Techniques for Devising Plot Twists

copyright 2014 by Gary Pullman

By analyzing movies which end with an unexpected twist, one may discern various techniques that writers have employed to accomplish this feat. With some overlap among a few instances, here is one classification of such techniques:

Denial: the apparent experience never happened. Example: April Fool's Day (1986): It seems that a serial killer is murdering people, but the apparent deaths are all results of practical jokes (it's April Fool's Day, after all) perpetuated by pranksters who could be gainfully employed, if they weren't so immature, as Hollywood special effects wizards.

Inversion: life is but a dream (or an hallucination). Example: When  a Stranger Calls (1979): A babysitter is terrorized by a psychotic killer who calls her repeatedly on the family's telephone—and the killer is in the house! The Descent (2005) also relies upon inversion for its plot twist, as does HighTension (2005) and Identity (2003).

Substitution: one person, place, or thing is replaced by another person, place, or thing. Example: Fallen (1998): The hero says he almost died in an ordeal, but he is possessed by the killer while he's speaking, so, in fact, it's the killer who almost dies, while the hero is already dead. Fridaythe 13th (1980) also uses this technique to generate its plot twist.

Marvelous: that which seems, in Tzvetan Todorov's terms, to be uncanny actually turns out to be marvelous (in other words, that which appears to be natural is really supernatural). Example: Carnivalof Souls (1962): A woman who believes she is the lone survivor of a car crash sees strange ghouls chasing her, but she's dead all the while. The SixthSense (1999) and TheOthers (2001) also employ the marvelous to create their plot twists.

Multiplication: e pluribus unum, reversed. Example: Scream (1986): A serial killer who stalks teens turns out to be two killers.

Impersonation: The Cabinet ofDr. Caligari (1920): A man relates his tale of madman Dr. Caligari, who along with his zombie-like henchman, committed a string of murders, but the narrator is the real madman, and he's telling his tale in an insane asylum; Caligari is, in fact, his doctor in the asylum. Angel Heart (1987), Sleepaway Camp and Saw (2004) also use impersonation to generate their plot twists.

Impersonation via split personality: a character masquerades as someone else. Example: Psycho (1960): Norman Bates seeks to cover up his mother's murders. The problem is that, years earlier, Norman killed his mother and developed a split personality: he has become both himself and his mother. This same technique generates the plot twist in Hideand Seek (2005).

Mistaken identity and Irony: through mistaken identity, something happens that is other than that which the audience has been led to expect. Example: Black Christmas (1974): When a sorority house must deal with a series of threatening telephone calls and the disappearances of some of their sisters, it is discovered that the man who dies, who is assumed to have been the killer, was not the murderer; the actual killer is still inside the house.

Duplicity: an actual situation is misrepresented to deceive someone. Example: The Wicker Man (1973): A policeman investigates a missing child on a British isle that celebrates pagan customs, but the story of the missing girl was fabricated to lure the cop to the island so that he could be sacrificed to the gods after being enclosed inside a burning "wicker man." Diabolique (1964) also uses duplicity to create its plot twist.

Jumped Conclusion: someone other than the suspect is guilty of a crime. Example: Friday the 13th (1980): In 1957, Jason drowns at Camp Crystal Lake; a year later, two counselors are murdered and the camp is closed. In 1979, the camp reopens, and a mysterious killer—possibly Jason, whose body was never found—begins to stalk the camp's counselors once again, but it's not Jason; it's his mother, Mrs. Vorhees. Substitution also creates the plot twist in Fallen (1998).

Unanticipated consequences: an act that is believed to effect a specific result has unanticipated consequences. Example: The Ring (2000): Rachel, a reporter investigating a video tape rumored to bring death to anyone who watches it, finds out that it is somehow tied to a mysterious young girl named Samara, whose body Rachel retrieves from a well, thereby freeing her spirit to kill again, rather than putting the ghost to rest, as Rachel believed would happen.

Irony: something happens that is other than that which the audience has been led to expect. (In a sense, most twist endings are ironic in one way or another. However, this category is reserved for plots that are intrinsically ironic: the irony results from the very nature of the storyline, rather than an element added at the end.) Example: When a Stranger Calls (1979): A babysitter is terrorized by a psychotic killer who calls her repeatedly on the family's telephone, and the killer is calling from within the house. The Mist (2007) also uses irony to create its plot twist.

