10 Utterly Devastating Horror Movie Endings You Didn't See Coming
9. Night Of The Living Dead
Inspired by Robert Matheson's novel I Am Legend, long before the disappointing Will Smith-led adaptation of 2007, Night of the Living Dead quickly became one of the most iconic and influential horror films of all time. Just about every zombie movie can trace its roots back to 1968.
As may be expected, one of the biggest things at play is the sheer hopelessness of the protagonists against the titular living dead. There were plenty of different escape routes tried, with all of them resulting in death all the same.
Ben (Duane Jones), the character who had argued against cowering and hiding, ultimately survived by cowering and hiding. However, as a posse went around in the daylight of the next morning, essentially cleaning up and picking off any zombies they could see, Ben was mistaken for a ghoul through the window of the house he'd made his hiding place, and was shot clean in the head.
Even in the world of horror, audiences will generally expect a win for the good guys, but that certainly wasn't the case with Ben, and how poignant and poetic that it was a group of living humans that killed him rather than the dead. Clearly, George A. Romero understood Matheson's novel better than the 2007 film version ever did.