Beware: we'll be discussing twist endings here, so there are spoilers within.

When was the last time you watched a movie and were truly blown away by the twist ending? When you look at lists of "Best Twist Endings Of All Time", you get the same movies popping up over and over again and again. The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, Psycho, Se7en, Fight Club, Planet Of The Apes, The Empire Strikes Back, Saw… all very well made movies, all with fantastic rug-pulling denouements. But look at when they were made; the most recent movie (Saw, 2004) was nearly a decade ago. That's a long time and a lot of movies to have passed without a single cracker of a neck-snapping twist. So what's happened?

Not to point fingers, but we think we know specifically who is to blame:

Wes Craven.
Yes, believe it or not, the master of horror is possibly the primary culprit of today's distinct lack of shocks in cinema. Not to belittle the genius director who brought us A Nightmare On Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House On The Left, it was his Scream series that forever ruined future generations of whodunnits. When the first Scream movie came out, and you didn't know which of the cast was the serial killer, and then it turned out that it was in fact TWO separate killers, that was all kinds of awesome. But then the sequel (and the sequel and the sequel) came out, and we were pointing the finger at everyone, so then no matter who the killer(s) turned out to be, we weren't surprised. Same goes from all the Scream-alike clones that followed in its wake, and every serial killer movie that has been made since. Perhaps we should be blaming the screenwriters of the Scream movies instead of the director, but it's too late to turn back now.

M. Night Shyamalan
His appearance here shouldn't come as a "surprise" (heh heh) to anyone, having built his entire career on the shaky sand that is twist endings. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable both had good twist endings, arguments could be made for how good or bad the twists in The Village and Signs were, but everything else has been twist free. In fact, Shyamalan hasn't had a twist ending to his movies since 2004, but audiences are still expecting one, so if it does come we won't be surprised, and when it doesn't we're left disappointed. This has also spilled out into other movies not even directed by Shyamalan such as The Number 23 and The Forgotten, where the audience goes in already poised to be surprised, thus robbing the surprise of any actual, y'know, surprise.

J.J. Abrams & Christopher Nolan
Abrams didn't direct Cloverfield, but it sure as hell had his fingerprints all over it, and that came all the way down to the promotional material. When the first trailers for Cloverfield came out, people had no idea what the movie was about, with guesses flying from a Godzilla reboot to a film spin-off of Lost. When the film eventually did come out, every last possible guess had already been guessed, with everyone thinking it was going to be one of a million possibilities simultaneously, and when one of their millions guesses proved to be right, there was a universal sigh of "Called it!" This same campaign wormed its way into Super 8 ("Aliens! Called it!"), who Benedict Cumberbatch was actually playing in Star Trek Into Darkness ("Khan! Called it!"), and, yes, the ending to Lost ("Purgatory! Called it!"). To a lesser extent, Nolan is guilty of similar smokescreens with who his characters really were in The Dark Knight Rises. Marion Cotillard playing Miranda Tate and Joseph Gordon Levitt playing Detective Blake? Two big name actors playing people we've never heard of in the Batman universe? Yeah, pull the other one, Nolan!

The Internet & You (yes, YOU!)
More than anyone, we the viewers are to blame for the lack of good surprises in modern cinema. If an actor or director says "Oh, that's top secret!", we can't leave well enough alone and allow the surprise to wash over us in the theatre. Oh no, we must find every rumour that there is available on the internet, scour over every on-set photograph for the tiniest possible piece of potential information so we can all come to our own conclusions ahead of time, which will inevitably lead to disappointment. The internet is also an endless catalogue of reference points from which we can ruin any and all future cinematic surprises; case in point, an on-set photo of an upcoming comic book adaptation showed that a character was wearing the exact same outfit they wore when they were killed off in the comic book. Now, the average cinema goer wouldn't know that information off hand, but when presented with it in a side-by-side comparison of comic book to on-set pic, they now know the fate of that character, and it robs them of the inherent emotional shock that WOULD have come with it naturally. But is that the internet's fault? No, no it's not. It's YOUR fault! Try getting some self-control, for Pete's sake!

How To Fix It:
There are two ways that film-makers can help solve this shock-draught. (1) Marketing: No more of this "Don't look over here, nothing to see here, but there really is something to see here, but we're not telling you what it is" marketing campaign. Telling us to expect a surprise is tantamount to actually telling us what the surprise is, which leads us to (2) Just pretend there isn't a surprise. According to the box office figures, we all went to see Iron Man 3 this summer, and not one of us expected the Ben Kingsley twist, and do you know why? Because we had no reason to. Everything was laid out on the table, exactly the way it was supposed to as if there was nothing to hide, and then the film-makers pulled back the table-cloth and POW! There was no table! This metaphor is getting a bit strained, but the point is that they didn't wink wink nudge nudge us into thinking something stellar was about to happen. They just let it happen, and it was genuinely surprising. Now there may have been a lot of backlash from Iron Man fanboys, but at least the makers of Iron Man 3 tried something different and pulled it off with finesse.

More of this please, Hollywood!