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Horror films with no happy ending (spoilers)... (1 Viewer)

todd s

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Another sad ending was I believe Ghost Ship with the Julianne Margulies...
She saves the souls of the old ocean liner and stops the bad guy. She gets rescued by a cruise ship. And as she is being loaded onto an ambulence she shes the bad guy and the others loading weapons onto the cruise ship. On a side note. The scene where the little girl shows everyone being killed was sweet.
 

Ocean Phoenix

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The ending to the 70s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was awesome. It was shocking on two levels:
First, because it was completely different from what happens in the original, yet seemed natural instead of different just for the sake of being different

And
Secondly, because it's so rare to see the aliens simply win! When it was over, I just kept thinking to myself...holy shit, the aliens won! I can't believe they (filmakers) let the aliens win! That seemed like a gutsy move to me.
 

MatthewLouwrens

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The ending of Body Snatchers freaked me out when I first saw it - it was a Sunday night horror film 1am, I was tired, and then... It took me forever to get to sleep. But I really loved it. Next day at university, I had a couple of hours between lectures, so I went to the library AV suite and watched the original. Both really great films.

Shaun of the Dead is a comedy-horror film where the horror (zombies) are played absolutely straight, and the comedy comes out of how essentially comic characters respond. And that has what I thought of as a sad ending - albeit with a nice comic twist: Ed is turned into a zombie. Sad. But Shaun finds him, chains him up in the shed with video games, and still goes to visit him. So that was happy.
 

Ryan Wishton

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Nightmare on Elm Street. The ending leads us to believe everyone dies. Of course they botched that by making sequels.

Joel, I wouldn't say any of the F13's had downbeat
endings. There was always at least one survivor. Jason (or copy) was almost always defeated for good (except from 2-4 where he was running around the woods). Part 4 had a sort of downbeat ending, but they never followed up on it so it was kind of useless. Sort of like the Halloween 4 ending. The later endings of the series were just ridiculously dumb on all levels. I think this series would have benefited from some downbeat and unexpected endings.

Exp: Jason defeating everyone and being the lone survivor; Having a side character that no one would ever suspect become the survivor and hero while killing off the main character.

Freddy vs Jason of course even had to cop out as well. They should have killed off all the human characters (They weren't likable anyways) before the final battle. It would have been more interesting for the two villians to defeat each other than to have outside help from bad actors.

Shakma: This is a movie about a killer monkey. I last saw this in the mid 90's. This movie had a very downbeat and unexpected ending. It's lead female dies about 2/3 through the film. We turn to a lead male who also dies before the credits role. No survivors and the monkey creature is still loose. You think you know who will live, but the story slaps you and says nope. Horror needs more unexpected endings.

Haute Tension had a pretty downbeat ending IMO. No one ends up happy. Since the movie is fairly new, I won't discuss in detail.
 

Colton

Supporting Actor
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Jan 12, 2004
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The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Even though Brad and Janet survive the night in Frank N Furters castle and the hostile takeover by Riff Raff ... they both lost their innocence and got their cherries popped.


- Colton
 

Matt Stieg

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Nov 26, 2003
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There's probably plenty of others from the Universal canon that I'm missing. There are also plenty of downbeat/upbeat endings, in which certain characters die and others survive (but their lives have certainly been drastically changed and altered forever). In fact, I never realized how many really downbeat endings there are in those Universal flicks...damn, I love those movies.
 

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