20 Most Intense Movie Endings Of All Time

10. The Mist (2007)

Endings don't get much more depressing than that to Frank Darabont's Stephen King adaptation The Mist, in which protagonist David (Thomas Jane), his son and a handful of survivors find themselves hopelessly fleeing from inter-dimensional monsters.

After they drive past an almost impossibly huge monster and later run out of gas, the adults decide that there's no point carrying on, and resign themselves to a suicide pact.

David shoots the three other adults before heartbreakingly shooting his own son, after which he steps out into the mist, waiting to be devoured. Then comes the big kicker: out of the mist arrives not a monster, but a tank, with the U.S. Army having found a way to overpower the monsters, effectively ending the alien invasion.

If only David had waited a few more minutes, his son and new friends all would've survived. And what's more, he doesn't even have any bullets left to finish himself off. Oh, and a woman (Melissa McBride) who left David's group earlier in the movie to find her kids, surely going to her certain death, drives past with the Army in total safety.

It's so relentlessly grim it almost inspires a demented laugh, but the evocative, haunting imagery and spine-tingling use of Dead Can Dance's "The Host of Seraphim" make it the best ending to any King adaptation to date.