*Spoiler Warning* I am going to be discussing the endings of several movies in this piece, but I don't really recommend most of them because their endings are bad. Well, Rosemary's Baby and No Country for Old Men do slap and have great endings, but they've been around for a long time and you probably know how they end anyway.
CW: Suicide, murder
Daniel Pinkwater's 1982 novella Young Adult Novel opens with a dark, serious chapter about a 13-year-old boy named Kevin Shapiro. Kevin Shapiro is suffering in an alcohol treatment center, reflecting on his grim home life and his own terrible struggles with alcoholism. I'm paraphrasing here, because this book is incredibly difficult to find (if you're interested, order a used copy of this collection), but here's roughly how the chapter ends: Kevin reflects on his life and despairs at his future. He sees nothing ahead for himself and he can't imagine things getting any better. The chapter concludes with this sudden heel turn (para.): "And he was right, so we hit him over the head and fed him to the pigs."
It's legitimately one of my favorite jokes in a book, up there with the whale in Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Hell's Angels sequence in Good Omens. I hope the fact that I'm still able to recount the gag despite not having a copy of the book at hand and despite not having read it in at least 20 years is testament to how good of a joke it is. See, the twist is that this chapter isn't really part of Young Adult Novel. It's a chapter of the in-universe novel being worked on by a surreal artist collective called the Wild Dada Ducks. The pointlessness of the chapter is a result of their whole nihilistic worldview and their love of nonsense for nonsense's sake.
Okay, but here's the problem: a lot of horror movies try to pull off this "fed to the pigs" ending and they try to do it sincerely. And it's honestly just annoying at this point.
I've watched a lot of horror movies. A lot of them. And while the last decade has produced a lot of truly brilliant horror movies, like any other decade it has also produced some middling horror movies. And something I've noticed with a lot of middling modern horror movies is that they try to spring dark, nihilistic endings on you with the expectation that your mind will just be blown. They try to Pinkwater you, but it's not a joke. It's just a sacrifice of the narrative in favor of serving what they think the genre requires. This is a problem, because horror can be a framework for really great stories and potent themes, but if those stories and themes are sacrificed so your audience can feel uncomfortable and upset, that's not good horror: that's bad storytelling. Let me be clear: my screed here isn't against horror movies with downer endings, or even downer endings in general. Rosemary's Baby is a masterpiece with a downer ending. No Country for Old Men is a masterpiece with a nihilistic ending. What I'm arguing against here is horror movies that set up intricate, detailed characters and storylines, then toss that all in the garbage because it's cooler to just kill everyone off at the end because that's how the real world works, maaaaaaaaaan. (Caveat: I, the writer of this piece, exist in the real world and have never been murdered by a giant man in a rubber mask. That said, I do acknowledge that such a thing is possible and has likely happened to somebody at some point. On the other hand, I do not require "person gets murdered by giant man in rubber mask" a prerequisite for realism.)
It's melodramatic and a bit overwritten, but it's mostly pretty fun trash that feels like somebody smashing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Shallow Grave. It's four people making terrible decisions and those decisions leading to worse decisions, all with a running theme of regret and having to live with horrible mistakes that reminded me -- in a positive way -- of the Black Mirror episode "Crocodile".
And then a big guy in a rubber mask shows up and kills them all.
See, the guy who was watching them and tracking their movements...the reason he was doing that was he's basically Michael Myers and he decided to murder them. Yeah, it's not very satisfying.
I can only guess why Franco chose this ending, considering none of the influences he lists have real downer endings, nor does the first three quarters of the movie feel like one of these horror films. He says in this interview that the main reason was to give the killer a "clean getaway" so he could "continue his routine." But the movie wasn't about that killer until he suddenly showed up in the last fifteen minutes of the movie, so why would we care? We haven't invested ourselves in what the killer does next; we've invested ourselves in these characters who are making mistakes and facing consequences. You know, the people the movie is about? This is a common problem with the indie horror renaissance. You get masterpieces like The Babadook and Hereditary and all of the other great horror films that have come out of the last decade and change. But you also get a lot of movies that try to have their prestigious indie horror cake and eat it, too. You get movies that want to go above and beyond with complex characters, potent themes, and subversive slow-burn plots, but somebody involved is also saying "Yeah, but it's a horror movie, so everyone should get murdered at the end." I hate to keep dunking on The Rental -- I did enjoy it, at least until the stupid hard turn into slasher movie territory -- but it's really difficult for a movie to examine the idea of making a horrible mistake and having to live with the regrets and consequences of that mistake when all of the characters stop living. It might be different if these characters died as a result of their actions, but it's made pretty clear that the masked guy probably would have killed them no matter what they did at the house. The movie just interrupts its own story so it can end with everybody dying.
