20 film endings that leave the viewers in shambles

For most of the film The Others,  the audience believes that ghosts are haunting Nicole Kidman’s Grace Stewart and her children. However, the ending reveals that they’ve been dead all along, and the phantasms they’re experiencing are a living family trying to exorcize them. The film ends with Grace’s ghost intending to make sure that she is not going to relinquish her house. It’s a chilling delivery from Kidman, and yet more evidence of why she’s one of the best actresses of her generation. 

It’s the rare horror film that decides to kill off its lead in the end, but this is precisely what Jeepers Creepers does. Moreover, it does so in a distinctly disturbing way, as it sees the titular creature taking Juston Long’s Darry back to its layer and carving out the back of his head to get his eyes. The ending unfolds over Darry’s screams, until the creature looks through his destroyed face, his eyes not firmly in place. It’s horrifying and unsettling, and it makes clear that this terrifying creature will be back to terrorize others again.

Ari Aster once again hit it out of the park with his horror film Midsommar,  which stars Florence Pugh as a young woman who joins her boyfriend and several others as they go to Sweden, where they become part of a sinister cult’s sacrifice. In the end, Pugh’s Dani stares on as her boyfriend, having been sewn up in a dead bear, is burnt alive, while she smiles secretly. The enigmatic nature of her smile, and the horror unfolding in front of her, conveys the bone-deep chill that folk horror is so adept at engendering.

Long before found footage horror films became such a staple in Hollywood, The Blair Witch Project showed how such a minimalist approach could be used to maximum effect. By the end of the film, the various characters have all ended up in a sinister house, and, after some disconcerting action off-screen, it cuts to black. The chilling effect results from the film’s refusal to give closure or clarification, leaving the fate of the protagonists unknown. As everyone knows, it’s the unknown that ends up being the most frightening.

The Dutch film The Vanishing is a truly disturbing piece of filmmaking, filled with suspense and a growing sense of dread. The center of the story is the main character Rex’s attempt to find his girlfriend, who was kidnapped and buried alive by the psychopath Raymond. In the end, desperate to find out what happened to his girlfriend, he agrees to be drugged, only to find himself buried alive, while the kidnapper enjoys a day with his family. Even though this seems like the only way the saga could have ended, seeing such evil manage to get away with it remains disconcerting.

Religious zealotry makes for rich horror material, as films like Saint Maud demonstrate quite clearly. Morfydd Clark gives an intense and haunting performance as Maud, a nun who attempts to save a woman's life in her care. Eventually, Maud is driven into a religious frenzy and lights herself on fire and, though in her mind she seems to have become almost angelic, in reality she is nothing more than a body consumed with flame, screaming out her life. Her zealousness had led to her horrifying demise.

Ari Aster’s feature debut Hereditary marked him out as a true horror auteur. It’s one of those horror films that manages to explore heavy issues such as family trauma and demonic possession, and it all comes to a grisly head in the film’s conclusion, in which the main characters are dead and their bodies are used to bring a fearful demon into the world. It is obviously a bit of a downer of an ending, but it’s also a remarkably powerful one, particularly since the viewer has already spent so much time with these tragic and doomed characters.

In 2011, Planet of the Apes was rebooted with a new film, Rise, which detailed how the apes became intelligent and eventually overtook humans as the planet’s dominant species. The ape revolutionary is Caesar, who gains enhanced intelligence thanks to a new Alzheimer’s drug. The problem is that a new version of it causes a lethal flu in humans, and the film’s ending credits show it spreading across the globe. This ensign has become particularly powerful and chilling — one might even say prescient — in the age of COVID and avian flu.

Even by the standards of horror, the film Funny Games is a disturbing watch (in its Austrian and American versions, both directed by Michael Haneke). Having spent the entire film torturing a family, the two young villains, Paul and Peter, look poised to begin the whole process again with a totally different family. Unlike in many horror movies, where there’s at least the pretense that some moral order has been re-established in the world, this movie suggests instead that evil is never really punished and that, instead, it just moves on to the next target.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has gone through several iterations, but arguably the most terrifying is the version from 1978. The film ends with the main character Matthew Bennell being revealed to have been taken over by the sinister alien beings. As character Nancy Bellicec screams in horror, he also utters one of the aliens’ trademark shrieks. The ending is particularly bleak, suggesting that there really is no hope for humanity and that the body snatchers will soon take over the Earth.

