10 Most Shocking Horror Movie Endings
When the best scares were saved til last.
Horror movies usually end in one of two ways: with a blatant sequel setup, or a shocking stinger that chills the audience to their collective core and plays on their minds long after the final credits have rolled.
Scary movies with generic happy endings might well exist, but concluding on a bleak, tragic or unnerving note has been a genre tradition for generations, not to mention a better fit for the subject matter.
People pay to see these films because they want to be scared, jump out of their seats in a shower of popcorn, and return home to an evening of nightmares, so ensuring this happens at the end is simply the filmmaker taking a supply and demand approach.
A sad truth of horror is that the genre has become over-saturated across the generations. Everything has been done to death, including shock endings of virtually every variety, but it's important to remember the movies that did this stuff first, from the Hitchcockian classics, to the early slasher movies that inspired countless imitators.
These are the films that should be celebrated for saving the best scare til last...
10. Psycho: Mother Takes Over
It's been imitated, parodied and analysed to the point where it's lost all meaning, but try and appreciate just how shocking the ending to Psycho was to unsuspecting cinemagoers back in 1960.
Who would possibly have suspected the unassuming mother's boy Norman Bates of dressing up as his late parent, murdering people and hanging out with her decomposing corpse? Even by today's standards, that came straight out of left field.
It's that final shot of Norman that lives long in the memory, the scene where his mother's voice plays in his head while he sits statue still in a police cell, famously insisting that she "wouldn't even hurt a fly". The Norma personality is now in control.
Moments before the scene fades to make way for a shot of Marion's car being pulled out of the swamp, a barely perceptible image of a human skull flashes across Norman's face as the evil buried deep within rises to the surface. It's nuanced Hitchcock at his very finest.