10 Utterly Devastating Horror Movie Endings You Didn't See Coming

It's important to know what you are letting yourself in for when watching a movie. Though we all like to be surprised on a wider level, watch a comedy for a laugh, an action film for some adrenaline-fuelled thrills, and so forth.

In that same regard, horror movies by and large are designed specifically to make an audience feel scared and uncomfortable, and in some cases, genuinely scar them for life. Some things simply cannot be unseen, but even going into a film with this attitude doesn't always save a viewer from feeling utterly inconsolable afterwards.

This is where a solid ending can change the game. It doesn't matter how gruesome, gory, or bleak a story has been, a good horror flick can always shift gears right at the end, with no one able to see what was coming.

Characters have died, have been revealed to be dead for some time, monstrosities have quite literally been born, and happy endings have been cruelly snatched away. Yes, the genre isn't exactly known for leaving an audience with sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows on their minds by the end, but some take things way beyond that to the point of genuine devastation.

Such is the tragedy of Dani's (Florence Pugh) life within the story of Midsommar, the opening scenes that see the fallout from her sister's murder of their parents and subsequent suicide only scratch the surface of the ordeal she is about to go through.

While a horror film removing its cast of characters to a rather claustrophobic and isolated setting of the Swedish woods was never going to end well, you'd still be hard-pressed to find someone who could telegraph how the thing was going to end.

On a vacation fuelled more by grief than anything, with a boyfriend who simply couldn't be bothered with her emotions, Dani's downward spiral was as rapid as it was shocking. The festival turned out to be a cultist community, with sacrificial elders, murder, and humiliation rituals aplenty, and Dani managed to be the sole survivor from her visiting group. 

Though this may be the case, it's a hard ending to read. Dani survived, but now, as the May Queen of the community, she's almost trapped there. She may have gotten some sort of revenge on her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) by all but ordering his death by fire, but the fact that this is where her life led her is utterly heartbreaking, so much so that Florence Pugh quit the horror genre altogether.