20 Horror Movie Endings That Are Practically Perfect

At the end of John Carpenter's horror classic The Thing, the titular shapeshifting alien has wreaked havoc on an Antarctic research station, killing nearly everyone there, and while the survivors have blown the station up, is the creature actually dead? Neither the viewers nor the characters can be sure. 

Protagonist RJ MacReady sits by the burning remnants of the station. Childs (Keith David), the chief mechanic at the station, emerges out of the snow and sits with him, claiming to have gotten lost in the storm. MacReady isn't sure if he believes him or not. The pair agree that their mutual mistrust is futile since both are too weak to do anything much, and they're aware that they'll soon freeze to death. Eventually, MacReady delivers one of horror's best lines: "Why don't we just wait here for a little while? See what happens." 

We leave the two men sitting quietly and sharing a bottle of scotch, as Ennio Morricone's terrifying score pulses away in the background, and that's the end of the story. We don't know if the creature was destroyed, and we don't know if the last two survivors are actually human or not. 

John Carpenter refuses to give audiences any kind of closure, and while many will have found this conclusion frustrating, that's precisely the point. It's haunting in its ambiguity, with the creature's presence having destroyed any semblance of trust among the scientists. This is the terrible effect of paranoia, rendered in the most chilling of ways.