Most movies go for the feel-good ending. Comedies are meant to make us laugh until the end. Dramas often see protagonists make up. Thrillers and action movies have the good guy conquer the evil villain. Horror is different. While the genre has its share of happy endings, where the final girl slays the killer or the monster is defeated, it’s also the one that can get away with terrifying endings. Here, the antagonists are either victorious or the hero is so damaged that there is no true victory for them. Movies like Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, Midsommar, and Smile knew how to scare the viewer through the very last second, but these 10 horror movies did it better than any other.
10
‘Speak No Evil’ (2022)
Christian Tafdrup‘s See No Evil is a highly uncomfortable chiller. The Dutch film focuses on a family vacationing in Italy who meet another family and quickly befriend. What starts out as fun quickly becomes something more sinister when the latter family begins acting more and more strange, causing the form to doubt what they’re seeing until it’s much too late to escape.
The 2024 American reboot went for the happy ending. No thanks. The original gets it right by going as dark as possible. Agnes (Liva Forsberg) has her tongue cut out and is taken. There is nothing Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) can do, as Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) tells them they were chosen simply because they let him. If only they’d run away immediately, they would have survived. Instead, the couple is stoned to death.
9
‘The Mist’ (2007)
Frank Darabont has adapted several Stephen King stories for film but nothing tops the emotional wallop he created with The Mist. The film stars Thomas Jane and a whole host of future stars of The Walking Dead, who are attacked by interdimensional monsters when a fog descends over their small town.
King’s novella had a hopeful ending. Darabont wanted nothing to do with that. In the final scene, David (Jane) and several others, including his own young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), flee in a vehicle that runs out of gas. With the monsters closing in, the group decides to end their lives on their own terms. David shoots and kills everyone off-screen. Out of bullets, he steps out, begging for the monsters to take him. It’s then that the military drives by. Hope was so close. If only they’d held on for a few more minutes.
8
‘Martyrs’ (2008)
Pascal Laugier‘s French horror film, Martyrs, is an exercise in extreme violence pushing against what audiences can bare. When Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) was a child, she was abused by a group of people, and now she’s out for revenge with her friend, Anna (Morjana Alaoui). What they discover is something more sickening than they could ever have imagined.
Martyrs has a dark and ambiguous ending. Anna has been captured and tortured nearly to death by a mysterious cult who believes their victims can get so close that they see the afterlife. With her skin ripped from her flesh and death near, Anna whispers to the cult leader what she sees. The viewer doesn’t hear her words, but whatever they are causes her to shoot herself in the head.
7
‘Hereditary’ (2018)
Ari Aster‘s debut film, Hereditary, may still be his best. A stacked cast includes Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff. They are part of the Graham family, and Annie’s (Collette) strange mother has just passed away, unleashing a series of bizarre events surrounding a cult. The most shocking scene involves Charlie (Milly Shaprio), who is decapitated out of nowhere. It’s not the only moment that sticks with you though, because the finale is a wild nightmare.
The final scenes see Annie possessed and sawing off her own head, which leads to her son, Peter (Wolff), jumping out of the window. This is not his freeing moment. Instead, the next time we see Peter, who was very much dead, he’s alive again in the treehouse, the demon Paimon inside him as the cult worships their leader.
6
‘Sinister’ (2012)
Sinister is regarded as one of the scariest modern horror movies. Directed by Scott Derrickson and co-written with C. Robert Cargill, their story centers on Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a true crime writer, who moves into a new home with his family. In the attic he finds a projector and reels which show the murders of several families. As he discovers that a demon named Bughuul is behind the killings, Oswalt tragically finds his own family marked for terror.
It’s revealed that the murders were all committed and filmed by children under Bughuul’s control. In the final scene, Ellison’s young daughter, Ashley (Clare Foley), drugs and ties up her family. Now possessed by the demon, she slaughters them with an axe and is taken by Bughuul. There is no happy ending for anyone.
