10 More Horror Movies Where Evil Wins

Because the hero has to lose sometimes.

By Jack Pooley /

While it's generally expected that the hero will eventually prevail over the villain in most movies, that's of course not always the case, and a villainous victory is never more common than in the horror genre.

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The very nature of horror movies - often defined by their downcast tone and the studio's deep desire for sequels - mean there's a not insignificant chance the bad guy(s) will come out on top in the end.

While plenty of horror pictures manage a compromise by letting the protagonist survive to the end, all while hinting at the masked killer's survival, these films handed a decisive L to the hero and let the baddie score a massive, unambiguous victory before the credits rolled.

And so, following up our previous 10 Horror Movies Where Evil Wins, here are ten more horror features that let heinous evil win, whether to the audience's satisfaction or deep disappointment.

From malevolent supernatural entities to shadowy cabals, flesh-and-blood sociopaths, and everything in-between, these evil forces all triumphed over the poor saps they were targeting, leaving audiences totally shook in the process, for better or worse.

10. Sinister

Sinister's ending may not be perfect - the Creepy Kids Collective is more than a little corny - but it gets a lot of credit for cleverly subverting one major convention of the haunted house movie.

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"Why don't they just leave the house!?," we all scream at our TVs in movies like this, but to his credit, true crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) eventually does just that, taking his family from the seemingly haunted Stevenson house and back to their former abode. But the twist ending reveals that each of the prior murder victims were only killed after they moved out of the haunted house, in turn meaning that Ellison has just inadvertently marked himself and his family for death.

Ellison then passes out and wakes up to find himself, his wife, and son bound on the floor, with their daughter Ashley (Clare Foley) responsible. With Ashley under the control of pagan deity Bughuul, she murders her family with an axe and then disappears into the void with the entity. 

Evil wins, with the good guys clearly being totally outfoxed from the jump.

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