“Bad Guy” being a relative term. I’m not talking about antiheroes and so on. Also, THIS THREAD WILL BE NOTHING BUT OPEN SPOILERS BY ITS NATURE.
From another thread, about the book I am Legend - “The vampire creatures end up forming their own society, which Neville is of course unaware of. He has been killing their ranks during the days, and they seem to frown on this. Eventually he is captured by some of them and realizes that like the virus that caused all this, humanity itself has evolved. This new society has actually replaced us on Earth, and to them HE is the monster. Much like how we have legends such as Dracula, or Werewolves, or the Lost City of Atlantis…he is their legend. He is what parents will tell stories of to their children at night. He will remain a horror story in their literature for all time.”
That’s a great twist!
A similar one that springs to mind is the film The Others, which is a good old-fashioned haunted house story - until the big reveal, where you find out that the characters that you’ve been following are not being haunted, but are actually ghosts and are inadvertently DOING the haunting, and the “ghosts” are the living people now occupying the house.
A third example is a now-classic issue of the comic book The Invisibles, which tells an entire story from the perspective of one of the enemy’s completely random, anonymous foot soldiers - up to the point where he’s unceremoniously killed by one of the book’s regular heroes during a battle. Way to flip the perspective!
What are some other great twists or reveals of this nature?
Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho explicitly treats Norman and Mother as two different people, until the big reveal towards the end of the book. The movie is pretty similar, but the book is actually told from Norman’s perspective – he’s horrified watching Mother kill the investigator, for example.
I don’t imagine this twist surprises many people anymore…
Oh, and the classic film example: Kevin Costner in No Way Out. He is the Russian mole.
Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot has a friend, Captain Hastings, who often functions as a sort of Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the story is narrated by a similar character who seems to be taking the place of Hastings in helping Poirot solve the mystery. It turns out, though, that the narrator himself is the murderer.
Haute Tension (Titled High Tension in the US). Horrible movie by the way, the twist comes out of basically nowhere and leaves so many holes in the story that it’s just rediculous.
Not a surprise twist but Blade Runner really works when you view the protagonist as the bad guy. Deckard isn’t joyful about his job, but he keeps killing these people to the end. He is cowardly to the point where he shoots women in the back fer cryin out loud.
I read that review, and was curious even though that type movie is not my cup of tea, and could never find what he was referring to online- can anyone 'splain?
Kevin Costner in No Way Out.
He’s a naval officer who starts an affair with Sean Young. Little does he know she’s the mistress of the US defense secretatry, Gene Hackman. Hackman finds out she’s seeing someone else (doesn’t know who) and accidentally murders her. Politician trys to find out who the “other guy” is so he can pin the murder on him. Claims the other guy is a KGB mole so everyone searches for him.
Turns out at the end that Costner actually IS a KGB mole.
To sum up, Girl on college break goes home with a female friend to stay with her family out in the country. Girl is secretly in love with her friend and while masturbating in bed hears a truck pull up. She looks out and sees a guy get out of the truck and the guy proceeds to come in, slaughter the family and kidnap her friend. Girl sneaks into the back of the truck (More like a cargo van really) and goes along for the ride and attempt to rescue her friend.
Turns out, the girl is really the guy who broke in. Some sort of alter-ego thing and if I recall she ends up in a mental hospital. The number of plot holes are quite astounding, I would imagine that line refers to how she is somehow in the back of the truck with her tied up and gagged friend (who is reacting to her) while at the same time being the guy up in front that is driving.
Agatha Christie pulled a similar trick in Curtain, in which the murderer has a history of getting people killed, but Poirot, who can’t prove that the murderer committed any crime, kills the murderer himself.
Huh. I guess if you really wanted to you could explain that away like Hitchcok’s Stage Fright (which also fits in this category)- what you think are real events that actually happened are just in the characters head, or what they want someone to believe happened. I read Hitchcock took much flak for it, as it was the first time something was shown to be a real event in a movie but actually wasn’t, exlcuding it was all a dream endings. I think.
Donald Kaufman: I’m putting in a chase sequence. So the killer flees on horseback with the girl, the cop’s after them on a motorcycle and it’s like a battle between motors and horses, like technology vs. horse.
Charlie Kaufman: And they’re still all one person, right?