5
‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ (1974)
In 1974, Tobe Hooper‘s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre helped launch the slasher fad. It’s so much more than a killer in a mask movie though. Instead, it’s a deeply political story about the lengths a family will go to when new technology takes their jobs. Marily Burns stars as Sally Hardesty, a young woman driving across Texas with her friends when they decide to enter the wrong house. Inside waits the chainsaw wielding Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his wild family of cannibals.
The third act is a non-step frenzy of violence. With only Sally left alive, the family ties her up, ready to make her their next meal. She’s able to escape, smashing face first through a window and running down the driveway in the breaking Texas dawn as Leatherface and the Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) close in. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ends with the Hitchhiker dead and Sally saved by a truck driver. However, even though she escapes, her wails of fear, as a frustrated Leatherface swings his saw, reveal that this final girl will never be okay again.
4
‘Halloween’ (1978)
John Carpenter‘s Halloween changed horror forever with a simple premise that has been copied off. The suburban nightmare begins with young Michael Myers killing his sister in 1963. Fifteen years later, he escapes from a psychiatric hospital, puts on a shapeless white mask, and looks to recreate his crime by stalking babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends. Many of them won’t live through the night.
Halloween set the template for slashers to come. After a slow burn build, Carpenter lets the Boogeyman loose in the last act. When Laurie goes across the street to check on her friends, the Shape is waiting. From one house to the next, Michael Myers teases the prey who he could kill at any moment if he wanted to. In the end, with help from Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasance), Michael is seemingly taken down, only for the final shots revealing where he’s been as the Shape’s breathing fills our ears. Evil can’t be defeated.
3
‘The Vanishing’ (1988)
George Sluzier‘s The Vanishing is one of the most bleak and unnerving movies you’ll ever see. The story begins with two young lovers, Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), who are vacationing in France when Saskia goes missing. Years later, Saskia has never been found, but then Rex begins receiving startling messages from Raymond (Bernanrd-Pierre Donnadieu), the man who took her and now wants to terrorize who she left behind.
This is again a case where the American reboot delivers a happy ending. The original does not. Raymond wants Rex to experience what Saskia did in her last moments. Desperate to know the truth, Rex gives in, so he agrees to drink coffee laced with drugs. When Rex comes to, he’s been buried alive in a coffin with no chance of escape. He will die here, slowly suffocating, while Raymond is free to kill again.
2
‘Don’t Look Now’ (1973)
Nicholas Roeg‘s Don’t Look Now gets a lot of attention because of the decades-old rumors that stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie actually did the deed during their sex scene. They didn’t, and there is so much more to this film than that curiosity. Don’t Look Now is a slow-burn mystery nightmare with Sutherland and Christie as John and Lura Baxter. After the drowning death of their daughter, the couple goes to Italy for work and to try to forget what happened. While there, a serial killer strikes.
In several scenes, John sees a short person in a red hooded coat, similar to the way his daughter was dressed when she died. Has she found a way to return to him? Needing to know, John follows the hooded figure in the final moments. Cornered, and with nowhere to go, the stranger turns around. It’s not John’s daughter. Instead, it’s the killer, an elderly little person with crazed eyes who slashes John to death.
1
‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999)
The Blair Witch Project had the greatest marketing campaign in movie history. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez had audiences convinced that the found footage they were seeing was actually real. It’s a simple premise for the terror, with college filmmakers Heather (Heather Donahue), Josh (Joshua Leonard), and Mike (Michael C. Williams) going into the Maryland woods in search of a legendary witch. They quickly become lost before something unseen stalks them through the trees.
In the final scene, Josh has disappeared and now screams from somewhere out in the darkness. A terrified Heather and Mike go looking and come upon a dilapidated house. Alone in the basement, Mike’s camera is knocked down by the unknown. In the final shots, a screaming Heather runs down the steps. There stands a motionless Mike in the corner, just like Rustin Parr used to do with the kids he killed. An unknown force then knocks Heather’s camera away, silencing her. The audience never sees the witch or finds out what exactly happened. The fear is in the unknown.
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