What's a good horror ending?
It's scary, sure, but it can also be funny, emotionally wrought, and so mysterious that
it raises more questions than it answers.
Put simply, the best horror film endings are the ones that stay with you long after you've
left the theater.
So much of Rosemary's Baby takes the form of a paranoia-driven thriller that, from a
certain perspective, you could almost frame it as the story of a pregnant woman who has
a strange dream one night and then grows increasingly terrified of the people around her.
It could be that they're only trying to help, as some kind of hormonal imbalance or mental
health issue drives her to think they're all out to get her.
That's how much of the film plays, and it's easy to see how other filmmakers might have
leaned into that even more.
But Roman Polanski's film all builds to that ending, in which Rosemary discovers that all
of her paranoia has been engineered by a coven of Satanists, who arranged for the Devil himself
to impregnate her, and that she has given birth to the Antichrist.
The coven's calm celebration as they stand around the bassinet — not to mention the
film's refusal to actually show us a clear shot of the child — only adds to the dread,
which culminates in Rosemary accepting that she could indeed perhaps be a mother to this
child.
"What have you done to it?
What have you done to its eyes?"
"He has his father's eyes."
The Wicker Man is one of the strangest horror movies in the history of the genre.
"Oh, no, not the bees!
NOT THE BEES — AHHHHH.
AHH, THEY'RE IN MY EYES.
MY EYES!”
No, not THAT Wicker Man… we’re talking, of course, about the original 1973 film upon
which the Nicolas Cage-led remake was based.
The original Wicker Man is a film that plays out in many ways like some kind of dream,
because most of its characters seem to be living in an entirely different reality than
the protagonist, Sgt. Howie.
They dance and smile and walk dreamily through life as though nothing is wrong, despite the
fact that Howie has come to investigate the alleged disappearance of one of their own
children.
As the film moves forward, we get the impression that he's about to shatter all of their illusions.
Then, in the film's final minutes, they instead shatter his.
The ending of this film is easily and instantly compelling, thanks in part to the striking
visual of the titular wicker man burning against the setting sun.
It's a haunting image, one that works in the film's favor even now.
What really makes the ending work, though, is Howie screaming out Bible verses as he's
burning alive while the cultists around him sing their own song of Pagan celebration.
It's not the ending you predict as Howie seems to get closer and closer to the truth.
Even though he's a bit of a stick in the mud, you're still rooting for him to thwart the
human sacrifices happening on the island.
Then, as the wicker man burns, you're left feeling both horrified and spellbound.
1974's Black Christmas is one of the most important precursors to the modern slasher
film genre for a number of reasons.
It's got the point-of-view cinematography, the slow ratcheting up of the body count,
the holiday setting, the sorority house, and it even has the final girl in the form of
Olivia Hussey's Jess.
Where the film departs from many other final girl narratives is in its haunting and horrifying
closing scene, in which Jess is left alone to rest in her bedroom while police officers
guard the house from outside.
The camera then reveals that no one has bothered to check the attic, where two bodies and the
real killer are still waiting for their moment, ensuring that Jess is still in terrible danger.
The cheerful Christmas lights and snowy landscape juxtaposed with that persistent ringing phone
as the credits begin to roll are among the most chill-inducing things in the history
of slasher cinema.
It's common practice in horror cinema to lull the viewer into a false sense of finality
before unleashing an ending that suddenly and terrifyingly swerves for one last jump
scare.
It was done famously in Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, as well as countless
other films of the 1980s.
But even before those films established that One Last Scare philosophy, there was Brian
De Palma's Carrie, and its final freaky moments.
When Sue Snell visits the site of Carrie White's burned-down home, we are immediately aware
that something is off thanks to De Palma's dreamlike construction of the scene.
Still, everything seems peaceful, concluded, and calm.
Then, well….
This crap goes down:
[Screaming]
Yikes.
Even though the film makes it clear that we are indeed watching a nightmare, the fear
is still real.
It's real because of the masterful way the sequence is directed, but also because after
all we've seen Carrie do, coming back from the dead doesn't exactly seem so far-fetched.
[Tires squealing]
[Explosion]
The Shining is a film so pregnant with symbolism, mystique, and meaning for fans nearly four
decades after its release that entire documentaries have been devoted to decoding its many supposed
hidden messages.
It's so dense with possible interpretations, and nowhere is that clearer than its ending.
When all the chaos at the Overlook Hotel has died down, the camera zooms in on a 60-year-old
photo to reveal the smiling face of Jack Torrance, and everyone leaves the theater or turns off
the TV scratching their heads.
Is Jack a reincarnation of another man who came to the Overlook decades ago?
Is he simply another version of the same spirit who keeps returning to this ground?
