10 Most Disturbing Horror Movie Endings

This one may be the most infamous on this list, but it’s also the most poignant and pointed. George A. Romero’s first foray into the land of the recently revived walking dead ends on a nihilistic note which underscores the film’s social commentary as well as cementing its place in horror history.

Ben, the sole survivor of the unbearably tense and increasingly hopeless night-long siege, finally manages to escape the cellar he’s been forced to hole up in after dispatching his former fellow survivors once they turned to reanimated people eaters. He walks out into the sunshine and, in a moment perfectly parodied decades later in Eli Roth’s feature debut Cabin Fever, is promptly shot by a posse who are out hunting zombies—and evidently failing to do their due diligence.

It’s no coincidence that Ben is a rare black hero in horror, and there’s a sharp insight into the horrors of racial stereotyping in the thoughtless way which the locals dispatch him without a word of warning or any attempt at communication—a clear message that they never viewed him as human. The ending presages Romero’s series-long recurring focus on the failings of his human characters, culminating in Land of the Dead wherein the zombies are some of the least evil beings onscreen.