40 Movies With Twist Endings on Netflix That Will Leave You Shook

After spending nearly the entire movie trapped in a basement with doomsday prepper Howard, Michelle escapes his bunker and enters the outside world. She's certain Howard's assertion that the world is under attack is nothing more than crazed ramblings from her captor, but the "Cloverfield" in 10 Cloverfield Lane should have tipped viewers off that a major twist was coming. Sure enough, Michelle is barely outside for a few minutes before she realizes that as unhinged as he may be, Howard was right: there really is a full-scale alien invasion going on outside.

Throughout Arlington Road, widow Michael is convinced his new neighbors are terrorists planning an attack on the FBI headquarters. Unfortunately, no one believes him, which leads him to head to the headquarters himself, where he is unwittingly used as a mule by his neighbors to pull off the attack. In the end, he's not only killed, but remembered as a terrorist despite his best efforts to stop his neighbors' evil plan.

The ending of Arrival is both gut-wrenching and beautiful. Throughout the movie, linguist Louise sees images of a child as she's trying to crack the palindrome-filled language of the aliens who have landed on Earth. It's not until the end that we realize that through learning their language, she has also come to see time in a nonlinear manner, and those images of a child are flashes of a future that hasn't happened yet, one where she'll have a daughter named Hannah who is destined to die young.

Atonement begins as a story of forbidden love between Cecilia and Robbie. When Cecilia's little sister Briony catches her with Robbie, the younger girl tells a horrible lie which lands Robbie in prison. He ends up fighting in World War II as a result, while Cecilia becomes a nurse. In the end, an older Briony visits the couple to apologize for what she did when she was younger, but they turn her away — or at least that's what seems to happen until it's revealed old Briony actually wrote their story as a book with a happy ending because the star-crossed couple died in the war without ever reuniting.

There are so many hallucinations in Black Swan, it's hard to tell what's real and what's only happening in Nina's head. That's why the film's ending, which sees Nina stabbing her ballet rival, Lily, in the stomach with a shard of glass and then returning to finish her performance of Swan Lake, is so twisted. Ultimately, it is revealed Nina only thought she stabbed Lily; in truth, she stabbed herself during one of her hallucinations, which leads to her bleeding to death on stage in the final scene.

The Cabin in the Woods is a deliciously meta slasher movie about a group of bureaucrats who create horror movie scenarios — like young people having a nightmarish weekend at a cabin — to appease a mysterious ancient god. As long as the captors are sacrificed in these scenarios, the gods are satisfied, but then two characters escape their doomed fates and work together to bring the whole system down. However, in the process, they also bring about the end of the world as the movie ends with a giant hand reaching up through the center of the earth before the camera goes black.

Released in 1962, Carnival of Souls is an eerie classic with a killer twist: the main character has been dead all along. At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist Mary is the only person to survive after a car careens off a bridge. After the accident, she flees town in hopes of escaping the trauma, but she keeps being drawn to an abandoned carnival, which turns out to be a gathering place for lost souls. In the end, the movie circles back to the beginning to reveal the car being pulled from the water again, only this time there are no survivors.

A Los Angeles private detective named J.J. Gittes is hired for what appears to be a simple case: follow the prominent husband of a woman named Evelyn Mulwray. But, unfortunately for him, the case is anything but simple. He soon learns its Evelyn's father, not her husband, he needs to be worried about. In the movie's most famous scene, Evelyn reveals just how evil her father is when she tells J.J. that he raped her when she was 15, and as a result, her sister is also her daughter.

On his deathbed, the wealthy and hated tycoon Charles Foster Kane utters just one word: Rosebud. His mysterious final word sends a journalist on a deep dive into Kane's ruthless rise to the top, but he never solves the mystery behind the word. Instead, only the audience knows the true meaning — Rosebud was Kane's beloved sled from when he was a boy, a tangible reminder that the only time he was happy in his entire life was when he was a child with no money or status.

After an airplane engine crashes through his bedroom, a giant rabbit named Frank warns moody teen Donnie of an impending apocalypse. Donnie tries to avert the coming disaster to no avail until he realizes the only way he can save the world is to go back to the moment when the engine crashed into his bedroom and let himself die.

After starting a fight club steeped in toxic masculinity with his new friend Tyler Durden, an unnamed narrator becomes embroiled in a dangerous and violent movement led by none other than Tyler. Well, at least that's what he thinks, until he and the audience realize Tyler doesn't actually exist. The narrator has dissociative identity disorder, and he's been Tyler all along.

