In the 2006 film “The Prestige,” Michael Caine plays an engineer who designs and builds magic tricks for stage magicians to perform. The film begins with Caine’s character explaining the three-part structure supposedly common to all great magic tricks:

  1. The Pledge. The magician shows you something familiar. A coin. A man.
  2. The Turn. The magician makes the familiar thing behave in an unfamiliar way. The coin vanishes. The man is sawed in half.

    But, he explains, the trick isn’t satisfying yet. Making a coin disappear isn’t enough. You need . . .

  3. The Prestige. The coin is restored. You put the man back together.

Let’s think about that structure as it applies to stories—in particular, horror stories. Often, a horror story features an evil thing, either clearly identified (a murderous wooden doll) or mysterious (muddy footprints appearing overnight in the hallway outside your bedroom), stalking and trying to kill an innocent. At the end of the story, the evil thing kills the innocent, or the innocent destroys the evil thing.

The story has to end in one of those two ways. What else can it do? So when it does happen, it’s awfully easy for the reader’s reaction to be: “SO WHAT? Is that all?” In many horror stories, yes, that’s all. And that’s supposed to be enough.

The cry of “So what?” from your reader may be a signal that she’s still waiting for the prestige.

  • The protagonist kills the monster . . . which is exactly what the monster needed, to become truly powerful.
  • She exorcises the terrifying ghost . . . who has been working so hard to protect her, without her knowledge.

Done well, that reversal, that ultimate defeat right at the moment when the protagonist “wins,” can be more deeply horrifying than any of the struggle that precedes it. See Richard Matheson’s classic short story “Prey” for a fine example.

Am I saying that every horror story needs a twist ending? Certainly not. For one thing, they would rapidly cease to be effective. For another, this is a solution to a specific problem. Not every story has a plot with only two possible outcomes, both easily foreseeable. But if your story falls into that category, and if you were thinking of ending it when the protagonist gets sawed in half, think just a little longer. Consider whether there’s any way to deliver a “prestige.”