13 Scariest Movie Endings That Kept You Up All Night

Scares come in many different forms. Sometimes it's all about the jump scare; the quick jolt that makes you dart upright in your seat, most likely spilling your popcorn in the process, and laughing it off a moment later. These can be fun, but more often than not such moments are forgotten about as quickly as they came.

Then, there are the scares that linger; moments that don't just jump and grab you, but creep up on you good and slow, with the threat of some fate far worse than anything the viewer could imagine.

Whether it's the sudden jump out of your skin, or the slow creeping threat, there's a particular potency to scares when they come right at the end of the movie. So often, endings serve to reassure as that all is well, the equilibrium has been re-established, and we can rest easy, knowing that nothing bad can happen once the lights come up.

But when a movie takes the opposite path, and goes out on a darker note, showing that the threat is not diminished, and good does not necessarily prevail every time; those are the endings that really stay with us, lingering in our memory with an unpleasant chill long after the credits roll.

Here are ten such dark and disturbing endings, liable to come back to haunt viewers in the wee small hours.

As you might expect, major spoilers ahead.

The heroine's fate might be right there staring at us from the title itself - and yet, it's still a genuine shocker once it actually comes to pass in the final moments.

After reaching blockbuster success as the director of Sony's original Spider-Man trilogy, Sam Raimi returned to his roots with this outlandish horror comedy, centring on Alison Lohman as Christine, an ambitious bank employee who denies a loan extension to an elderly woman, and winds up cursed.

Drag Me To Hell was somewhat mispromoted on release, built up to be an entirely straight-faced shocker, when it's in fact a far more tongue in cheek, slapstick fuelled "spook-a-blast" (to use Raimi's own term), in the vein of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness.

However, as Raimi's earlier films demonstrated, just because a movie is funny doesn't mean it can't be genuinely scary at the same time - and Drag Me To Hell has some very scary moments indeed, not least in its jaw-dropping conclusion in which, despite all her best efforts to deflect the curse, Christine is dragged to hell after all.

After we've spent so long rooting for the heroine, seeing her struggle in the face of adversity, appear to find the answers, yet fall nonetheless; it's truly unexpected. That final image of demonic hands bursting from the train tracks, Lohman's face turning skeletal before our eyes as the train comes hurtling over, is one that'll really stay with you.