Mind Screw - Television Tropes & Idioms

NEON. GENESIS. EVANGELION. Don't even start on how much controversy this provoked.
- While the actual series is majorly mind-screwy, it's End of Evangelion that truly takes trope and flings it out the window into unexplored Beyond The Impossible territory. For the two of you out there who haven't seen it, I'll just give you one quick example- It involves a giant robot being transformed into the tree of life by a set of nine other giant robots and a huge tuning fork, then getting plunged into the vagina-forehead of a giant alien who has taken on the form of the male lead's mother's clone. This is to save the world. Apparently.
  - And then, everyone turns into Tang, there's some conversation about human nature, the giant alien falls apart and spurts a giant stream of blood onto the moon, and lastly, "Kimochi warui". God fucking DAMN.
- Gainax actually has made fun of this in FLCL with Kamon, where they take pot-shots at fans for overanalyzing it.
Melody Of Oblivion, also by Gainax, is a good example of this.
Serial Experiments Lain.
FLCL. It may take you two or three viewings to understand just the plot, which is, in and of itself, just a Comingof Age story. Fridge Brilliance ftw!
- The manga is even worse about it. Good luck!
On those two notes, pretty much anything by Studio Gainax will have at least some traces of Mind Screw...even Petite Princess Yucie.
Angels Egg, an animated "tone poem" that was seminal for this sort of work in anime.
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is pretty much one of the most amusing Mind Screw type series ever.
Zetsubou's Spiritual Successor, Bakemonogatari, is equally good as an amusing Mind Screw, but it also has a plot.
The Big O, though it wasn't entirely intentional: the planned third season was apparently supposed to explain things in a more straightforward manner, it's just that they didn't get to.
Revolutionary Girl Utena. Utena's director Ikuhara has expressed particular, almost sadistic, delight in the despair fans have shown over figuring things out. Some of his more famous replies to fans have been "Miki keeps timing things because his watch contains the secret of the universe" and "The reason Utena turns into a car in the movie is because I really wanted to turn a cute girl into a car."
Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon.
Paranoia Agent: In the end, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies because that Desihner chick lied about how her dog died... when she was in sixth grade In between, a smiling lad on golden rollerskates who may or may not be real, magic or just a metaphor goes around bashing people's heads in, except when he doesn't. This was also directed by Satoshi Kon.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe turns guilt and repression into a real life serial killer. Since these are staples of Japanese culture, most of the country dies.
Dead Leaves takes this to Beyond The Impossible levels. It begins with a guy who looks like Canti from FLCL and a girl with a weird eye marking waking up naked in the middle of nowhere, and ends with a super-intelligent (?) baby coming out of the girl's panties with Guns Akimbo, putting enough dakka in the air to kill a bull elephant, and flying off into space to kill a giant worm. Retro, the Canti Expy, frequently comments along the lines of "This is so screwed up."
Boogiepop Phantom. Compared to this, the last two episodes of Evangelion are about as confusing as See Spot Run.
- It doesn't help that it's a sequel to a novel, which it completely fails to mention. If you've seen that, it becomes a lot easier to comprehend, though still heavily in the Mind Screw department.
The hentai/horror anime Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend), the Naughty Tentacles Trope Maker, does this to the point of incoherence.
- What, its fans care for the plot?
Texhnolyze is another big recent example, with a lot of symbolism that will require several viewings in order to fully understand everything.
- As a matter of fact, this is rather expected, since Texhnolyze has a lot of the original staff from Serial Experiments Lain.
The "Land of Books" episode of Kino's Journey.
The ending of Akira is considered by many to be an example of this.
Paprika by Satoshi Kon, notice a trend?
- Relatedly, the director Satoshi Kon has been much kinder than most and explained the movie as "following dream logic" and that we should just go with it.
Ergo Proxy: Lain with shotguns. Full of mind-screw situations - especially when Proxy One starts playing mind-games with Vincent Law, his host and when the identity of Real herself comes into doubt later on. The group also has other weird experiences, like an episode focusing on the characters taking part in a game-show, and an episode where Pino explores a disney-like theater complete with anthropomorphic animals. When compared to the rest of the tone of the series, it's no wonder most of the cast are near-crazed by the end.
Brain Powerd. Okay, so there's a monster that employs people to help it absorb all life energy on earth so it can fly into space, and it produces robots with cockpits in their crotches, except that there are other crotch-piloted robots fighting against them, and all the robots are built from giant killer Lego disks. The robots may or may not be metaphors for children, and somehow every episode is about incredibly screwed-up family issues, except the ones where they toss around the word "organic" way too much. Um... Yeah, no idea. And that's just the premise. The last several episodes are a downward spiral of nonstop epic WTF-just-happened-itude.
- If you think that's something, you should see what happens when Mamoru Nagano, BP's mecha designer, writes his own manga...
Ghost Hound. = Psychological conditions + I can't tell what's real and what's a dream + awesome, creepy ambient music + the supernatural + I can see your butt.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. So ambiguous and convoluted at times that official translators admit in the notes that they're basically making a guess and winging it. Unofficial translators do not say such in the notes only because that takes up space better filled by actively and profusely cursing at CLAMP.
- While not quite as bad, its sister series xxxHolic definitely has its moments.
- Making a timeline for this series is practically impossible. And don't even think about trying to create a character chart.
- Even the characters are baffled by some of what's going on.
  - Among the characters that have expressed a great deal of confusion is The Chessmaster Big Bad. Aka, the man who planned a decent chunk of the confusing events.
- This troper has a personal theory that the writers are doing it this way on purpose just to screw with the reader's/viewer's heads.
Geno Cyber, though it's hard to comprehend the plot when you're too busy vomiting every five seconds and crapping your pants in terror.
- The main reason why it's a mindscrew is because there's a totally unexplained Time Skip between the first and second arcs, compounded by the fact that the first arc has No Ending.
Suzumiya Haruhi. The Anachronic Order will mess you up, since you cannot relate half of the stuff being said. Furthermore, it gets hard to follow in the 4th novel Disappearance and it's continuance in another novel, where time travelling is combined with alternate universes. It may take you 2 times to read just to understand how they actually managed to solve it. The 9th (current) novel features two realities, for no apparent reason, in which different stuff happens. and ends with a Cliff Hanger, so we still don't know what's going on.
- To be fair, the more surreal of the two phone calls in the 9th novel is obviously made by someone who knows more than they really should, and as it's the first point of difference, it's likely the cause of the split. Who they are and what they want is, of course, unclear.
Earth Maiden Arjuna. On one hand, the general theme of letting the earth be and saving the environment from unnatural influences is pretty clear. On the other hand, the details of the plot are rather surreal, to say nothing of the presentation...
Chaos;Head is one right from the beginning. The viewer is forced to pay attention to everything that goes on, not knowing if it's simply a delusion or possibly real. Even when things get cleared up, there's still another layer of mystery beneath that.
Soul Taker is what happens when you take Devilman and mix it with Neon Genesis Evangelion. The seventh episode's screwy enough that it will make you realize how easy it is to understand Evangelion.
- Make that Devilman meets Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Akiyuki Shinbo, and as we all know most of the stuff he directs is pretty much mind screw, even Pani Poni Dash to an extent
Alien Nine. Even if you read the entire manga and watch the anime more than three times, all keeping the coming-of-age metaphors in mind, you are still most likely to be left scratching your head at something.
Tekkon Kinkreet starts out pretty straightforwardly. The ending, on the other hand...
Haibane Renmei is a much gentler version of this; while the plot itself isn't all that ridiculous, the backstory and setting is never explained.
Mononoke, particularly the "Noppera-bou" story.
You have a slice-of-life anime. The concept seems normal. Then they bring in a giant, floating cat that hates the color red and is voiced by Norio freakin' Wakamoto!
- To be fair, Chiyo-chichi only exists in one character's dreams/daydreams. The other characters are appropriately weirded out when she mentions it in real life.
One of the newest examples in the Anime folder, Clannad. The Gainax Ending Grand Finale takes the cake...and eats it! It's enough to give Evangelion a run for its money.
Ouran High School Host Club, of all things, has hints of this, though you'd have to look really, really closely to notice them. Things like showing a shot of a character looking out of an empty window, turning the camera away for a moment, then turning back to the window, only this time the pink-tinted clock tower seen throughout the series is visible through it. Hey, it's made by the same guys as Utena, what did you expect?
- In the first episode, clips of light bulbs turning on are shown as more of the characters realize Haruhi's secret. In the last episode, during an interaction between Éclair Tonnerre and Haruhi, a shot of an unlit light bulb is shown.
Yu-Gi-Oh GX Season 4. Those three seasons that made it look like your typical Gaming Anime were just deceiving you.
A mild version at the end of the Lucky Star OVA, to give a brief synopsis; everyone turns into frogs and Shiraishi flys around singing.
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni.
- The sequel, Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, is even worse.
- When They Cry in general is a huge Mind Screw because of Rika Furude and Frederica Bernkastel, though it's all but confirmed that the Bernkastel in Higurashi is also the witch Bernkastel in Umineko.
Baccano has one in the very first episode (even before the immortals and the plot getting REALLY confusing,): Carol has a flashback to a conversation between her and the Vice President on a train. The VP is sitting at the table reading a newspaper and embarking on an mild mind screw speech, talking about how the description of any event changes wildly given the perspective at which it is viewed. Carol gets snapped out of her flashback by the VP hitting a fly with a folded peice of newspaper: the exact same one he just finished folding in flashback.
Darker Than Black has a lot of weird Techno Babble concerning the Gate, and a lot of things are never really explained. The last episode of the first season gets special points, given that it includes a segment inspired by Evangelion's Gainax Ending (specifically the "Congratulations" scene). On the other hand, a second season is beginning in October which might explain some things.
Casshern Sins is kind of hard to understand in general, but you can tend to take all the symbolism in stride. Episode 18, however, just kicks your brains out. It seems a fairly standard episode of Lyuze, who is trying to kill the robot who killed her sister, but actually loves him too. She dreams of her sister telling her not to forget her. But in the middle of all that, we have random photographs of a woman. No, I mean... PHOTOGRAPHS. As in of a human, not an anime character. Given the themes of the episode, it may be her voice actor, but who knows?

Close Anime

Anything, anything Grant Morrison writes. Except for All-Star Superman.
The point in which The Maxx jumps from trippy to actual Mind Screw may vary from person to person. Some may say it's when the villain turns out to be a giant psychopatic self-help fueled banana slug; other may say it's just right before the revelation of why Julie's Outback was created(that part with the Hooly); or maybe when Sarah comes back from Disney Death as an Is...
Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape. In which Tom "Nemesis" Tressler finds himself in a mysterious city, along with all DC's other "spy" characters, and apparently it's the future setting of OMAC, complete with Lilas and GPA agents, or maybe it isn't, and characters die, but come back, and when he dies, the whole thing starts again.