Robert Eggers burst onto the horror scene in a big way with his debut The Witch,  which stars Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, a young woman who is banished, along with her family, to the terrifying woods of colonial New England. There they have to contend with a number of threats, including a witch and a goat that may be the devil. In the end, Thomasin’s family is dead and she is led to become part of a coven, and the film’s final terrifying image is of her embracing her witch side. She is finally free, but she has left a trail of destruction behind her.

Some twist endings earn themselves a place as some of the greatest in film history. Take, for example, Planet of the Apes, which ends with the astronaut Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) stumbling upon the ruined Statue of Liberty. Given that, throughout the film, he’s thought he was on another planet only to discover that he’s been on Earth all along, this revelation hits both Taylor and the audience like a punch to the gut. It’s one of those endings that radically changes the way one views the entire film and, just as importantly, it also highlights the ability of humanity to destroy itself.

George Romero forever changed the nature of movie zombies with Night of the Living Dead, which sees a group of people attacked by the living dead. The real tragedy, however, occurs when the last survivor, the African American man Ben, is shot and killed by police, who think he is a zombie. Afterward, his body is burned with the other dead bodies. It’s a bleak ending, but it’s also key to the film’s biting social commentary about the inequities and problems of late 1960s America.

The Cabin in the Woods is a remarkably self-aware horror film, and it delights in using the tropes and conventions of the genre. The ending, however, packs the greatest punch. Only two characters manage to survive the carnage and, in the end, they decide to leave the world to its gruesome and terrifying fate: destruction at the hands of ancient gods that have required human sacrifice to keep their powers at bay. It’s an explosive ending suggesting that humans might not be worth saving.

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby remains one of the director’s most haunting works. Mia Farrow gives a terrific and harrowing performance as the title character, who ends up becoming a pawn in a sinister game in which a pair of seemingly benign elderly neighbors want to make her the mother of the Antichrist. It all leads to the terrifying ending, in which Rosemary comes face-to-face with her monstrous progeny and, rather than abandoning it, takes it to her chest and becomes a monstrous mother indeed.

Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man remains a paradigmatic example of the folk horror genre. It also features a bleak and chilling ending, where the main character, policeman Neil Howie, is sacrificed in a giant wicker man by a group of villagers hoping to restore their crops to fertility. After all, not every film would be willing to subject its supposed hero to such torments, but this film goes for the gut, so it’s easy to see why it has been much imitated but never surpassed (even by Hardy himself).

Directed by Neil Marshall, the horror film The Descent brings two deep-seated human fears together: claustrophobia and the terror that caves might be filled with creatures humans don’t know exist. In this case, a group of women end up stranded in a cave, where they encounter strange and predatory humanoid creatures called crawlers. In the end, the only character left alive is a sitting duck for the creatures, and the ending leaves one in no doubt that sometimes, there really is no escape from one’s doom. 

Alex Garland’s Annihilation  is one of the director’s best, and it remains one of the most haunting and viscerally disturbing films of 2018. Natalie Portman stars as Lena, one of a group of women who investigate a strange phenomenon known as the Shimmer. Within its bounds DNA begins to recombine in new and unpredictable ways, and by the end of the film it’s unclear whether Lena is even herself any longer. It’s a chilling ending, one that points out the limits of the human and the permeability of the self.

Some movies have their premise right in the title, including Drag Me To Hell. Sam Raimi puts his unconventional but macabre touch on this story about a young woman who is cursed by a Roma woman and, in the film’s final moments, ends up being pulled into Hell. What this final moment lacks in subtlety it makes up for in sheer horror. After all, there’s nothing quite as terrifying as the thought of being dragged into the darkness with no one able to help.

Alfred Hitchcock left an indelible mark on the history of horror with Psycho, and Norman Bates (memorably portrayed by Anthony Perkins) likewise casts a long shadow. Bates is in some ways a tragic figure, as he’s essentially been driven mad by his murder of his mother. In the film’s chilling ending, the mother side of his psyche has fully taken over, and one of the film's last shots has Norman staring into the camera, his face contorted by a twisted and knowing little smile. There’s clearly no hope for him any longer.