50 Movies Where Evil Won

Plot: Three English schoolgirls and one of their teachers go missing in a rock formation in the Australian Outback, and no-one knows where they've gone.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, an exquisite, dream-like masterpiece from director Peter Weir, is a famously open-ended work. What happened to the missing women is never explained at all, and although one of them is recovered from the Rock, she remembers nothing, and the other three are never seen again.

So, what took them? A human killer? A demon? The land itself? The movie never answers these questions, but whatever it was that took them, it won. It completely won.

The disappearances remain eternally unsolved, dooming everyone affected to a lifetime of psychological torment. The school that the girls were from closes down, the community is traumatized, a friend of one of the missing girls commits suicide, and the headmistress of the school dies off-screen on the Rock as well, as is told in the film's epilogue. 

All of this helps to make Picnic at Hanging Rock one of the most haunting movies of all time, the kind that will shake you for days and never leave you.