10 Scariest Sci-Fi Movie Endings Ever
These are the sci-fi endings that forced you sleep with the lights on.
As a genre, sci-fi deals with the fantastical, theoretical, and the otherworldly. Stories revolving around time travel, space exploration, and other universes don't just entertain us but help expand our imagination.
But science fiction also has a habit of being creepy as hell. When you're watching characters running away from demons, aliens, robots, or just trying to survive in a dystopian future, you can't help feeling unnerved. Some sci-fi movies are so disturbing, they terrify the audience... even if they aren't classified as horror!
Ultimately, the most important scare in a film has to be the last one. If done badly, it can make a solid movie come across as disappointly anticlimactic. But if the finisher is deservingly frightening, it can haunt viewers for many years to come. These spine-chilling moments can take many forms. An ending can be eerie because of a freaky image, a well-timed jump scare, a bloodcurdling sound effect, a spooky line of dialogue, or a shocking twist.
Even if you've seen these sci-fi movies a dozen times, it's guaranteed the final scenes still unsettle you.
10. 12 Monkeys
12 Monkeys revolves around a virus that killed 99% of humanity, forcing the survivors to send a man named Cole back in time to prevent it from happening. Throughout his mission, Cole keeps having flashbacks of a childhood memory where he witnessed a man being shot dead at an airport.
In the final scene, Cole discovers the man who will unleash the virus while at an airport. As Cole is about to kill him, he is shot by a police officer. Just before he dies, he looks to the crowd and sees himself as a child. Before passing away, Cole acknowledges that the man he saw being shot when he was a kid was actually himself.
This ending is disturbing for multiple reasons. First off, Cole failed to stop the virus from wiping out humanity. Also, this conclusion proves Cole is a victim of predestination. In layman's terms, the timestream is set so Cole never have altered the past. And to top it all off, Cole is stuck in a paradoxical time loop where he must watch himself die for all eternity.