Close Comic Books

The ending of Time Bandits as well as just about every other Terry Gilliam film ever made.
The 1960s version of Lord Of The Flies. It's not even in a funny way. It's kind of scary.
- Most of the film's quite normal but then they film the pig close up and then they film the sea for two minutes. It doesn't help that it's in black and white. You could also call this Nightmare Fuel.
2001: A Space Odyssey. The book, on the other hand, is considerably more comprehensible.
- A popular urban legend (later confirmed by Arthur C. Clarke himself) goes that, after the premiere, Rock Hudson stormed out of the theater yelling, "What the hell was that all about?"
- The movie was such a mind screw that the film adaptation of 2010: The Year We Made Contact was largely devoted to trying to explain what the hell had happened in the last movie. You may not have heard of this sequel. There's an excellent reason for that.
  - There's another reason why you might not have heard of it...
- The prologue and ending of the original book of 2001 are significantly longer than their movie equivalents for the same reason. There was a lot of 'splaining to do.
The 2004 film Casshern had no explanation for the ending or for the various Deus Ex Machina moments that appeared throughout the film. For example, giant metal bolts of lightning that: Started the plot, transported the hero right to the point he needed to be with no question from anyone, and conveniently provided the final chamber with a giant hole in the wall.
The beginning of The City Of Lost Children. Most, not all of it, make sense by the end.
Cube intentionally offers no real explanations to what the titular Cube is and why the characters were placed in it.
- The sequels, however, make things worse with their attempts to actually explain things somewhat, as none of the three films are made by the same people and can't seem to agree on essential points - Hypercube being the worst offender in this area.
The Matrix. The sequels have a mild case of it, anyway; in the first movie, Morpheus took the time to explain what was going on.
- The "Animatrix", a collection of short anime films based off the trilogy, easily qualify as Mind Screw material.
  - When they're not being Nightmare Fuel, anyway...
David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. Or, to an even greater degree, Eraserhead.
- Mr. Lynch is so well known for his Mind Screws, that he had to title his one non-maddening movie The Straight Story. And it's still kind of weird.
Waking Life
- Waking Life doesn't seem to be so much Mind Screw as just the sort of pseudointellectual rambling that you get when you put a bunch of art or philosophy students together, with or without some sort of psychoactive substance.
  - Except it isn't pseudointellectual, it's just intellectual.
Primer, thanks to Time Travel, Second Hand Storytelling, and a Usual Suspects Ending. There is an explanation for almost everything that happens, but you have to watch the movie at least twice to put all the clues together.
The Fountain.
- Seconded with gusto. There were three plotlines, and figuring out which was which and how the heck they related to one another was HELL. And even after that the movie sticks with you and makes you wonder what the heck was going on. Also, ethical and philosophical questions. Pain. But the good kind.
  - This troper, through an explosive moment of Fridge Brilliance realized that the movie is somewhat of a take on a "choose your own adventure" story - you, the viewer, are presented with three plots, and it is up to you entirely to figure out how they go together: whether all three are linear and true, whether only one is real and the other two are in the protagonist's mind, whether two are two and the third is a story, etc. It's quite a brilliant piece of writing, frankly, but Americans tend to hate it because we like simple cause-effect, what-you-see-is-what-you-get stories.
Donnie Darko, to the extent that members of the cast can't agree on whether there is a legitimate Time Travel story, or just a handful of psychedelic delusions.
- Director Richard Kelly's second film, Southland Tales, somehow manages to be even more violently insane than his first. It was supposed to be part of a massive multimedia experience (that never really panned out), but it would take a damn lot of graphic novels to explain what on God's green Earth was happening at any point during that movie.
  - Read all about it here.
Dead Man with Johnny Depp is a very otherworldly film, during wich few things happen and most of the dialogues are just plain weired. It's even pointed out in frustration by the protagonist at one point.
The Butterfly Effect is a sort-of mindscrew. Is he traveling through time? Moving across alternate universes and adapting to the memories of the version of himself in the new universe? Is he just totally nuts and then one day finally gets the help he needs? Is the end really just another delusion? These last two possibilities are subverted in the DVD release alternate ending in which he goes back to when he was in his mother's womb and commits suicide with his own umbilical chord before even being born.
After a certain point in the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the opening shot is redone, starting off a long medley featuring the three central characters merging into one and walking naked down an alleyway.
David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is a lot less disgusting than the book it's named after (it actually borrows from a large part of the works of William S. Burroughs), but only slightly less confusing.
- Pretty much all of Luis Bunuel's movies are like this.
- Speaking of Cronenberg films, eXistenZ is Philip K Dick-like in the mind screw department. It features a VR game within a VR game within a VR game within a VR game (... yah), the characters openly question whether they're still in the game at every level (and for bonus points, compare real-life to VR), switch sides multiple times, and reference things that happened at other levels.
The movie π (Pi) has a paranoid mathemathical genius, Hebrew numerology, conspiracies, neurological headaches, the secret name of God, and the protagonist taking A Drill to his head to escape all this crap. To top it off, it's in black and white. And is scored to techno music.
What the <BLEEP> do we know is a major, major offender of this one. If you can make some sense out of the cryptic, convoluted Technobabble about Quantum Mechanics, Religion, Life, the Universe and Everything, you'll see how this movie easily beats Serial Experiments Lain in terms of head-trippiness, even though even The Other Wiki agrees it's all just quantum mysticism mixed with the ideas of some new age school. According to Intuitor, it also completely messed up Quantum Physics, horrible research, biases and scientific inaccuracies destroyed any hope of correct science.
- Here's the key: there is a middle-aged woman doing her best attempt at a deep male voice partway through the film. The name given on screen is "Ramtha". Her cult funded the entire movie.
  - The woman is JZ Knight, who claims to be channeling a 40,000 year old Indian spirit. Who speaks suspiciously good English. And doesn't understand squat about quantum mechanics.
Jean-Luc Godard's film Weekend.
Guy Ritchie's Revolver. It involves a formula that supposedly allows the main character to win any game, a blood disease that disappears for no apparent reason, a crime lord apparently being the same person as the voices in everybody's heads... Yeah.
Zardoz, quite possibly the only film to begin with a giant stone head coming out of the sky, declaring the penis to be evil, and throwing a bunch of guns out of its mouth. The movie just gets weirder from there.
- Including a bunch of women attempting to give an erection to SeanConnery, who is wearing a bright red nappy.
- The commentary on the DVD has the director admit he was on drugs throughout filming.
Jim Henson (yes, THAT Jim Henson) made a overly symbolic (and Oscar-nominated) short film called Time Piece. Scenes include a caveman in an office, Jim Henson's head on a serving tray, and the only dialogue in the movie is Jim himself saying "help" about 3 or 4 times.
- He also made a humorous but bewildering teleplay called The Cube (no relation to the Canadian film and its sequels). It's about a man trapped in a cube shaped room. He has no idea where he is or how he got there. Other people can enter and leave freely, but he cannot. People change into other people, objects appear and disappear, bizarre philosophical interpretations of his situation are suggested and dismissed, and when he gets cut he bleeds strawberry jam. Is he dead? Insane? Part of some twisted psychological experiment? Or is he really just a character in a television program? In a way this film deconstructs this trope, as an overabundance of explanations are provided by other characters, though which (if any) is the truth is never revealed.
- OMG! I saw this on TV when I was a kid! Scared the crap outta me!! It was such a mind screw that I wandered about befuddled for days afterward. I had no idea that was Jim Henson. It was also major Nightmare Fuel for me, especially the strawberry jam blood!.
Videodrome
Give My Regards To Broad Street has some Mind Screwing - partly from symbolism, partly because of Dream Sequences started and ended with very little warning.
The Oscar-winning French/Canadian/Belgian animated movie Belleville Rendezvous.
The ending of The Ninth Gate caused everybody to make that sound Scooby-Doo makes when he's confused.
Repo Man for sure, but played for laughs.
Last Year in Marienbad, considered one of the most famous mind screws in French cinema. The film has no discernible plot other than apparently two people who may or may not have had a affair a year ago in Marienbad (German name of a Czech city) meet each other again at some sort of elite social gathering. Other than that, it plays out like some sort dream over loosely connected scenes. People still has no idea what exactly it was about, but the cinematography was beautiful.
Barton Fink. Granted, nothing the Coen Brothers have done is completely straightforward, but when John Goodman is on a shotgun rampage through a burning hotel screaming "look upon me," and no, it does not make sense in context, you start to wonder what you've gotten yourself into.
The collected works of Mr. Charlie Kaufman.
- Synecdoche, New York is an absolute Mind Screw from start to finish. From the ridiculous jumps in time to plays within plays within plays to a woman living in a perpetually burning house before dying after 30 years from "smoke inhalation".
Jacob's Ladder is a Mind Screw from start to finish.
Watch the Argentinian film Hombre Mirando al Sudeste (Man Looking Southeast) and try to decide which of the explanations is true. You'll be lying in bed thinking about it, seriously, as it's just that freakin' bizarre, and ends unanswered.
After it runs out of material and stops being a comedy, Art School Confidential wants desperately to be a Mind Screw, it tries so hard! But somewhere along the line someone missed the point of what a Mind Screw actually is and the movie doesn't even really bother to actually try to confuse you with anything, because it's so proud of how it's got a grown up plot about a guy who commits murders and makes paintings out of them, only he dies and someone else gets arrested for it, instead of some silly story about art students.
Memento lacks any overt symbolism, but the ending (which is the middle) will make you wonder what you just watched, especially since which story told by Teddy concerning the protagonist and the death of his wife is true, among other factual discrepancies, is never explained in the movie. Then again, that may been the point.
I Love Your Work isn't as extreme as others on this list, as a simple "I guess it was all in his head" makes sense of it as a whole, as the ending makes that seem like the most likely explaination. But some scenes are still pretty odd.
Brazil is a prime example of this. It's about a man living in a corrupt bureaucratic government who uses his dreams as an escape. It gets difficult to separate what's real and what's not, especially at the end when he's going insane as his best friend tortures him. In the original ending, at least.
The opening scene of The Cell has J-Lo riding across the Namibian desert in a wedding dress, dismounting and then looking back on her horse which has turned into a chess piece; and then approaching a boat that is half-buried in the sand and a boy who turns into a werewolf. Later on the film involves a schizophrenic serial killer who drowns his victims, augments their bodies so they look like dolls and then masturbates whilst hanging himself above them by chains attached to metal rings in his back; an albino german shepherd; a horse getting sliced up sushi-style; a collection of doll-like, corpse-like women inside display cases behind glass panels attached to crude machinery that jerks them about in grotesque, sadomasochistic sexual poses; a female bodybuilder; a demon-like man with purple curtains attached to his back; Vince Vaughn getting his intestines pulled out and spiralled around a rotisserie; vultures; peacocks and J-Lo dressed as the Virgin Mary. Justified on account of the fact that the majority of this takes place within people's minds.
Stay. It all makes sense at the end the entire film is the product of Ethan's dying mind absorbing his immediate surroundings, but through the course of the narrative, good luck trying to make sense of anything.
Unless you're a Beatles fan and have some basic knowledge of the 60's counterculture movement, Across the Universe can be anywhere from "slightly confusing" to "incomprehensible acid trip on film".
- Topped a few months later by I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' attempt to quantify the existence of Bob Dylan by presenting him as SEVEN SEPARATE CHARACTERS, including a woman, a small black child, and Billy the Kid. If you have an extensive knowledge of the man, the metaphorical touchstones are fairly easy to follow, but if you're even but a casual fan, entire chunks of the movies will leave you stonefaced or completely confused as to their relevance.
Anything directed by Alexandro Jodorowsky.
Most films directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, including Solyaris, Stalker, and The Sacrifice. but most notably The Mirror, to which Tarkovsky commented that even he himself didn't understand the full meaning behind some of the scenes.
In Total Recall, Quaid describes the real plot of the Big Bad as "the best mind fuck yet." And then Hauser shows up on video chummy with Cohaagen... The real mind fuck—for the audience that is—is the ending, which forces the audience to ask themselves if the entire movie did or didn't take place in Quaid's mind. On second viewings... it's still not clear. Fairly well done for what is otherwise a fairly standard action movie.
- Word Of God is no help on the matter. In fact the director has said both interpretations are consistent with the facts, and it was set up that way on purpose.
Westworld is an odd case in that it almost makes sense, and keeps setting itself up as if for The Reveal. By the end, we've still got a decadent amusement park where a bunch of Ridiculously Human Robots started killing people for no apparent reason. Add in gallons of What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic, and you've got yourself a headache.
The Blades of Glory ending.
The Believer's ending.
Japanese auteur Takashi Miike, when he's not being the master of extreme violence and gore, is a master of the Mind Screw. His most mind-bending film, however, has to be Gozu. Disappearing corpses, a river without a bridge, creepy transvestite waiters, unreliable guides with bizarre skin conditions, young women giving birth to full-grown men, middle-age women selling breast milk, an almost deserted former fishing town, Yakuza who live in a junkyard, an American reading her dialog from a queue card, and a huge minotaur wearing baggy underwear. And that doesn't even begin to describe how twisted this movie is. The strangest thing is that it all makes perfect sense when you realize it's all a symbolic representation of the protagonist's inner journey, told with symbolism from both Japanese and Greco-Roman mythology, and represents his coming to terms with his own homosexuality and love for his Yakuza "older brother", and his "rebirth" as a new person.
Marebito by Takashi Shimizu, the director of Ju-on; The Grudge. A man obsessed with fear finds his way into a warped underground labyrinth world, is menaced by "Dero" ("Detrimental Robots"); and rescues a feral girl who turns out to be a vampire, who he keeps chained up in his apartment, and feeds by killing other people and draining their blood. But is that really happening? Do any of them actually exist? Is the girl real, perhaps his own daughter who he abuses and treats like an animal, while he kills people to feed his own delusion? Or has his detachment from reality actually enabled him to stumble into a real alternate, quasi-supernatural world? The ending completely refuses to resolve any of these questions; leaving them up to the viewer to answer.
Old Boy
"Northfork".

