The revelation that a movie’s main character was secretly the killer all along is a hoary old cliché, but a few choice movies have made this infamous twist shine. It is a played-out, tired trope. A murder mystery sets up an intriguing bevy of suspects, gives viewers good reason to believe that each of them is guilty, and then finally comes to its barnstorming conclusion. However, just as the satisfying killer reveal is about to happen, the movie lets everyone down by revealing that the main character was the killer all along.
This gag was first popularized by an Agatha Christie novel that won’t be named here since it remains one of the most impressive and successful uses of this twist. However, much like movies that reveal their main characters have been dead all along, stories where the hero is the killer tend to flop more often than they soar. Viewers have already seen countless spins on this trope from amnesiac lead characters who don’t remember their past to main characters with secret alter egos, to self-aware killers who simply lied to the audience. However, a few great movies have made this revelation genuinely shocking and effective.
10 High Tension
2003’s High Tension is at the bottom of this list only because Alexandre Aja’s psychological horror movie might have been better without its last-minute twist ending. For most of its runtime, High Tension is the unbearably tense tale of two young college students, Alexia and Marie, who must escape a deranged serial killer who invades Alexia’s remote home and murders her family. Then, in an unlikely twist that suddenly makes the movie a twisted black comedy, High Tension reveals that Marie has been the killer all along. While undeniably silly, this twist does turn a terrifying horror endurance test into a campier, cartoonier, and more shamelessly fun affair.
9 My Bloody Valentine 3D
For the most part, 2009’s My Bloody Valentine 3D is a gruesome slasher that remakes the 1981 original movie and adds a lot more gore to proceedings in the process. However, as this twisty slasher nears its conclusion, it becomes increasingly obvious that the remake won’t stick with the original movie’s disappointing killer reveal. Sure enough, the ending of My Bloody Valentine 3D reveals that the movie’s seemingly sweet hero himself is the killer, not his smarmy, philandering childhood best friend.
8 The Uninvited
2009’s The Uninvited is a rare American remake of a Japanese horror movie that is worth seeking out. A loose remake of Korea’s A Tale of Two Sisters, The Uninvited follows two teenage sisters as they attempt to welcome their new stepmother into their family. For most of the movie’s runtime, it seems pretty obvious that Elizabeth Banks’ seemingly sweet stepmom is hiding a murderous secret. However, the ingenious twist ending of The Uninvited reveals that the movie’s heroine is really the killer, and her sister only exists in her imagination.
7 Shrooms
2007’s Shrooms is an underrated Irish slasher movie that sees a group of unlikable college students head out into a remote forest to trip on psilocybin mushrooms. Once there, the group is picked off one at a time as the final girl hallucinates a ghoulish supernatural presence in the woods. What seems like a riff on the Evil Dead movie franchise turns out to be something far darker when Shrooms reveals that its heroine was the killer all along, murdering her friends in a delusional rage while imagining the hooded figure she blamed for the murders.
6 Tenebrae
1982’s Tenebrae is a stylish, gruesome Giallo movie from horror legend Dario Argento. The slasher’s dreamy story follows a cynical horror author who realizes that everyone involved in the production of his latest novel is being picked off by an unseen assailant. In an interesting twist on this familiar trope, it turns out that the author wasn’t the killer all along. Instead, he was targeted by a deranged fan who pulled off the early killings, killed her, and then opportunistically continued her killing spree.
5 Triangle
2009’s Triangle is a trippy time-loop thriller wherein Melissa George’s beleaguered single mother must repeatedly avoid a masked murderer who killed her friends on board a derelict yacht. In a dark horror movie ending viewers won’t soon recover from, Triangle‘s desperate heroine is revealed to be the killer. Driven to purgatory by her crimes, she is forced to watch helplessly as her fate repeats on in a torturous, never-ending cycle.
4 Memento
Memento’s chronology is complicated. Unlike Irreversible, the events of the movie aren’t shown backward, but rather the amnesiac lead character must unspool his actions in the present. Guy Pearce’s charismatic antihero Leonard wakes up to a series of notes that he left himself which, he hopes, will allow him to understand the fate that befell his wife before the movie began. However, Memento’s devastating ending reveals that Leonard is the story’s villain, not its hero, and the events viewers have seen until this point are missing a lot of pivotal context that is only revealed during Memento‘s ending.
3 Hellraiser: Inferno
2000’s Hellraiser: Inferno was one of countless sequels in the Hellraiser franchise. However, director Scott Derrickson’s offbeat horror noir was a rare horror sequel that fixed its franchise as Hellraiser: Inferno injected moral ambiguity back into the increasingly gory, silly movies. Craig Sheffer’s corrupt cop Joseph Thorne spends most of Hellraiser: Inferno’s knotty plot trying to hunt down a twisted serial killer known only as the Engineer, but his effort is all for nothing in the end. It turns out the amoral Joseph himself is the Engineer, as his sins have symbolically tortured and killed his inner child over the years.
2 Angel Heart
1987’s Angel Heart was a major influence on Hellraiser: Inferno with its sweaty, bloody tale of Harry Angel. A cynical private investigator hired by a mysterious benefactor to hunt down a Satanic murderer, Harry never seems like a straight-up good guy. However, it is still a daring surprise when Angel Heart’s brutal ending reveals that Harry is his own bounty, and his love interest is his estranged daughter. His benefactor is Satan, engineering these events to force Harry to pay for his horrific crimes.
1 Shutter Island
Director Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island movie adapted Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name and managed to make one of the oldest twists in cinema history feel fresh in the process. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels is a troubled cop who is sent to the titular institution to investigate a patient’s disappearance, only for the ending to reveal that Teddy himself is really an inmate. In a crushing twist, Shutter Island reveals that its hero murdered his wife after she drowned their children, meaning he has been the movie’s mysterious killer all along.
