12 Most Hopeless Horror Movie Endings
7. The Descent
A timeless classic in every sense and one of the best examples of British horror at its peak, The Descent possesses an ending so bleak and hopeless that it was actually changed to a more uplifting conclusion for its release in the United States.
The story of six women who go on a cave spelunking adventure, The Descent is tight, claustrophobic and so often hard to watch because of director Neil Marshall's use of up close shots. The caves the women are crawling through get even worse with the introduction of the Crawler creatures who reside down below.
The film concludes with final girl Sarah climbing up a mountain of skulls and bones, and finally taking in a gulp of fresh air as she pops her head over the surface. She reaches her car and has a vision of her friend-turned-nemesis Juno, whom she left to die in the caves. That's where the US version closes, however the UK and Neil Marshall-preferred version rolls on to show Sarah is still stuck underneath the ground.
She had imagined climbing out of the cave, imagined the vision of Juno and well and truly caps off her mental break by closing the film with a vision of her dead daughter as Crawlers close in around her.