20 Horror Movie Happy Endings Nobody Saw Coming

19. The Conjuring

With The Conjuring being a James Wan joint, it was fair to expect something of a bleak ending, what with the grim conclusions to his previous films Saw, Dead Silence, and Insidious in particular.

Yet The Conjuring wraps up with the entire Perron family surviving their traumatic supernatural ordeal, and Wan goes even further than that, as he very pointedly avoids the "one last jump scare" cliche he so clearly sets us up for.

After the Perrons get back to normal life, demonologist Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) takes their haunted music box and places it inside his special room of cursed artifacts.

Wan then closes in tight on the musical box for a frankly excruciating amount of time, priming the audience to expect one more jump scare. But alas, it never happens - the music box simply stops chiming and we quietly cut to the end credits.

In 2013, when supernatural horror was arguably at its peak and obnoxious jump scare endings were very much the rage, ending the film like this was such a breath of fresh air.