17 TV And Movie Plot Twists That Made Us All Say "WTF"

These are the kinds of plot twists that haunt you for years, and not in a good way.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the titles mentioned. Proceed with caution!

1. Dexter

Randy Tepper / © Showtime / Courtesy Everett Collection

In one of the worst plot twists of all time, after seasons and seasons of a strong sibling bond, Deb reveals that she's in love with her brother, Dexter. It completely ruined Deb's character arc and her connection with Dexter — and was frankly insulting to anyone with adoptive siblings.

2. Remember Me

Nicole Rivelli / Summit Entertainment / Courtesy Everett Collection

At first glance, this movie seemed like a simple contemporary romance that also dealt with trauma and grief. But it turns out that trauma and grief were actually the main event. At the end, just as everything seems to be going well, we see a teacher write the date on a chalkboard: September 11, 2001. Cut to main character Tyler standing in his dad's office building — which turns out to be the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It's shocking and pretty gross.

3. Pretty Little Liars

Freeform

Pretty Little Liars was full of plot twists, some better than others, but many of them incredibly bizarre. It's hard to choose just one that's more weird than the rest, but in terms of being off-putting for fans and not making much sense within the world of the show, the big, bad A.D. turning out to be Spencer's secret British twin probably takes the cake. Or her terrible British accent does, at the very least.

4. Gossip Girl

CW Network / CW Network / Courtesy Everett Collection

Everyone wanted to know who Gossip Girl was, and yet no one really guessed that it was Dan. Why? BECAUSE IT MADE NO SENSE. The fact that it turned out to be him went against everything that he had said and done throughout the show, turning him into a totally different character and one that was impossible to root for.

5. Safe Haven

Relativity Media

A woman fleeing her abusive husband moves to a new town, befriends a neighbor, and falls for a widower. In the end, it's revealed that the neighbor is actually the guy's dead wife, who has been watching over them falling in love. Not weird or creepy at all!

6. Wild Mountain Thyme

Bleecker Street

Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt spend almost the entire movie yearning for each other but not getting together, and the audience — and Emily's character — have no idea why. An hour and 20 minutes in, we finally get the big reveal: Jamie's character believes that he is a honey bee. The reason for this is NEVER explained.

7. A New York Christmas Wedding

MarVista Entertainment

A woman's guardian angel visits her at Christmas and offers to show her an alternate life where her best friend/crush and father aren't dead. She discovers that her best friend/crush had died after becoming pregnant as a teen and losing the baby. That's not the weird twist, though. That comes when the guardian angel reveals that HE IS THE DEAD BABY. And by giving the woman her happy ending — changing the timeline so that no one dies — he erases himself from existence entirely.

8. Orphan

Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

A couple adopts a little girl and people start dying. The twist isn't that the little girl is murderous (though she is) — it's that she's not actually a little girl at all. She's an adult with a growth disorder. What makes it all even more bizarre is that an actual child is playing this "adult" character.

9. Life on Mars

ABC

Life on Mars already had a weird premise — a cop from 2008 wakes up in 1973 — but it worked. Up until the end of the series, that is, when it's revealed that the entire show has been one long virtual reality dream, and the characters are actually unconscious on board a spaceship on the way to Mars. It deviates a lot from the ending of the original UK show — it seems that the American creators took the title a little too seriously.

10. Dallas

CBS

Another terrible "It was all a dream" twist! Truly the worst plot device, and this is perhaps the most infamous use of it. Season 9 of Dallas was about the death of Bobby and its aftermath, and in the end it's revealed that the whole thing — including Bobby's death — had been a dream.

11. Old Boy

Show East / Arrow Films

After being kidnapped and held captive for 15 years, a man escapes and strikes up a relationship with a woman much younger than he is. We later learn that this woman is, in fact, his daughter — and he's been deliberately manipulated into a relationship with her as part of a revenge plot. Surprise incest always makes for the most WTF plot twists.

12. Magnolia

New Line Cinema

At the end of three hours focused on the separate but intersecting lives of the ensemble cast of characters, Magnolia drops an actual storm of frogs into the otherwise ordinary world, in one of the most bizarre and unexpected moments in cinematic history.

13. One Tree Hill

Warner Bros.

One Tree Hill loved a good plot twist, but the most memorable is undoubtedly the moment when Dan is about to go into surgery to get a heart transplant, and the person carrying his new heart trips, causing the heart to go flying through the air before landing on the ground and BEING EATEN BY A DOG. It's perhaps the most bonkers sequence ever to grace our screens.

14. Game of Thrones

HBO

In one of the most controversial final seasons of all time, our hero becomes a villain. It wasn't entirely surprising that Daenerys would end up here — fans had theorized about it for a long time — but the swiftness with which the show made her turn from someone with good intentions into someone actively murdering thousands of innocent people was enough to give you whiplash. The idea of the twist might not have been strange, but the execution meant that it just didn't work.

15. Serenity

Aviron Pictures

What at first appears to be the tale of a man pulled into a murder plot by his ex-wife who is trying to escape her abusive husband is not at all what it seems. The plot twist reveals that the events of the movie are, in fact, part of a video game created by a boy as a fantasy scenario, in which his dead father is actually alive and kills his abusive stepdad.

16. Riverdale

The CW

Basically, everything that's happened on Riverdale since about halfway through Season 1 has been a bizarre plot twist — and they just keep getting weirder and weirder. It's truly impossible to name just one, although Jughead's fake death last season was a highlight (or perhaps lowlight). There was also the return of Jason Blossom in corpse form, alongside a creepy doll sibling. Honestly, what even is this show?

17. And finally, The Village

Buena Vista / Courtesy Everett Collection

A post about plot twists wouldn't be complete without mentioning M. Night Shyamalan. His twists can be hit-or-miss, and the one from The Village is both, depending on whom you ask. It's also pretty weird — it turns out that ye olde village we're watching is actually in the modern world, and the "elders" have invented literal monsters to keep the villagers from realizing the truth.