You invest a good chunk of your time and money on a new horror movie that just came out, and you’re super excited to see it. All week, you’re careful to avoid reading the reviews and posts about the film because you want to see it for yourself and be surprised by everything that happens on screen. Now you’re sitting in the dark theater with other horror fans who are reacting to all the tropes you’ve come to expect in a good scary movie; the thrills and chills, the jump scares, and buckets of blood. It has it all, but the ending doesn’t quite do it for you. It doesn’t take away from the overall experience, but you think that it could have been better with a different ending.
While there is no right or wrong when it comes to the best endings for a horror movie, some work better than others.
The way I see it, there are five different outcomes you can expect when you watch a horror movie, with nuances that can debated, but I list five that I believe are the most prominent, and I provide some examples of each.
HEA, or Happily Ever After. This is where the hero/heroine prevail and defeat the monster or killer, at least temporarily. Throughout the history of cinema, there are countless horror movies where good triumphs, and they continue to be made today. They can’t technically be called ‘feel good’ movies because they are horror-based stories, but they have a satisfying conclusion. After witnessing protagonists go through all kinds of hell, the reward of seeing them triumph over evil in the end is something a lot of audiences prefer to see. There are innumerable examples through the decades, from The Exorcist to Child’s Play to The Black Phone. For me, the best of these movies is Alien. When Ripley flushes the xenomorph into space at the end, it was a moment that might have had some people in the audience on their feet and cheering. The climax was particularly rewarding because of what Ripley was up against with this creature. After what it did to her entire crew throughout the film, she didn’t seem to have much of a chance going one-on-one against this thing. As intriguing as this alien lifeform might be for study and observation, this is not a monster that most people would be routing for, which is important when you’re watching a movie with a happy ending.
There are other movies in which the protagonists are not so likeable, and you don’t mind seeing them killed. These types of endings can be every bit as rewarding for audiences. Which brings us to another type of ending you will often find in horror movies.
Miserably Ever After is your basic negative ending, where the hero/heroine does not come out on top, or very often not even survive. In this case, it is the villain that wins, and the impact can be very powerful on horror filmgoers. As a case in point, the film that comes immediately to my mind is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 remake starring Donald Sutherland. This is another “alien” film, and it involves extraterrestrials that invade our planet in the form of seed pods that grow into duplicates of people and replace them without anyone knowing. At the end, when we find out that Sutherland’s character is one of them, we know that there is no hope for the rest of the world. We’re all doomed. Can’t get much more negative than that.
Agnostic Endings are ones in which nobody really seems to win. This is not to be confused with the next type, the Ambiguous Ending, which I will get to shortly.
Agnostic endings are clear enough, it’s just a cinematic draw, but make no mistake, this type of ending can really pack a punch, often a gut punch. The movie that best represents this kind of ending is Seven, a grim story about humanity’s penchant for evil and a serial killer’s quest to personify this by committing murders that represent the so-called Seven Deadly Sins; pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. When the killer, John Doe, reveals that he is ‘envy’ and then kills Detective Mills’ wife before delivering a box with her head inside for Mills to open, Doe’s goal is to provoke the detective to kill him out of wrath, the seventh and final murder that would complete the serial killer’s master plan.
Mills’ grief is too great, and he does, indeed, end up shooting and killing Doe, who smiles triumphantly before dying. But is Doe the winner? I would argue that the antagonist can’t win if he dies and the protagonist survives, even if that was the antagonist’s plan all along. But it’s not just a question who the last man standing is that determines the winner, at least not in this case. The hero kills the villain, but this does not make Mills the winner either because his life is in ruins. In the end, it’s not a triumph in the true sense for either Mills of Doe. I’d say that the only one who wins in Seven, is the audience.
What do you think?
It opens up a great debate at the very least.
Ambiguous Endings by contrast are ones where you have to decide for yourself who the winner is. And there is usually no right or wrong answer. A superb example of this John Carpenter’s The Thing. Yup, another alien film.
At the end of The Thing, it’s not clear if MacReady or Childs have been compromised by the alien invader. Or perhaps neither of them are The Thing. Either they are both human, doomed to die in the Artic, or one of them is The Thing, who will freeze and have to wait to get thawed out again in the future while the other one dies.
At the end of The Thing the audience is left just unsure and paranoid of the characters they should trust as they were throughout the majority of this epic remake.
I had to create this fifth category because sometimes after sitting in the dark for two hours watching a movie that seems pretty straightforward you abruptly get thrown for a loop in the final scene. I call this type of ending, WTF, or What The Hell Just Happened, because that’s what you end up asking yourself, and you have to decide for yourself what you just saw.
There are some movies that can be somewhat confusing, like Momento, but when you watch then again they start to make more sense. Others, not so much, and I point to The Shining with its iconic ending that still has people theorizing about to this day. As the film draws to its climax, there are odd visuals that aren’t explained, such as the man in the bear suit, but the final shot revealing Jack Torrance in a photograph that was taken at the Overlook Hotel in 1921 is a revelation that is completely mind-blowing.
What exactly is the filmmaker telling us with this mic-drop ending? Or was Stanley Kubrick just messing with our heads?
To cite a more recent film, Mother!, released in 2017, from the beginning plays as a surreal nightmare. The allegorical representations of the characters and the symbolic imagery used have all been discussed, but the final sequences go to a whole other level of insane. Compared to the popularity of The Shining, there are bound to be a lot of people who still haven’t seen Mother! so I don’t want to give too much away. Suffice to say, the finale is disturbing.
What kinds of endings do you like best? What other categories would you include? They say, ‘every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,’ but it doesn’t matter all that much, as long as they keep making great horror movies.
Published 12/30/25