8 Horror Movies With Seriously Messed Up Endings
From classic to modern horror, these movies have some of the most disturbing endings in the history of the genre.
We all love horror movies for the genre's unique power to toy with our innermost fears and, in doing so, convey ideas in expressive and sometimes quite gory fashion that wouldn't have been as effective otherwise. Yet, few people expected the endings of the movies we're going to talk about today to be so traumatic. Here are 8 horror movies whose final scenes proved to be too much even for the most hardcore fans of the genre.
8 Horror Movies with the Most Unsettling Endings
8. The Descent (2005, IMDb rating: 7.2/10)
7. Eden Lake (2008, IMDb rating: 6.7/10)
6. The Wicker Man (1973, IMDb rating: 7.7/10)
5. Night of the Living Dead (1968, IMDb rating: 7.8/10)
4. Martyrs (2008, IMDb rating: 7.0/10)
3. Inside (2007, IMDb rating: 6.7/10)
2. The Mist (2007, IMDb rating: 7.1/10)
1. Don't Look Now (1973, IMDb rating: 7.1/10)
Sure, the endings of some of the movies listed above may seem a bit anticlimactic in some cases, but that doesn't take away from how messed up they were, leaving the audience shaking in their boots forever.
It is probably the classics that are worth starting with. For example, in Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968 a few months after Martin Luther King's assassination, Ben (Duane Jones), a rare black male protagonist at the time, was killed in the finale by rednecks who mistook him for a zombie. Even if John Russo and George A. Romero didn't imply the political subtext, it was so timely that the fear of zombies paled in comparison to the horror of racist sentiments.
Classic horror films featured more than a few plot twists that were horrifying from a pure story perspective. In The Wicker Man, for example, neither the audience nor the character played by Edward Woodward expected until the very end that he would be considered a ritual victim. The Mist should also be considered a classic because, although it was released in 2007, it is based on Stephen King 's famous novel: the final sequence in the car still gives us nightmares…
However, modern cinema seems to offer even wilder endings. Martyrs, for example, emphasizes detailed graphic scenes, such as one where the protagonist is skinned alive, which make the movie incredibly unpleasant to watch. But it seems that even this can't be compared to the gruesome finale of Inside, or rather its incredibly gory scene where the baby is cut out of the womb. Ugh, it is gross to even write about it!