10 Horror Movies That Left Out The True Horrific Ending

Sometimes the real world is far scarier than the big screen.

The Exorcism Of Emily Rose
Lakeshore Entertainment

The thing about horror movies - and all movies, to be fair - is that they end.

Once the credits roll and audiences stop watching, that's it. The characters in the movie are frozen in time, left exactly where they were in the final frame of the film. Nothing else happens to them.

But real life has no credits. The cameras never stop rolling. People aren't just left standing in a certain place for the rest of time - their lives move on.

That can create some interesting dissonance between horror films based on true stories and the actual events that inspired them. Whilst the cinematic versions of these tales wrap everything up in a nice little bow, reality is far messier than fiction and there's often more to a story than what goes into a Hollywood picture.

These ten horrors are all rooted in the real world somehow but left out key details of the actual story. Maybe it was to cut time, maybe it was to fit the story better, or maybe it was to spare audiences of the horrifying truth behind these so-called "true" stories.

10. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Exorcism Of Emily Rose
Bryanston Distributing Company

The original 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre shares some of its DNA with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs.

All three films take some inspiration from Ed Gein, a real-life killer with a habit of making trinkets out of dead people's bones and skin. Sound familiar?

Gein was not the only real-life figure that writers Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel borrowed from in this movie. In an interview with Texas Monthly, Henkel revealed that another genuine criminal was part of Leatherface's character.

Elmer Wayne Henley was an accomplice to an older serial killer in the '70s, helping him lure his victims back to his home.

As Henkel says, "I saw some news report where Elmer Wayne said, 'I did these crimes, and I'm gonna stand up and take it like a man'. Well, that struck me as interesting, that he had this conventional morality at that point."

The disparity between Henley's utterly monstrous actions and his apparent moral compass is extremely disturbing. How can one man commit such heinous acts and own up to them with such an apparent lack of guilt?

It's unsettling, and a vital detail missing from the first Massacre film.

Contributor
Contributor

Jacob Simmons has a great many passions, including rock music, giving acclaimed films three-and-a-half stars, watching random clips from The Simpsons on YouTube at 3am, and writing about himself in the third person.