20 Horror Movies So Good You Overlook Huge Flaws

7. The Birds - The Weak Ending

There's a saying that you don't always remember a whole story, but you'll usually remember how it ends. A terrible ending can sometimes obliterate the entire thing singlehandedly. Sometimes.

On other occasions, the rest of it is so bloody great that a disappointing conclusion feels like little more than an inconvenience. Such is the case with Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, a natural horror flick that sees Hitchcock at the peak of his powers. Coming right off the aforementioned Psycho, Hitchcock crafted yet another horror masterpiece, using his consummate command of film language and storytelling to weave an enthralling horror yarn in which everyday birds are suddenly some of the scariest villains in horror history. 

But alas, the ending is a total anticlimax. The surviving main characters leave the house they've been hiding in and drive away. Despite being surrounded by birds, none of them attack, and the characters are allowed to drive away. The Birds suddenly ends there, and while ambiguous endings can be good, this one just felt a bit lazy above all else, mainly as the birds just allowing them to leave didn't fit in with what we'd seen from them throughout the rest of the story. 

You can put this in the same folder as pictures such as, say, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's a mostly magisterial offering that drops the ball in the last moments.