10 Most Shocking Horror Movie Endings
9. Halloween: It Was The Boogeyman
When John Carpenter chose to end the original Halloween on a chillingly ambiguous note, with Michael Myers's ultimate fate unknown, his intention wasn't to kickstart a multi-sequel slasher franchise, as hard as that is to believe given what came next.
After launching a final assault on Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode, the masked psychopath is shot six times by his physician Doctor Loomis and falls off a balcony, but moments later, his apparent corpse is gone.
In many ways, Halloween would have been all the more terrifying if that was the last we ever saw of Myers. The fear of the unknown, the mystery surrounding his undying evil left intact through the ages.
The original indie slasher is so terrifying because Myers is depicted as a force of nature, an almost spectral presence in an otherwise grounded world. The less the audience knows, the scarier he is, which is why very few of the sequels worked.
"It was the Boogeyman..."
"As a matter of fact, it was..." when Donald Pleasence utters that final line, the audience is left to contemplate the grim realisation that Boogeymen actually exist.