The genius of changing the question

[Ed. - This post may contain spoilers for numerous movies, among them Identity, The Others, Usual Suspects, Lone Star, Momento, Frailty and films by M. Night Shyamalan.]

In the final act of the 2003 thriller Identity all the characters, dead and alive, are revealed to be split personalities inside the brain of a serial killer. You would've had to have been telepathic to have seen this coming and the new information forces you to radically and quickly rethink everything you have seen up to that point.

That's a twist.

I have a friend who ruined The Sixth Sense for a theater-full of people when he slapped his forehead halfway through and loudly exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, I think he's dead!"

That's a twist, too. The film led you to believe you were solving one mystery, while another, deeper one lurked right in front of you. The same could be said of The Others, Lone Star and The Village.

But I'm not sure whether it's fair to claim that Usual Suspects really has a twist. You know that the mystery is the identity of Keyser Soze. You have only yourself to blame if you didn't figure out the answer. The same is true of Psycho. The question is always the killer's identity. The fact that Albert Hitchcock threw up a few red herrings doesn't change that. Ditto films like Momento, Scream and Seven.

I probably wouldn't think about this subject at all if, years ago, I hadn't seen Frailty, which is one of those movies that, once seen, can never be unseen.

Could I have guessed that Adam and his dad would turn out to be the good guys, that the slaughtered people were actually demons, that the movie's hero would grow up to be the God's Hand serial killer, and that Adam had killed his brother and taken his name so he could lure a cold-blooded murderer out to the Rose Garden at the behest of God? I doubt it. Even if I wasn't permanently scarred by the gut-churning moment when Adam takes up his dad's work.

Humans have a prejudice for the real. Frailty uses that. You think you're watching a gritty thriller about a boy with a killer for a father, when in fact you're watching a supernatural horror movie about a man with a demon for a son. Somebody get me the remote, I need to hit the rewind button. Just as soon as I stop shaking.

What separates a clever ending from a true twist? The former surprises with the answer, while the latter, like Frailty, changes the question.

Will YouTube ruin moviemaking?

Do I get thrown out of the horror geek guild if I admit that I found Blair Witch boring? Jerks get lost, someone's standing in a corner, the end. At what point was I supposed to be scared?

And where was the witch?

Blair Witch tried to pull the same stunt Jaws did. Disorientation plus apprehension equals jitters. But at the end of Jaws, I was rewarded when I saw saw the object of my terror made flesh and bone. Blair Witch wussed out.

"You're supposed to use your imagination," my friends explained. But by that logic, why make a movie at all? Why not just tell people there's something lurking under their beds and leave it at that?

If you go to the trouble to make a monster movie, you owe your audience at least one good, long look at the monster. Bless you, M. Night Shyamalan.

At least Blair Witch was trying to be original. Two new movies - Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead - sound as if they were modeled after UGC. They're monster movies, as they'd be posted to YouTube. Their style is the exact opposite of stalker vision. Instead of seeing what the killer sees, you see what the victim sees.

In theory this intimacy should be scary, but in reality it's almost always annoying. Because in real life, you'd never get to see the monster. It either eats you when you least expect it, or while you're running the opposite direction.

Cloverfield has received positive reviews and Diary of the Dead is the work of a film legend. They may turn out to be individually brilliant. But in general Hollywood shouldn't try to emulate the style of amateur Internet content creators. Hollywood's advantage is that it has the financial resources and SFX knowhow to actually show us the monster. It ought to exploit that edge.

Image from the The Village and Fair Use rationale found on wikipedia.