Is the Overlook perpetuating a cycle of violence to sustain itself?
Never has being so uncertain about a horror film's ending been quite so intellectually
satisfying, and we've got nearly 40 years of theories, essays, and films to prove it.
"They're here!"
Poltergeist is one of those films that could have easily front-loaded all of its good ideas
into the meaty scares for the first and second acts of the story, leaving the finale a little
too predictable and a little too stiff.
After all, the scene of young Carol Ann ominously announcing the arrival of spectral visitors
through the TV is iconic in itself, and many ghost movies might have just coasted on that
one striking image.
Thankfully for all of us, that's not what Poltergeist does.
We can talk about the clown doll, the pool full of bodies, the creatures from beyond,
and everything else that comes up during the final confrontation in the film, but what
really makes it all work is the house's eventual collapse into an extradimensional ball of
debris.
In that moment, Poltergeist goes from instant classic to eternal classic, the kind of film
we'll talk about forever.
Then, to add even more brilliance to the crazy finale, we get that TV getting pushed out
to the hotel patio.
Some horror films leave you with one last scare, but this film leaves you with one last
laugh as the whole audience nods in agreement.
Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Dracula was an attempt to bring Bram Stoker's original
novel to the screen in a way that both utilized lush practical effects in a memorable way
and also paid tribute to the book's themes and operatic sense of storytelling.
The result is one of the most vivid horror films of the 1990s, and its ending is nothing
short of beautiful.
After finally reclaiming his reincarnated bride in the form of Mina, Dracula attempts
to take her back home to Transylvania, only to ultimately be defeated.
Instead of simply dispatching the monster, though, Coppola's film lingers on the love
story, allowing things to culminate in a heartbreaking moment in which Mina sees the tragedy of Dracula
as an eternal man longing for a reunion with the love of his life.
Its final moments offer some consolation, as we see that Dracula and his bride seem
to have finally reconnected in the afterlife after centuries apart.
Also Dracula's head gets cut off, which is pretty rad.
Yeah, sure, The Cabin in the Woods might be all about spoofing horror movie tropes, but
its commentary doesn't land unless the film is also able to deliver on the horror goods.
You can't make a convincing meta-satire unless you've also got the real elements on which
the satire is based, and it's there that The Cabin in the Woods really starts to excel.
"They made us choose… they made us choose how we die."
This is particularly true of the film's climax, in which all of the horrors of the underground
facility are unleashed at once.
It's a wonderfully wicked way to both show us something scary and also make fun of horror
movie expectations, but then the film goes a step further with the revelation that this
is all a ritual designed to preserve humanity.
The film's final moment, in which the surviving heroes decide to let the human race be destroyed,
is both a subversion of what we expect to happen and a beautifully engineered final
jolt of horror.
For much of its runtime, The Witch seems to be the story of a devout religious family
who begins to see hexes and demonic influences all around them when their baby is taken by
a wolf.
The isolation the Puritan family faces, plus their sense that everything they do is either
God's will or the result of unclean behaviors, could naturally produce such a paranoid reaction
to a tragedy.
The Witch could have played the whole film that way, with no explicitly supernatural
elements, and it still would have worked.
Instead, the film builds and builds to a climax in which Thomasin finally gives in to her
curiosity and asks if Black Phillip, the goat, is really something more.
What follows is a full-on Satanic embrace, complete with a witches' sabbath in the woods,
and Thomasin's ecstatic rise as a young woman who's able to finally, fully be herself.
It's a horror film ending that's both legitimately frightening and genuinely celebratory.
Night of the Living Dead remains revolutionary for a number of reasons.
Director George A. Romero's 1968 film created the modern zombie genre as we now know it,
reshaped our expectations for horror cinema, and added a layer of social commentary that
was helped along by the presence of Duane Jones, a black leading actor at a time when
that was nearly unheard of, as Ben.
Ben spends much of the film arguing with other white characters about the best course of
action to take, and then manages to emerge as the sole survivor of the battle at the
farmhouse overnight.
With the sun rising at last, he hears an approaching rescue crew and stumbles to the window to
catch their attention… only for, well… this to happen:
"Alright, hit him in the head - right between the eyes."
"Good shot."
Yup - he's immediately shot in the head and thrown onto a pile of burning corpses like
just another ghoul.
It's a shocking twist in the midst of what's supposed to be a calm resolution - something
many brilliant horror films would take a cue from in the decades that followed.
It's also a bold statement on the cultural climate.
For all his will and for all his survival instincts, Ben was dismissed by people who
were supposed to be his saviors, and became another casualty of a society eating its own.
The closing credits featuring the body disposal only make everything that much more stomach-turning.
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