When a new group of camp counselors tries to reopen Camp Crystal Lake 20 years after a young boy named Jason drowned, someone begins picking them off one by one. Near the end of the movie, Jason's mother is revealed to be the killer, but the final girl Alice ends her reign of terror and waits for the police in a boat on the lake. But in one final twist, the decaying body of Jason emerges from the lake and attacks her.

After his father's death, Nicholas Van Orton copes by becoming a workaholic and neglecting his relationships with his wife and brother. On his 48th birthday, Nicholas's brother Conrad gives him a ticket for a game that will change his life forever, but things take a dark turn when he loses all of his money. Ultimately, Nicholas ends up on a roof where he accidentally kills his brother and then jumps to his death, but the real twist is it was all just a game designed to make Nicholas appreciate his life, and the brothers are both alive in the end.

It's pretty obvious that something is up with Chris's girlfriend's family from the moment he arrives at their palatial estate, so it's not too surprising when he discovers they're behind the disappearances of numerous Black men and women. What is surprising is that Chris's girlfriend, Rose, is in on the whole thing and brought him there expressly for her family's nefarious purposes.

A private investigator named Patrick is hired to investigate the case of a missing girl in Gone Baby Gone, but the case turns out to be much more complicated than he imagined. In reality, the girl was taken by the local police captain, who knew her parents were neglectful. The P.I. learns that the captain staged an elaborate kidnapping plot to convince everyone the little girl was dead when she was actually living in his home.

When a journalist named Nick's wife, Amy, goes missing, all eyes are on him as the primary suspect, and there's no denying all of the evidence points to him. But the big twist is Amy carefully manufactured every piece of the evidence and staged her own disappearance for attention. What's more, when she returns safely, and Nick tells her he's going to leave her, she drops the bombshell that she's pregnant.

The Handmaiden seems like a relatively straightforward adaptation of Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith at the start, with Sook-hee being hired as a handmaiden for Hideko, a wealthy man's niece. The two quickly fall in love, but their romance is full of shocking double-crossing. It's revealed Sook-hee was originally hired to convince Hideko to marry a con man who would have her committed, but the two women team up to turn on him and Hideko's abusive uncle so they can run away together.

Identity has a pretty standard slasher movie premise: 10 strangers are killed one by one by a murderer in a roadside hotel. However, things get weird when the killer turns out to be a 10-year-old boy, who is himself just one of 10 personalities of a man who has dissociative identity disorder.

There's no shortage of dreams in Inception — after all, the central story involves a thief pulling off a heist in a multilevel dream environment. Of course, with a setup like that, twists are inevitable. Still, the final scene, which sees Cobb visiting his children while his dream totem spins, is jaw-dropping thanks to the camera cutting to black before the totem stops spinning, leaving viewers in the dark about whether or not he's awake or still lost in a dream world.

Krampus puts a dark spin on the traditional Christmas tale of a scrooge rediscovering their Christmas spirit. In the movie, a little boy named Max wishes his family would disappear, and Krampus, a demonic counterpart, arrives to make his wish come true. By the end, Max is repentant and regains his Christmas spirit, seemingly saving his family in the process . . . at least until the final scene reveals Krampus has trapped them all inside of a snow globe.

After a home invasion leaves his wife dead, Leonard Shelby develops anterograde amnesia, which forces him to leave himself clues in the form of photographs and tattoos as he searches for her killer. Tragically, he discovers in the final act that she didn't die in the home invasion at all. In actuality, he accidentally killed her later and blocked out the memory.

A routine trip to the supermarket turns into a nightmare for a father and son trapped inside the store with their fellow shoppers as a strange mist full of monsters descends on the building. Ultimately, the man, his son, and three shoppers escape, but it soon becomes apparent there's no hope for survival. Desperate to save his son from a horrible death, the man shoots the little boy and their companions, then steps out of the car and tells the monsters to come and get him. Instead, a military tank rolls up, which means they were all only moments away from rescue.

The Night of the Living Dead kicked off Hollywood's zombie obsession, but it's also notable for its devastating ending. After surviving a long night where each one of his companions was killed one by one by the undead, Ben, a Black man, steps out into the daylight and calls to the police for help. But instead of helping him, they mistake him for a zombie and shoot him on sight in a heartbreaking moment that doubled as a commentary on what was happening to Black men and women during the civil rights movement.

A young couple is delighted to welcome a 9-year-old Romanian orphan named Esther into their home, but their perfect life begins to fall apart from the moment they adopt her. At first, it looks like Esther is just another creepy horror movie kid, but the movie's big reveal is she's actually a 33-year-old woman with a growth disorder posing as a child.

