Script: Twist My Arm, or Arm Your Twist

Twist endings. If it’s too obvious your audience is annoyed (what’s up, The Village). If it’s too complicated we’re confused (anybody know what the hell happened in Tale of Two Sisters? I would have been terrified if I hadn’t been so damn lost). And while it’s important to misdirect and be discrete, if you don’t plant your twist well enough, it hits viewers from left field like a big ol’ loose piece of machinery of the gods.

Looking at films that pulled off twists well, I’ve come to some conclusions. The twist should be right there in the premise, and both the twist and the premise should be in the same genre. Simple, right? Let’s run a check list of some of the winners:

The Sixth Sense. Premise: a kid sees dead people. Clearly a Horror film. Twist: Bruce Willis is a dead people. More horror.

The Others: A woman thinks her house is haunted. Creepy ghost story. She’s actually the one haunting it. Uber creepy ghost story.

The Usual Suspects: A detective questions loser Verbal Kint about the mythic Keyser Soze. A crime thriller. Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze. A smart crime thriller.

In all of them, the twist is right there in the premise, sometimes all you gotta do is rearrange the words. And we’re not breaking genre at the end to inject our little surprise, we’re giving the audience exactly what they signed up for the whole way through.

This all sounds stupid simple, I know, but to look at a twist that doesn’t work, you’ll see it breaks from these simple ideas:

The Abyss. Stuck at the bottom of the ocean with a maniac with an atomic bomb. Thriller, right? Neat tense film. Twist: there’s aliens. What the hell? Did I miss the sci-fi bomb-bay doors opening? Because that feels like a different movie to me, Jim. The twist isn’t even related to the premise, and neither are in the same genre. If you’re like me, you felt ripped off by deus ex alienus, and threw a slipper at the TV.

We love twists because they’re usually something clever hidden in plain sight all along, and the pieces come together at the end to give us a new idea and a new way to interpret everything we’ve seen.

And the best twist films still have enough of an interesting (and misdirecting) story that knowing the twist doesn’t detract from repeated viewings. Without the twist, The Sixth Sense is a great little character drama. Ditto for The Others.

So, to write a good twist, just take a good character story, scramble up your premise, and keep it all in one genre. Deceptively simple. Now, go forth and twist.