Random Shocking Horror Movie Endings That Took You by Surpris (20 items)

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  (#20) Tourist Trap

  • Tanya Roberts, Chuck Connors, Keith McDermott, Robin Sherwood, Jon Van Ness, Jocelyn Jones, Dawn Jeffory

  After getting stranded and predictably separated in an isolated wooded area with nothing but a creepy tourist trap filled with animated waxworks, a group of friends get picked off one by one. The crazed killer is actually the seemingly kind and simple country bumpkin, Slausen (Chuck Connors) who offered to help fix their car in the first place.

  As it turns out, Slausen is a crazed killer who began with his cheating wife and his good-for-nothing brother she was having an affair with. He just kept killing after that, preserving his victims as wax dummies kept all over the house to keep him company. He has some kind of telepathic ability and can make the dolls move, driving his delusions. Slausen kills everyone until only Molly (Jocelyn Jones) remains. He torments her with the moving mannequins, but she sees an opportunity to grab an axe and takes it. She chops him to death as he dances with the doll in his dead wife’s likeness. 

  The film then ends similarly to Nightmare on Elm Street where everything is bright and hazy, making it disorienting enough that you wonder if it’s a dream. It’s a new day and Molly, the “final girl,” is seen driving away from the wax house of horrors with all of her friends (in mannequin form) in the car with her. 
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  (#14) Angel Heart

  • Robert De Niro, Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet, Charlotte Rampling, Brownie McGhee, Michael Higgins, Ezekial Dann Florek, Stocker Fontelieu, Eliott Keener, Elizabeth Whitcraft

  Private investigator Harry Angel is searching for a former singer that went off to serve in World War II and disappeared. This case leads him to a series of murders. Further investigation reveals HE is the man he’s looking for on both counts. 
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  (#9) In the Mouth of Madness

  • Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, Charlton Heston

  John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness is a Lovecraftian horror that, sadly, often goes overlooked. In it, John Trent (Sam Neill), an insurance investigator, is hired by a publishing company to investigate the disappearance of prized horror author Sutter Cane and his latest manuscript.

  He and book publisher Linda Styles, (Julie Carmen) track the eccentric author down in Hobbs End, a land of Cane’s creation. Trent discovers anyone who reads the book will be turned into monsters and he makes it his mission to stop this from happening (even if that means hacking readers to death with an axe).

  The film closes with a stark-raving-mad John Trent, leaving the false safety of his padded cell to voyage into a world overrun with monsters unleashed by Sutter Cane (who has transcended to god-like status). Trent wanders into a theater screening the adaptation of Cane’s book. He then comes to the realization that he isn’t a person at all, he is merely a character in Cane’s book - written into a horrific existence.

  Trent dives deeper into the mouth of madness with this revelation as he watches himself on the big screen, maniacally laughing and crying while reliving everything he just went through.
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  (#3) Sleepaway Camp

  • Mike Kellin, Katherine Kamhi, Robert Earl Jones, Felissa Rose, Christopher Collet, Jonathan Tiersten, Thomas E. van Dell, Paul DeAngelo, Susan Glaze, John E. Dunn, Karen Fields, Owen Hughes, Loris Sallahian, Desiree Gould , Willy Kuskin

  This good, old-fashioned summer camp teen slasher would not have the cult following it does and would have fallen much deeper into obscurity if not for the jaw-dropping final reveal. The mousy teenager, Angela, is not only revealed as the killer, but apparently, she’s actually her own brother as well.

  As it turns out, Angela died years ago and her brother Peter took over her identity after being forced into cross-dressing in his dead sister’s clothes by his dysfunctional aunt. Angela is revealed as Peter in a creepy full-frontal nude down by the lake while holding a head in his hand.
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  (#5) The Descent

  • Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone

  There are two versions of this film and the ending in the European version is oh-so-much better (in a super depressing sense). In both, a group of women gets trapped underground after a cave-in during an expedition and they soon discover they aren’t alone. An entire race of flesh-eating creatures lives deep within the cave and starts slaughtering the group. 

  In the original version, only one woman survives the underground massacre and finally escapes the cave. It goes so far as to show her driving away before she comes to and realizes the entire escape was a hallucination and she was still in the cave the whole time. In the edited version, she just drives away.
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  (#6) Invasion of the Body Snatchers

  • Robert Duvall, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy, Donald Sutherland, Veronica Cartwright, Brooke Adams, Don Siegel, Kevin McCarthy, Art Hindle, Michael Chapman, Philip Kaufman, Lelia Goldoni, Tom Luddy, Stan Ritchie, David Fisher

  The 1978 film is a remake directed by Philip Kaufman, but a great one. The original was released in 1958 and was directed by Don Siegel and based on the book The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. All version have the same premise; alien beings invade a town, cocoon the humans, and replicate their image as a way to infiltrate the population undetected.

  In the final scene, Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) walks through his office and he makes his way out to the streets. Nancy Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright) is relieved to see another human being in a pod-person infested town, so she approaches him. Much to her horror, Sutherland slowly raises an arm, points at her, contorts his face, and lets out an inhuman screech that is met with her terrified scream. The hero has lost, leaving nothing but feelings of defeat, hopelessness, and an immense sense of doom for the human race.

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