13 Scariest Movie Endings That Kept You Up All Night
4. Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg's 1973 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's short story has long been held up as one of the most groundbreaking, powerful horror movies ever made - and with good reason.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie star as a married couple left broken by the death of their daughter. Moving to Venice with work, bizarre circumstances lead them to believe their daughter may be trying to communicate with them from beyond the grave.
Famed for its imagery of a small girl in a red hooded coat (an influence on Steven Spielberg's similar motif in Schindler's List), the film sees Sutherland enduring apparent psychic episodes in which he thinks he is seeing his daughter, who was wearing such a coat when she drowned.
However, in the haunting climax, Sutherland approaches the mysterious figure - and discovers all too late that it is not his daughter, but a disfigured female dwarf who has been responsible for a series of murders in Venice, of which he promptly becomes the next victim via a meat cleaver to the throat.
Written down like that, the climax might sound too absurd to be genuinely scary. However, thanks to the powerful atmosphere and palpable emotional realism the film has built up to that point, it truly is a shocking, unnerving conclusion.