Spoiled Goods

A few months ago Pluto TV (and Amazon Prime) added the live Rifftrax show from Halloween 2016 featuring an early 60s movie called Carnival of Souls.  The plot is sort of a forerunner to The Sixth Sense:  a dull blonde woman is with her friends and they decide to drag race some guys for no reason.  Their car goes off a bridge and while her two friends die, the dull blonde survives.  Except years later she starts seeing these white-faced ghouls when she’s on her way to Utah to be a church organist.  And sometimes it seems like no one can see or hear her.  Hmmm…

[As an aside she becomes fascinated with this old carnival that was right in Michael Offutt’s backyard on the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Salt Lake City.  The one shown in the movie was destroyed but a third version is still there, though now it’s just a concert venue not a carnival.  It still has the onion-shaped domes like the original.  It was closed when I was in SLC but I got pictures from afar.  Sadly I did not see any pasty white ghouls—just a lot of Mormons.  Same thing.]

Rebuilt concert hall probably free of zombies.  Probably.

At one of these points where no one can see or hear her, she goes to this shrink’s office she visited earlier.  The shrink has his chair turned to face away from her as she’s talking to him.  Ooh, who could be in the chair?  It’d be a great surprise…if we couldn’t clearly see the top of the guy’s head with the white hair and white paint.  As one of the Riffers said, “Um, hey, Dead Guy, we can see you.”

And yet this goes on for like two minutes while we all know what’s going to happen.  Finally he turns and she screams and runs away.  A moment that should have been shocking instead elicits a sigh and, “About fucking time!”

Incidentally the guy in the chair was also the director so maybe he would have noticed the gaffe if he were behind the camera instead of in the chair, but really someone should have noticed.

Another hilarious non-surprise was in the cyborg cop-free Cyborg Cop 2.  After his partner is killed, the partner's wife gives the main character a lighter and suggests that maybe it'll come in handy.  At the end he has the evil cyborg down and covered in flammable liquids and then, guess what?  He uses the lighter to light it.  The Riffers hilariously deadpan, "Oh, look, the lighter.  They brought it back.  I did not think they would bring that back."  The foreshadowing was so obvious everyone could see it coming!

There’s something similar in an MST3K episode of the late 80s or early 90s movie Werewolf.  At the end it’s dark and the camera is panning up some stairs and stuff and it’s super careful not to show the main character’s girlfriend’s face.  To its credit far more careful than Carnival of Souls.  Still, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen.  Mike and the Bots are like, “Come on, come on, we know she’s a werewolf.”  Guess what?  She is.  Though as they say, she looks more like she’s from a high school version of Cats.

The point being that surprises that aren’t surprises end up annoying the audience not shocking or scaring it.  Movies and books love big plot twists, but if you make the plot twist too obvious then your audience just ends up saying, “About fucking time!”

It’s especially problematic for mysteries because if you tip off people to the killer too quickly, then your audience will be annoyed they have to wait however many pages to reveal what they already know.  Unless it’s like Columbo and you reveal the killer at the start so the audience can watch him figure it out.

I’m sure you can think of a movie or book where you figured out the plot twist long before it was revealed.  If you’re going to do a twist, you have to make sure it’s not too obvious.  That is where I suppose a good beta reader would be helpful, because he/she might let you know if he/she saw the twist coming.  Not that everyone will.  Some people are idiots.

Since I’m talking about plot twists and stuff on Pluto TV, there was an episode of The IT Crowd where one of the guys, Roy, is trying to watch a movie.  A rival calls him and reveals there’s a big plot twist and so Roy spends most of the episode trying to make sure no one tips him off, which includes punching a cop.  At one point he’s going to watch the movie with his boss and his boss starts rattling off all these possible twists:  they’re from the future, they’re from the past, he’s his own brother, he’s a clone, and so on.

As annoying as twists can be if they’re too easy to figure, just knowing there’s one coming can also be annoying.  So when you’re writing your description or writing a review, maybe try not to spoil for people that there is a big plot twist at all.

And now the big plot twist for this blog post…nothing.  Ha ha, made you…not do anything at all.  Suckers!