10 Great Horror Films Ruined By Terrible Endings
Despite starting strong, these movies limped over the finish line.
People will tell you it's not the destination that matters, it's the journey. And to that I will tell you: they're full of sh*t. Is it the journey when you get to the airport and are delayed by 17 hours to your holiday resort that eats into your sun lounging, coconut-sipping free time? Is it the journey when you're stuck on a bus in the middle of nowhere riddled with the runs because you ate bad street food? Is it the journey when you're locked in an Uber watching your fare tick up whilst stuck in gridlocked traffic? Is it!?
No, it's not. And the same can be said for films. As much as we might enjoy the fickle fancies that entertain us along the way, the ending is what solidifies a film into cinematic history, or relegates it to the trash heap.
When it comes to horror movies in particular, so often we're left with lacklustre twists and confused exposition dumps that the whole thing gets soured in the process. So let's look at the movies that promised so much more along the way only to stick us in the bus with no toilets, the sweaty airport, or the god damn doomed Tesla instead. You could have been so much more.
10. 47 Meters Down
A big dumb shark movie needs to be a big dumb shark movie, and there's not much more you can ask from it than that. 47 Meters Down embodies that faithfully, delivering a gripping, suspenseful tale of two sisters - Kate and Lisa - stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a dive cage as great white sharks circle ahead.
Not satisfied with sticking to one ending, 47 Meters Down doubles down on delivering two, becoming a confusing amalgamation of both happy and tragic tales that has to be unknotted by the time we're actually at the close of the film. First we see both sisters survive, only to cut and have Lisa stuck at the bottom of the ocean and her sister killed by a shark - the pair being rescued a result of nitrogen narcosis from huffing too much gas.
A bleak ending suits the films tone, but what was a sharp and snappy narrative becomes muddied by the bait and switch, numbing audiences to the reality of Lisa's situation with a messy finale to be picked out between all the dark shots of endless water.
If they were going to stick with the fake out, director Johannes Roberts should have gone with the original that saw Lisa die when the hallucination wore off. Might as well go whole hog here and avoid the cliches of the inexperienced diver surviving by virtue of her sacrificial mentor.