1. David Mercy-Kills His Son Moments Before He's Rescued - The Mist
The Ending: David (Thomas Jane) is emotionally spent after seeing his wife killed by the tentacled creatures and feasting his eyes on a gigantic alien creature walking through the mist. As such, he and three others give up and agree that life's not worth living. However, they've only got 4 bullets for the five of them (including David's son Billy), so David shoots the four of them, and steps out into the mist, ready for the impending creatures to take him. However, out of the mist rolls not an alien but a military tank, as it turns out that the tide of the war has turned, and the military have managed to kill most of the beasts. David killed four people, including his son, for nothing. To rub salt in the wound, one of the women who ventured out into the mist to save her two children (Melissa McBride) earlier in the film is shown safely rescued by the military.
How It Trolled Audiences: It's an ending so soul-destroyingly bleak that even the original novella's author, Stephen King, admitted that he wished he'd come up with it. From the outset, audiences expected the aliens to be killed and David and his son to survive, yet even once those fatal shots were fired, we figured the movie would just end, right? Nope. Frank Darabont rubs David's and the audience's faces in it, by doing the cinematic equivalent of pointing and laughing at the horrible irony of his situation. Our advice for coping with this ridiculous ending? Lie down, try not to cry, and cry a lot.