13 Scariest Movie Endings That Kept You Up All Night
6. The Descent
Neil Marshall's 2005 subterranean spine-tingler is, to my mind, the best horror film yet made in the 21st century. Its blend of claustrophobia, paranoia, brutal action and flesh-ripping monsters proves to be an extremely potent, adrenaline-pumping cocktail that holds up after multiple viewings.
Not content with providing mere visceral thrills (though the film delivers these very well indeed), The Descent understands that the best way for such heightened drama to properly get under the viewer's skin is by grounding matters in an all-too plausible emotional trauma.
To this end, the prologue shows Shauna Macdonald's extreme sports enthusiast Sarah lose her husband and daughter in a horrific road accident. Picking up a year later, she ventures out on a caving expedition with her friends, who hope that the experience will be good for her; no such luck there.
After the friends get hopelessly lost in uncharted territory and stumble into the feeding ground of cannibalistic cave-dwelling humanoids dubbed Crawlers, Sarah appears to be the sole survivor - and in the closing moments, she seems to find her way out into the light of the world above. Running to safety, she jumps into her car drives as far as she can - only to be jump-scared by the 'ghost' of her treacherous old friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza).
In the US theatrical cut, this is where things end (and 2009's The Descent Part II picks up from this) - but in the superior original ending, Sarah then opens her eyes to find that her escape was a delusion, and she is still trapped in the cave. Not only that, but she has a vision of her daughter in front of her. And so we leave Sarah trapped miles underground, having been clearly driven insane.
Not exactly a feel-good ending, then.