13 Scariest Movie Endings That Kept You Up All Night

13. Drag Me To Hell

The heroine's fate might be right there staring at us from the title itself - and yet, it's still a genuine shocker once it actually comes to pass in the final moments.

After reaching blockbuster success as the director of Sony's original Spider-Man trilogy, Sam Raimi returned to his roots with this outlandish horror comedy, centring on Alison Lohman as Christine, an ambitious bank employee who denies a loan extension to an elderly woman, and winds up cursed.

Drag Me To Hell was somewhat mispromoted on release, built up to be an entirely straight-faced shocker, when it's in fact a far more tongue in cheek, slapstick fuelled "spook-a-blast" (to use Raimi's own term), in the vein of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness.

However, as Raimi's earlier films demonstrated, just because a movie is funny doesn't mean it can't be genuinely scary at the same time - and Drag Me To Hell has some very scary moments indeed, not least in its jaw-dropping conclusion in which, despite all her best efforts to deflect the curse, Christine is dragged to hell after all.

After we've spent so long rooting for the heroine, seeing her struggle in the face of adversity, appear to find the answers, yet fall nonetheless; it's truly unexpected. That final image of demonic hands bursting from the train tracks, Lohman's face turning skeletal before our eyes as the train comes hurtling over, is one that'll really stay with you.