10 Film Directors Who Used The Same Ending Twice
9. The Protagonist Succumbs To An Evil Ritual - Ari Aster
The Original
Ari Aster's soul-crushing horror debut Hereditary ends with sole survivor Peter (Alex Wolff) revealed to have been a helpless pawn in a cult's ritual to find a human host for the demon they worship, Paimon.
In the final scene, a weakened Peter becomes the vessel for Paimon, with Aster lingering on Peter's ambiguous facial expression as it appears that the cult has completed their task.
The Repeat
Aster's follow-up Midsommar has a number of superficial similarities to Hereditary, namely that it's similarly centered around an extremely traumatic bereavement and the central characters' response to it.
While the movie then heads in some directions very much its own, it ultimately ends up circling back to a Hereditary-adjacent ending.
In this case, it's revealed that protagonist Dani (Florence Pugh) has effectively been manipulated by the neopagan cult over the course of the film, who took advantage of her grief to bring her into their order.
And so, in the final scene as Dani watches her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) burn to death in a ritual sacrifice, Aster clings to Dani's inscrutable facial expressions, which change from horror to happiness with no further context given.
In both instances the endings are crushingly effective and invite fierce debate from audiences, no matter that they're basically variations on the same elemental idea: innocence corrupted and vulnerability exploited.