Twists in horror movies are a staple of the genre, and have been for decades. Even when the twist itself ends up defining a movie’s entire existence after its premiere, like The Sixth Sense, it doesn’t diminish the movie itself. Fans can go into M. Night Shyamalan’s movie knowing exactly what the ending is, at least what they think the ending is, and still have a great time with it. A great movie twist, especially in a horror movie, only enriches everything around it and what came before it, without taking away from the experience of watching the movie itself.
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There are times, however, where a twist in a movie not only hurts the film that it is found in, but then makes everything that follows it, and sometimes the movies that came before it, even worse. It’s a rare feat, but as horror franchises continue to twist themselves into knots to find new ways of justifying a sequel’s existence, twists are bound to happen that turn a movie series’ continuity into a house of cards. Suffice to say, spoilers will follow.
7) 3 From Hell Confirms the Firefly Family Survived
Fourteen years after Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, where the filmmaker concluded the film in explosive fashion and killed off his three lead characters, he brought them all back for a sequel. The opening minutes of 3 From Hell immediately confirm that, surprise, the twisted Firefly family all survived their shootout with the police and have all been in jail this entire time. It’s a twist that needed to happen; there’s no movie without it, but in truth, it removes the actual power of the ending from The Devil’s Rejects, which makes it a tragedy.
6) Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers Introduces the Cult of Thorn
The Halloween franchise had humble beginnings, though every sequel would start to add a little more to the origin of Michael Myers in ways that made it far too complicated. With the sixth movie in the series, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the franchise reveals that Myers has been under the influence of a Druid cult the entire time, and his motive for killing all of his family members is derived from this. Throw in attempts by doctors to clone Myers into new fetuses, and you’ve got a movie that just throws everything that came before it out the window.
5) Jaws 2 Reveals There’s Just Another Shark Now
To its credit, Jaws 2 does have some really interesting character drama at its core, with Chief Brody haunted by the events of the first film in a way that star Roy Scheider makes very compelling to watch. That said, the film also literally begins with yet another giant shark just suddenly appearing off the coast of Amity Island and dining on swimmers, boats, and anything else it can find. It’s a ludicrous plot set-up for the sequel, and one that would ensure the best adventure movie of all time was actually just the start of a shark family’s big revenge saga. Nonsense.
4) Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III Makes the Family Interchangeable
Tobe Hooper’s original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn’t planned to start a series, which is why there’s a ten-year gap between the first and second movies. With the third movie, the rights to the franchise shifted to New Line Cinema, with plans to make it a new horror franchise in the vein of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but what it meant is that the cannibal family at the heart of the movie would only have one familiar face, the leather one. As a result, the movie made sure that every Chainsaw movie that followed would have the main killer surrounded by entirely different family members every time, with no actual continuity to speak of.
3) Paranormal Activity 4 Tries to Make It All Make Sense
When the first Paranormal Activity was a box office success, it naturally meant sequels would follow. With Paranormal Activity 2 the sequel began to experiment with a larger mythology, one where sisters Katie and Kristi are unknowingly tied up in a big demon conspiracy. That film had a twist up its sleeve, that it was actually set before the events of the first movie, only for its ending to be set after, concluding with Katie abducting her young nephew Hunter and disappearing into the night.
Locked into a continuity corner, Paranormal Activity 3 took things in a different direction and dialed the clock back even further, delivering a 1980s-set found footage movie that expanded the world by revealing that a coven of witches is behind the larger conspiracy. This brings us to Paranormal Activity 4, which takes place years after the first movie and attempts to make all of that make sense. Not only does the movie have a difficult time doing that, it just set up even more sequels that had to do the same.
2) Saw 4 Unmasks Jigsaw’s New Apprentice
The Saw franchise as a whole is built on its big twist ending moments, with each movie having some kind of surprise meant to throw the audience for a loop. To its credit, Saw 4 does have a couple of twists under its belt, one of them being that, surprise, it actually takes place concurrently with Saw 3 and isn’t a sequel, really.
The other big twist in Saw 4, though, is that Costas Mandylor’s Detective Hoffman isn’t a victim of Jigsaw’s latest game, but an accomplice in the killer’s grand plan. This isn’t a bad one in the film itself, but it completely messes up everything that follows. As a result of the “Hoffman is now Jigsaw” reveal, the other sequels all destroy any sense of time between the movies, meaning they all appear to happen immediately after each other, despite the extensive planning and preparation needed for all those games. That’s also without mentioning all of the retconning the series needed to even make the Hoffman twist make sense at all.
1) Scream 3 Establishes One Guy Planned the Entire Trilogy
Scream 3, originally the ending of the franchise, was easily the most meta of the entire franchise, and that extended to its big twist that largely broke the two movies that came before it. In the film, we learn that Roman Bridger, the director of Stab 3, is actually Sydney’s half-brother, a product of the brief time Sydney’s mom spent in Hollywood.
In the film, he reveals he tried to make contact with Maureen, but she rejected him, sending him on a path of revenge. Roman would go on to film Maureen’s affairs, revealing the infidelity to Billy Loomis and setting him down the path of the events of the first film. With Scream 3, he became jealous of the fame Sydney earned from the first two movies and sought to get some of that for himself. Having a hard time keeping track? So did everyone else.
To its credit, Scream 3 tries to make this twist carry weight, acknowledging that it’s ludicrous and in keeping with the twisted chronology that horror movie films often end up having. The problem, of course, is that it’s just as silly and inconsistent as the big twists in any other horror franchise, and it makes the first film’s bedrock shaky in ways that hurt it.
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