Horror Fiction: The Pleasure of Pain, or Painful Pleasures

Just as some philosophers see morality as emerging from a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, some psychologists regard sadomasochism as a universal basis for human conduct. Human existence, such students of human behavior contend, teeters and totters between active and dominant conduct and passive and submissive behavior. Today’s active, dominant person may become the passive, submissive party tomorrow--and vice versa. In “Sado-Masochism,” Elisabeth Bronfen’s gloss on the topic in The Handbook of the Gothic, the author puts the matter in Freudian terms:

From the onset of his work on instincts and perversions, Sigmund Freud emphasized that sadism as an active and masochism as a passive posture enlacing pain with pleasure are the two faces of the same perversion, although the one aspect may be more strongly developed than the other. At the same time he also emphasized that while these two terms could not be studied in isolation, it was equally true that the underlying contrast between activity and passivity extended beyond the question of sexual perversion, proving itself to be among the universal characteristics of sexual life. As such, the polarity reappears in psychoanalytic theory in the opposition between phallic and castrated, as well as in the opposition between masculine and feminine (231).

Obviously, for Freud, sadomasochism was not exclusively, or even primarily, a sexual disorder. Instead, it is the basis for all human activity. As such, it could be the ground of activities between male-male participants or between male-female participants. If sadomasochism were to take place between two men, it would be characterized as involving a phallic participant (the active, dominant party) and a castrated (passive, submissive party), whereas if sadomasochism were to occur between a man and a woman, the man would be masculine, the woman feminine. (Freud doesn’t seem to have reckoned a place in his scheme of things for masochism between two women, but, perhaps, sadomasochism between two women could be said to follow either the male-male paradigm, with the active, dominant participant adopting the role of the phallic woman while the other performed the role of the feminine party, or the male-female model, with the active, dominant participant adopting the masculine role while the other woman performed the feminine role.)

If sadomasochism truly underlies all human behavior, it is obviously a component of the conduct of horror fiction characters. Initially, the monster functions as the sadist, which is to say, the phallic, or masculine, and antagonistic, aggressive character, while the hero or heroine and the victims adopt the role of the castrated or feminine characters. However , during the course of the story, these roles are apt to be reversed, so that the sadistic-phallic-masculine monster becomes the masochistic-castrated-feminine character and the masochistic-castrated-feminine hero or heroine and the victims--those that remain alive, at any rate--become the sadistic-phallic-masculine predators. Indeed, in slasher movies, it has become a common motif for the sole survivor, a female character, to outlast even the monster, often banishing or destroying it so that she becomes the final girl (the last character standing). During the course of the story, the viewer (or, it may be, the reader), who identifies with the protagonist, is allowed to experience both poles of the sadomasochistic continuum (and, no doubt, several points between them).

The sadomasochism of the drama or narrative can be provided by an external source or it can occur internally, within the character, as Bronfen points out in the closing paragraph of her article:

Within Gothic literature phantasy enactments of sado-masochism can be found in the intersubjective conflict, the domination-submission played through in narratives where political institutions are shown to inflict violence on their subjects, notably [in]. . . scenes of torture. . . . But they can also be manifested in the register of intrasubjective conflict, where characters enact the struggle between a sadistic super-ego as a representative of the law and a masochistic ego as representative of forbidden pleasures, by suffering from guilt, self-punishment, or self-purging. . . (232).

As examples of novels in which the sadomasochism derives from “intersubjective conflict,” Bronfen cites the works of Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Maturin; as examples of stories that contain “intrasubjective conflict,” she mentions the works by Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and James Hogg.

For my own part, I believe that Freud’s theory concerning sadomasochism as a universal basis for human behavior has merit (although, typically, I am myself anything but Freudian in outlook and am not, in general, a big fan of psychology or, at least, of psychologizing), and Bronfen’s division of “enactments of sado-masochism” into “intersubjective” and “intrasubjective” conflict seems valid, although films like The Descent, it may be argued, are predicated upon both types of conflict, the threats to the characters coming at once from without and from within.

