10 Horror Movies With Seriously Messed Up Endings
No final girl for you.
A horror movie with a f*cked up ending? Well, colour me flabbergasted!
Seriously though, we know that horror films aren’t exactly known for their sunshine and rainbow filled plotlines and happy endings – what with all the death and gore and stuff – but a lot have finales in which there’s at least some sort of vaguely positive resolution or retribution.
You know the type: the bad guy is killed, the final girl survives and there’s momentary relief for the horror movie’s protagonists usually paired with an ending that leaves the door wide open for the five or six obligatory horror sequels. Something along those lines that’s at least roughly resembles a happy ending.
But certain horror movies have no mercy, either for their characters or for us horror aficionados. Some horrors are basically just a barrage of death, gore and despair from start to finish and when horror finales go dark they go pitch black.
From classic horrors to depressingly disturbing newcomers to the genre, these horror film finales are such a gut punch that they’re bound to leave even the most seasoned of horror fans reeling.
Major spoilers are coming your way, obviously.
10. The Descent
The Plot
A year after the tragic death of her husband and daughter in a car accident, the still grieving Sarah goes on a recuperative spelunking adventure with her group of outdoorsy girlfriends. While they’re exploring a particularly claustrophobic passage in an unexplored cave system, rockfall blocks their only way out.
As if being trapped miles beneath the surface of the earth with little hope of rescue wasn’t terrifying enough, it soon transpires that the group aren’t alone when they find the caves are inhabited by subterranean humanoid creatures with a taste for human flesh.
The Ending
As the group fall prey to the creatures only Sarah and her friend Juno (who it turns out was having an affair with her husband before he died) remain. Sarah stabs Juno in the leg with a pickaxe (understandable) and leaves her for the cave-swelling flesh-eaters to make her escape alone but falls down a hole and is briefly knocked unconscious.
She quickly awakens however, sees daylight and manages to escape the caves. Hysterical, she finally reaches her car and drives away only to be startled by the ghostly apparition of Juno sitting next to her.
Now if you’ve only seen the American version, here’s where the movie ends. A good enough jump scare ending, but it’s the ending in the original British cut deemed too depressing for American audiences that really packs a punch.
The scene cuts back to the cave where Sarah awakens having dreamt her escape and the camera pans out as we hear the screeching creatures advancing upon her. No final girl for us.