10 Horror Movies With Seriously Messed Up Endings

The Plot

A fairly run of the mill 80s slasher for the most part, Sleepaway Camp tells the tale of Angela – a young orphaned girl who is sent to live with her cousin Ricky and eccentric aunt after witnessing the death of her father and brother Peter in a horrific boating accident.

Years later Ricky and Angela, now in her young teens and still severely traumatised, are attending summer camp which as any horror fan will tell you often isn’t the safest place to be. The introverted Angela becomes the brunt of her peers’ bullying but finds a few allies in camp counsellors Ronnie and Susie and her protective cousin Ricky.

Campers who have taunted Angela start getting offed in variously gruesome ways and it seems pretty obvious that Angela must be behind the murders. So far, so predictable 80s slasher right?

The Ending

Wrong! Angela is indeed the killer, but there’s a much bigger twist coming our way. As the body count rises and the counsellors finally catch on that there’s a murderer stalking the camp, they start searching for missing campers.

Ronnie and Susie find a naked Angela humming crazily to herself and cradling something in her arms. A flashback shows us what transpired after the boating accident that killed her family years earlier: it was actually Peter that survived the accident, not ‘Angela’, and the eccentric (or rather, batsh*t insane) aunt that took him in decided to raise him as his dead sister. As you do.

Angela/Peter stands up and drops the severed head of a fellow camper she’d been cradling and shows us proof of her masculinity in all its full-frontal glory. It’s not so much the severed head or even the dangling genitalia that’s shocking, but more the crazed look on Angela/Peter’s face and the ungodly hiss they’re making that’s really messed up.