20 films where pretty much no one survives

Robert Eggers’ The Northman is a fascinating film since it is basically an earthier, grittier, more viscerally violent version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The heart of the story is Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth, a young prince who goes into exile after his uncle murders his father, only to hunt him down to attain vengeance. By the end of the film, everyone has perished, including Amleth, who has managed to kill his uncle in the bowels of a volcano but has also been grievously injured. He is subsequently carried to Valhöll by a valkyrie, a fitting end to a film about the terrible costs associated with epic heroism. 

Quentin Tarantino’s films are almost always blood-soaked affairs, and The Hateful Eight is no exception. It begins with eight strangers who end up taking shelter in the same stopover, only for things to quickly devolve into violence, bloodshed, and death. A certain acidity to the film marks it out from many of the director’s other films, but this is precisely what makes it such a compelling watch. It even retains its biting humor right up to the end, illustrating the extent to which Tarantino has continued to mature as a filmmaker even while staying true to his essential vision.

Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front has long been highly regarded for its blistering anti-war stance, and its 2022 adaptation retains many of the book’s bleakest passages. Like the source material, its ending is despairing, as the main character, Paul Bäumer, ends up dead. More than that, his identity is consigned to oblivion since his dog tags are not discovered with his body. War is a terrible machine that grinds up everyone who gets caught in its gears, and the film allows the viewer to see how World War I left a scar that marred an entire generation of young men.

Al Pacino has always excelled at playing morally compromised — and sometimes downright villainous — characters, and Tony Montana of Scarface is one of his finest and most chilling creations. The film essentially chronicles his rise to power as a drug lord before it all comes crashing down around him and brings death and ruin to everyone. There’s something almost operatic about his rise and fall, and, like all of the great tragic characters of cinema, his ultimate demise is as inevitable as it is powerful. Moreover, there is also something bleak and depressing in its ethos, which is not always the case with crime movies of this type.

Martin Scorsese has long been fascinated with criminal characters, which is much evidenced in The Departed.  What begins as a story of two moles — one in a criminal gang and one in the Boston police department — soon begins to turn bloody as people turn against one another. Ultimately, nearly all of the main characters are dead, with Mark Wahlberg’s Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam shooting Matt Damon’s Staff Sergeant Colin Sullivan. Dignam might have survived the onslaught, but it’s clear that the events of the film have left him largely dead inside, which is its own form of living death.

Sunshine, like all good sci-fi films, is thought-provoking and disturbing in equal measure, focusing on the efforts of astronauts to save Earth by bringing the sun back to its former strength. As it turns out, however, things are much more difficult than the astronauts thought at first, and as the film unfolds, they die one by one. Ultimately, their sacrifice is not in vain, as the sun is finally brought back to its former strength, and Earth is saved. Everyone might die, but at least their demise serves a greater purpose.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford make for a compelling duo in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which focuses on famous outlaws and their efforts to evade the law. Anyone familiar with this famous story knows how the film will end, but even so, it’s hard not to wish that they might find some way of surviving the death that waits for them. The film's last shot is especially haunting, as it freezes the two characters in time. They might have perished, but at least they will live on in their own form of immortality. 

Ari Aster has repeatedly shown that he is one of his generation’s most audacious horror directors, and his feature debut, Hereditary, shows off his skills. It’s a haunting and brutal film about one family and their efforts to contend with the fact that their dead matriarch was, in fact, the leader of a coven. As it unfolds, they each meet gruesome and terrible fates until the last survivor, son Peter, throws himself out a window to his death, only for his body to be inhabited by a malevolent demon. The film is horrifying and tragic in equal measure, and it shows how deeply family trauma can infect and affect the present. 

The aptly-titled This is the End  focuses on a group of friends who encounter the literal apocalypse. It's a very tongue-in-cheek film, and while the end of the world hovers outside almost every frame, it never loses sight of the fact that its real purpose is to make the audience laugh. Moreover, the film throws everything at the wall, right up until everyone is dead, with several characters even making it to Heaven. As if all of that weren't enough, there's also an amusing little cameo from the beloved boy band Backstreet Boys, whose hit "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" plays as it ends.

Final Destination has proved to be a remarkably enduring horror franchise, largely because it is a fascinating reflection on the inexorability of death. The fifth installment follows the familiar pattern, with a group of friends escaping near-certain death only to be killed in an imaginative and gruesome fashion by death itself, with the added conceit that characters can take one another’s life spans. This works out well for Sam and Molly, who survive right up until the end when it’s revealed they’re on the plane from the first film, and they die in the explosion, which also causes the death of the last surviving character. It’s a brilliant twist that pulls the rug out from under the viewer and reveals that sometimes there really is no escaping one’s fate.