Close Film

Alice In Wonderland
- Which isn't half as bad (especially once you hit the, "Oh, it's about puberty" point) as Through The Looking Glass.
- Alice In Wonderland is confusing? Once you realise its all a dream it becomes perfectly straight forward: the nonsense is normal for dreams, there isn't really any plot just lots of witty dialogue and then Alice wakes up.
The Wayside School series is an absurdist Mind Screw for kids.
The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (which actually contains something called "Operation Mindfuck"), and ended with the main character realizing that it's all a book and that nothing is real However, when he tells his friends about this, they either reject it as untrue, or dismiss it as unimportant. Also its sort-of-sequel, the Schroedingers Cat Trilogy.
- This is lampshade-hung at the end of the trilogy, at which point the main character breaks the fourth wall to criticize the authors for placing too much importance on symbolism, and not enough on writing a satisfying conclusion.
- Also its sort-of-prequel, Masks of the Illuminati, which is relatively conventional until the last chapter, at which point sanity is thrown out the window.
  - Technically sanity is brought in the story at the end, but it's done with the aid of lots of psychedelic drugs that the protagonist consumes with Albert Einstein and James Joyce, making the experience less than coherent.
Any dream sequence in A Song Of Ice And Fire. Besides these there is the House of the Undying.
Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves ranks with the most convoluted in any medium. You might not understand what happened in the book, but you might have trouble with poorly lit areas afterwards.
- It basically says that the house changes based on whos in it, so Your Mind Makes It Real. Also, the book isn't about a house, but a guy who made a movie about a house which is bigger on the inside. The book is a book about the movie about the house. Its also got hundreds of footnotes, sometimes going for pages, and they can be severely screwed up1 ~~some passages are also struck out, sometimes for whole pages~~, and there is a lot of blank space and sideways and backwards ~~or both~~.
  - 1 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
- His next book, Only Revolutions, makes less than 0 per cent sense.
While its symbolism is clear, the novel The Man Who Was Thursday has a definite Mind Screw ending, as the last two chapters change it from a suspense novel with some philosophical undertones to an allegory of the Sabbath.
Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren actually begins and ends with schizophrenic word salad.
Pretty much anything written by T.S. Eliot. Especially The Waste Land.
- Possibly an even worse example is Four Quartets. All together now:
  What we call the beginning is often the end
  And to make and end is to make a beginning.
  The end is where we start from.
- Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is quite straightforward. So why did Andrew Lloyd Webber decide to throw in a fragment from Four Quartets as "The Moment Of Happiness"?
- Once the magic words are explained, though, it all falls into place. In the case of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock the words were "impotent" and "whorehouse."
Steven Brust's novel Orca ends with two of these in a row. First, we discover that Kiera the Thief, who actually narrates a lot of the book, is really Sethra Lavode, vampire, sorceress, and all-around Bad Ass. Then, in the last sentence of the epilogue, Kiera lets slip that she's been hiding another secret all through the book: Vlad has a son. The all-around effect is that since everyone's been hiding things from each other and it's clearly established that the characters are telling stories after the fact, both Kiera and Vlad may be hiding things from us, too. Of course, Brust has something of a history of this; halfway through the first book in the series, Jhereg, we find out that Vlad is the reincarnation of the founder of house Jhereg.
The Brothers Karamazov is billed as a murder mystery and courtroom drama. Yet, characters make key revelations towards its conclusion (especially in Book Eleven, which features a conversation with a demon that might not be there) that qualify it as a Mind Screw. With everyone playing mindgames against each other for different reasons, peeling through the layers at the end and dissecting the motivations and the symbolism just blows one's mind.
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. There's a plot in there somewhere, amongst all the sex, drugs, violence, bizarre philosophy, and Dead Baby Comedy, but this editor is damned if he can get far enough into the book to find it.
- The afterword in this editor's book explained it as being about drug addiction (mostly morphine) and the way it messes up your mind and sense of reality. "Oh," I said, "that explains everything. ...Wait, no it doesn't."
The book of Revelation in The Bible, making this Older Than Feudalism. Revelation has so much symbolism that interpretations of it range from "it all already happened in the first century" to "some has already happened" to "it'll all happen sometime in the future". Interpretations on who the "Beast" is ranges from the Roman Emperor Nero to the Pope to Ronald Reagan to the Mass Media to a future Skynet-like artificial intelligence.
- Made worse by the author basically writing, "I don't have to make it clear, because you all know who I'm talking about, right? Right?"
Don't forget Thomas Pynchon's V, which has possibly one of the 10 densest plots in any medium.
- And don't even try to start Gravity's Rainbow...
The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. A series of vaguely connected short stories about decadent artists living in an alternate version of the The Roaring Twenties, linked by a mind-destroying play script whose plot we never learn, but we keep getting little excerpts. Filled with Unreliable Narrators, Ax Crazies, Cosmic Horror, and falconry. By the end of the book, it makes no sense, but is absolutely terrifying.
The very end of Pontoon by Garrison Keillor, starting just after Raoul dies and continuing for the last five or six pages.
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. The reader is left with the sense that the novel was symbolic of something, but unsure of what exactly. The plot is mindscrewy enough, let alone the twist ending. Plus, at one point people die from seeing a colour that has never been seen before. Yeah.
- Yeah, but isn't it about bicycles?
- It's quite arguably linked to the theories of an Irish author named John William Dunne about the nature of time, as O'Brien was a contemporary and big fan of Dunne. It certainly helps explain the soul named Joe, for example.
The whole of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is written by Charles Kinbote. Or was it? Maybe it was written by John Shade using Charles Kinbote as a narrative device to tell two mixed stories of a daughter's suicide and a king's romantic retreat from his country in turmoil. Maybe Charles Kinbote is real but also insane, and wrote the whole thing from mountainous seclusion, planning to end his life shortly thereafter. Or perhaps the whole book was written by one minor character who is mentioned twice in the entire novel. It's all there in the book; who wrote it all and for what is up for grabs though.
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Does Addie's monologue imply the existence of an afterlife? Is Darl a psychic, or just a psycho? And WTF was up with all the Bananas? There's even an entire chapter which consists of a character declaring his dead mother to be a fish.
- To add to the Faulkner list, The Sound And The Fury. Does Benji serve any purpose besides narrating the first part of the novel? What the heck is up with the last chapter? And don't get me started on Quentin.
Jorge Luis Borges drifts around between a bunch of genres, but spends a considerable amount of time in Mind Screw. One such story - entitled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - is about the narrator finding an article in an encyclopedia about Uqbar, a country that doesn't exist, which in turn has literature about Tlön, a world that doesn't exist - but by the end of the story, the real world has started to fade away, leaving only Tlön. I think.
- "El Otro, El Mismo" ("The Other, The Same"), in which he - as an older, middle-aged man - meets himself as a teenager on the bank of a river. Each sees the river as the location they are in at that point in their/his life (half a world apart) and they attempt to figure out if they are both real or if one of them is dreaming or hallucinating, and if so, which one. Eventually, Borges speculates (from the older man's POV) something about time being a circle and he had somehow crossed through the middle to intercept the boy while he was dreaming... Not only is the reader left wondering about the two, but also if Borges actually had this encounter in real life and decided to write about it.
Happens a lot in Gravitys Rainbow, especially what exactly happens to Slothrop, the chapter set in Hell, Slothrops' sodium pentathol dreams, and the ending where the final V2 rocket kills you, the reader
Pretty much anything by Carlton Mellick III, titles include Razorwire Pubic Hair and Satan Burger, which are pretty much what the titles would lead you to expect.
Trying to dissect Only Revolutions, eh? Well, break out the LSD and textual criticism cognoscenti, let's get this party on! (Note it's by Mark Z. Danielewski.)
God's Debris by Scott Adams consists entirely of a dialogue between a delivery man and a crazy guy he has a package for. Apparently, the book was laced with hypnotic suggestions and, in the foreword, asks you to identify the single fault in the crazy guy's logic. The sequel, the Religion Wars, on the other hand, provides more comfortable mind screws in the form of a Xanatos Roulette, Memetic Mutation, and What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic, as well as having an actual plot.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series is another example. Although it is convenient that you can start reading any of the books at any point in the story, put it down and walk away, and come back a year later. Nothing will make sense, but that's okay, because nothing makes sense in that series anyway.
The closing chapter of Robert Sheckley's Mindswap hits this trope full on. The hero ends up trapped in the "Twisted World" but believes himself to have successfully returned home.
Just about anything by Philip K. Dick, but especially apt is The Unteleported Man, in which the protagonist makes the journey through a strangely one-way teleporter to the planet Whale's Mouth. Soon afterward, he's hit by an LSD dart, and the world dissolves into Mind Screw for the rest of the novel.
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, is the ultimate embodiment of this trope. The plot is covered in about a tenth of the chapters in the book. The rest tell a series of unconnected vignettes, describe minor characters in excessive detail, give allegories for the main plot, and teach you geometry. One chapter was described by Joyce as "A chattering dialogue across a river by two washerwomen who, as night falls, become a tree and stone." Some chapters feature random doodles in the margins. The first sentence is the ending part of the last sentence, making the book circular. Finally, it's written in a combination of a phonetic Irish accent, random puns that you need a doctorate in ancient mythology to understand, and general stream of consciousness. In short, it makes no sense. Which is awesome.
- Also by the same author is the more coherent but still rather mind screwy Ulysses. As a good comparison on how mindscrewy Ulysses must be: everyone who watches Evangelion tends to form the opinion that Mr. Anno is depressed and has mother issues. With Ulysses, Carl Jung read it, and concluded that Joyce was schizophrenic.
  - Actually, Joyce's wife was schizophrenic; and much of the inspiration for his use of language and symbolism came from her.
  - No, it was his daughter who was schizophrenic.
Polish science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem was particularly fond of this, and uses it to varying degrees in many of his books and stories. He occasionally lampshaded his Mind Screw plots by having his characters react to them with increasing bewilderment and confusion. His bitingly-satirical "Ijon Tichy" character exists almost entirely within this trope. Throughout the various Ijon Tichy books, one is never sure whether Tichy is a brilliant but highly eccentric scientist and space explorer, a madman with elaborate and grandiose delusions, or simply a self-aggrandizing teller of tall tales with a particular moral or philosophical lesson; particularly since all of the stories are first-person narratives told from Tichy's own perspective. The best example is The Futurological Congress, which involves the use of drug-induced perception modification on an enormous scale; and Tichy, like the audience, is never really sure what is real and what is hallucination. The ending leaves the protagonist musing about the nature of reality and perception. One of the voyages in The Star Diaries ends with Tichy's descent into madness and incoherence; but whether this is merely a temporary condition caused by the extended isolation of the voyage, or a revelation of his true condition as a lunatic (and all his other voyages as delusions), is never explained.
The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a classic 19th century Mind Screw. It doesn't help that it's in high school text books.
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. Not only is every single of the three stories mind-screwing in itself, they get even weirder when you consider Paul Auster's statement that they were essentially one and the same story told three times from differend perspectives.
A very mild version of the trope, but one which seems to be trying for an effect outside the book, occurs in the final volume of Harry Potter, when Dumbledore and Harry have a discussion inside Harry's head/at King's Cross station.
Dumbledore: Indeed, this is all happening in your head, but why should that make it not real?
Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys. Until the end you never no if the protagonist is insane or if she really is a member of The Organization, an outfit that sounds like the MIB on serious medication. And don't get me started on the Scary Clowns.
The majority of Haruki Murakami's work uses this to some extent, but After Dark has it in place of the plot.
Armageddon II: The B-Movie, by Robert Rankin. Actually justified in the book itself by the flywheel of the Earth wigging out. (For the curious: we're talking a book in which Elvis is not only alive, but is hunting down the Antichrist with the help of a talking, time-travelling sprout, and that's the part that makes sense.)
- Just generally, everything Robert Rankin has ever written.
- The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code is another one, in which you begin to wonder whether the crazy person is the main character, everyone in the world except the main character, Robert Rankin, or yourself.
Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Recurring symbols include the colour red, trout fishing in America itself - as an activity, as a character, as an adjective - and mayonnaise. One of the chapters is entitled "Sandbox minus John Dillinger equals what?" Oddly, it all kind of makes sense when taken together.
Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience contains the story of Lyca, as told in "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found", a long and symbolism heavy story of how Lyca falls asleep in the wilderness, is discovered by a lion, and is taken to a cave. Her parents find her, seemingly in the afterlife. It makes a little more sense if you look at it as a metaphor for growing up or sexual awakening, but it's still a very strange and dreamlike narrative.

