10 Horror Movie Franchises That Wasted Their Perfect Ending

The caveat here, is that the attention is on the UK cut of Neil Marshall's The Descent.

This 2005 feature focusses on a group of friends whose caving adventure goes array after a) they get lost in said cave, and b) that cave just so happens to be inhabited by flesh-craving crawlers.

While the US version of The Descent ends with Shauna Macdonald's Sarah managing to eventually escape this cave and be the film's sole survivor, the UK cut - which was the original version of the movie - has Sarah's escape merely being a hallucination. In reality, she's stranded in the cave and waiting to become crawler chow.

Not every movie has to have a happy ending, and The Descent is legitimately one of the greatest soul-crushing finales in the history of horror and likely in the history of cinema, period. There's no victory parade, there's no overcoming the odds, there's no besting the bad guy. Nope, The Descent's final moments are a devasting, depressing punch to the gut.

It's just a shame that this misery was made redundant when The Descent Part 2 was released in 2009 and explained how Sarah really did manage to escape from the bleakness of the first film's cave setting.