Nicole Kidman gives a truly inspiring and harrowing performance in The Others, in which she plays a mother desperate to protect her children against malevolent forces that inhabit their house. The twist, of course, is that they are the dead ones, and the presences are the new residents trying to exorcise them. It’s really quite disturbing for the viewer to realize that the characters have been dead all along. Moreover, it is also a tragic tale of a mother’s descent into madness, even as her love for her children proves to be the one thing that can transcend death. 

John Carpenter’s The Thing has gone from being considered a failure to one of the director’s most respected works. It’s a haunting film, mostly because the thing of the title is capable of taking on the shape of any other creature, which makes the researchers at an Antarctic station even more paranoid. Ultimately, all of the characters perish, except two who are left stranded in the snow, neither of them quite sure whether the other might be the being in disguise. They might technically be alive, but it’s clear that death is just around the corner, as certain and as implacable as the cold Antarctic surroundings. 

Cloverfield is one of the more thoughtful and disturbing of the found-footage films, which were very much the rage throughout the 2000s and 2010s. In this case, the film follows a group of friends whose lives in Manhattan are brutally disrupted by the appearance of a terrible monster. Like so many other monster movies, there are bodies liberally scattered throughout the runtime, but it’s the ending that is particularly depressing, as all of the characters end up dying as the military bombs Manhattan in an effort to destroy the creature. This is one monster movie that does not have a happy ending.

Lars von Trier is known for his enigmatic films, but Melancholia is one of his more accessible ventures. In the film, two sisters have to contend with their own personal dramas, even as a near-certain apocalypse approaches due to Earth’s impending collision with a rogue planet. “Melancholia” is an apt title for the film since no one can really stop the inevitable demise of Earth and everything on it. Indeed, the final scene of the film is remarkably haunting and devastating, as the characters and everyone else are totally obliterated. Melancholia asks the audience to consider what their own response would be to the literal end of everything.  

The late George Romero was a visionary when it came to the figure of the zombie, and his Night of the Living Dead has proved particularly influential. The ending of the film is a particularly bleak one, since the sole survivor of the zombie apocalypse, Ben, a Black man, is shot by a posse who thinks he is one of the undead. In addition to being an incisive bit of social commentary — the film was released in the 1960s, after all — the moment is also particularly haunting since Ben has already endured so much. In the end, he is reduced to just another body being burned.

Stanley Kubrick brings his own unique brand of cynicism to Dr. Strangelove, which focuses on the frenzy that erupts when a rogue US general tries to ignite a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. Peter Sellers is at his best in three different roles, including the title role, a deranged scientist who once worked for the Nazis. The film is blisteringly funny, and it pulls no punches when showcasing the absurdity of a world in which mutually assured destruction is a possibility. Indeed, that’s precisely how the film ends: with the world destroyed in a series of nuclear blasts. It’s one of those endings which manages to be both bleakly funny and frankly terrifying. 

Based on the graphic novel of the same name, Zack Snyder’s 300  focuses on a group of Spartan warriors — led by Gerard Butler’s Leonidas — who march off to protect all of Greece from the invading Persians. It’s a mission that is almost certainly doomed from the beginning since they know there aren’t enough of them to really stop the Persians. It proves the case, but with their sacrifice, they inspire the rest of their homeland to fight against those who would see Greece brought under despotism. Their death, though emotionally wrenching, nevertheless has a larger purpose that gives it meaning.

Even though it has its dark moments, as a whole, Star Wars tends to be at least somewhat optimistic. One notable exception to this is Rogue One, which focuses on a group of characters as they attempt to capture the vital plans of the Death Star. In the end, they succeed in their mission — setting the stage for the events of A New Hope — but they do so at tremendous cost, with all of the new characters meeting their demise in one way or another. It’s a haunting yet strangely beautiful way to end the film and a reminder of how much sacrifice is entailed in bringing down the evil of the Empire.

It’s not every sequel that can live up to the high standards of the first in a series, but Beneath the Planet of the Apes manages to do so. It once again takes place on a future Earth in which apes are the dominant species, but this time, the stakes are even higher as the apes wage war against a group of mutant humans living beneath the ruins of New York City. In the end, astronaut Taylor ends up launching a doomsday missile that brings an end to all life on Earth, a potent reification of the series’ message about humanity’s tendency toward self-destruction. 

The Cabin in the Woods is one of the cleverest horror films to have emerged from the 2010s, and it certainly has fun playing with the various tropes associated with the horror genre as a whole. In this case, however, a group of young people are unknowingly being offered as a sacrifice to vengeful ancient deities. However, in the end, a pair of them choose to let the world end rather than do their part to save humanity, and their actions usher in the apocalypse. It’s a remarkably bleak way to end a film, even a horror one, making it so effective.