Primal Fear? Because, while we know that Alan committed the murder while under control of his alternate personality Roy, we learn at the end that Alan doesn’t exist, “Roy” was in control the whole time and is an evil bastard.
The Others, but only kinda-sorta. Nicole Kidman’s character isn’t exactly a bad guy, per se, but it’s a similar twist in that you come to realise that rather than being terrorized by hauntings, it is she and her family that are the ones doing the haunting.
Good twist, though I have to admit that I saw it coming from a mile away.
Oh, might as well throw a spoiler warning in here.
So here it is: Spoiler!!!
In The Sixth Sense this poor kid is bothered by seeing ghosts all the time, then is perpetually traumatized by this idiotic ghost who is trying to psychoanalzye him.
Or pretty much anything else by Chuck Palahniuk, for that matter.
Odd that no one has mentioned Memento, yet. The main character abuses (and probably has done so before) his own handicap to cause himself to murder people that annoy him.
There’s this movie called No Way Out. With Kevin Costner. It definitely falls into this category.
Hmm…that’s not how I remember it at all. It was the cop that was pretending to help him (Ted?) that was using him to murder people. When he realizes it, he sets himself up to kill Ted, but because he realizes he’s using him, not because he’s “annoyed”.
Yeah, it’s in the OP.
Although not quite what the OP had in mind, I would put Fallen in this category.
In Perfect Stranger, Halle Berry–the beleaguered journalist trying to catch the killer Bruce Willis–is revealed to have been the villain all along.
I Googled the ending so I didn’t have to watch it, I swear.
À la folie… pas du tout, a 2002 French film starring Audrey Tautou, is told from two perspectives, the first appears to be an affair between Angelique, a university student, and a doctor but the second shows the whole relationship to be only in her head and that the doctor is completely oblivious to her and her affections.
Anyone remember Angel Heart, that psychosexual Mickey Rourke / Lisa Bonet movie from the late 80s?
I don’t remember much about it either, except that the twist at the end makes it fit right in this category.
Oh yeah, and from the comics world – “Bem” by Gilbert Hernandez, from the first volume of Love and Rockets.
I’ll nominate Christian Bale in The Machinist. I mean, there’s obviously something wrong with him right from the beginning, but it’s not until the end of the film that we find out just how messed up he is, and why.
On the literary side, consider Sheriff Nick Corey in Jim Thompson’s novel Pop. 1280.
Didn’t he have like a fake mole on his face that was actually a microphone set up so he could learn the secret recipe of KFC?
There was a similar storyline in the TV movie Obsessed, starring Jenna Elfman. She imagines an affair with a man she barely knows and ends up in jail for stalking and other things, all the while convinced that her delusions are fact and that he is lying.
A-yup… I came in here to mention that. Angel (Rourke) keeps ending up places just before someone there is brutally murdered… starts investigating… turns out he (his alter-ego?) sold his soul to the Devil and is unknowingly the murderer in all the cases.
Or something like that – my memory is a bit hazy too.
Strawberry Spring is a short story in the Stephen King compilation Night Shift. It turns out that the narrator has some issues.
Except that, a) he was aware that his wife was really alive so the fact that he’s killing anyone at all was an issue of him wanting to murder people, and b) the person who annoyed him in the movie is the cop, so we can say definitively that he has killed someone at least once just for the sake of annoyance, and c) it’s likely that the cop isn’t the first and that they had a mutual relationship where one covers up the murders and the other gets a personal assasin.
Not as much in the movie as the stage musical but the German friend Max in Caberet.Granted he is not the lead, but in the first act, there is no real hint he is a Nazi, and the audience bonds with him as does the young couple. He is sort of the Van Johnson to Gene Kelly in Brigadoon or something. Then in the second act, he is revealed as a real shit.
The subtlty is brilliant. Now this is in the original production. The updated version in the '90s was more like the film and had more clues to the character’s soul so the reveal was not as powerful.