Visualizing Horror: Movie Posters

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

For writers, horror is primarily a matter of action described in words. For illustrators, horror is primarily a matter of image depicted in color and shape. A writer has a few sentences with which to snare the unwary reader’s attention, plunging him or her into the action of the story, an illustrator a few seconds in which to ambush the wandering eye. To do so, creators of horror posters, in addition to traditional design techniques and artistic principles, rely upon creating both a sense of the bizarre and an air of mystery. Their pictures pose more questions than answers, arousing viewers’ curiosity and, their creators hope, make them want to see the films that the posters advertise.

In the early days of horror movies, posters were more verbose, as wordy as they were pictorial. Mostly, adjectives suggested the traits of the featured creature and, perhaps, how the moviegoer should feel about the monster. A poster for The Blob read “Indescribable. . . Indestructible. . . Nothing Can Stop it. . . THE BLOB!” The picture showed a massive, blood-red gelatinous mass enveloping a passenger train from which horrified travelers seek to escape on foot while one of them, a woman, screams in the foreground.

Another early poster, even more loquacious, shows a young blonde woman, lying supine. Facing the viewer, she reaches out with her right hand while she attempts to fend off a monster with her left, a look of abject horror upon her face. Although the text suggests she is being raped, the monster is depicted only as a demonic head, out of which tentacles grow, Gorgon like, some ending in suckers, others in animal skulls, and still others in the heads of bizarre beasts. The text reads, “A few years ago in Dunwich a half-witted girl bore illegitimate twins. One of them was almost human! THE DUNWICH HORROR.”

For films that are associated with a particular person, place or thing, such as The Amityville Horror, the action of which takes place inside a haunted house of sorts which is of a distinctive design, the poster depicts the house, with its eyelike windows looming in the background while, at the center of the foreground, the silhouette of a male figure approaches the viewer, carrying an object that is difficult to identify clearly but may be a rifle. Clearly, the gunman and the spooky-looking mansion are related in some way, but how? Why is he armed, and what sway does the apparently haunted house hold over him?

A more recent film, The Descent, shows six women, the characters who explore the movie’s uncharted cave, who, by the unlikely postures they’ve adopted, form a human skull. “Scream your last breath,” the text advises. How are the women related, and why, collectively, are they posed to depict a human skull? Will they be the deaths of one another? If so, how? And why? And into what will they descend?

A poster for Friday the 13th is divided in half horizontally. The left side of the upper half shows the close-up of a young woman’s head as she screams. The right side of this same half of the poster shows a cabin, lit from within, at the edge of a deep woods; a full moon glides across a partly cloudy, starlit sky. The upper and lower halves of the poster are divided by paper, perhaps representing a diary. Words, in red, on the folded-down sheet of paper on the right read, “On Friday the 13th they begin to die horribly. One. . . by one.” The left side of the lower half of the poster depicts typical events at Camp Crystal Lake, and, thrusting in from the right edge of the same portion of the poster, a hand holds a sharp-edged hunting knife. The juxtaposition of innocent fun at a summer camp with an image of brutal death creates a sense of dread.

A poster for Hellraiser shows the close-up of a man’s head into which, porcupine-style, many nails have been hammered, all to the same relatively shallow depth so that he resembles a human pincushion, giving literal expression to the term “pinhead.” Between the nails, lines of blood are visible, dividing his face into a grid pattern. Who hammered the nails into the man’s head and cut the gridlines into his face, and why? Who is this mysterious “hell raiser”?

For The Hills Have Eyes 2, a vaguely feminine body, trussed up inside a sheet of canvas, and secured by a rope, is being dragged across the desert by a male figure, dressed somewhat like a mummy, whose back is all the viewer sees. Directly behind the dragged figure, a hand pushes through the soil, clawing at the ground. What the hell is going on here?

A film called simply Horror shows a white-collared priest wearing a cross, except that, in place of a human head, he has the head of a long-horned goat, which is emblematic of the devil. The poster’s text reads, “Expect nothing less than sheer. . . HORROR.” The picture is as humorous as it is horrible, suggesting that the movie may be a bit campy, but it does make the viewer wonder what the satanic priest’s motive is and what plan of action he hopes to execute. Is he merely a deceiver--a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it were--or is he something much worse?

