Lessons Learned from Bad Horror Movie Endings

As an audience, we put a hell of lot of weight on the final minutes of a movie. It terms of structure, an ending might only last 5 or 10 minutes. However, it's our final engagement to the movie, the end of a conversation. The relative length of an ending doesn't matter, because its prominence guarantees its importance. If we're unsatisfied, we feel betrayed. It's like having a nice conversation with a stranger in a park or a bar. You're laughing, you're bonding with someone, maybe revealing some interests or past history you wouldn't usually. Then, when it's time to go, they start talking about how the Jew-run media is concealing the lizard men's schemes from the public and that's why they don't use banks. The sheer disappointment and confusion of the experience is startling.

Let's look into a few examples of bad horror movie endings in otherwise good (or even great) movies, because its a hell of a lot more interesting. That a piece of cinematic dogshit ends on a poor note is not frustrating or tragic - it's expected. A movie that seems to make all the right steps, then flounders in its final moments demonstrates how difficult the task is of wrapping up the project a filmmaker might have sunk their own money, their professional reputation, and years of their life into. What began as promising might end as bitterly disappointing. Sometimes a simple, clean ending is illusive.

HIGH TENSION

A twist ending makes for an easy target for critics and audiences. The disorienting feeling that the whole movie up until now has been a deception can either come across as a sly illusion, like a magic trick, or a frustrating, cheap gimmick used to cheaply spice up a boring script. It's understandable that most audience feel alienated when it happens, because if not done with a certain level of respect for the audience, it comes across as condescending. High Tension makes just that mistake.

A murderous trucker breaks into the secluded home of a college girl, and slaughters her family while her girlfriend is visiting. Philippe Nahon (I STAND ALONE) is a slight actor, but he looks like an 8 foot tall demon in a baseball cap thanks to the visual trickery of forced perspective (like in LORD OF THE RINGS with the hobbits & Gandalf) and some clever lighting. We don't need (or get) any backstory on the how few times the trucker's mom hugged him, or flashbacks to the girls' college campus to see their relationship. In a few brief moments we totally understand the character dynamics.

After finishing off the girl's family while the protagonist-girlfriend hides, the killer shoves the girl into his rusty murder-van. This sets off just the sort of tense throwback thrillers we need more of. The killer travels across the French countryside, being pursued by our hero looking for a chance to save her girlfriend and maybe take some vengeance for the lost. We watch her get stronger, braver, until the pint-sized hero catches up with the killer, and we think she's going to save the day. