12 Greatest Red Herring Movie Endings

8. The Aliens Didn't Defeat The Army - The Mist

Frank Darabont's terrifying adaptation of Steven King's sci-fi horror novella devotes a lot of its screen time to convincing the audience that humanity is on its last legs, with a science experiment gone awry bringing a fleet of terrifying, tentacled monsters into our universe.

This pays off in act three as protagonist David (Thomas Jane), his son and a few other survivors drive their car past a gigantic, six-legged monster the size of a modest skyscraper, resigning them to the fact there's no way out of this situation.

As such, David and the other adults enter a suicide pact, which culminates in David shooting everyone else dead, including his young son, before trying to shoot himself but running out of bullets.

As he hears the monsters approaching, he runs out into the mist hoping to be set free from this life, only to be met by a series of U.S. Army tanks rolling through the mist. Mere moments after David killed his own son and several others, he realises they all would've survived if they just waited a few minutes longer, as the U.S. Army has now effectively conquered the creatures.

Though it flirts with being almost comedically miserable, this was extremely clever, in setting a relentlessly miserable, hopeless tone and then pulling the rug out with an ironically "happy" ending, for most of humanity at least.