15 Greatest Ending Lines In Film History

9. Why Don't We Just Just Wait Here For A Little While? - The Thing (1982)

chinatown jake
Universal

Ambiguous endings don't get much better than John Carpenter's horror masterpiece The Thing, which pits a gaggle of research scientists in Antarctica against a mysterious, deadly monster that can take the shape of its victims, and is picking them off one by one.

By the end of the film, following some ballsy attempts to destroy the monster, only two of the men - Kurt Russell's pilot MacReady, and Keith David's mechanic Childs - are left alive, their base burning around them and the fate of the monster unresolved.

Both slowly freezing to death and unsure of whether they can trust each other, Childs asks MacReady what they should do, to which MacReady offers up the film's immortal closing line:

“Why don’t we just wait here for a little while? See what happens.”

With that, the survivors share some scotch and the credits start to roll, concluding without clearing up what happened to the monster, or if MacReady and Childs are even really themselves. It doesn't get much more terrifying than that.

Contributor

Aidan Whatman hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.