Jeepers Creepers 2, a film in which a serial killer collects his victims’ eyes, shows what appears to be an orange sky in which a series of crimson lightning bolts flash and out of which emerges the suggestion of a human face, the most distinctive feature of which is its open mouth and teeth. Under the movie’s title, the caption reads, “Feed your fear.” Upon reflection, it becomes obvious that the orange sky and red lightning bolts are really an image such as is produced by a retinal scan--the poster’s viewer is looking at his or her own eyeball and, at the same time, into the face of the serial killer who collects just such trophies. The design for this poster seems to take into consideration the old wives’ tale that the last image that a murder victim sees--that of his or her killer--is imprinted upon his or her retina forever. This poster creates a sense of immediacy, once one sees that the outer world--the sky and lightning--is really the inner world and that, consequently, one might be viewing what will soon become one’s own death

Alfred Hitchcock showed Psycho audiences just how frightening vulnerability can be when he had knife-wielding Norman Bates attack a hotel guest as she was showering in her bathroom. The movie Slither capitalizes upon this same sense of vulnerability. A bather has left her bathroom door ajar, and the viewer--or voyeur--sees her bent knee, rising above the side of the tub in which she bathes, presumably relaxed, unaware of the large, wormlike creature that, poised upon the rim of the tub, is about to plunge into her bathwater while, behind it, others ascend the side of the bathtub--and still more of the loathsome slug-like monstrosities, gathered at the base of the tub, await their turn to join their ilk. The phallic significance of the large worms hardly needs to be mentioned. This poster evokes the fear of both physical and sexual assault.

Sometimes, the movies that such posters advertise actually contain the scenes that the posters depict. For example, the Slither poster suggests that the antagonist--the monster--is going to be a mass of monstrous worms symbolizing, perhaps, the violence of sexual assault, or rape. There is a parasitic worm--a bunch of them, actually--courtesy of a fallen meteorite, which transforms its host--the bathing beauty’s husband, Grant--into a zombie-like monster. There’s sex, too--or a lack thereof--for Grant becomes infected after, refused sex by his wife, Starla, he goes to a local tavern to drown his sorrows, meets a female acquaintance who’s smitten with him, and goes into the woods with her, where, before anything further can happen between them, Grant becomes a host to the alien parasite. At home, he builds a nest for the larvae and, hatching, they possess the townspeople, turning them into zombies as well. Suggesting sexual assault by wormlike creatures, the poster is accurate on a figurative, if not a literal, level.

Of course, it’s not really the task of the poster to provide a faithful and accurate depiction of the movie’s scene; the poster’s task is to sell tickets. To do so, in a few images, digestible by instinct more than reason, within a few seconds, the artwork must create a sense of horror and of fear, and it must also appeal to its viewer’s curiosity by creating an air of mystery that leaves questions unanswered.

A Descent into the Horrors of Extreme Feminism

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Concerning The Descent (2205), it behooves one to ask who is descending and into what, precisely, the characters are descending. The “who” is a team of nubile young women, and the “what” is an underground cavern. Symbolically, a cavern represents the womb, and an underground world suggests the interiority of the person, an interiority that is not normally seen or surveyed—the unconscious mind. The idea of descending, of “going down,” also has, perhaps, a vaguely sexual—and, in the context of an all-female cast, a homosexual, or lesbian—connotation.

Women are going down together, inside a giant womb symbol, just as they are undertaking an exploration of their unconscious minds. Women often regard one another as rivals rather than as friends—or so it is said, at any rate. The Descent builds upon this idea of same-sex rivalry. Although they do encounter strange, fetus-like creatures, they discover, as their relatively superficial friendships falter, that they actually have more to fear from one another than from the monsters as they become as much their own enemies as the adversaries of the beasts that stalk them.

