10 Horror Movies That Originally Had A Much Darker Ending

It's safe to say that horror stories are the last place anyone should look to for a happy ending. After all, a large part of what makes the genre so uniquely thrilling is that there's no guarantee that the heroes will make it to the end, or that the bad guys will get their comeuppance.

This fact naturally leads to horror movies having some of the darkest endings ever committed to celluloid. It has also, naturally, led to filmmakers who pushed the envelope farther than their collaborators found acceptable, meaning some of the most brutal and depressing endings in movie history met their ultimate fate on the cutting room floor.

This list, naturally, will be focusing on these unremittingly bleak scraps of cinematic history. Intriguingly, while all of these endings are undeniably darker than the ones that replaced them, some of them are actually better fits for their respective films than the endings that replaced them.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the bleakest non-canon endings in movie history, and whether or not they were better than the finales that wound up gracing the silver screen.

Serving as a prequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, 2017's Leatherface didn't exactly wow the critics. Much of the movie's criticism came from its overly sanitised tone, which made the movie feel at odds with the disturbing, grindhouse atmosphere of the original movie. Had the movie kept its original ending, however, this particular critique would have been harder to justify.

In the movie's original cut, Final Girl Elizabeth "Lizzy" White is swiftly decapitated by Leatherface's infamous weapon of choice. Horrible, yes, but when you remember the brutality the eponymous villain inflicted on his victims in the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre you could almost argue Leatherface was being merciful in granting Lizzy a quick death.

Especially when you see her fate in the alternate ending.

In this deleted scene, the camera pans around to Elizabeth's body - stuck on a meat hook, missing a leg and having had the skin around the lower half of her face peeled off to make Leatherface's mask. The worst part is she's still alive to suffer through all this.

This gruesome, inhumane treatment of his victims is far more in character with the Leatherface of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and would have gone some way to silencing critics of the prequel's relatively lighter tone. (With heavy emphasis on the word "relatively".)