Not necessarily the best-constructed or most culturally relevant plot twists, but the moments where you actually remember hearing an auditorium full of movie watchers gasp, shout, or otherwise involuntarily react. Here’s some I remember:
*Caesar saying “no” in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Perfectly set up and caused whole rows to scream “OH SHIT!” in two screenings I saw.
*The “warm black dingus” monologue in The Hateful Eight. It’s really hard to shock people these days in terms of “did they really let THAT into a movie?” You can put almost anything you want into South Park, let alone into an R-rated film that you have to be an adult ticket-buyer to see. This movie found a way to genuinely make audiences react with incredulity that they were seeing and hearing this.
*The winner for me - Jigsaw standing up and revealing himself at the end of the original Saw. No one knew anything about the movie at the time, prior to seven sequels etc. It quickly became a word-of-mouth hit and in the weeks after Halloween packed theaters repeatedly had a collective freakout as the ending unfolded.
I didn’t see it in a movie theater, and I already knew there was a twist, but the “big reveal” in The Crying Game was certainly shocking. (Anyone who’s seen it will know the moment I’m referring to.)
When James Cromwell shot Kevin Spacey. Was not expecting a police captain to shoot one of his detectives in his own house, or even kill off Kevin Spacey halfway through the movie.
The first time I saw it I was prepared for that one, because it’s so famous. But there are two more jumps in the movie, when the detective gets killed, and when Norman’s mother is revealed.. I wasn’t prepared for those.
In my case, when that scene ended (the little critter took off, leaving the bloodied crew staring in open-mouthed shock) the audience applauded. As in: “Well done!”
The scene near the beginning of Midsommer showing the aftermath of a murder-suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning from car exhaust certainly shocked the hell out of me and when I looked up reviews and Reddit threads about the movie afterwards, it was pretty consistently mentioned as the most gut-wrenching moment in a movie that’s full of fucked-up moments. I guess it’s one of those things that we frequently read about happening, but never really see depicted on the screen (at least not as explicitly as in that scene) so it really stuck with people.
In Jaws, there’s a scene where a scuba diver (Hooper, as I recall) is investigating a sunken boat that the shark attacked. There’s a big hole in the sunken boat, and when the diver touches the boat, the owner’s head falls out. Cue audience screaming.
I was watching that with my girlfriend at the time. (Hi, Gina! ) We both jumped out of our seats.
The moment in Crocodile Dundee when Susan is filling her canteen from a pond never fails to freak out an audience too.
For me, the biggest surprise ever was when Vincent blew Marvin’s head off in Pulp Fiction. Didn’t expect that one at all. And I loved the splatter of blood all over the rear window. A great added touch, that!
Sam Jackson’s big black Johnson didn’t surprise me as much as it just made me gag. Yeccch!
Craig Kilborn was still hosting The Daily Show when TCG came out, and when he mentioned it in the fake news, he added, “Have you heard the big secret about it? It’s overrated.”
For the filming of the chestburster scene, the cast members knew that the creature would be bursting out of Hurt, and had seen the chestburster puppet, but they had not been told that fake blood would also be bursting out in every direction from high-pressure pumps and squibs.[27][67] The scene was shot in one take using an artificial torso filled with blood and viscera, with Hurt’s head and arms coming up from underneath the table. The chestburster was shoved up through the torso by a puppeteer who held it on a stick. When the creature burst through the chest, a stream of blood shot directly at Cartwright, shocking her enough that she fell over and went into hysterics.[27][30][32] According to Tom Skerritt, "What you saw on camera was the real response. She had no idea what the hell happened. All of a sudden this thing just came up.
) We both jumped out of our seats.
