10 Great Horror Movies Where The World Literally Ends

Anyone who's seen more than a few horror movies will be well aware that things often don't go well for the central characters, and the prospect of a happy ending is decidedly less likely than in other genres. 

These bleak endings tend to be localised to the characters of the story, but not all horror films are created equal, and some dare to take the stakes to a near-unimaginable, literally global scale. And so, the following 10 horror films, each terrific in their own way, concluded with the ultimate Bad Ending - the end of our very own world as we know it.

These movies all climaxed with an apocalyptic finale that saw humanity wiped out and Earth destroyed, or in the very least the suggestion that humanity's time was imminently nearing its end. It's a terrifying existential thought, that the billions and billions of lives on this planet could be snuffed out by an aggressive exterior force, from aliens to Hellish monsters, ensuring that each of these endings haunted viewers long after the end credits rolled.

So, no matter how bad your day might've been, remember that it can always be worse and Earth could've been turned into a hellscape or exploded by extraterrestrials, among other things.

The original international release of Evil Dead threequel Army of Darkness had a much bleaker ending than the cheesier, sunnier one shot for U.S. audiences.

In both versions, Ash (Bruce Campbell) consumes a potion that allows him to return to the present, but in the international cut, the final punchline is that Ash miscalculated the amount of potion he had to consume, drinking seven drops instead of six, causing him to oversleep by centuries. And so, when a raggedly, bearded Ash finally awakens, he's in a future post-apocalyptic London where humanity appears to have been wiped out entirely, and he can only lament that he overslept.

Unsurprisingly, this ending was loathed by the studio, who persuaded director Sam Raimi to shoot a more conventionally satisfying climax for the U.S. market. All the same, it provided one hell of a cliffhanger setup for a fourth movie which, of course, sadly never came to pass.