There's just this huge disconnect between the story the movie is telling and the movie that it's trying to be. The result is that neither the bleak ending nor the more complicated story resonate. They just cancel each other out because they're not really tied together in any meaningful way.
Another example of this disconnect between story and genre is Oculus, another movie that sacrifices all of its narrative and thematic depth for the sake of a shocker ending. Mike Flanagan, the director, has since become a master of exploring resonant themes in a horror framework (with The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Doctor Sleep all -- in my opinion -- managing to craft emotionally compelling stories around well-drawn characters without sacrificing scares or supernatural elements). However, Oculus came out pretty early in his career, and it's clear he was much more adherent to the "Horror = Nihilistic ending, no matter what" school of thought.
Oculus is a movie about a family with an evil mirror, and it shifts between two points in time: a period where the two children of the family are 10 and 12 years old, and 11 years later when both kids are in their early 20s. It tells the story of how the parents of this family become corrupted and psychotic as a result of this evil mirror's presence, and also the story of how the adult kids investigate and try to destroy the evil mirror, with the film cutting back and forth between the two stories. It's a potent metaphor about how childhood trauma, especially trauma pertaining to parents, and how our perception of what causes evil changes as we grow older, from a belief in supernatural forces to a more earthly cynicism about the human race in general. It's a theme Flanagan explores a lot in Doctor Sleep and the Haunting series to great effect, and one he clearly has a lot of personal stock in.
But then Oculus ends with the sister getting killed by a trick axe because her brother saw a ghost or something.
Then the brother gets taken away to a mental institute, again, because a ghost tricked him.
Again, why are we exploring themes of regret and how we process trauma when the people who are going through the experience just end up dead or insane at the end? What's the point of giving these characters heavy, realistic arcs if these arcs are just going to be interrupted by a monster eating their brains or whatever? Is horror so formulaic that no matter what the story we're telling, we HAVE to end it with the random, unearned death of the protagonist? The 21st century has been such an exciting time for indie horror, but indie horror isn't really indie if they're all just going for the same shock as Night of the Living Dead. Yes, Night of the Living Dead is a classic horror movie with a bleak ending, but that ending worked because that whole movie was about society and prejudice, not just because it was surprisingly dark. You can't just take an ending that worked and shove it into whatever story you like. You can't end Pulp Fiction with the reveal that Vincent Vega was really Marcellus Wallace all along just because the ending of The Usual Suspects is amazing.
The ending of a movie should fit in with the character arcs, and it should feel like a result of the character's actions. Otherwise, we might as well just be watching COPS and laughing at hapless people suffering.
Night of the Living Dead has an amazing ending, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- an arguably much more violent and disturbing movie -- ends with the hero getting away and it's one of the greatest endings in film history because it feels like the appropriate conclusion to the movie.
Let's look at one more example of an otherwise solid horror movie completely crapping its pants with a "fed to the pigs" ending. This one's a little different from the others in that the protagonist does survive, and yet I think this might be the worst offender in the "unearned tragedy at the expense of the movie" camp.
Lights Out is a really fun movie (based on an excellent short film). It's a delightful premise that gets played with in amazing ways. It's a pretty bog-standard boogeyman movie where the twist is that the monster only exists in darkness. Shine a flashlight on it, it disappears and you're safe. But if there's a power outage? Hoo boy, you better run for your life, the monster is coming!
Seeing Lights Out in theaters was one of the most fun theatergoing experiences I've ever had. The audience was gasping and laughing at every brilliantly constructed jump scare. The movie got an applause break when one of the heroes made particularly clever use of a car to escape the monster's grasp. Honestly, if Lights Out accepted that it was a ridiculous thrill ride and leaned into that strength, it would be a modern classic. Unfortunately, because it's a horror movie and filmmakers seem to think that every horror movie has to dip into grim, real-world seriousness, it completely flubs its ending.
So throughout the movie, it's been somewhat established that the monster is the spirit of a mentally ill girl with a sun allergy. The girl died and got attached to another mentally ill girl, the latter of whom is now an older woman suffering from depression. This is already a supremely problematic premise that reinforces really awful stigmas surrounding mental illness, but you could almost let it slide as a sort of, "Well, they just needed some kind of backstory for the monster, I guess." But then the movie hits its climax, and the big world-saving move is...