Close Literature

Aeon Flux. No, not that infernal movie, the TV show. Some episodes are worse than others, but the complete lack of continuity, bizarre dystopian setting, overtly philosophical conversations (or complete silence depending whcih season your watching), and unusual symbalism that is indistinguishable from the Rule Of Cool events. It's weird. It is, however, absolutely awesome.
- The fact that the creator Peter Chung seems to actually know what's going on, but deliberately stops himself when he starts explaining it is either very annoying or ver liberating depending on how you look at it.
The Prisoner ended with such a colossal mind screw that fans reputedly harassed series star Patrick McGoohan for months demanding his explanation of the series. How bad was it? Well, any really, really bad Mind Screw will get compared to Evangelion, right? Okay, so now realize The Prisoner is what Evangelion gets compared to!
- The remake's website seems to be gleefully continuing this tradition.
Twin Peaks could be considered a mind screw. Alternately, it was just weird.
Reality TV example: Criss Angel's Mindfreak. Much like the name of the trope itself, it is also watered down version of the term best used to describe his feats.
Every last damn thing about the Battlestar Galactica season 3 finale. "There's too much confusion", indeed.
Lost. They can fill the rest of this page with arguments back and forth about whether or not Lost is "really" that much of a Mind Screw, but, in all honesty, this trope is pretty much the show's whole reason for being. Either Lost is a Mind Screw, or else this either isn't a trope or Lost isn't a show. I'll leave it up to you to decide which. Like Lost does. Examples:
- In the early season 1 episode "Walkabout", part of the past of main character John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) is revealed through flashbacks. However, it is not revealed until the last flashback scene of the episode that Locke had been confined to a wheelchair for four years, which is helped by the fact that he regained the use of his legs following the crash of Oceanic Flight 815, which started the show's main narrative, thus having shown no hints of his previous condition until this episode.
- The opening scene of the season 2 premiere appears to be taking place in a sunny apartment, causing the viewer to wonder if this is a flashback, and for which character. However, just before the opening title sequence, it turns out that this scene is actually taking place inside the "hatch" on the island that has been blown open in the season 1 finale.
- The season 2 episode "Dave" suggests that all the events of the entire show might have actually taken place inside the mind of Hurley, a main character who had previously been an inmate in a mental ward. However, Word Of God says that this will definitely not be the ultimate resolution for the show, because it's considered a "bad idea" outside a "what if" one-off story. Still, in a case of Executive Meddling, ABC rejected the original draft for this episode, fearing that it was offering a solution for the show as a whole rather early in the game. It's unknown what changes, if any, have been made to the plot to address ABC's concerns.
- The opening scene of the season 3 premiere repeats the concept of the previous season premiere, this time supposedly taking place in a small suburbian neighborhood, only to be revealed at the end of the scene to be taking place in the secret home village of the mysterious "Others", with Oceanic Flight 815 breaking apart right above their heads.
- The opening scene for the season 3 episode "Not in Portland" inverts that, this time by showing a scene with Juliet (a member of the "Others") sitting on a beach, then entering a worn-out building and meeting Ethan, another member of the "Others", thereby implying that the scene was taking place on the island. Instead, it turns out the scene is actually taking place in Miami, before Juliet was recruited by the "Others".
- The first flashback for Locke in the season 3 episode "The Man from Tallahassee" again plays with viewers expectations, this time by implying that Locke is already confined to a wheelchair by this point. However, the scene eventually ends with him standing up and walking away, and it's not until the last flashback of the episode that he actually ends up in a wheelchair.
- The first flashback scene for the character of Nikki in the controversial season 3 episode "Exposé" is eventually revealed to be part "Exposé", a Show Within A Show Nikki was guest-starring on (starring Billy Dee Williams, played by himself in the Lost episode). The original idea for the episode was to have all Nikki flashbacks be part of the fictional show, and only reveal their true nature by the end of the episode. However, those plans for Nikki's story were cut short due to negative fan backlash towards her character.
- The season 3 finale features a number of flashback scenes with a really devastated, bearded Jack. Only at the end of the two-hour episode it turns out that all the "flashbacks" in this episode were actually flash-forwards, and the Jack shown in those scenes actually made it off the island, as did Kate, whom he meets at the end.
- The season 4 episode "Ji Yeon" apparently features flash-forwards for the Korean couple Jin and Sun, who seem to have made it off the island, with Sun delivering her baby by the end of the episode. Only then it turns out that all the "flash-forward" scenes for Jin, who was never shown together with his wife in this episode's flashes, were actually flashbacks, and Jin is considered dead in Sun's flash-forwards.
- The season 5 finale ends in such a way, that NOBODY can predict what will happen. It ends with Juliet successfully activating a nuclear explosion directly on top of a massive pocket of electromagnetic energy. We don't even see the explosion...just a fade to white. Whether or not this destroys the island or the energy is anybody's guess.
- On top of that, a moment in the season 5 finale fits exactly with the original meaning of Mindfuck - We discover that the Locke we've been following since he got back to the island is actually a mysterious entity which opposes Jacob. This completely changes not only the viewers perception of Locke over the season, but the viewers perception of the ghosts all through the show.
Life On Mars, especially the final episode.
- Life on Mars is actually pretty straightforward (weird as all get-out, but straightforward), and Word Of God says it was all in his head/he died. Individual interpretations may vary.
  - The sequel series Ashes To Ashes takes the Mind Screw one stage further at the end of S2 when Alex wakes up from her coma she starts seeing images of 1982 communicating with her saying she is in a coma there.
- Or on the other side of the pond, he's an astronaut from the year 2035 and the 125 precinct is really a manned voyage to Mars... nice Title Drop BTW
Reichenbach Falls. A BBC Four one-off drama based on an idea by Ian Rankin. DCI Jim Buchan is an Edinburgh policeman whose personality and cases are similar to those of Rankin's Inspector Rebus (the Rebus novels sometimes tend towards mildly Mind Screwy in any case). He resents his former friend Jack Harvey (a pen-name used by Rankin) who is a famous crime novelist, and occasionally argues with the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (hence the title). He gradually becomes aware that he's a fictional character created by Harvey, and the author is planning to Drop A Bridge On Him (again, hence the title). He therefore decides, at the launch of Harvey's new book, that he's going to kill the author first. After that it gets weird...
Buffy The Vampire Slayer does this in the final episode of the fourth season. The second-last episode is the climactic battle against that season's Big Bad; the actual final one is some kind of shared dream/hallucination involving a guy with cheese on his head. (Joss Whedon said that when he set out to write it he realized after a bit he was attempting a forty-minute tone poem.)
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer also has an episode in season 6 in which Buffy is poisoned by a hallucinogen-producing demon and is torn between two realities: being a Slayer and being an insane girl in an asylum, with parents who love her and are trying to make her sane again with the help of a psychiatrist. But then, when the episode ends, it does so with an image of Buffy in her normal-crazy-girl reality, not as Slayer Girl, leaving you with the impression that the entire show, including the later seasons, are all a product of an insane girl's overactive imagination. Joss Whedon said he considers the series to be actually happening, but put that in just for fun, and if people want they can consider the whole series to be the delusions of Buffy.
- Which would also make the entire Angel series part of that hallucination, too. At least it's not as bad as that Tommy Westphall crap...
- There's also the scenes in Buffy's mind in Weight of The World, featuring lots of symbolism, doppelgangers, repetition, and Buffy's Issues.
The Angel episode "Awakening" ends with a Mind Screw. The entire Indiana Jones-inspired segment where Angel saves the day and ends up with Cordelia is all a fantasy in his head as his soul is removed.
- Even bigger is the reveal that the entire series has been one big Xanatos Roulette to bring forth Jasmine.
The Star Trek Deep Space Nine episodes "Far Beyond the Stars" and "Shadows and Symbols" heavily imply that the events of the entire series may have simply been the imaginings of a mentally unstable African-American pulp-fiction writer in the 1950s. "Shadows and Symbols" does, however, state that it was a "false vision" the Pah Wraiths attempted to use to trick Sisko.
- It has been said in the series companion book that there was discussion for the final scene of the final episode to be Benny Russell holding the series script standing in a studio lot (presumably at Paramount), which would have been the Mind Screw to end all Mind Screws.
  - It would also have been an Audience Screw, invalidating not just the show they were watching but other shows with it (both TNG and VOY had used elements from DS 9, after all). Good thing they thought better of it.
Elsewhere in the Trek franchise, Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise had their share of these episodes — and most can be traced back to one inveterate Mind Screwer. Brannon Braga absolutely loves stories like this. The results are mixed: Braga's Mind Screws include some of the best and worst episodes of these shows.
- Another DS 9 ep that does this is Rapture. Because they never really explain whether the visions were actually an important message from the Prophets, and Sisko would have been fine without the surgery, or if they really were hallucinations from the accident and the surgery was necessary.
Though Firefly is notable for being extremely straightforward in most respects, the scenes in the episode "Objects in Space" involving River's hallucinations can be considered a mild Mind Screw. It gets worse in the Big Damn Movie, where River's hallucinations become much more pronounced and vivid.
Even Supernatural got in on the act with Dean's fantasy world in What Is And What Should Never Be. Would that sweet little four year old in the pilot have turned out to be a jerkass if it wasn't for emotional abuse, neglect, a tight leash and a massive martyr complex or does he just think that little of himself? Does he think that Sam's a wuss, Mary's perfect and his soulmate is pretty much death or were they all part of him? But whatever way you look at it, it's still a profoundly disturbing tearjerker that sets up the It Got Worse events of the finale nicely.
- They did it again with Mystery Spot. Was it all just a dream? Did Dean actually die and go to hell? The people that were killed (by Sam and the Trickster), do they remain dead? And the fact that Dean's "We can't be martyrs anymore" speech (which has so many things wrong with it that I don't know where to begin) in No Rest For The Wicked is almost an exact copy of the Trickster's speech just carries the Mind Screw further.
Classic Doctor Who managed its Mind Screw with the middle four episodes of Trial of a Time Lord (it being called Mindwarp should have been a clue). The final two episodes of the arc attempted to clear up the Mind Screw elements. Due to a number of reasons, especially Executive Meddling and Author Existence Failure, it failed miserably.
- The final season of Classic Who is notorious for this sort of thing, mostly due to editing-room decisions made to shoehorn the stories into the X-episode serial format. 'Ghost Light' is especially full of it - even the DVD-issued Special Edition is best tackled with a notebook and pen.
- And then there's "Midnight". The audience never learns who, what or how the monster was, why it took over Skye and wanted to kill the Doctor, if there even was a monster or just a bunch of terribly conjunctive mishaps... the only thing we can be sure of is Humans Are Bastards. And it's one of the best episodes of the show.
- From the Expanded Universe: The Blue Angel. Parallel universes. Space warthog Valkyries. The Doctor giving birth to a winged baby from his leg. Claims that the Doctor's mother was a mermaid. Giant space owls. A Star Trek parody starship called the Nepotist. One character is an elephant (a green one, no less!), another gets turned into a giant squid for no adequately explained reason. Parallel universe Dalek-analogues who are humanoids made out of glass. Twenty questions that manage to be clever, patronising, and headache-inducing all at once...yeah, it seems to be a product of an acid trip during a Classic Who marathon.
- Also, the Troughton Story "The Mind Robber", Episode one was written in a hurry with no budget (hence the 'void' set and the robot costume re-used from a version of 'Rossums universal robots', the wierd dream-like setting coupled with the fictional them of the rest of the story and the masters vanishing gave the impression that episodes 2-5 were all a dream.
Sarah's dream sequences in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
St Elsewhere: The Tommy Westphall Universe hypothesis. It is best just to ignore it.
- You can't ignore it, they have charts!
Quite a few Monty Pythons Flying Circus sketches, and all the Deranged Animations. Not due to an over-reliance on symbolism, but rather ignoring everything except the Rule Of Funny.
There's a great Japanese show called Uchu Keiji Shaider. You can bet it will contain something like mind-controlling dolls,or people doing a demonic dance or some really odd-looking chroma key!
Carnivale: Considering it was heavily influenced by Twin Peaks, this is unsurprising.
Heroes relies on this to an extent. Much of the symbolism (the "symbol", cockroaches, etc.), the religious subtext, and the obvious puberty / Have You Tried Not Being A Monster themes that generally pop up in this genre. And that's not even getting into the Season 3 finale...
During the taping of one of his comedy specials, comedian Howie Mandel once executed a Mind Screw on a person from one of the front rows who got up to go to the restroom. As soon as the poor unfortunate was out of earshot, Mandel had the audience in the vicinity of his seat rearrange themselves, and then continued with his act. When the audience member returned and stood, confused, in the aisle trying to find his seat again, Mandel stopped his act to "help" him for several minutes while the audience went wild, before revealing the gag and letting everyone go back to their original seats.
Fringe. The name says it all.
"Failed pilot" Virtuality, which I can only describe as 2001 meets Serial Experiments Lain meets Big Brother IN SPACE (with some Ghost In The Shell and Ex Is Tenz for flavor) from the producers of Battle Star Galactica. The Mind Screwiness is made worse by the fact that it's an unfinished pilot. Breaking it down:
- 2001: The crew is trapped on a very long journey with a possibly unreliable AI. Hypersleep is averted because the ship is propelled through space by carefully exploding small nukes, which everyone needs to be awake for.
- Brother: In order to help with funding (I think, I missed the first 30 mins), the ship has become a Big Brother-style house, complete with Confession Cam booth.
- Lain: When the captain is killed by an inexplicably malfunctioning airlock, a crew member mysteriously finds his VR goggles in her quarters. She goes into his last simulation, and discovers that the captain's consciousness may have survived.
- Ghost: One of the crew members is raped while inside her own simulation, and it appears that another crew member knows the assailant, a program(?) posing as a gynecologist. However, why would they need a simulation of a gynecologist?
- Existenz: The captain flexes his hand as though he's still in a simulation when the VR developer/psychologist asks him if he's certain of reality, and, again, why would they need a simulation of a gynecologist?
  - To answer the question about the simulation of a gynecologist, Alice is using her VR module to imagine the pregnancy she's not allowed to have being aboard the ship. Maybe. We conspicuously never see her break character or take off the module. And there are a lot of unncessarily details: magazines, waiting room, that make her seem less in control of the program. In essense, it's a question that may never be answered.
We Are Klang is generally surreal, but balanced with 'realistic' comedy. Alien, the last episode of series one, however, is essentially a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid and ends on a borderline Gainax Ending.