The longer her husband fights in World War II, the more troubled Grace Stewart becomes. She and her two children become plagued by spirits on their English estate, and she comes to suspect her daughter may be possessed. Then, in a goosebump-inducing turn of events, it's revealed Grace killed herself and her children, and rather than being plagued by ghosts, they're the ones haunting the new occupants of the house.

When the son of the Kim family, Ki-woo, is offered a job working for the wealthy Park family, he jumps at the chance and finds ways for his poor family to also land jobs with them as well. Things take a turn when they discover the previous housekeeper's husband is living in the basement unbeknownst to the Parks. When the desperate man escapes and embarks on a bloody massacre, the patriarch of the Kim family ends up killing the patriarch of the Park family and hiding out in the basement from the police.

The ending of the original Planet of the Apes movie has been parodied numerous times, but there's nothing funny about the shocking final scene. As an astronaut tries to escape a world run by primates, he stumbles across what's left of the Statue of Liberty and realizes he's been on Earth all along.

In 19th century London, rival magicians Robert Angier and Alfred Borden can't stop trying to outdo one another, but the lengths they go to are shocking. It's eventually revealed Alfred has an identical twin, which explains how he pulled off his more impressive illusions. To keep up with his rival, Robert had enlisted Nikola Tesla to help him clone himself, and then kill his clone at the end of each trick to preserve his secret.

An author suffering from writer's block heads out to a cabin for a bit of inspiration after discovering his wife had an affair. His peace is short-lived though, thanks to the arrival of a man named Shooter who kills his dog, sets fires, and appears to be a murderer. At the end of the film, it's revealed the writer and Shooter are the same person, and the writer proceeds to murder his wife and her new boyfriend.

Remember Me appears to be a typical relationship drama about two NYU students from different economic backgrounds trying to make their relationship work. But things take a turn when Tyler, who spends most of the mov

ie working through anger issues, goes to the World Trade Center to meet his dad on Sept. 11, 2001. Unfortunately, Tyler ends up dying in the terrorist attack, and the final scene features his beloved journal lying in the rubble.

Two men wake up chained in a room with a dead body between them and no means of escaping without either maiming themselves or killing each other. It quickly becomes apparent they're the latest victims of a sadistic killer known as Jigsaw, but the most shocking part of the movie is the reveal that the dead body isn't dead at all. It's actually Jigsaw, who has been alive and in the room with them all along.

When a serial killer uses the seven deadly sins as inspiration for his killings, detectives Somerset and Mills are put on the case. Near the end of the movie, they catch their killer, but he has one last gruesome surprise in store: he has Mills's wife's head in a box, which he uses to goad the detective into killing him.

US Marshal Teddy Daniels is tasked with hunting down Rachel Solando, a patient at a mental hospital who murdered her three children. But what Teddy doesn't realize is he actually has a mental health condition himself, and he was assigned the task of finding "Rachel" because he murdered his wife after she killed their children. His doctors hoped helping him play out the case would restore his memories.

After his home is broken into, child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe's first case involves helping a child who claims he can see dead people. The twist is, the little boy's gift is real, and Dr. Malcolm is one of the dead people he sees. Turns out, Malcolm died during the home invasion at the beginning of the movie.

It may seem like common pop culture knowledge now, but The Empire Strikes Back's pivotal moment in which Darth Vader tells Luke that he's actually his father is one of movie history's biggest twists. What's more, viewers had to wait three years to see what happened next.

A family on vacation is plagued by their evil, underground doppelgangers in Us. That whole situation is weird enough on its own, but things take a truly gasp-worthy turn when the family's matriarch is revealed to be one of the underground dwellers, who switched places with her above-ground double when they were just children.

The residents of the 19th-century community of Covington have been told to avoid going into the forest for fear of the monsters who lurk there. But when a blind member of the community ventures beyond the community's borders, she discovers there are no monsters, and they're actually all living in modern times.

Norman and Claire appear to be a happy couple until a supernatural force begins reaching out to Claire. It soon becomes apparent it is the spirit of her husband's mistress, who he murdered, and in a truly chilling final sequence, the dead woman's corpse ends up saving Claire from being murdered by Norman as well.

A police sergeant named Neil Howie journeys to a remote island of pagan worshippers in search of a missing girl who everyone on the island claims doesn't exist in The Wicker Man. Neil becomes convinced the girl is still alive and that the villagers plan to sacrifice her to ensure a good harvest for the coming year, but when he finds her, it becomes clear the community was never going to hurt her. Instead, they sacrifice Howie by putting him inside of a wicker man and setting it on fire.

A woman named Erin accompanies her boyfriend to his family's house for what's meant to be a relaxing evening in You're Next. But instead, a group of deranged killers attack them. Erin fights them off and learns her boyfriend was the one who planned the attack in the first place.