Oy.
The old woman shoots herself in the head, destroying the monster.
What's interesting here is that it's somewhat an inverse of the other two films I've talked about here. Oculus and The Rental are films with deeper ideas and themes that ruin themselves with a generic horror movie ending. Lights Out is a generic horror movie -- albeit a really fun one -- that ruins itself because it thinks it's equipped to tackle deeper ideas and themes. In both instances, the result is the same: a dark, nihilistic ending that just doesn't fit the movie it's in.
And in fairness, Lights Out isn't quite at the nihilistic level of some other movies I could complain about, but it's pretty damn grim to say "the only way to defeat the fun shadow monster is for a person with depression to kill herself" and the movie doesn't really continue on into any sort of denouement that examines how awful this is. It just ends with the survivors huddled together in an ambulance. You can bet the end credits didn't get the same applause break as that wacky moment with the car.
Yikes, is all I can say to this ending. Maybe the filmmakers meant this to be uplifting in some way, like "she's finally the one in control and she has the power to end this whole nightmare," but Jesus, let's recap what this movie is saying metaphorically. I don't know what this instinct is the world of horror filmmaking. It seems like they've got it in their head that the "fed to the pigs" ending is not just an integral part of horror, but the most effective ending you can possibly come up with for horror. Given that so few classic horror movies end this way, I can only assume that a lot of modern-day horror directors saw Night of the Living Dead when they were young, were blown away by the ending, but didn't really think about why that ending is so good and instead took away the surface idea that "horrible, random death makes a great ending for a horror movie." There are other examples of horror movies with unearned bleak endings that mostly just hurt them in the end: Eden Lake, Absentia, Unfriended 2, a few shorts from the V/H/S series, The Den, Sinister, and plenty more, and I could analyze each of these in greater detail, but I think I need to stop here in case this just turns into a full-on rant. Instead, I'll cap things off with a nihilistic, grim ending that I think does work.
Again, spoiler warning, because this IS a movie I recommend watching without any foreknowledge. (Although it's super gross. Like, body horror gross, not morally gross.)
The Beach House is a dark, Lovecraftian, apocalyptic film that shares some similarities with The Rental. Both center around two couples at a seaside house. Both involve the couples getting high and repressing their feelings. Both start off pretty slow before getting into the horror.
Gradually, weird things start happening in the environment around the house. Glowing microbes appear at night. A weird fog covers the area. Jellyfish wash up on shore and spread parasites. And the older couple starts behaving more and more erratic. Things worsen and soon characters are getting infected with a horrible virus that's not quite the zombie plague but that's not quite not the zombie plague. It becomes clear that something terrible is happening not just at the beach, but around the world. The apocalypse is here. As I've already hinted, the end is grim. The world seems to be completely overtaken by whatever horrible environmental, disease-ridden collapse is happening. One by one, all of our main characters die, with astrobiology student Emily (Liana Liberato) being the last to succumb to the infection. It's bleak, it's dark, and it thematically and narratively works.
The reason I say this ending works is that unlike in The Rental and Oculus, the dark ending really does fit in with the arc of the characters. Both couples are facing an ending of sort from the very beginning. Emily and her boyfriend, Randall, seem on the verge of breaking up because she wants to continue her studies and he wants to bum around the beach for the foreseeable future. The older couple is avoiding the horrible truth that the wife is dying and the husband is just trying to give her one last pleasant trip. This movie is telling us from the beginning that these people and their current situation is temporary, and something is going to come to an end before their story is over. The fact that it's the end of the world is a fitting conclusion, not just an idea thrown in so that the movie can technically qualify as a horror film.
There's also the larger themes of environmental decay and the rise of new life forms. Emily has a monologue that's a little on the nose but nevertheless pretty interesting where she describes the harsh conditions under which life can survive and develop. Her succumbing to the infection at the end is also a moment of her having to give in to the new life forms that are taking the place of humanity. In a world where climate change is destroying life and giving rise to new viruses and plagues, it's a harsh but fair ending. The Beach House has a dark ending, but unlike the other three, this isn't a "fed to pigs" situation because we know -- if we've been paying attention -- that this ending is the inevitable conclusion to the story of these characters. This ending isn't here to shock you; you probably won't be shocked. It's a smart, challenging ending that actually makes the movie before it better in retrospect. All right, lastly, let's cover Eden Lake.
Fuck this movie. Okay, that's all. Have a good night.
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