Close Live Action TV

Many Primus songs features a number of psychedelic and amusingly disturbing aspects.
Don McLean's song "American Pie" is a Mind-Screwy combination of imagery and references to other songs and historical events.
- Some of McLean's lyrics allegedly reference Bob Dylan (The Jester). Who, incidentally, is famous for his own well-known, mind-screwy song: "Desolation Row". ...to name one of MANY in Dylan's catalog.
  - "Desolation Row" is child's play compared to "Changing of The Guards", "Brownsville Girl" and "Highlands", all written and recorded long after Dylan's most reputedly mind-screwy era.
- There have been many analyses of this classic song. One of the best is one of the earliest, by Bob Dearborn. One of my favorites is the very Mind-Screw-friendly site IMISSAMERICANPIE.COM.
Many people have put forth their theories on The Eagles' Hotel California, particularly regarding "the beast" that the residents just can't kill. Others just figure it's about a guy who does a bunch of drugs in a cheap hotel.
Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Especially the part right after the guitar solo.
- '39 from the same album is also like this (they set off in '39, travelled for a year, and returned in '39 — WTF?!?!), unless one realises that this is a filk song, which like many folk songs is an allegory about a voyage (this one being a space voyage, so one year of ship time is 100 years of Earth time). Watching the video on the DVD version of the album makes it suddenly make sense.
Nightwish. What a grand old time it is to figure out what half of the lyrics are saying, especially since half of them are of word salad quality. Stargazers, The Poet and the Pendulum, and Ghost Love Score are all huge mind screws, especially the second one with all of its mood whiplash.
- Most of their other songs have quite straightforward lyrics, though.
Most of the output of They Might Be Giants falls into this territory. Especially Particle Man and Doctor Worm.
- The Statue Got Me High is probably the best example, or at least the most literal.
- House at the Top of the Tree is notable too, particularly since it's on one of the kids' albums (No!). The ending is the epitome of "wait, WHAT?".
Most of the Anglo-French band Gong's work hit this trope while Daevid Allen was in charge. Prostitute Poem from the album Angel's Egg seems to be a deliberate attempt to induce a bad trip in any listening acid heads. "I am breaking off a piece of your mind... I am eating it..." Brrrrr.
"Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" by the Pet Shop Boys. The song itself is relatively straight-forward, but the music video's a bit of a Mind Screw, with a strong dash of Nightmare Fuel.
- For Mind Screw in their songs, look no further than "The sound of the atom splitting".
- Minus the Nightmare Fuel, the same goes with the music video for Total Eclipse of the Heart. "Turn around bright eyes...".
The Ayreon rock opera "The Human Equation" appears to simply be a look into the mind of a comatose man dealing with a lifetime's worth of angst and misdeeds... until the very end of the final track, where It's revealed that it is simply a computer simulation being run for the benefit of an advanced alien life form.
- This will completely fly over the head of anyone who hasn't been keeping up with Ayreon's ongoing Forever of the Stars story line, though. Guide Dang It actually applies to music for once!
  - More like All There In The Manual; there are no less than six albums linking their stories together into the same overarching space opera metaplot as of 2009, and more may be coming.
  - And this makes, you know, money?
  - Enough to keep Mr, Lucassen afloat, at least. It's damn good music.
The Dropkick Murphys (!) song "State of Massachusetts" seems like a straightforward song about a single mother, until you pick up on the clues (the title being the most obvious) that the whole thing is to be taken as an allegory, at which point it becomes an incomprehensible meditation on the SJC, the academic élite, the "culture wars," television's influence on society, and Boston's place in history.
David Bowie's 1995 concept album "1. Outside" is a story told in anachronic order of a 25-year-long investigation into illegal trade in body parts harvested in ritual murders centered in Oxford (NJ) and London (OT), which also seems to be a metaphor for Bowie's own career, including an apparent disco/industrial elegy to Major Tom. The fact that it was planned as part of a scrapped 5-part cycle does not help.
- Let's not forget Life on Mars, which has been described as "a cross between a Broadway musical and a Salvador Dali painting." A girl leaves her house as her parents fight, goes to the movies, and then there's something about fighting sailors, corrupt cops, and Mickey Mouse.
- Heck, a lot of David Bowie is like this, and that's not even counting Labyrinth. 1984 is pretty screwed up, too. It's either about, y'know, 1984, another futuristic dystopia entirely in which the main character may or may not be a prostitute, or a whole bunch of other stuff entirely.
The music video for Genesis's Land of Confusion, which involves puppet-version of the band, as well as the Reagans, a swamp with heads instead of plants, and the keyboardist using his own tongue as a hot dog bun.
- The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, anyone?
Mr. Bungle. Look them up.
- I don't think Bungle's nearly as much of a Mind Screw as Fantomas is. Of course, if you ask Mike Patton, Fantomas is perfectly straightforward...
- A lot of things involving Mike Patton are like this, usually combined with various levels of Nightmare Fuel
"Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine..."
- Also, "I am the Walrus." Reportedly, John Lennon commented, "Let's see the fuckers figure that one out," after recording it.
- And "Yellow Submarine." It's not actually about them on a freaking sub, people. Neither is the movie, for that matter.
  - Who says it isn't? Paul himself said he wrote the song just because he wanted to give Ringo a simple, child-like song that would sound good coming from him.
Anything by Frank Zappa that's supposed to tell some sort of story will eventually turn into this to some degree, but a pretty extreme example is the album Lumpy Gravy. In between music concrete collages of an unfinished ballet and other leftovers, a group of people, who are apparently hiding inside of a giant drum, discuss encounters with boogey-men, pigs, and vicious ponies with claws, and speculate that the entire universe is one musical note.
- Joe's Garage is a full double-album Mind Screw. The first half sounds like a pretty straightforward story of a guy guy playing music in a totalitarian society where music is illegal (ok so far) who discovers he likes to have sex with appliances (ok, so maybe not so straightforward) but by the end of the second disc, it, uh ... well he ends up working in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, pooting little green rosettas onto muffins. All narrated by The Central Scrutinizer — a cheap looking flying saucer kinda thing about five feet across covered with stupid looking headers and exhaust hoses and some spoked wheels but who actually gets around by being dangled from a string held by a union guy eating a sandwich.
Many of the songs by Lemon Demon have a very mind screwy lyrics, such as "The Saga of You, Confused Destroyer of Planets" or "Your Evil Shadow Has a Cup of Tea".
- Your Evil Shadow is a deliberate attempt at this. "Ben Bernanke" is another mind screwy song.
- "Telekinesis" is another good example.
- "Correctional Facility Food Sucks" possibly wins the award for "Mid Screwiest" song, though.
Pick a Tool music video. Any Tool music video. Also frequently overlaps into serious Nightmare Fuel territory.
- Even their stage on Guitar Hero: World Tour is a Mind Screw!
- Seeing as it uses the artwork from their music videos and studio albums, that's kind of a given.
The band Yes dodged this trope all the time, and did so by explaining that they mostly composed their lyrics based on how the words sound rather than what they mean. However, Siberian Khatru (on the album Close to the Edge) is supposed to be about life on the Siberian steppes, but at the same time is about a balmy summer day by a riverbank in England. Figure that one out!
- Jon Anderson, frontman of Yes's collaboration with Vangelis produced The Friends Of Mr. Cairo. 12 minutes of nothing but Minds Screw
Devin Townsend, a Canadian musician, has distilled this into the purest form possible with his album "Ziltoid the Omniscient". Beginning as a somewhat lighthearted tale of the titular Ziltoid invading Earth demanding coffee, it ends with him questioning the state of the universe, the creator revealing that they're all 'just puppets' and it finally turning out that it's all a daydream in the mind of a coffee shop employee. Not even mentioning that it tends to shift from speedy metal to weirdly dissonant ambient music seemingly at random, and EVERY SINGLE VOICE on the album is the same man singing, up to and including whole choral arrangements of just his voice. Oh, and he made the puppets he mentions in the story. In fact, THAT'S THE INSPIRATION FOR THE WHOLE THING.
The video for Goldfrapp's 'Ride a White Horse'. Anyone who has seen it will agree. Totally off, and very strange.
Queensrÿche's Rock Opera Operation Mindcrime. The main storyline is a flashback suffered by a man in an insane asylum, and it's possible that none of it actually happened. And that's just the surface twist.
Arguably, many forms of classical music fall into this category for the non-academic listener (and even the academic, for many of the modern compositions). Embedded within the music of the Romantic era through the twentieth century are such dense layers of symbolism and mathematical placement of notes that we often find pieces that look good on paper, but are not necessarily enjoyed by everyone. Even studying these compositions or attempting to play them can be a nightmare.
- Twelve-Tone, atonal, and minimalists compositions often elicit mixed reactions from the audience, and generally a negative response from anyone outside the classical circle. It is very difficult for the average person to find coherency in just one listen and not looking at the score.
- Complex forms of counterpoint such as the Fugue can also be mind screws because there is so much going on at once that it can sometimes be hard to latch onto the theme or subject, etc., without looking at the score first (It also depends on how well it is performed).
The Procol Harum song Whiter Shade of Pale is a classic example. Much like Hotel California most people have their own idea about what it means. Word Of God says the band members came up with the song while sitting around drunk.
When it comes to trippy concept albums, you'll have a hard time topping Pain of Salvation's "BE". Themes cover practically everything from mankind's relationship to God and vice versa through to the state of industry and consumerism; the myriad plotlines include both a Space Probe which becomes God and a greedy misogynistic billionaire who has himself cryogenically frozen and wakes up after having become immortal, the last man left alive on the planet. Songwriter and lyricist Daniel Gildenlow cites dozens upon dozens of sources in the accompanying booklet. Musical devices include the recitation of population statistics, two-minute long dramatic monologues, God's answering machine and a track which consists of the sound of a heartbeat, followed by four minutes of silence and then a young girl chirping, "There's room for all God's creatures, right next to the mashed potatoes!"
Several songs by the group Renaissance have imagery that tells some kind of story but the listener is stumped as hell trying to figure out what it's really talking about. Take my descriptions with a grain of salt - as I said, I've no idea what these are on about either. Favorites include:
- "Trip to the Fair" where a lady goes alone to a fair that is completely abandoned, then everything starts moving on its own (and either starts attacking her or she half-faints in terror) and as soon as she can't take it anymore everything becomes normal and the fair is full of people wondering what she's afraid of.
  - From the CD notes of Scheherazade and other stories: "...a delicate story of Roy Wood and Annie Haslam showing up at Hampstead Heath for a fair that had closed down..."
- "Black Flame", where the only thing that's certain is that the singer has been somehow taken over by a 'black flame' that now has full control of her, feeds off her, and apparently hurts. There's a lot of weird imagery of being mouth sounds "I am words, I am speaking", "I'm just a sigh, just a crying" and in the bridge the singer is talking to someone as though she is inside them, while still telling them to try and escape.
- "Running Hard", where someone just seems to be slipping through a world of weirdo nightmare images and metaphors, and the more they try to escape or find reality, the freakier it gets.
Dream Theater's Scenes From A Memory: Metropolis Part 2 Album definitely has some mind screwing going on. It tells the story of Nicholas, who has visions of a girl. He visits a hypnoterapists and under his guidance realises that he is just a reincarnation of Victoria, a girl that was murdered by The Miracle, one of her two lovers, the other one being The Sleeper (and The Miracle and The Sleeper are brothers, too!). However, in the last song on the CD Nicholas is shot by the hypnotherapist, who, in turn, is actually a reincarnation of The Miracle.
- On the topic of DT, there's also the video for "Forsaken." See for yourself.
A number of The Birthday Massacre videos fit this trope. For example, "Blue" and "Looking Glass."
I don't know if this would count, but perhaps Rammstein's music video for Mutter. Features Till Lindemann, with hair and fully dressed, going on a seemingly very long journey, on a rowboat through a swamp, in order to bring a bowl of drinking water to another Till Lindemann, bald and naked, living in concrete hole in the ground. The song is anti-cloning/genetic engineering, so it's possible that the bald/naked Till could be a clone, being kept in a hole and perhaps only to be used to harvest its organs in case clothed/hairy Till needs them. Or the mind screw interpretation could be that the bald/naked Till is the REAL Till, and the clothed one is the clone who has taken his place as Doppelganger, but still retains some guilt, and keeps his true self safe and alive.
Just try to figure out the plot of any CoheedAndCambria song without the comics. Especially anything from Second Stage Turbine Blade or Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Part one. Go on, I'll wait.
- Some of their songs are fairly comprehensible on their own, but others are just bizarre. Like Ten Speed (Of God's Blood and Burial), which is about a possessed, talking bicycle. For example.
The music video for the Madness song (Waiting for the) Ghost Train is a fairly mild example. It features the band dressed in suits that look like newspapers, a random London Underground sign for a station that doesn't exist, a man dressed as a frog appearing out of nowhere and disappearing just as suddenly, lead singer Suggs wearing a succession of funny hats for no good reason, the saxophonist dressed as a Japanese man with angel wings being thrown out of a plane and the drummer's head appearing from a pot of baked beans, among other truly weird things. In spite of this bizareness, the song's meant to be about apartheid in South Africa. So Yeah...
The music video for Disturbia by Rihanna. It looks like if nightmare fuel manifested itself in music video form, and didn't care about whether it made any sense or not.
Syncronicity II by The Police. It's predecesor was a straightforward, bouncy song about harmony of mind and understanding. While it is a song about a middle-class man in a rather disastrous home situation, a mundane job, and a generally depressing, repetitive, and horrible life. With a giant sea monster looming somewhere in the distance. Yeah, there was some headscratching.
Pink Floyd's The Wall falls here. The movie even more so.
Carrie Underwood's song So Small is pretty straightforward, but the video... well, see for yourself.
Pick a song by Captain Beefheart. Any song by Captain Beefheart. Founder Don Van Vliet is also very fond of True Art Is Incomprehensible; both in his music and his painting.
Oingo Boingo (a.k.a. Danny Elfman's old band) has had it's fair share of these (which is kind of unsurprising when you consider their headliner). Most notable include Reptiles and Samuri from the album Nothing to Fear and Long Breakdown from Dark at the End of the Tunnel. This troper is still trying to figure out a) Why a reptile AND a samuri would have one's head and 2) Why would someone wander in geometric patterns in the dark?
The music video for Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice. Christopher Walken dancing around a Los Angeles hotel is strange enough in its own right. But Christopher Walken flying around a Los Angeles hotel? Woah...
Porcupine Tree. It's not just the songs (and entire albums) depicting LSD trips, there are songs which just reach into one's head and scramble things about as one tries to make sense of them.

