Horror movies are always at their best when the third act goes a little off the rails.
Thriller endings are supposed to leave us feeling either satisfied or completely unsatisfied,
and nowhere in between.
So, when a scary movie actually delivers that grand finale that ties all its terror tricks
together, it can be pretty unforgettable.
Let's take a look back at some of those horror flicks that really stuck the landing before
the turn of the millennium.
And, it should go without saying, spoilers for these old movies lay ahead...
The Omen Directed by Richard Donner, The Omen features
one of the most iconic villains of all time: Damien Thorn, a pint-sized Antichrist destined
to rule the world.
Adopted by an American ambassador, Damien is indoctrinated by his satanic nanny.
Soon, the body count starts stacking up.
After realizing his adopted kid is actually the son of Satan, Daddy Thorn takes Damien
to a church and plans to go full-bore biblical on him.
We're talking Abraham and Isaac.
"No, Daddy, no!"
"God help me."
However, before he can finish the dastardly deed, the cops show up and open fire.
After the gunsmoke clears, we cut to a funeral.
But unfortunately for mankind, Damien is alive and well — it's Thorn who's six feet under.
And in a satanic twist of fate, Damien has been adopted by Thorn's old buddy — the
President of the United States.
Damien looks directly at the camera and gives an eerie smile that'd easily prevent anyone
watching from ever wanting kids.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers In Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers
remake, Donald Sutherland plays a San Francisco health inspector named Matthew Bennell who's
drawn into a bizarre conspiracy involving an evil alien race.
These extraterrestrials are creating doppelgängers of every human on Earth, and their plan is
to absorb victims while they sleep and create emotionless doubles using plant-like pods.
The process is horrifying.
Naturally, this doesn't sit well with Bennell and his small group of survivors, who desperately
try to stay awake to avoid having their bodies snatched.
The group also discovers they can fool the aliens by acting cool and detached.
But if they show an ounce of emotion, the pod people emit a high-pitched scream to alert
their fellow aliens.
It sounds like this:
(shrieking)
Bennell does his best to prevent the bad guys from spreading their pods across the world,
but there's no stopping the invasion.
At the end of the film, it appears that Bennell is hiding from the bad guys in plain sight,
surviving by impersonating the pod people.
But as he leaves his office one day, he runs into an old friend who's still human...and
that's when this happens:
(shrieking)
Friday the 13th The horror genre is full of last-minute gotcha
moments, from the graveyard dream in Carrie to the return of Freddy in A Nightmare on
Elm Street.
But as good as those are, Friday the 13th's finish stands decapitated head and shoulders
above the rest.
This slasher classic follows a bunch of teenage counselors fooling around at a summer camp
when a mysterious maniac turns up, slashing folks with every sharp instrument known to
man.
Eventually, the culprit is revealed to be an angry Mrs. Voorhees, a former camp cook
who wants revenge against all counselors for letting her deformed son drown in Crystal
Lake decades ago.
Luckily, final girl Alice neck-chops Mrs. Voorhees and escapes the camp by climbing
into a canoe and sailing onto the lake.
She falls asleep before reaching the shore, and when she wakes up, it's a beautiful day,
the cops have arrived, and it seems like she's finally safe.
And that's when a waterlogged Jason jumps out of the lake and pulls Alice down with
him.
Alice later wakes up in a hospital, with no sign of Jason anywhere.
But she's not convinced he was some figment of her fatigued imagination.
"Then he's still there."
No one believed her then — but the dozen films to follow certainly proved she was right
about that.
The Thing Directed by John Carpenter, The Thing is a
brutally cynical sci-fi film that follows a group of American scientists trapped inside
an Antarctic research station.
They're being hunted by a shapeshifting alien that absorbs its victims and creates identical
copies, so in addition to battling this otherworldly beast, our heroes are also dealing with a
serious case of paranoia.
By the film's last act, the titular thing has slain almost everyone in the camp, with
the exception of MacReady, a bearded helicopter pilot who blows the creature to kingdom come.
Unfortunately, he sets the entire base on fire in the process.
As he sits alone in the wreckage, that's when Childs, MacReady's old frenemy steps in.
The guy vanished during the climactic showdown with the thing, and now MacReady isn't sure
if Childs is human anymore.
The two are in a standoff, and as the cold sets in, they share a bottle of whiskey and
wait for someone — or something — to make the next move, leaving us to wonder if our
heroes will make it out alive…or if they're even heroes anymore.
"If we've got any surprises for each other, I don't think we're in much shape to do anything
about it."
If you're gonna punctuate a pic with a question mark, this is how it's done.
Don't Look Now After their daughter tragically drowns at
their English estate, John and Laura Baxter find themselves trapped in a spiral of grief.
Devastated, they move to Venice, where they encounter two creepy sisters who claim they
can see the little girl's spirit.
Laura believes the psychic siblings, but John is skeptical.
Nevertheless, he does notice that something weird is going on.
There's a mysterious little figure running around town, wearing the same red coat his
daughter had on when she drowned.
There are also rumors of a serial slayer in the area.
Stranger still, after his wife returns to England on an emergency visit, John inexplicably
spots her riding a funeral boat down a Venetian canal.
John's unease grows, until he spots the girl in red one last time.
Hoping that maybe it's the ghost of his daughter, he follows the cloaked figure...only to realize
it's actually a monstrous dwarf armed with a meat cleaver!
This is who's been dropping victims in the Grand Canal.
