Watch clips: Great Expectations: Pip meets Magwitch I The Empire Strikes Back: Darth reveals his secret I Rosemary's Baby: Mia Farrow's shocking discovery I The Wicker Man: Edward Woodward toasted by mad islanders I The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: inside a mental hospital I Fight Club: Ed Norton deals with his alter-ego I Planet of the Apes: Charlton Heston finds the Statue of Liberty

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The most powerful tool in cinema is the perfect twist, those vertiginous seconds when the bottom falls out of your seat and you are no longer sure whether to trust your eyes.

It is the scene where Bruce Willis discovers a bloodstain on the back of his raincoat in The Sixth Sense: he is dead and that is why Haley Joel Osment can see him.

It is the panic on Stephen Rea’s face when his shy new girlfriend, Dil, takes her kit off in The Crying Game: she is a he.

It’s the roar of despair from Charlton Heston when he stumbles across the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty on a sandy beach in Planet of the Apes: Heston realises that he has been on Earth all along and humanity has destroyed itself.

These great film twists are pure and delicious shocks. Aristotle called the process peripeteia: the sudden reversal from one state of affairs to its ghastly opposite via a “discovery” that turns blind ignorance into painful knowledge. As an example he cites the scene in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles in which the messenger unwittingly damns the hero with the happy (but fatally wrong) news that Oedipus probably didn’t kill his father and marry his mother.

The scene in Fight Club in which a schizophrenic Ed Norton discovers that he is possessed by a homicidal alter-ego played by Brad Pitt is just as mad and electric. The potty melodrama could so easily beggar belief. Instead, it sets the imagination on fire. Most of all, this single scene inspires you to replay, and reassess, the picture in your head. The grip we have on reality seems to slip the moment that Norton regains his. With one ingenious, crazy leap of faith, the director David Fincher plugs our imagination into every grim nuance of his story. Norton’s split personality is a sublime stunt, whatever your views on the story.

For every film armed with a reversal as traumatic and remarkable as Fight Club, there are hundreds that fail spectacularly.

The road to the holy grail is generously feathered with turkeys. The most prolific offender is M. Night Shyamalan, who has tortured his career to death trying to re-mint the elusive box-office success of The Sixth Sense.

Films that are dependent on flipping expectations within the space of a single scene are precarious gambles, which probably explains why there are so few big twisters in production.

But there are three intriguing prospects on the immediate horizon. Tom and Charlie Guard’s ghost story, The Uninvited (April 24), stars David Strathairn and Elizabeth Banks in a terrifying battle of wills between parents and children.

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