10 Horror Movies That Ended Too Soon

The ending of a movie is one of its most important aspects. It's likely what most people will discuss first when they walk out of the cinema and will greatly influence their lasting impression of the entire work.

So, naturally, it's important to stick the landing when it comes to the climax, and horror films have a long history of their endings leaving a strong, lasting impression. Who could forget Carrie's final jump scare as the undead hand shoots out of the grave? Or The Shining's jarring jump cut to a frozen Jack Torrance's deranged gurning?

Unfortunately, something that can happen to both the best and worst horror films is they decide to end it all just a little too soon. Sometimes everything that came before is still enough to leave an audience with an overall positive impression - but sometimes it isn't.

So, which horror movies could have kept going? Which tales of terror could have given their audiences even more nightmares if they just showed a little patience? Let's see if your favourite, or least favourite, horror flick made it onto this list.

Spoilers follow.

The film adaption of World War Z takes the book's highly original presentation, subtitled 'An Oral History of the Zombie War', and turns it into an action film that doesn't do nearly as much to distinguish itself from other zombie stories. It's far from an awful movie but its ending has garnered negative attention from more than a few critics.

Former UN operative Gerry Lane fights his way through hordes of zombies around the globe in his efforts to help synthetize a vaccine for the plague. After successfully completing his mission, he returns to his family in Nova Scotia and tells us in a monotone voiceover that people all over the world are now rising up against the undead.

And that's exactly the problem: we are told in a quick montage about people fighting back against the zombies and not actually shown the fighting in the detail it deserves. This makes the movie feel like it just ran out of time and decided to wrap everything up in a quick voiceover, rather than dedicating more time to exploring these new ideas.

This makes more sense when you discover that there was meant to be a climactic battle set in Moscow and filmed in Budapest, before legal issues with Hungarian authorities and weapons permits derailed the shoot. So it's no wonder that the fans felt a little robbed by this cobbled together ending they got instead.