10 Horror Movies With Seriously Messed Up Endings

The Plot

The late, great George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is the quintessential zombie flick. A truly ground-breaking movie, it broke with convention by casting a black actor (Duane Jones) as hero and featuring unprecedented levels of gore for the late 1960s and influenced countless horror movies to come.

Jones stars as Ben, man who takes shelter in an isolated farmhouse with a fellow group of survivors after a zombie apocalypse overruns rural Pennsylvania. It’s soon clear than Ben is the only person equipped to deal with the dead rising from their graves and as the night goes on, more of the group succumb to either the zombie horde or their own stupidity and soon Ben is the only one left.

The Ending

Ben survives the night and by morning finds the zombie horde being thinned out by a group of gun-toting, redneck-looking dudes. He cautiously goes to make his way outside and just when we think our hero’s is going to make it – BANG! – the rednecks shoot him, mistaking him for another zombie. His lifeless body is then unceremoniously dumped on a pyre and burnt alongside the corpses of the living dead.

Although Romero himself has said that Jones’ casting was merely because he was the best man for the part as opposed to a political statement the movie, especially its ending with Ben’s senseless death at the hands of a redneck posse, is undeniably evocative of America’s racial tensions which makes its finale all the more bleak.