8 Horror Movie Moments Nobody Understands

Some of the very best horror movies don't tell you s**t. The scariest thing in this genre is the unknown - after all, the old adage goes that the audience's imagination is more terrifying than anything filmmakers can come up with using the limitations of modern moviemaking.

The best horrors know the audience's lack of control is a tool to be used to disarm and, yes, absolutely scare the willies out of them. Consequently the ambiguous ending is a trick director's deploy often and, when done right, it can leave fans debating a film's true meaning for decades.

However there are other reasons that audiences leave a horror movie completely bewildered, and not all of them are good. Sometimes, key context might be left on the cutting room floor, or the script might be so convoluted that it's plain old impossible to grasp what the hell the writers were actually thinking in the first place.

For good or bad then, all of the following horror movie moments left audience's scratching their heads. While some theories attempt to pin down a true meaning, the truth is there's no consensus, no final piece of the puzzle that definitively pulls everything together.

Martyrs is one of those classic horror movies that's been talked about to death, which is why it's even more impressive that nobody has been able to come down conclusively on its ending one way or another.

Though the film starts off relatively simple, with a woman invading a house to murder the people responsible for keeping her captive as a young girl, it quickly moves into the surreal as the woman is killed, and her friend Anna is re-captured and subjected to torture.

Her captors have a pretty nuts goal behind her suffering: to figure out once and for all whether there's life after death. In order to achieve this answer they need to create a "martyr", someone who is tortured so extremely that they essentially become a being caught between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

After being gruesomely flayed, Anna achieves this and whispers the secret into the ear of the organisation's leader, who then promptly kills herself. Without being privy to what this secret was, audiences are left to ponder what comes after death, if anything. What did Anna see? We can only guess.