20 Horror Movie Endings That Are Practically Perfect

17. The Devil's Rejects - Free Bird

Two years after his absolutely dire directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses, rockstar-turned-horror-director Rob Zombie's sophomore feature continued the story of the Firefly family, a family of serial killers. 

The Devil's Rejects, though certainly not to all tastes, is a vastly superior beast to its predecessor and sees Rob Zombie come into his own as a director while giving these frightening, well-played villains a proper chance to shine. This time around, they're on the road and on the run from a vengeful sheriff who's just as ruthless as they are. 

The influence of killers-on-the-run films like Bonnie & Clyde and Badlands is evident from the off, and the former is particularly significant in this regard. Just like Bonnie & Clyde, The Devil's Rejects has a crazy ending in which the main characters are finally gunned down by the authorities. 

The Devil's Rejects ends with the Firefly family driving at a road blockade, guns blazing, as Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird blares over the scene. A decade before it was immortalized in Kingsman's church fight, that Southern Rock classic was beautifully deployed to represent a final explosion of defiant rage from these murderous southerners.

It's also excellently shot and edited, with the blurred, slow-motion camerawork giving this sequence a heightened, surrealistic feeling that captures the bitter desperation of these grotesque characters in their last moments. This was a fabulous slice of pure cinema, and perhaps the single best achievement of Rob Zombie's entire career as a director.