The Five Types of Twist Ending

Art by Ben Willsher, from our horror story Cold in John Carpenter’s Tales for a Halloween Night, Vol. 6 (2020)

This essay is an updated and extended version of a piece first published on my blog back in 2014. And, boy, was it popular!

A twist is a moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before it. A twist is essentially a specific type of action or ‘beat’. Aristotle called it the ‘peripeteia’ (variously translated as ‘reversal’ or ‘sudden change’), referring b...