If any genre benefits from having truly memorable conclusions in its movies, it’s horror. Just look at The Twilight Zone, a show that often served as sharp commentaries on society. But that’s not what it’s always remembered for, instead, the series’ lasting imprint has been it was always equipped with twist endings. M. Night Shyamalan’s movies, too, have many notable factors, but what pops into most people’s minds when they hear his name is, once more, that they have twist endings. Unexpected endings have a way of sticking in one’s memory, and they’re even more likely to do so when a narrative has spent most of its runtime trying to get the viewer’s skin crawling.
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The following movies’ endings aren’t necessarily “twists” in the traditional sense, where you’re expecting one thing and get another. But they are “twists” in that you’re not expecting the delivered outcome at all. And, considering they’re all endings within the horror genre, you can bet they’re grim. Suffice to say, Spoilers Follow.
1) Prince of Darkness
John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness follows a group of scientists who are called in to investigate a strange, swirling, light green liquid in a church’s basement. It turns out the slimy liquid is actually Satan, and now that it has new targets, it begins to take them over one by one with the ultimate goal being to have one of them serve as the gatekeeper of a mirror that is conduit for bringing him back to Earth in his full, red form.
That gatekeeper is Kelly, one of the final individuals in the film to be taken over. It ravages her body and essentially turns her into the temporary vessel of Satan. Once she, the Anti-God, begins to pull Satan into our realm via the mirror, the priest played by Donald Pleasance lops his hand off. But it regenerates, and Catherine, one of the two protagonists, runs to the mirror and tackles Satan, resulting in both she and him being sent floating back into the other realm, at which point the priest smashes the mirror, trapping them there forever. It’s great that Satan doesn’t make his way into our realm, but a protagonist is lost in the process.
2) Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi’s return to horror after some time with Spider-Man was the fun, funny, and scary Drag Me to Hell and, like his Evil Dead movies, it packs a punch. The narrative follows Alison Lohman’s Christine Brown, a loan officer who wants to move up at her bank. To do so, she needs to say “No” to a lot of people, including an elderly woman, Mrs. Ganush, who ends up being a gypsy witch.
Mrs. Ganush puts a curse on Brown, the specifics of which are that she will experience horrifying strange occurrences for three days straight, at which point she will then be, well, dragged down to Hell. Though Mrs. Ganush dies midway through the film, and Brown ends up figuring out that she can give the cursed object (a button in this case) back to the her even if she’s deceased. Unfortunately, Brown mistakes an envelope containing the button with a similar envelope containing a rare coin that was a gift for her boyfriend. She’s then dragged down to the fiery abyss at Union Station.
3) The Mist
The vast majority of The Mist takes place in a small town’s grocery store. A fog has descended upon the town and, within that fog, there are a bunch of mostly unseen monsters. The grocery store is a death trap. Not just because of the monsters, but also because of a religious zealot who is turning the group of survivors against one another.
By the film’s end, only a few individuals remain: Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn), Amanda Dunfrey (Laurie Holden), David Drayton (Thomas Jane), and David’s son. They drive away from the grocery store only to run out of gas in the middle of the mist. With the monsters closing in, David executes the other three (including his son) in a mercy killing. Then, the mist begins to dissipate, and the Army rolls in. He just shot his son in the head moments before they would all be safe. It’s a twist that messed with the heads of just about everyone who went into the movie without a single idea of what was coming.
Rent The Mist on Amazon Video.
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4) The Thing
One of the most compelling aspects of John Carpenter’s The Thing is figuring out who was assimilated when. And there are ways to do so. There are really only two outliers.
The first is relatively early in the film. A dog is shown walking through a corridor until it stops at an open doorframe, where we see a single man’s shadow. That individual could be one of three of the film’s characters. The other mystery is much later in the film, specifically in the last scene. In the last scene, we don’t know if either Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady or Keith David’s Childs have been assimilated. And they’re not so sure about one another either. What they do know is that it’s awful cold out, and no help will be arriving for a long, long time.
5) Night of the Living Dead
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was and remains a hugely influential entry in horror cinema history. Of course, it kickstarted the zombie movie subgenre, but it was also a late ’60s movie that cast a Black actor in the lead role. It ended up being a casting decision that gave the film’s final moments substantial impact.
For the most part, the farmhouse-set zombie flick focuses on Duane Jones’ Ben and Judith O’Dea’s Barbra. We first meet Barbra in the opening scene, and not long after that we (and she) watch her brother die. That already makes Night of the Living Dead seem like a film that doesn’t pull its punches. And, in the third act, the tense throughout film delivers a series of gut-punches as all five of the people who were in the farmhouse’s basement before Barbra and Ben took refuge in it are killed. First, young couple Tom and Judy die in a gas pump explosion. Then, the dying little girl in the basement turns into a zombie and butchers her mother with a trowel. Lastly, Barbra is dragged out of the farmhouse by her now-zombified brother. To top it all off, while Ben survives the night, he is shot from a distance by a posse wrangling up and executing the zombies after they mistake him for a member of the undead. Or did they? Because it’s just as plausible they saw a Black man and murdered him now that all Hell has broken loose and they know they can get away with it. Either way, we’ve lost a lovable protagonist, and he’s thrown into a pile with any number of other rotting corpses.
Stream Night of the Living Dead on Max.
6) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Like The Thing, 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror remake even better than the original. And, like the ’50s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it’s a film that ends on a down note, specifically by having Kevin McCarthy’s Miles Bennett running around warning people about the alien invasion. But the down note has an upside as it seems a few people believe him and will set out on spreading his warning.
The ’78 version, however, is all down side. We follow Veronica Cartwright’s Nancy Bellicec as she walks through a quiet, peaceful park. Her husband, Jack (Jeff Goldblum), has become a pod person as has one of the two protagonists, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams). But Nancy has managed to avoid that fate. That is, right up until she spots the film’s main protagonist, Matthew Bennell (the late Donald Sutherland), walking alone. She approaches him, showing her humanity via excitement and facial expressions, at which point Matthew opens his mouth, points, and emits the film’s signature pod person scream. It’s devastating. All due credit to Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers, too, because it has the audacity to chuck a six-year-old off an in-flight helicopter.
Stream Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) on fuboTV.
7) Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers brought the title villain back after killing him off in Halloween II and going a different direction with Halloween III: Season of the Witch but, for the time being, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was left in the past. Instead, the focus was on Danielle Harris’ Jamie Lloyd and her foster sibling Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell).
Well, them and the returning Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis, who was also seemingly killed at the end of Halloween II. Little Jamie seems safe throughout most of the movie because, well, she’s a kid. But the end of Halloween 4 has a mic drop in store for the viewer as she’s apparently taken over by the evil soul of Michael Myers. She kills her stepmother (off-screen) with a pair of scissors and stands at the top of her home’s staircase, leaving Dr. Loomis to scream in despair. Cut to credits. Unfortunately, this was a great ending ignored by the subsequent and far inferior Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.
Stream Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers on AMC+.