The cast of characters ranges across the spectrum of social roles available to contemporary women, and the women’s varied nationalities and ethnicities suggest that this movie is about all women everywhere, rather than just the five who actually make up the expedition’s party. Juno is the intrepid adventuress; Sarah, a Brit, is the wife and mother; the British Beth, her friend, is her confidante; and the European sisters, Rebecca and Sam (note the masculine name), are, respectively, the timid female and the competent professional woman. The only man in any of the women’s lives, Sarah’s husband, Paul, a role-reversed Mr. Mom who tends to their daughter, Jessica, is out of the picture, as is the child: father and daughter were killed in a car accident following a rafting adventure in which Sarah and her girlfriends participated. Juno, the movie suggests, may be bisexual, for, just before their spelunking expedition begins, she and her team are joined by the reckless and obviously butch Holly, Juno’s friend. Wife-and-mother Sarah and her best friend, Beth, harbor resentment toward Juno, who abandoned them the previous year. Her abandonment of her friends haunts Juno’s dreams, and it is obvious that she feels guilty about her actions.

These dreams also set up the shifting themes of the character’s waking (conscious) and sleeping (unconscious) lives, heralding their descent into their unconscious, where they will confront their deepest, most secret fears, as embodied by the strange fetus-creatures who will hunt them.

The contours of the cave they explore resemble the shape of the womb. Wide at the entrance (vagina), it narrows toward the middle (cervix), and then opens again, into another wider space (uterus, or womb). As the women negotiate their way through the womb-cave, Sarah, the wife and mother, gets stuck and, suffering from claustrophobia, panics. As subtext, her becoming trapped seems to represent pregnancy, which causes a woman to get “stuck,” physically and, to some extent, both emotionally and socially, if not vocationally, as well, for nine months in a process that, for many, epitomizes femininity. Beth, her best friend, plays the role of the midwife, delivering Sarah, but the birth process represented by Beth’s freeing Sarah from the cave’s narrowed passageway goes awry: the womb-cave collapses, burying the women inside a womb-become-a-tomb. Their gender, especially as it is involved in pregnancy, has not only trapped them, but it has also, in fact, buried them alive.

Juno announces that she has duped her friends. In pretending that they would be exploring an already-charted cavern while taking them to an unexplored cave instead, she has betrayed her fellow women. Femininity, represented by the charted cavern, was once familiar and non-threatening, but, now, as represented by an unknown cave, it has become an alien, unknown, and possibly hazardous region. Juno has risked their lives along with her own to realize her ambition to have a cave named for her as a sort of shortcut to a symbolic or surrogate motherhood.

Juno seeks a new way by which women can generate and produce, if not reproduce, except that the way is not new. It is the age-old technological-masculine substitute for women’s natural ability to reproduce life through the feminine-exclusive means of pregnancy and childbirth, as men seek to create material artifacts through technological-masculine means in imitation of, and compensation for, women’s natural-feminine ability to have children. Juno seems to want to usurp these technological-masculine means by asserting her will over the other women and over the womb-cave to which she has brought them for this purpose. In the process, she has endangered the lives of both herself and the other members of the party, ostensibly her friends but really her rivals. None of them sees the other danger—the drooling mouth, a sort of vagina dentata—that appears, briefly, in the foreground of the scene. Playing the role of the midwife a second time, Beth points a way out of the womb-cave: art, in the form of a mural painted by Native Americans (Roseau’s “noble savages”), shows the trapped women a way out of their predicament, depicting a second exit from the womb-cave.

As they continue their descent, Holly, thinking she sees sunlight, rushes along the cavern, heedless of Juno’s command to slow down, and falls, breaking a leg. Lesbianism, with a patina of machismo, as an alternative means of satisfying one’s sexual desires, is crippled, and it hinders women in their explorations of themselves as individuals and of their femininity as women. As the sisterhood tends to their injured comrade, the traditional wife-and mother, Sarah, wanders off, on her own, encountering one of the womb-cave’s misshapen, aborted-fetus-like monsters, which seem to represent her (and her companions’) forsaking of traditional and biological maternal roles. The creatures are an army, it seems, of outraged fetuses or, perhaps, could-have-been fetuses, who were aborted by virtue of the women’s decision to renounce their baby-making capability in favor of pursuing the more traditionally masculine role of explorer. Things quickly go from bad to worse.
The lesbian has been crippled, but now she is killed by one of the creatures, and her ostensible lover, Juno, the leader of the women’s group, struggles with the murderous monster for the remains of the slain woman. The monster, as an aborted fetus, perhaps, represents the traditional role of women or, at least, its outcome, but it is a role that has been thwarted by the women’s will—their choice—to engage in spelunking.

