10 Horror Movie Villains You Didn't Realise Actually Won

While it's expected for the hero to eventually come out on top in most movies, the horror genre is at least a little different.

In horror, even if the protagonist makes it to the end in one piece, that's rarely the end of the story, with a final scene often showing the audience that the killer is still around in some form, ready for a sequel should the studio pull the trigger on it. Box office depending, of course.

Some movies play this up more overtly than others, and sometimes the villain's survival or even flat-out victory proves sly enough that you might not have even noticed it.

And that's absolutely the case with these 10 horror movies, each of which dished out under-the-radar wins to the antagonists, even if the audience isn't really encouraged to appreciate that fact.

In some instances the filmmakers were clearly angling for a sequel that may or may not have ever happened, and in others they simply failed to implicate the bleaker implications of how they wrapped things up.

It might not seem like it at first, but in these horror flicks the bad guys came out on top...

Final Destination 2 ends with protagonists Kimberly (A. J. Cook) and Thomas (Michael Landes) seemingly managing to cheat Death for good. 

Given that the pair haven't reappeared in any sequels and every other major character in the series has been claimed by Death in the end, they're effectively the series' two only survivors.

Except, not quite.

The DVD release of Final Destination 3 includes a "Choose Your Fate" feature, allowing audiences to watch alternate branching paths of various scenes from the film.

This includes a different ending in which a newspaper cutting is briefly visible which reveals that Kimberly and Thomas were killed in a freak woodchipper accident. 

And even if you dismiss this as non-canon, it's worth knowing that, according to franchise creator Craig Perry, the intent was always to have Death beat the duo eventually.

In fact, the original plan was to have Kimberly and Thomas show up in Final Destination 3's final train crash sequence, yet due to scheduling conflicts it never happened.

But given that neither has been heard from since the second movie, and Final Destination 5 did everything it could to give Death a decisive victory over everyone, it's clear that the duo aren't still among the living.