When it comes to horror movies, we've seen it all: aliens, werewolves, vampires, homicidal
clowns, and even creepy dolls.
"Hahahahahahaha!
I don't believe it, I just don't believe it."
With so much shock factor already out of the way, though, there are still some movies that
catch us off guard -- especially those with endings that are horrifying head-scratchers.
Nothing's scarier than walking away from a movie confused, so let's dive right into our
nightmares and try to get some of these confusing horror movie endings explained...
The Shining
Stanley Kubrick's iconic interpretation of Stephen King's novel, The Shining, took a
lot of liberties with the source material and turned what was an elaborate hotel story
into something much more cerebral.
The psychic concept of "Shining" has spawned countless books and documentaries which have
tried to make sense of the movie, but one thing we can all agree on is that after trying
to murder his wife and son, Jack Nicholson's character most definitely froze to death outside
of the Overlook Hotel there at the end.
Yep, dead.
Fans might remember the sight of Danny and Wendy Torrance escaping in a snowmobile as
the movie ends with a close-up of a framed photo hanging in the presumably haunted hotel.
The picture is dated July 4, 1921, with Jack Torrance smiling in front of a crowd of partygoers,
which understandably is pretty perplexing.
Some have theorized that Kubrick, a stickler for details in his movies, specifically posed
Nicholson like this as a reference to old 18th century drawings of the devil.
This would suggest that "dull boy" Jack went to hell for trying to kill his family, regardless
of whether his rampage was caused by the ghosts of the hotel or a particularly nasty strain
of cabin fever.
Jacob's Ladder
The 1990 psychological thriller Jacob's Ladder features Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, a Vietnam
War vet who is stabbed by a bayonet on the battlefield and returns to the States to a
whole new life, where his cozy pre-war role as a husband and father is just a memory.
Before being shipped off to the battlefield, Jacob had a wife and three sons, the youngest
of whom, Gabe, died before he deployed.
After returning from the war, he moves in with new girlfriend Jezzie, but suffers from
nightmarish visions of monsters and other surreal imagery.
The film bounces back and forth between Jacob's realities -- from his future life with Jezzie
to his past family -- while he believes he’s experiencing some kind of after-effect from
a chemical agent he was exposed to in Vietnam.
Even worse, the events of the movie are revealed to be only happening in his mind, all while
he lay dying from a stab wound on the field.
Just before the triage doctors declare him dead, Jacob mentally goes home to his apartment
before the war and reunites with Gabe, who leads his father up their home's staircase
into a bright light.
It’s all pretty complicated, but in the end, the final scene seemed to mean that Jacob
had finally found peace in the afterlife.
In the Mouth of Madness
John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness lived up to its name by going off the deep end in
ways that would make H.P.
Lovecraft blush, and even outdid Inception with its story-within-a-story metafiction
motif.
In the movie, Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance investigator sent to look for
a famous record-breaking horror author named Sutter Cane, a moniker meant to pay homage
to author Stephen King.
Cane goes missing just as his next bestseller — take a wild guess what it's called — was
expected to break world records, so Trent treks off to New England to search for the
author, and ends up reliving many parts of Cane's stories.
In the movie, Cane's novel is so embraced by the masses that his stories actually unleash
a bunch of deities from another dimension, intent on taking over the world, and Trent
discovers he’s actually just a character in Cane's story.
"I am not a piece of fiction."
What's even crazier is that Cane turns out to be the portal through which these monsters
emerged.
Neill's character eventually wakes up in a rundown psychiatric ward and discovered the
world around him descending into hell, with widespread suicides and murders as monsters
roamed the Earth.
Through all the madness afoot, Trent finds a movie theater playing the theatrical version
of Cane's book, and, in another layer of weird, the movie replays all of his experiences,
firming that he really was a Sutter Cane character all along...and only became real as the story
unfolded.
Did you get all that?
Let the RIght One In
This Swedish vampire love story -- and we're talking about the original here, not the 2010
remake, Let Me In -- introduces Oskar, a 12-year-old bully victim who makes pals with a secret
blood-drinker named Eli.
Oskar wants revenge against his cruel school-aged tormentors, and Eli is all too happy to oblige.
But there’s a catch.
See, Eli lives with an old man named Hakan, who tries to get in the way of Oskar's relationship
with Eli, because he doesn't want to be replaced as her food source provider.
Hakan is eventually caught in the act of scaring up some lunch for the girl and splashes acid
on his face to keep his identity secret before offering up his own life as a drink for Eli.
At the end of the movie, after Eli’s done away with the meanies in Oskar's life, the
two run away together, and their last scene together shows Eli in a large box next to
Oskar on a train, talking to each other through morse code.
It looks like Oskar is probably on his way to growing old and repeating the life of the
late Hakan, who was probably once a little boy who loved Eli, too… and the film ends
on that suggestive note, just as John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel of the same name had.
However, the movie neglects to include the author's epilogue.
Lindqvist didn't like the popular theory that Oskar was becoming the new Hakan at the end
of the story and penned a subsequent short story called "Let the Old Dreams Die" which
shows Eli and Oskar in a photo from 2008, almost three decades after the events of the
story.
The couple still appears young and in love, implying that Oskar actually joins his girlfriend
in immortal undead-ness.
Thanks for watching!
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