By using a tool—a pickax, representing an artifact of the technological-masculine order—Juno scars the fetus-monster’s face, but it drags Holly’s body off as a second monster attacks Juno. The women’s leader manages to kill her attacker, with the man-made pickax, but she also mortally wounds the timid member of their sisterhood, the wife-and-mother’s best friend, Beth. In denying one’s femininity, an alpha woman like Juno, it appears, can have a negative, even a fatal, effect on the lives of lesser (read, more traditional) women. Feminism, especially in its extreme form, may not be good for all ladies. As Beth begs Juno to help her, Juno, as if confirming the prophetic nature of her earlier nightmares, abandons Beth to her fate. Sarah dreams of her daughter, but, this time, Jessica has the face of one of the aborted-fetus-monsters, the imagery establishing the thematic connection between children (or would-be children) and their abandonment (or abortion).

As if crippling and then killing the renegade woman-lesbian were not enough for the outraged, vengeful fetus-monsters, the creatures fall upon Holly’s corpse, consuming it, as Sarah, rescued by Juno, flees. The women discover that the creatures are blind and rely upon their heightened sense of hearing to hunt their prey.

The masculine-named Sam is embracing her sister, the distraught, timid girly girl, Rebecca; however Sam, emasculated with fear at the sight of a monster, is unable to protect or to defend her sister, and it is up to heroic Juno, armed with the man-made pickax, once again, to save a damsel in distress.

In her retreat from the feeding pit in which the monsters are devouring the remains of the lesbian, Sarah encounters Beth, telling her friend how Juno had abandoned her, and Sarah fulfills Beth’s request that she kill her to put her out of her misery. The wife-mother has killed her midwife, but, it appears, not soon enough, for a child-like monster attacks Sarah, forcing her to kill (abort) the fetus-creature. Nature, through its exercise of the biological imperative, reasserts its will, as another fetus-monster —the slain creature’s mother (or the mother role itself, which has been thwarted by Sarah’s murder of the child)—attacks Sarah.

In fending off the female monster’s attack, Sarah falls into a pool of (menstrual?) blood, where the female monster (maternal instinct) pins her. Using a sharp bone fragment (symbolic, it seems, of the death instinct, which, in Freudian psychology, is opposed to eros, the life instinct), Sarah kills the monster, but its mate, the male of the species, then attacks her. She manages to kill it with the bone fragment as well.

Sam and Rebecca are next to be dispatched by the monsters, before the creatures force Juno to jump into a pit of water. After killing a creature lurking in the water, Juno climbs the side of pit, but loses her grip and slides back into the crater. Sarah, appearing above, grabs her, hauling her out of the depression. It’s obvious from her expression that she scorns Juno for having abandoned Beth to her fate. However, her contempt is forgotten for the moment when they are again attacked by the fetus-creatures. They kill their attackers, and, when Juno is distracted by additional creatures, Sarah stabs Juno in the leg, abandoning her to her fate, as Juno had earlier abandoned Beth.

As the monsters descend upon Juno, Sarah flees, escapes through an exit in the cave, and drives off—or so she thinks. As Juno’s bloodied corpse appears beside her in the car’s passenger seat, she realizes that she is merely daydreaming; her escape was just an illusion, and the exit she thought she’d seen was nothing. She’s fled into a dead-end arm (a Fallopian tube) of the cavern. She thinks of her daughter, who offers her birthday cake. The monsters—fetus-like creatures representing, perhaps, her abandonment of her role as a mother—are heard, descending upon her, as the film ends.

The Descent may be regarded as a repudiation of extreme feminism’s demand that women, to become authentic individuals, abandon the roles of mother and wife, forsaking family and even the childbearing role that nature and biology, no less than society, have assigned to them. This is the lesson that the women learn, too late, from their exploration of their unconscious minds that is represented by the cave, which also doubles as the ultimate symbol of femininity, the womb itself.