15 Good Horror Films That Totally Lost It By The End
11. Devil
The Film:
Five strangers trapped inside an elevator, each with a guilty secret, dying one by one and one of the people is not who they seem. If you claim that premise doesn't get you excited, you're lying.
In fairness, that anticipation probably went away when you found out M Night Shyamalan wrote the story. The film itself is a fairly average thriller which is very watchable but doesn't have an awful lot to it.
The Ending:
M. Night Shyamalan did the story for this, so obviously there's a twist. The old woman, the second death, was actually the supernatural villain all along. The twist itself is absolutely fine; it's a hell of a lot better than the plot twists in Signs and The Village. It's the climax that's a problem.
The finale essentially comes down to the final victim apologizing for causing a car crash. The old woman, apparently literally the devil, then doesn't kill him just because he said sorry and disappears from view. Yep, that's it. The climax of the entire movie is an apology. Well, at least we all know how to survive a horror film: just apologize to the villain.
It's an undeniable anticlimax to what is a perfectly solid movie (it's a hell of a lot better than some of the other films M Night Shyamalan has been associated with) on the whole. It's partly thanks to this weak ending that the film holds up poorly on subsequent viewings.