10 Best Movies Where Everyone Dies

Happy endings aren’t all their chalked up to be anymore. With so many films filling up studio shelves and overflowing DVD racks, there’s only so much ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ we can take.

What’s the remedy to this, you ask? Why, that would be killing everyone off in a fiery filmic blaze, of course. Films that are not afraid to treat their characters realistically are much more fun to watch, as TV fans can surely attest to with shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead and their notorious blood-lust.

Taking a leaf out of their book, these ten films embrace death to its most extreme - leaving no one standing from either the main cast, or in some cases, the entire world, by the closing credits. Nice.

Cinematically, being able to kill your characters offers higher stakes throughout the film, better tension as there’s actual lives on the line, and an unpredictability that fans will appreciate. Whether it be through cataclysmic events, infectious disease, or just plain old murder, there’s plenty of ways to wipe out a cast and shake things up, as these examples definitely prove...

The sequel to the original Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes explores exactly what it says on the tin - a subterranean colony of mutant humans that live beneath the main cities occupied by futuristic primates. Simple.

In all seriousness though, the instalment documents Brent's travel to the planet of the apes in search of the astronaut from the original film, George Taylor. In his search for the lost American, Brent discovers the aggressive ape community that now inhabit earth, and a colony of rebel humans living out under what used to be New York that communicate telepathically to avoid detection by the apes.

Worshipping a giant nuclear bomb and deformed from years of radiative exposure, Brent has to try and find Taylor whilst surviving two battling species that are just as primitive as each other. With the apes intent on wiping out humankind and eventually discovering the underground group, the bomb is detonated in a final act of defiance when the two worlds come to battle - wiping out the planet and its inhabitants in the process.

This didn't stop numerous sequels, remakes, and reboots from happening however - though the central themes of race and war have always been interestingly played out on screen in the ape movies. Whilst Beneath isn't the best of the franchise, it is one of the strangest and most daring, making it a worthwhile watch when you're having an existential crisis.