5 Ways Movies Always Telegraph Their Twists

Then, of course, you have Fight Club, wherein Tyler Durden, the Narrator, and Marla Singer spend their days in the same house, but all three of them are never shown to interact at the same time, and the movie sometimes resorts to sitcom hijinks to achieve this. The Narrator finds out he is Tyler when Marla refers to him as "Tyler," which she presumably never once did up until that point and is something that can't be hand-waved away by Tyler's "Don't talk about me" rule.

The 2018 Charlize Theron film Tully, which is a lot like Fight Club except with less brawling and more postpartum depression, has a twist that relies on Theron's husband not once thinking to go and see the stranger he's letting into his house at night to look after his newborn child (spoiler: she's imaginary). The TV series Mr. Robot would manage to craft eight episodes' worth of carefully staged interactions before revealing the main character's friend is both imaginary and dead.

It's not like this technique was invented in 1999, either. In Psycho, Mrs. Bates is painted as a loud, intrusive, and controlling old woman, but is only heard when Norman isn't around. She also never talks over him when they're arguing, and never shouts from the house when she knows Norman is with Marion, which is something that kind of person would definitely do if they hadn't already been murdered by their own son.

Related: 6 Movie Characters Whose Names Spoiled Huge Plot Twists

In Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, they do this with Prowler. He's secretly Miles' awesome down-to-earth uncle who's supposed to be a screw-up, but is living in a very expensive-looking apartment in New York and does undefined "engineering" jobs during all of Spider-Man's run-ins with the villainous alter ego. How can an uncle this cool be a secret bad guy? Probably the same way the peace-loving Sir Patrick Morgan turns out to be the alter ego of the evil warmongering god Ares in Wonder Woman.

Yeah, superhero movies love this trope. In Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm, the titular Phantasm turns out to be Andrea, Bruce Wayne's girlfriend, who has the most reason for killing mobsters but is portrayed in the movie as the goodest of the good. The Flash TV series also has a masked villain, the Reverse-Flash, who turns out to be the head honcho at S.T.A.R. Labs and a friend of the Flash. Of course, they try to hide this from the audience by putting him in a wheelchair, but come on. This is the Flash we're talking about. One of his main villains is a radioactive telepathic gorilla. A wheelchair fools no one.

Related: 6 Throwaway Jokes That Ended Up Predicting Huge Plot Twists

It's like they'll reach a point in the story where they know the character has to die, but realize at the last minute that they haven't quite built up enough empathy for them yet. "Quick, have them reveal something deeply personal!"

Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire does this with Cedric Diggory. He's competing in a big tournament when his father (and only his father, out of all the other contestants in this high-stakes, prestigious competition) comes to wish him luck. So now you know how much his father loves him, and it's assured that Harry has someone who won't betray him, because Cedric is such a good, lovable guy. One climax later, Cedric is super dead. "Don't cry, sir. Your son had to die in order to raise the stakes in a blockbuster."

Prestige TV shows certainly aren't above this. In Killing Eve, the title character has a revealing conversation with her colleague Bill (the first time he really opens up) before he goes off to get murdered in a nightclub. In Game Of Thrones, to throw us off the scent of who would die in Season 8's big battle episode, they devoted the entire preceding episode to having all of the characters get emotional "letting the guard down" moments. Fans were actually annoyed when most of them survived the next episode. This trope is so well-established that it felt like a letdown.

Related: 7 Brilliant Movie Clues That Were Hidden In Plain Sight

Take Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, a movie from a long-forgotten time when Robert Downey Jr. was affordable, whose climactic scene sees Sherlock Holmes throwing himself and his archnemesis Moriarty over a waterfall. This is followed by a memorial service for Holmes, whose body was never found, but of course he's presumed dead. Watson narrates an obituary he's writing for him, and you'll never guess who was hiding in plain sight waiting to read it as soon as he left the room.

Other movies with a similar "presumed dead" character who turns out to still be alive for the big twist include Gone Baby Gone and Big Hero 6. Superhero movies do this a lot too, like with Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, Jean Grey in X2(who returns in The Last Stand), and T'Challa in Black Panther. Those last two are more egregious, because they're set in universes with supernatural elements where resurrection is a possibility, so "The body vanished underwater" feels like a formality. And the first is egregious because it lets Michael Caine cry for what seems like an hour.

Meanwhile, in the Hannibal TV series, the only reason we don't find out that Will and Dr. Lecter survived their tumble off a cliff is that the show got canceled. Congrats on subverting the trope, guys!

Related: 5 Movie Plots Given Away By The Characters' Names

M. Night Shyamalan's third entry on this list, The Village, is a good example of this. It's set in what looks like a 19th-century village whose inhabitants are told not to go outside at night or stray too far because there are monsters. The twist is that the fearsome monsters (which never kill one person) are in fact the village elders playing dress-up. And the awful world that lies outside of the village's boundaries that the elders keep describing? It's mostly trees, and then the modern world in which the story actually takes place.

In the 2014 Godzilla, Bryan Cranston visits an abandoned city that's supposedly heavily irradiated. But when he gets there, he finds he can take off his mask without being transformed into a 300-foot nuclear MechaCranston. You can also find this in the recent Netflix film I Am Mother, wherein a little girl discovers that her robot caretakers are lying to her about the outside world being a toxic death zone because, get this, the Earth has been taken over by robots.

So think about that the next time a friend tells you some outrageous fib like "Hey, don't go outside, there's a really bad tornado heading this way" or "Hey, stay inside. There's a rabid dog on the porch." They're just hiding something really cool out there! Go look!

The big twist of this article is that KJ loves you, and the only way you can let him know you love him too is through his email.

For more, check out The Game Of Thrones Twist We All Wanted (And Were Still Mad About) - Winter Is Taking Forever:

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