10 Great Cliffhanger Endings From Recent Horror Movies
The ambiguous endings that'll keep you up at night.
A great cliffhanger ending can be a tough nut to crack. Get it right and you leave your audience in suspense, inspiring many post-film discussions and debates as to what might happen to our protagonists. Who can forget the eerily ambiguous conclusion of John Carpenter’s The Thing for instance, or the shocking final scare at the end of The Blair Witch Project.
Get it wrong though, and you risk leaving your audience with a frustrated feeling that they’ve watched an incomplete story that the writers were either just too lazy to finish or are hedging their bets on future sequels to resolve dangling plot threads.
These endings can be set up in several ways; perhaps a final shock reveal will show our antagonist to still be alive and out for revenge, or perhaps they’ll show our protagonists to still be under threat or trapped, cutting to black before we have a chance to see things fully play out.
Other times, we are presented with more subtle cliffhangers, showing a seemingly happy ending for our characters and a clear wrap-up of their story, but with just enough hints to leave us with a lingering sense of dread around what further horror might be in store after the credits roll.
Ultimately, leaving things to our imagination can sometimes be the scariest ending of all, and here are ten recent horror movies that stuck the landing and delivered impactful cliffhangers that left us shaken.