10 Horror Movie Villains KILLED Before The End

10. Howard Stambler - 10 Cloverfield Lane

10 Cloverfield Lane was basically sold as a kitchen sink riff on the original found footage monster movie, focused instead on a group of survivors residing in an underground bunker while the Earth above them is decimated by the alien invasion.

With no apparent presence of the monster from Cloverfield, however, crazed survivalist Howard Stambler (a brilliant John Goodman) turns out to be the movie's prevailing antagonist; a man who effectively keeps fellow survivors Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) as hostages.

That is until he kills Emmett, of course.

This all appears to provide plenty of conflict to sustain this tightly wound chamber piece all the way to the finish, but Howard actually ends up shuffling off his mortal coil a little earlier than expected. He's killed when Michelle horribly maims him with a vat of acid, leaving him unable to escape the bunker as it catches fire and explodes.

Much as this might appear to be a logical end-point for the story, the film ends up going on for another 10-or-so minutes, as Michelle encounters an alien spacecraft and is then forced to battle it.

It's often mentioned that the final sequence feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie, and given that 10 Cloverfield Lane was adapted from an unrelated spec script called The Cellar, it's easy to believe that the story originally ended when Michelle killed Howard and left the bunker.