Close Music

Pretty much any play written by Samuel Beckett, with Waiting for Godot probably being the most well-known example.
- For that matter, anything written by other Absurdist playwrights - Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet.
- Waiting for Godot is rather ironically, Beckett's most sensible piece of work. One of his other plays consists of half a minute of of breathing noises that start and end with birth cries coming from a pile of garbage.
August Strindberg's Ghost Sonata is this combined with Nightmare Fuel. "She sucks all the gravy out of the food and replaces it with water."
The interrogation sequence from Anyone Can Whistle, an extended musical scene ironically titled "Simple."
Philip Glass's opera Einstein On The Beach is all symbolism and no plot.
Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. The Peanut Gallery becoming characters, the characters becoming peanut gallery, and somehow it's a revenge murder plot by a scorned critic?
- Also, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Harold Pinter's Old Times. A wife and husband (Kate and Deely) invite a guest (Anna) over for dinner and talk for the remainder of the story. The ending implies that Anna doesn't actually exist.
Gene Doucette's Deus Ex Quanta. A dark comedy about a murder investigation and quantum physics, performed in Anachronic Order.
Eugene Ionesco, like most absurdists, did this excellently. While some of his plays were actually strange and elaborate metaphors (like how everyone turning into Rhinocerouss in Rhinoceros was analogous to the support of Nazis within France), some were just weird.
- His first play, the Bald Soprano springs to mind. Inspired by the inanity of the phrases found within an English-French phrase book the play contains bizarre speech patterns, unusual repetition, faulty logic, a spontaneous and unpredictable clock, a married couple who don't know each other, and a rather overdone argument concerning doorbells. The play is hillarious, but it's always hard to tell which parts are purely humorous and which are symbolic. There is no bald soprano.

