anything – then gets interesting as it switches to a parallel reality where what happens is mirrored slightly different
For some reason, The Exorcist is hugely popular in Bollywood horror – this is the fourth in a series of otherwise unrelated films about possession. The film conducts its borrowings not unentertainingly and is boosted by a script that turns what we think is happening on its head with quite a degree of dexterity
From the director of The Last Exorcism Part II, a title that does nothing to suggest a horror film. All we get is a ghost story that does an M. Night Shyamalan shift into an improbably contrived fugue state drama
Two Americans fleeing an armed bank robbery with hostages take refuge at a house that they discover it is haunted. A vy the numbers effort before arriving at a confused twist ending.
The title is misleading – we expect some kind of internet based horror film but the show telescopes down to being no more than a Backwoods Brutality effort. On the other hand, it is not taking itself too seriously and some of the twists become entertainingly absurd
This comes with a fascinatingly original premise – man wakes up with complete amnesia and finds that he has the ability to kill anyone within thirty feet of him. The case of a film that holds attention with a captivating and unusual plot and a series of constant whiplash reversals