She plants her knife right into John's neck, and as his body violently convulses, John
realizes the vision of his wife on a funeral boat was actually a premonition of his own
demise.
But there's nothing he can about it as he bleeds out on the floor — a victim of grief,
guilt, and one ugly monster.
Talk about a tragic twist.
In the Mouth of Madness Equal parts H.P.
Lovecraft and Stephen King, In the Mouth of Madness will make you feel like you're losing
your mind.
In it, John Trent is an insurance investigator hired by a publishing company to track down
bestselling author Sutter Cane.
The writer has mysteriously vanished, taking his new novel with him.
But as Trent digs deeper into the case, he learns that Cane is no average author.
See, Cane has millions of loyal followers around the world who worship his novels...which
gives him the power to bring his characters to life.
Worse still, Cane's new book will drive people mad and turn them into monsters.
It's all part of his scheme to destroy the human race and subject humanity to the rule
of ancient gods.
But before Cane can accomplish his plan, he wants Trent to deliver his now-finished manuscript
to his publisher… and Trent has to obey because he's actually one of Cane's characters.
Obviously, Trent refuses to believe he was dreamed up for some book.
But soon enough, Cane's novel has turned the world into a mutated madhouse.
With society crumbling around him and his mind slowly slipping, Trent winds up in a
movie theater and watches the film adaptation of Cane's book.
As it turns out, Trent is the main character and everything that's just happened to him
is playing on the big screen.
Realizing his life is a Sutter Cane creation, Trent snaps, laughing hysterically before
weeping uncontrollably.
But hey!
At least he has the entire theater to himself.
The Blair Witch Project Nearly 20 years later, it's easy to forget
how big a deal The Blair Witch Project was when it first debuted in 1999.
It revolutionized viral marketing, introduced the found footage fad to the mainstream, and
totally messed people up with its incredibly freaky ending.
After heading into the woods to make a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch,
three college students — Heather, Mike, and Josh — find themselves completely lost
and wandering in circles.
"I gave you the map!"
"I gave you back the map!"
They soon discover spooky stick figures hanging from branches, hear creepy kids giggling at
night, and then Josh mysteriously disappears, leaving only a few teeth and a piece of his
tongue behind.
Soon after, Mike and Heather hear him screaming in the distance, and they follow the sound
to an abandoned house.
Camera in hand, Heather makes her way into the basement and finds her friend standing
in a corner…which is how a child slayer of local legend would position his victims.
That's when someone — or something — attacks her from behind and the camera falls to the
ground, still recording for several seconds before it stops.
Psycho It's a bit of a shock in Psycho when the main
character, Marion Crane, is suddenly and violently dispatched in the middle of the film.
But things take an even crazier turn when it's revealed that the culprit is hotel manager
Norman Bates in drag.
Having offed his own mother years ago, the disturbed motel clerk suffers from a split
personality that causes him to act like his evil mom and stab unsuspecting victims as
they shower.
"We all go a little mad sometimes."
Norman is eventually captured and tossed into a cell, where he completely transforms into
his domineering mother.
Huddled beneath a blanket with his mom's voice running through his head, Norman looks at
the audience and gives a chilling grin, as Mrs. Bates' skull flashes over his face, proving
that there is no more Norman — only Mom.
We then cut back to the Bates Motel, where the cops are towing Marion's car out of a
swamp, leaving the viewer to wonder how many more cars will be found down there.
Night of the Living Dead This seminal zombie film has a simple plot:
one fateful day, corpses rise up from the ground — and boy, are they hungry.
Soon, a small band of survivors find themselves trapped inside an old farmhouse, desperately
fighting the zombie horde, not to mention their own growing fears and rivalries.
Eventually, there's only one survivor left, a black man named Ben, who wakes up the next
morning after hearing a volley of gunshots in the distance.
Cautious but hopeful, Ben peers out the window, spotting an all-white posse outside.
Suddenly, the gun-toting group sees Ben, and assuming he's a zombie, a gunman puts a bullet
in his head.
Having survived an assault by an army of flesh-hungry fiends, our hero is ultimately defeated by
the very people who were supposed to keep him safe.
"Okay, he's dead.
Let's go get him.
That's another one for the fire."
There are a lot of social and political undertones that can be drawn from the ending.
But the film lets the scene speak for itself — a stroke of brilliance on director George
A. Romero's part.
The Sixth Sense In the movie that put M. Night Shyamalan on
the map, we meet child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, who has some unfinished business to
attend to.
Years after failing to help a young patient suffering from hallucinations, he gets a shot
at redemption in the form of nine-year-old Cole Sear.
And folks, Cole has a heck of a problem: "I see dead people."
Cole reveals that the people he sees don't know they aren't alive.
And while the doctor is skeptical at first, he quickly learns the boy really does possess,
well, a sixth sense.
Realizing the spirits might need help, Crowe encourages Cole to communicate with the ghosts
and come to terms with his gift.
Meanwhile, Crowe has grown distant from his wife, and at the end of the movie, he sits
beside his sleeping bride — which is when the director's famous knack for twists kicks
in.
In her sleep, Crowe's wife asks why he left her and then drops something on the floor.
It's Crowe's wedding ring…the one he thought he was wearing during the whole film.
Suddenly Crowe remembers that a disgruntled patient — the one he'd failed so long ago
— actually ended his life before doing the same to himself.
Crowe's been a ghost all along, and the clues were everywhere.
It doesn't get much better than that.
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