When it comes to horror movies, there are several ways that they work to scare people. One is through the jump scares, such as with slasher movies like Friday the 13th. A second is using gore, as was made famous in the torture porn of films like Saw. However, some say the most effective way to scare people is through disturbing images and themes in movies.
Many of the movies using the disturbing themes to send viewers into a sense of dread or unease are also the movies with the most shocking endings. While all sorts of horror movies have downer endings, the ones who do it right leave an undeniable scar in the viewer's minds. Here is a look at 10 horror movies with the darkest endings.
10 Roesmary's Baby (1968)
In 1968, Roman Polanski created one of his masterpieces when he adapted the Ira Levin novel Rosemary's Baby. The film is about a woman named Rosemary (Mia Farrow) who moves into a new apartment with her husband and then finds out she is pregnant. As the movie goes on, Rosemary begins to believe her neighbors don't have her best interest at heart. By the end of the film, when she learns she was pregnant with Satan's child, there is no turning back.
9 Apollo 18 (2011)
Apollo 18 is a found-footage movie, and, when it comes to the found footage movies, endings are almost always dark with the people filmed never surviving. This is an alternate history film, where the canceled Apollo 18 mission went through as planned and landed on the moon.
The problem is that the spacecraft never returned. The found footage showed the horrors after it landed on the moon and also proved why no other mission was sent to the moon. The darkest part is that the United States knew this could happen and left the astronauts there to die.
8 Sinister (2012)
Blumhouse made a ton of low budget movies that ended up making a lot of money, and one of these movies is Sinister in 2012. Ethan Hawke stars as a true-crime writer who moves his family into a house where an entire family was killed in the past without telling his own family the secret.
While they are there, he realizes the house might be causing the madness and moves his family out of there before it is too late. The darkness comes when he realizes all the families who lived there suffer the tragedy after moving out, and it is now too late for his family.
7 The Descent (2005)
One of the best horror films that centered on a predominantly female cast was The Descent in 2005. The film starts when a group is on their way home from a whitewater rafting trip when one of the women is in an accident that kills her husband.
The movie then picks up a year later when the women go back on another trip, this one with six women going spelunking. However, when they end up trapped in a cave where there are creatures, they end up fighting for their lives. There are multiple endings in the movie, but, in the darkest ending, the women do not get out alive.
6 The Mist (2007)
Released in 2007, Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption) directed the Stephen King adaptation, The Mist. The King story had an open-ended conclusion where the survivors don't know if they are going to live or not. When Darabont agreed to the movie, he got King's permission to create his own ending, and it was dark as night.
When David believes there is no hope, he takes his own son's life to protect him from pain, but then the rescue team shows up a moment too late.
5 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979)
In 1956, Don Siegel created a seminal sci-fi movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and, while it was great, In 1979, Philip Kaufman directed a superior remake. The film had a spectacular cast, with Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, and Brooke Adams in the lead roles.
Just like the original movie, no one knew who to trust, and, one by one, people were replaced by aliens. The kicker here was that the one person that Elizabeth trusted the most turned out, in the end, just to be another victim of the invasion.
4 The Wicker Man (1973)
Do not watch the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man unless you want to watch something terrible and nothing near as brilliant as the movie it remade. Instead, take it all the way back to 1973 and watch the original horror movie.
Edward Woodward is Police Sergeant Neil Howie in Wicker Man, a man searching for a missing girl. His investigation leads him to an island where he finds a cult worshipping a Pagan god. Christopher Lee stars as the island's leader. The end comes when Howie realizes he is outmanned and is sacrificed to the diety.
3 Night of the Living Dead (1968)
In 1968, George Romero created the modern-day zombie. Before this, zombies were Haitian legends where men were buried and brought back when their bodies were still alive, but their brains remained dead. Romero created the actual dead rising from their graves in Night of the Living Dead.
The movie had a group trapped in a house, hoping to stay alive. The end came with one survivor, Ben, but his ending was quickly turned grim, as the men who showed up to fight zombies gunned him down, as well.
2 Pet Sematary (1989)
Stephen King has some of the darkest endings in his books. Some are so dark that the movies change them, with Cujo as a perfect example. However, when it comes to Pet Sematary, the film kept the pitch-black ending because that was the entire morality tale of the story.
Gabe was hit by a truck and died, and his father buries him in a mystical pet cemetery where he comes back from the dead, but as a murderous zombie-like being. The film's end has the man bury his wife, who Gabe killed, and then sits there waiting for her to return to finish him off.
1 It Comes At Night (2017)
The most recent movie on this list with a very dark ending is It Comes at Night. Released in 2017, It Comes at Night starts with a contagious outbreak that kills people all over the planet. The main characters are a father, wife, and son who are secluded in a house in the woods. However, when strangers show up, these people realize that even hiding in the woods won't keep them safe from a viral infection.
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July 23, 2020 at 05:30AM