Close Theatre

Final Fantasy VII, the memory fuck-up part. Cloud finds his entire history is a lie. Procceds to angst for a good portion of the game.
- You sure you didn't mean the Time Travel/Compression/Loop in Final Fantasy VIII? With a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere that some fans insist is Bizarro future Rinoa?
  - Pretty sure they mean when Cloud finds out that he was a clone and that the story he tells in Kalm of what had happened when he was sixteen and should have been completely obliterated by Sephiroth, was actually the story of Zack, and Cloud had just been a bystander to the whole thing. Either the memory was completely invented, or somehow 'borrowed' from Zack...
Please tell me what you just have accomplished after playing Rez. Are hacking and electronic music....... LIKE THAT ?
The Lost videogame Via Domus, true to the TV show it's based on, features a major mind screw at the end. Throughout the game, the main character, Elliott Maslow (a survivor of Oceanic Flight 815 who has never been seen on the show), who is suffering from amnesia, has been trying to retrieve his lost memories. It turns out that Elliot used to be a journalist who ratted out his girlfriend Lisa, also a journalist, and took a photo of her being shot in the head by the guy the two were after. On the island, he is repeatedly haunted by visions of Lisa, eventually making him regret his selfish ways. The game ends with Elliott leaving the island on a sailboat, only to witness Oceanic Flight 815, the very plane he had crashed with, break apart above his head. Suddenly Elliott wakes up on the beach (instead of in the jungle, like he did in the beginning of the game) amidst the burning wreckage, when suddenly Lisa comes running towards him, relieved that both of them survived the crash. It should be pointed out that this ending was explicitly suggested by Damon Lindelof, one of the show's executive producers/main writers, and the concept of time travel had already been established on the show by the time the game came out.
- Fans of the show are torn whether this ending is really bad, or one of the few things that are actually good about the otherwise critically panned game.
Anything made by developer Goichi Suda (b.k.a. "Suda51").
- Killer7 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, No More Heroes. If you claim to fully understand what the heck is going on in Killer7, you are dead wrong.
- The plot of Contact is largely ambiguous and open to interpretation, especially the Professor's and Mint's motives. The ending is pretty confusing as well, and probably creates more problems than really solves any; there's a divide amongst those who've played the game as to whether it was really unique or just anticlimactic.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The ending. Well, calling it an ending would be a bit of a stretch, the thing practically ended midway through act II.
Metal Gear Solid 2. Nobody had tried using postmodernism to question the links between character, player, and designer in a game before. It's going to be a long, long time before anyone tries it again.
At the beginning of Sanitarium, you wake up in a mental hospital with no memory and bandages wrapped around your face. Flashbacks appear sporadically as you play through the game and alternate between roaming the grounds of the hospital and going into bizarre settings where you actually seem to be other people, to the point where it's unclear what's real and what's delusion. Turns out that it's all delusion - more specifically, it's a big dream you had while you were in a coma after your car wrecked because your evil business partner cut your brake lines. However, the symbolism of the settings and actions during the dream is still of great note.
The original Silent Hill game screws with the player by taking things a step further than simply having a confusing plot: the game has no third-person narrative; it's played entirely through the point of view of the Player Character. Because he's kept in the dark over what's going on, the player is never let in on things either. It isn't until Silent Hill 3 that the full story is finally revealed.
- The game screws with you more in Silent Hill 3, where it's implied that the monsters you've been killing are innocent people, and all the dangers you've faced are all in your head.
- SH 2 gets really mind-screwed in its second half, with the stuff that goes on in the Historical Society Abyss and the Hotel.
The ending of Neo Quest II. Watch and be confused.
The plot of the fourth ending of Drakengard defies explanation. That goes for the fifth ending as well.
Shadow Of Destiny is a more mild example than some on this page, but nevertheless tends towards this. The game is designed so that you have to play all of the Multiple Endings to know what's going on, but at least two of said endings directly contradict each other; the ones that DO let details slip don't explain what they mean; certain details are revealed and then re-revealed as something completely different; and the only character who knows what's going on refuses to enlighten the rest of the cast. Lampshade hung when one character admits that The Reveal she's just given you is based on things she's been told and that "not all of it may be true".
- Its Spiritual Successor, Time Hollow, falls squarely under this too. Don't expect to understand the real motivation behind anything or anyone until the epilogue, and even then it's a bit iffy.
Earthbound: Children with giant heads attacking wildlife everywhere, possessed street signs, a glowing neon Dark World of backwards talking shadows, talking dogs, an afterlife that looks like a Grateful Dead album cover, and let's not mention the final boss...
- While certainly strange, Earthbound is arguably the most straightforward game in the trilogy. Its predecessor, for one thing, had you entering someone else's mental world, by... touching a seashell and reading a diary? And then came Mother 3, which is even stranger.
The ending of Final Fantasy Legend AKA Sa Ga 1. You've been climbing up a tower that leads to various worlds. You fight the apparent Big Bad. And then you walk through the door that leads to the top of the tower... only to walk into a trapdoor leading to what appears to be the very first world, at which point you can enter the tower after using the various orbs you acquired up to this point; the door to "paradise" opens, and... you're in a featureless white room. Wandering around leads you to The Creator of the World, who says you've won "the game"; you promptly decide to fight him. You see a door behind him that he wanted you to go through, but decide to go home instead. The Gameboy equivalent of Neon Genesis Evangelion, that ending was.
- This also seems to be the plot behind the Architect and Neo's little conversation near the end of Matrix Reloaded.
SD Snatcher is probably the closest to examining the innards of Hideo Kojima's brain most people would like to come. The plot's perfectly straightforward (if a bit odd) until about halfway through, where it begins a slow downwards slide - starting from Gillian being forced to pretend to be Solid Snake in order to clear his name after killing a priest and ending with Snatchers in fursuits and clown suits colonising a ripoff of Disneyland (hidden behind a painting) because it looks like the Kremlin. Actually, no, it's probably when the master Snatcher manifests out of a pool of liquid skin.
Don't Eat the Mushroom.
- Don't forget Carousel. MAH BRAAAIN. To play these two, though, you'll need to download Knytt Stories, a fun platforming game you can make levels for.
  - The former because it's a drug trip and the latter because of its Gainax Ending.
- For those who can't access the linked forum, there's a video LetsPlay of Don't Eat the Mushroom on this page (scroll down a bit to find it). It's screwy. Very mind-screwy.
Second Sight's last few levels, though not as bad as most of the entries on this page, was still rather mind-screwy. Mutant kids eating the Big Bad! The present is the future! The past is the present! Jayne's dead! Jayne's alive!
The Xbox Live Arcade Game Braid has a highly confusing story to go along with it's tricky time-manipulating gameplay. Absolutely everything is metaphorical. What appears to be a simple tale about rescuing a princess turns out to be a complex story of a man's obsession, and the atomic bomb, or something...
Eternal Darkness...at least when the sanity gauge gets low, anyway.
The entirety of Mondo Medicals and its sequel Mondo Agency. Unless you have a complete understanding about CURING CANCER BY SHOOTING PEOPLE WHILE THINKING LIKE A STAR or how killing indians in order to save technology will somehow save the president... before you kill him, then you are pretty much fucked with these games.
The little-known Baroque, which takes place in a distorted world where people physically transform into a metaphor for their twisted delusions. It's confusing enough from the very start that, by the time you learn that the flying babies with deformed faces are actually the physical manifestation of God's pain, and you've been firing them out of your Infinity Plus One Gun, you'll be relieved that the plot is starting to make more sense.
The Stinger of Bubble Symphony aka Bubble Bobble II can act as a kind of Mind Screw. Were the four children (or original protagonists and girlfriends, whatever) just pretending to have Involuntary Shapeshifting and go on that quest, or did it really happen and they all managed to make or receive suits of their bubble dragon forms and toys of the items, Plot Coupons and cute baddies, and play around with them afterwards? Why don't you take a look and suggest something?◊
- The Downer Or Was It A Dream Endings do not have any relation.
The Elder Scrolls series retconned five of Daggerfall's conflicting endings into a single canonical event by making it so that they all happened at once, breaking the relationship between time and reality and causing all sorts of incomprehensible chaos.
- On a related note: ANYTHING written by Michael Kirkbride. 36 Lessons of Vivec is an excellent example.
Shade. To avoid unnecessary spoilers... let's just say that it starts getting weird fast, and ends with one of the most cryptic, incomprehensible scenes ever seen. How did the tiny human figure crawl out of the sand if it's dead, and what did it mean by "You win. Okay, my turn again"?
Marathon Infinity, when jumping between different timelines in order to find the one where the universe can still be saved from the W'rkcacnter, you go through very strange "dream" levels. The terminal messages found on Where Are Monsters In Dreams are perfect examples of this.
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time involved a massive Mind Screw late in the game. It was revealed that the entire universe was, in reality, a MMORPG for 4D beings, thus making all the characters computer programs that happened to gain sentience. If that wasn't enough, the Big Bad succeeds in deleting the entire universe. It no longer exists, but it still happens to exist because people still thinks it exists even though it got deleted. Is your head splitting open yet?
Both F.E.A.R. and Project Origin's hallucinations are generally chaotic mindfucks that in a lot of cases don't make a whole lot of sense at first glance....or even after you've got the proper context. And in Project Origin, there is a literal case of a Mind Screw, where Alma rapes Becket during a hallucination.
- What makes you belive it's a hallucination?
During Halo 3 the Master Chief apparently gets several cryptic messages from Cortana. It is never explained how she hijacked his vision and hearing over a distance of probably hundreds of light years. The first messages just don't make much sense. Those towards the end in the infested High Charity level, are just plain weired.
Most of Yume Nikki, and how.
See also the Chzo Mythos.
The Mirror Lied, a freeware game by freebirdgames.com, fits this trope perfectly. See also Shrug Of God.
Vampire The Masquerade: The coffin is a mindscrew. The player is filled with legend speculating on it's contents, is given a life-threatening mission to recover it, and the one character who begs you not to open it is acting pretty out of character...who wouldn't open it?
Vagrant Story, particularly the ending; though most of the game involves the protagonist trying to figure out what in his head is real and what isn't.
Xenogears, like the whole thing.
- Perfect Works.
Ever17 in increasing amounts as it becomes increasingly obvious to the player, if not the characters, that things just don't add up. They manage to explain it all into a single continuity even but until then you may have to pause to ask yourself things like... actually, explaining the mind screwiness would actually be spoilerific. And even then there are a few strings dangling.
A lot of The Path has this, for example, pictures and patterns randomly flashing over the screen, the random items you find littered around the woods and anything you see in grandma's house after encountering the wolf, especially if you've unlocked the secret rooms.
There's a fairly minor one in Baldurs Gate- in the catacombs under Candlekeep, you meet Elminster, Tethoril and your stepfather Gorion- who was murdered at the end of the prologue. They tell you that Gorion was actually poisoned and made to look as if dead, and that for some time you've been trapped in a grand illusion created by the Big Bad and his doppelganger minions- and you've just murdered most of your childhood friends, believing them to be doppelgangers. If you believe them and follow them, they lead you past a load of apparent Doppelgangers, who chase you- and the three characters turn into Greater Doppelgangers and, if you aren't careful, kill you. Bastards.
Tales Of The Abyss makes perfect sense right up until the ending, at which point it suddenly enters full Mind Screw mode and refuses to explain what happened.
An obscure Atari Jaguar game called Attack of the Mutant Penguins is so convoluted that it requires an Angry Video Game Nerd to explain it to you.
Plumbers Dont Wear Ties is a supposedly softporn "game" that somehow manages to be this. Let The Nerd himself try to explain this to you as well.
Call Of Duty 4. Shock and Awe
Two of the bosses in the VIP 5 Super Mario World hack are complete and utter 'what the hell is that' things, such as Tanasinn and Julius. The first has some weird quotes too, such as Don't think. Feel and you'll be Tanasinn. and I lose. However, I am immortal. Anything can become Tanasinn. You are also the same.. It's basically the strange embodiment of Japanese Message Board memes...
- Julius, at least, is nothing more than a special guest appearance by the final boss of Final Fantasy Adventure. And he got his old theme song back.
Every time Scarecrow makes an appearance in Batman Arkham Asylum.
The Half-Life 2 modification Dear Esther has a plot, and a lot of it is revealed to you, such as the fact there was a car crash, where Esther was apparently killed. Anything more than that...who knows?
Kingdom Hearts stopped making sense somewhere around the middle of Chain Of Memories. Kingdom Hearts II made an admirable and mostly-successful attempt at cleaning up loose ends, but still left a few questions unanswered, and then introduced a whole host more with the Updated Rerelease's secret ending video (which turned out to be a teaser for the PSP prequel Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep).

Close Videogames

Meta-example: anything on the Dada Comics page, though its not like they try to make sense.
Dresden Codak does this to varying degrees. This one is a complete Mind Screw.
- The author admits to having been influenced by A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible which seems to be nothing but a Mind Screw. Have a look.
Kagerou. The main character's Split Personality is actually pretty realistic (he's unaware of his other personalities, and none of them are really functional human beings), suggesting that the author perhaps has some personal experience.
Expecting to Fly by Daniel Østvold.
Adventurers! lampshades this trope in the some sort of symbolic climax.
Grounded Angel (link). Let me save you a couple of hours of mediocre art and predicable plot twists: the main character turns out to be an angel who is being chased by demons and a cat-man who leads a cult, they want the power of a book that only she can open. And in the end when she gets to the book? Turns out humanity is not yet ready for the way she wants to use it, and she gets to return to the start and do it all over again with her memories of the whole thing erased; oh, and she's been doing this for 176 years. Yeah, everything in the story occurred at least 64,240 times.
The Sluggy Freelance guest arc "The Sluggite Koan" does this in a big way. What at first seems like a somewhat straightforward Refugee From TV Land and Trapped In TV Land story delves into weird symbolism, philosophy, and loads and loads of Metafiction.
Yu+Me: Dream starts of as a straightforward Girls Love strip (albeit with an ebonics-spouting conscience), until the last ten pages of issue 9, when the entire comic up to that point is revealed to be All Just A Dream, with a minor character actually being a Morpheus-like being...and then it gets weird.
The final arc of the fifth book of Fans, "What Dreams May Come" focuses on a wish-granting artifact granting a kind of (extremely geeky) Instrumentality, apparently a metaphor for the afterlife. A few of the earlier and later introspective storylines could get a little Mind Screw-ey, but this one (being the intended finale) was just plain insane.
Templar, Arizona. The main characters are straightforward enough, but everything about the world around them is some twisted reflection of our own.
- It doesn't help that it is apparently, but not explicitly, set Twenty Minutes Into The Future.
Level.
Occasionally, Gene Catlow wanders into this, mainly due to the strange mix of philosophy, spirituality and sheer silliness.
Bob and George, the Entire series was just one big MIND SCREW, unless you pay attention to every detail, you are going to get lost.
Jerkcity. It's just a bunch of chat logs, mainly focused on UNIX, pot smoking, and homosexuality. OR IT IT?

Close Web Comics

Certain veins of lonelygirl15 videos veer toward this. Specifically, while LaRezisto consistently has a few clear points amongst the smoke and mirrors, OpAphid just seems to be weird-for-the-sake-of-weird half the time.
- OpAphid is like that. It's even worse in Redearth88.
The League Of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions had some moments: the idea that it was both a story of superheroes in the future & a TV show about superheroes in the future was one; the Queue's explanation of how they created the LICC universe was another; although the Gerber Elf was the only one we know was an intentional Mind Screw on the part of an author.
The Nostalgia Critic references one chase scene near the end of the Tom and Jerry the Movie. The scene is shown while The Critic goes a little nuts himself. It's pretty complicated to explain so I'll let The Critic himself describe it.
Nostalgia Critic: A cat and mouse are driving a ship trying to save the daughter of Indiana Jones while being chased by a purple people eater, a dog on a skateboard, a performing ship captain, his hand puppet Squawk, two Mexican wrestlers and a doctor riding an ice cream cart. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Mind Fuck.
- And now we have Top 11 Nostalgic Mindfucks which will all no doubt be joining this article very soon... if they aren't here already.
- He also suggests that Moonwalker should've been named 'Mind F***er' instead.
Charlie The Unicorn. Full stop. Just head over to it's WMG page if you want to see how zany things can get.
Salad Fingers is this with some High Octane Nightmare Fuel. To some, it's not just a Mind Screw. It's full-blown Mind Rape, complete with post-trauma (again, to some).
The entire premise of You Tube Poop.
Inward Hellix combines this with Guide Dang It and classic psychological horror to produce a major mindfuck of an online puzzle. It doesn't help that answers are rarely (if ever) published.

