20 Worst Endings In Recent Horror Movies

As we all know, endings can make or break any movie of any genre - get it right and a good film can be elevated to greatness, but screw it up and something promising can be derailed forever more.

Endings are tough nuts to crack, then, and horror is certainly no exception, enough that many films in the genre clearly struggle with how to wrap their story up.

And over the past year-or-so, these are the 20 horror films which served up the most shambolic, frustrating, polarising, and downright WTF endings one way or another.

Now, it's fair to say that some of these movies are actually still a worthwhile time despite their less-than-stellar final scenes, but in other examples the ending was such a misfire that it had a catastrophic impact on the perception of everything that came before it.

Some of these endings clearly needed a total rethink because they fundamentally didn't work, while others could've easily been tweaked into shape with a few changes, but across the board they all concluded their respective stories on a frustrating bum note...

The big hook of The Strangers franchise is that we don't know anything about the masked killers - they're simply anonymous psychopaths who only attack people "because they're home."

But in a desperate bid to justify its own existence, the recent The Strangers - Chapter 2 ill-advisedly detailed the backstory of two of its three killers, Pin-Up Girl (Ema Horvath) and Scarecrow.

At the very end of the film, after protagonist Maya (Madelaine Petsch) kills Pin-Up Girl, we cut to a flashback showing Pin-Up Girl aka Shelly as a child, where she beats a fellow student to death at school out of jealousy of her hanging out with Scarecrow.

And because this isn't needlessly revealing enough, it also gives us an origin story for the series' iconic phrase, "Is Tamara home?," which was a playground game played by Tamara - the girl Shelly killed - and Scarecrow.

Trying to give dimension to these characters is to miss the point entirely, and ensures interest couldn't be lower for the already-shot Chapter 3.