20 Horror Movie Endings We Almost Got

4. Esther Lives - Orphan

Orphan 2009
Warner Bros.

2009's absolutely unhinged Orphan drops the all-timer reveal that the vicious "9-year-old" Russian girl Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) is actually a 33-year-old Estonian woman with a hormone disorder who poses as a child in order to quite literally get away with murder.

But her latest adoptive mother, Kate (Vera Farmiga), turns the tables on Esther in the climax, kicking her in the face and snapping her neck along with the perfectly-placed one-liner, "I'm not your f**king mommy!"

Esther is quite unambiguously dead, her corpse left to sink into the icy water below, but an alternate ending was also conceived where Esther calmly walks back to the family home, reapplies her makeup, and acts sweet and innocent just as the cops arrive.

It's certainly a fun ending which reinforces the entire premise of the film, that nobody would ever suspect an adorable child of murder, but let's be real - that neck snap is just too damn satisfying to deny.

 
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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.