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Even though Ralph Bakshi's animated films are more known for their adult material, some of his films, especially Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, have trippy sequences that could be considered mind screw.
Twelve Ounce Mouse
Parodied in Perfect Hair Forever: "I wish these hot dogs and cats were not symbolic of anything, and this was all just a dumb anime mindf***!"
Transformers: Beast Machines was more of a Heavy Mind Petting, but it was still pretty clouded with symbolism, and the fact that it could be deciphered tended to raise another problem when the message didn't go over well.
The final episode of Teen Titans was really more of a No Ending, but it was such an over-the-top and inexplicable No Ending that it has to be mentioned here. It has been stated in interviews that the show's staff wasn't too keen on explaining things in the story; what transpired here can be best described as that policy's logical conclusion.
- It should be noted, though, that the sort of question Glen Murakami wasn't keen on answering were things about the characters' non-suited lives, and the "how did villain X get out of the Cardboard Prison last time?" sort of things that he considered unimportant, a distraction from the main plot. This was the only episode in which nothing was made sense of. (Well, Beast Boy does move on after the Terra incident - which we'd thought him over three seasons ago. The rest is pure randomness.)
Xavier: Renegade Angel is basically one massive, nonsensical mind screw after another, until the whole thing resembles a 3D-animated acid trip Gone Horribly Wrong.
The episode of Totally Spies, "Deja Cruise". To make a long story short, it was like the girls' dreams were having dreams. The WOOHP contract may as well have this clause on it: "CAUTION: Prolonged employment at this occupation may cause you to lose the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality."
ReBoot had an episode that only makes sense when you realize it is a homage to The Prisoner, oddly enough. The end of the episode revealed it was All Just A Dream, but the Mind Screw elements make more sense because of that, and Matrix received some Character Development bordering on a World Of Cardboard Speech.
MTV's Aeon Flux in its entirety. Even the writers have admitted not knowing what the hell it was all about.
Ed Edd N Eddy: in "One Plus One Equals Ed", the titular trio try and know everything so they can become super-smart and famous. In their quest for knowledge, however, all of reality breaks down- trees are flat as cardboard, Eddy eats the sun, Nazz turns into a dinosaur, and on and on. The madness only ends when the Eds are flying on a balloon that gets popped by the animator's giant pencil. And they never speak of it again.
Parodied in The Simpsons, where an advertising company produce a TV advert for The Plow King, featuring a opera-singing woman screaming at a snow-globe before smashing it on the pavement. In black and white. The family's response sums it up well.
Lisa: Dad, was that your commercial?
Homer: ...I don't know.
The Nine Lives Of Fritz The Cat is probably the most Mind Screwiest western animation films ever. And unlike the film it's a sequel to, Ralph Bakshi had absolutely nothing to do with it.
At least one episode of The Angry Beavers suddenly starred Mexican Masked Luchador El Grapadura (The Stapler) and was voiced entirely in Spanish with English subtitles that were clearly not what was being said.
One in the Time Travel episode of Gargoyles, to quote the Nostalgia Critic: basically, they make it back to Manhattan, but it turns out Xanatos took over in the forty years they were gone, but then it turns out that it isn't Xanatos at all, but a computer with Xanatos' memories, but then it turns out it wasn't the computer, but Lexington, who was overtaken by madness, but then it turns out that the whole thing was an illusion created by Puck to get the time medallion, but then it turns out that it was all a dream, but it may not have, interesting? Yes. Confusing? Oh, hell yes.

Close Western Animation

The May Day Mystery, an uncategorizable and indescribable series of bizarre documents, possibly the coded annals of a conspiracy. Sure, it could all just be an (insanely) elaborate hoax, but What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic?
The Time Cube website - either his mind is screwed up or everyone else's is.
Fan Fiction quite often drifts into this trope, either by being so full of personal in-jokes and/or bad grammar that it might as well be written in Sumerian, or simply by having a writer who enjoys playing with his/her readers' heads.
- Especially My Immortal. Good heavens, My Immortal. There's a resemblance of a plot, and that's it.

Close Other

Modern quantum physics: If two particles that have been separated, and you influence one, then the other gets influenced too. No matter how far the particles are removed from each other. Also, observing a particle always changes its behaviour.
- Really, everything about Quantum Mechanics following this point is just really unnecessary. You can sum up in two little phrases: It's Broken, and It'll Break You.
- If I remember correctly, this particular idea was first proposed by Einstein, who thought it was the greatest mistake he had ever made (funny that it turned out to be true). To be precise, the phenomenon is that two quarks can be "synchronized" so that if one has its spin change, the other will also change. Instantaneously. No matter how many light-years apart the two quarks are. Which is against the rules by Relativity — nothing can travel faster than light. Honestly, this is perhaps less weird than the concept of quantum superposition — when nothing is looking at something, it is in a bunch of states at the same time — or the Many-Worlds interpretation — at every quantum event, a Universe is created for every possible outcome. And this is what the books that try to explain things to normal people say...
- It should be pointed out that the thing above about observing a particle makes a lot more sense if you think about it for a moment. Consider how we observe things in the normal world: photons get thrown at things, and we watch what they send our way. Now, the things we're talking about here are significantly smaller than light particles. So in order to "observe" a particle, you need to throw another particle at it, and then observe the result. It's a bit unreasonable to expect the first particle to not move if you throw something just as big at it, isn't it?
  - Now tell us how it can act as a wave of probablility when it's "unobserved".
  - Magic.
  - The casual reader will reply to the above: "But isn't the particle still being hit by photons even if nobody is looking at it?" That's when things get screwier.
- QM
  1. The Uncertainty Principle is a statement about the process of measurement; no matter how big or small the particle you'd throw at the first, there would still be an irreducible relationship between the uncertainties in the measurement of its momentum and position (or time observed and the energy observed).
  2. Einstein thought the Cosmological Constant his greatest mistake; it now looks like he might have been wrong about that in general, though right enough in the particular (he introduced it to avoid an expanding universe as a solution to his General Theory of Relativity, now it may help refine the theory).
  3. The Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky thought-experiment was originally proposed by Einstein et al as a way of disproving quantum mechanics as then formulated. It certainly is a poser; however, it is not about particles 'influencing' each other over a distance—-you can't make the measurement be "UP" so that the measurement on t'other end will be down. It's just that suddenly, you know something about a potential measurement made (say) light-years away, but you don't know whether it has been made or will ever be made, and they'll never know if you've made a particular measurement or not, unless one or both of you send emissaries out to tell each other, which will happen causally. The statistics for measurement of the particles at each end are unaffected.
  4. Even though the EPR experiments don't disprove locality, Bell's Theorem does.
- Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum physics, once stated that anyone who thinks that they understand quantum physics doesn't. He also purportedly shot down a colleague's theory by stating that it made too much sense. On the opposite end of the scale, he once dismissed a theory as being "[...] not even wrong."
- The fact that educators seem to be engaged in a long-running "who can explain quantum mechanics in the most counter-intuitive way" competition doesn't help matters.
  - Although QM is counterintuitive, and logically a counterintuitive method is the only way to understand something that is itself contrary to your intuition. Really, it's the ones who are trying to make it intuitive you have to watch out for - they're the ones who'll try to "teach" you something incredibly stupid.
- Quantum Mechanics has convinced scientists who study it of the existence of God. Think about that.
The programming language Haskell is purported to have a similar effect on some unwary programmers for its extensive use of unusual programming concepts — everything from lazy evaluation, to algebraic data types, to currying — and some large amount of borrowing of concept from category theory, a branch of mathematics that even other mathematicians call general abstract nonsense. Also possibly the only programming language with a case of What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic for its use of the term "Monad" to refer to one of its central concepts, which has nothing to do with the Monad of the Pythagoreans or of Gnosticism.
- Category theory has gained quite a bit of respectability among mathematicians in recent years, partly because of its applicability to computer science (not just Haskell, but all kinds of things). The Monad in question is actually a straightforward implementation of the category-theoretic concept, so the category theorists are to blame for the nomenclature, which I believe was influenced by Leibniz. Haskell isn't so much a mind screw itself; it just points up how much of a mind screw programming is when reduced to its essence.
  - Haskell is straightforward - as long as you've never tried programming before. Once you get used to it it makes a lot more sense than, say, C. Most programmers are just too used to thinking about things the way the machine does them, rather than following an intuitive logical process.
- If you think that Haskell is a mind screw, try using Lisp. The parentheses alone will drive you insane. The fact that the language only has one type (functions) will also generally throw programmers unfamiliar with non-object oriented programming into fits.
  - We must be thinking about two different Lisps. Classical Lisp has two types — atoms (which don't really have types) and lists. Functions there are just another lists, and parenthesized syntax ( really, just lack of any) makes it really easy to express recursion and metaprogramming. Once you get it (there's a saying among lispers that to understand recursion you just have to understand recursion first), the whole thing gets really neat. Any new lisper first tries to invent the new syntax to throw away all that parentheses — but then he or she gets it, and never returns to the idea.
- The esoteric language Homespring, on the other hand, was pretty much intentionally a mind screw. It might have been created to make a language higher level than anyone could ever need or want. The name? It stands for Hatchery Oblivion through Marshy Energy from Snowmelt Powers Rapids Insulated but Not Great. And a paradox is explicitly defined within the official language documentation, just to make sure no-one manages to fully implement it.
- Brainfuck.
  - Brainfuck is actually pretty simple. Try Malbolge instead.
Abstract algebra, topology and anything in mathematics that isn't immediately usable in some engineering/economics field (and even those aren't completely exempted). Forget everything that you claim to know about such "trivial" things as addition, multiplication, division, space (space, as in 3D space), etc. Remember, that some of the trippier aspects of quantum-mechanics are just special cases in mathematics.
- Mathematically, Quantum Theory is quite simple, really. It's in trying to make sense of it that things get ugly.
Don't forget Fractals. Taken from the right perspective, it's impossible to tell a tiny sliver of melting ice from a glacier hundreds of square miles in size. Many natural features exhibit self-similarity across a boggling number of scales.
- Similarly, such features as the length of a coastline or surface area of an object appear larger when they are measured with a finer resolution, since closer examination reveals more elaborate convolutions.
Also, the work of the french philosopher Jacques Derrida is nearly completely composed out of Mind Screws and openly admits it.
The religion of Discordianism, which either inspired Illuminatus or was inspired by it, claims to have a long-running project to undermine consensus reality known as "Operation Mindfuck". They also cheerfully admit they might be lying about it.
- Discordianism was founded almost two decades before the Illuminatus!'-trilogy was published, and the latter freely quotes its holy book, Principia Discordia'', as well as refers to its founders and significant members, including one of the authors, Mordecai the Foul aka Robert Anton Wilson, so it's pretty clear which came first.
Biggest Mind Screw in Mathematics or a faulty proof?
"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."
- i.e. for "xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ you can only find integer values for x, y and z that will produce a valid equation where n <= 2.
- Considering that it was never mentioned by Fermat again and that the eventual solution was 150 pages of extremely complex math involving mathematical concepts that didn't exist during Fermat's time (i.e. before basic calculus), it's almost certain that Fermat discovered his proof was wrong and never mentioned that fact, or had no proof at all, but we may never know.
  - BIG-LIPPED ALLIGATOR THEOREM!
  - Some have suggested that his theorem was a practical joke to frustrate fellow mathematicians: It's true, they just couldn't prove it. It is now the mathematical equivalent of the The Great Politics Mess Up: Some Sci-Fi shows say that Fermat's Theorem has still never been solved, when it fact it finally has.
For spatial mathematics, consider this: The 'right-hand' 3-dimensional Vector direction of Y is counter-clockwise from X, which is clockwise from Z, which is counter-clockwise from Y. What this means is that Left is -1, Right is +1, Down is -1, Up is +1...And Backward is +1, Forward is -1. Somehow, this makes the math work *Right*.
A great many (and there are MANY) theories pertaining to the assassination of President John F Kennedy. There's even one about the driver shooting him, even though he didn't (taped evidence) that all other conspirators find ridiculous.
The Banach-Tarski theorem states that any sphere can be divided into pieces and reassembled into two spheres the same size as the original. Irregular Webcomic offers an explanation in (almost) layman's terms as to how this is possible.
In a rare non-mathematical example, people on youtube will defend Sonic 2006 as a decent game that could have had a good plot, if only Sonic team had filled in a few of the plot holes. This troper admits they may all be little kids, but you have to draw the line somewhere goddamit. One of them admitted to liking the MACH SPEED ZONES.
- In their defense, they do have a few good points: as a Sonic game the music is universally badass. One of them defends the loading times. This troper expects he owns a 360.

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