10 Movie Endings That Left A Sour Taste In Your Mouth

5. The Nightmare - Deliverance

Deliverance chronicles a canoe trip to the Georgia backcountry gone totally and utterly wrong, as four friends from the city - Lewis (Burt Reynolds), Ed (Jon Voight), Drew (Ronny Cox) and Bobby (Ned Beatty) - encounter a couple of hillbillies with sinister intentions. Bobby is raped, which inspires Lewis to take action: he kills one of the hillbillies, which leads to disaster when the men attempt to make it to the end of the river in their canoes.

Drew dies; Lewis is severely injured; Bobby is too distraught to act. It's up to Ed to get his friends home in one piece, and he's forced to kill and then lie about what happened in the process. The ending of the film is capped with a nasty stinger, as Ed - back in his own bed - awakens from a nightmare in which a hillbilly's hand rises eerily from a lake.

It's a very, very unsettlingly end to a film that already embraced a relentless tone of anxiousness from start to finish - after everything that Ed has been through, we are made to feel like co-conspirators in his crimes. We understand why he did what he did, and also - to an extent - why he chose to lie about it to the police. But like Deliverance's protagonist, movie-goers are left with a sense of guilt - a fear that the secret isn't quite buried.