Author Stephen King praised the ending of the film version of The Mist as the superior take.
Some filmmakers have no qualms about sending audiences out on the bleakest note; others famously watered down their conclusions. These are among the most debated.
Warning: This article is made up almost entirely of spoilers.
More than films in other genres, horror movies and thrillers ultimately endure in the collective consciousness, or drift toward obscurity, because of their endings – when all the dread and anticipation come to a head.
Here’s a look at the final scenes of 10 still-debated movies: some that went full tilt to unforgettable effect and others that dialled down the terror, often diminishing or defeating the story’s entire point.
The Mist (2007)
Writer-director Frank Darabont crushed any inkling of optimism that might have lingered in the final moments of Stephen King’s sci-fi horror novella The Mist, about a mysterious phenomenon that envelops a small Maine town, trapping a handful of residents in a supermarket. Lurking, soon to attack, are otherworldly tentacled monsters.
In the book, survivors drive off into the mist, hoping for refuge. Darabont instead chose to deliver a gut punch when a survivor, in a seeming act of mercy, shoots his fellow passengers, including his own son, before offering himself to the beasts. But the fog clears, and we quickly learn that the military has contained the disaster. If he’d only waited one more minute.
The brutal conclusion proved unpopular at first with critics and viewers, though King has repeatedly praised Darabont’s as the superior take.
“The ending is such a jolt — wham! — it’s frightening,” King has said. “People who go to see a horror movie don’t necessarily want to be sent out with a Pollyanna ending.”
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The Blair Witch Project was an instant pop culture phenomenon in part because of the campaign conjured up by its director-writers, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, to leverage the burgeoning internet to convince viewers that the film was found footage and therefore real.
Three 20-somethings get lost in the Maryland woods as they try to uncover the truth behind a local legend. It does not end well for them, and the final scene is an anxiety bomb complete with a derelict building, creepy children’s handprints, bloodcurdling screams and certain death for them all.
The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
This savvy send-up of horror movies from Drew Goddard follows five college students on a woodsy getaway, intentionally cribbing a classic setup. What ensues is a sci-fi extravaganza and a conspiracy theorist’s dream: they are part of a mysterious global ritual to appease the ancients through human sacrifice.
In the end, when you think we’re milliseconds from a close call, expecting the two remaining friends to pull the literal trigger in time to save humanity – well, they don’t.
Hereditary (2018)
No film has terrified me like this Ari Aster supernatural-psychological horror about a family with a macabre history that, as a New York Times critic put it, “blurs the boundary between mental and supernatural disturbance”.
The buildup is so agonising, disorienting and dread-soaked – the facial contortions, the jump scares, the decapitations – that by the end, I was begging for relief. It never came. Instead, the demon king triumphs in a set piece depicting a cult ritual that can’t be unseen.
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2010)
Plenty of movies probably should never have been made, and writer-director Tom Six’s revolting Dutch bio-horror – about a doctor obsessed with demented medical procedures – might top that list. That said, its final moments, while absolutely dreadful, give this tale of three live victims being sewn together to form one entity a sort of bleak poetry and pensive stillness.
With the doctor and the front segment of the being both dead, the two remaining segments hold hands as one of them dies from an infection, leaving the middle woman alone, sobbing and unspeakably trapped.
Fatal Attraction (1987)
This psychological thriller and cautionary tale about adultery from Adrian Lyne has haunted viewers for decades. If only they’d seen the original ending, which was scrapped because test audiences felt that Alex (Glenn Close) – who obsessively stalks the family of her married lover, Dan (Michael Douglas), after he ends things – deserved a more ruthless demise.
The film initially concluded with Alex framing Dan for murder and taking her own life. In the revision, Alex is killed by Dan and his wife, Beth, in a violent struggle.
The rework was despised by Lyne, Close and others who fought hard to keep the original. Ultimately they acquiesced, and the film was an Oscar-nominated box office and critical hit.
The Descent (2005)
It’s remarkable what a difference one minute can make, especially when it’s the last minute of a terrifying movie like this British one from Neil Marshall, about six women fighting humanoid cave dwellers during a spelunking expedition gone wrong. For North American theatres, the final 60 seconds or so were cut because, as Entertainment Weekly put it, audiences “weren’t digging its uberhopeless finale”.
The original has Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), the sole survivor, fleeing the cave and speeding off in her car, only to awaken in the cave with the monsters closing in – her escape a hallucination. The American version does not cut back to the cave, and Sarah simply drives off, presumably free.
Speak No Evil (2024)
Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson devoted an entire article to how this film, the American reboot of the 2022 Danish original often called The Guests, sanitised the story’s bleak worldview by changing the last act, thus defeating its whole point.
Both films are about parents and their daughter learning they’re part of a sick game while visiting the remote country home of a family they’d met on vacation. But the original, directed by Christian Tafdrup, ends with shocking cruelty, as the visiting couple is stoned to death and their child abducted. The remake, from James Watkins, has the visitors outsmarting their tormentors and escaping.
The Guests is “the story of evil itself” and how it “strikes without meaning,” Wilkinson wrote. The American production tries “to soften the blow, to humanise the bad guy”.
Bird Box (2018)
This Sandra Bullock-led monster movie, directed by Susanne Bier, also largely defeats the point of the story by sharply deviating from its source material, Josh Malerman’s novel, to deliver a more hopeful but ultimately bland conclusion.
In the apocalyptic tale, those who lay eyes on mysterious entities are doomed. Blindfolded, Malorie (Bullock) shepherds two children toward a sanctuary, a former school for the blind, deep in the woods. In the film, when they arrive at the school, they join the others. The children play and all feels promising.
But the conclusion that Malerman wrote is far darker: The survivors choose to gouge out their eyes, intentionally blinding themselves as permanent protection, underscoring the desperation of their circumstances.
Get Out (2017)
Rarely is a softened finale a boon to a horror movie, but Jordan Peele’s modern masterpiece about the illusions of a supposedly post-racial America may have benefited from his decision to drop the original ending.
The final scene as we know it has Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a Black man, leaning over the bloody body of Rose, his white girlfriend whose family has implanted the brains of their wealthy white friends into the bodies of Black people. The sight of red and blue lights in that moment is bone-chilling. But instead of the police, his best friend, Rod (Lil Rel Howery), a TSA agent, arrives to save the day.
But Peele’s first iteration did indeed have the police arriving and arresting Chris for the killings. In that version, we’d see him months later in prison talking to Rod, glass between them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maya Salam
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