10 Most Disappointing Endings In Movie History

The fear of the ocean is called thalassophobia, and it’s a fairly common fear, going by the popularity of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, who incorporated that phobia into his work extensively. The sheer enormity of the ocean, and not knowing truly what lurks within, should be relatable to a lot of people, and that’s what made The Abyss so tense.

It’s marketed as a simple sci-fi movie, but there is certainly horror to it. Being sunk in a submarine and being unable to be rescued; strange unidentifiable lights watching you; water flooding into an enclosed location and having no way of stopping it - it’s terrifying. So when the film instead changes from a claustrophobic drama to a weird alien film, it’s another one of those tone shifts that can really mess with you.

In truth, the film would have been better if the aliens were more Lovecraftian, Cthulhu-esque beasts that the characters had to fight off, but instead they’re benevolent, and the rest of the film was spent worrying over nothing. Director James Cameron doesn’t seem to be a fan of anything but the happy ending, as Terminator, Aliens and Avatar have shown.

As it turns out, the original plot of the film involved Cold War tensions that were resolved by the aliens’ appearance, but even this might not have made up for the letdown after a movie’s worth of sheer underwater terror.