Comments on: Twist endings bloody horror genre

By: Floyd R. Turbo

Floyd R. Turbo — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 03:13:04 +0000

Also the degree of difficulty in twist endings is high. I’d wager the audience of good horror (as opposed to splatter-fests or torture pron — misspelled intentionally for trolls) films is very sophisticated — hard to surprise totally.

I liked The Others. I kinda saw it coming, but it was dark and moody — though to pile on kbiel’s point I wasn’t as invested in Kidman and the kids as much as Bruce Willis’ character in Sixth Sense.

By: cftoto

cftoto — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:44:16 +0000

Kbiel — show me up all day long! I love intelligent, spirited debate here and you provided it in spades.

By: kbiel

kbiel — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:11:23 +0000

I was just trying to extend your remarks, not show you up. After all, you can not get the audience invested in a character or group of characters without good writing.

By: La Shawn

La Shawn — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:33:46 +0000

I meant to say the twist WAS NOT hinted at strongly enough.

By: La Shawn

La Shawn — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:33:00 +0000

cftoto , don’t you hate when that happens?

The twist in “The Uninvited” was hinted at strongly enough. After the big reveal, I went back to look at certain scenes again, and I saw hints, but they were a stretch.

By: cftoto

cftoto — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:40:57 +0000

Well said … actually, better than what I just wrote. Dang.

By: kbiel

kbiel — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:13:00 +0000

Actually, writing a twist ending is like the clichéd game pitch, “easy to learn, but hard to master.” The simplest way is to get the audience emotionally invested in the character and his goals. Once you have done that, you can then turn the character’s world upside down and take the audience with him. That was how it worked in “The Sixth Sense,” as audiences identified with Bruce Willis’ character and made his goals their own only to find out that not all was as it seemed. Shyamalan could not reproduce that same thing in “The Village” because he spent too much time on the fright aspect and too little time in getting us to identify with the characters (and the stilted speech kept audiences at a distance as well).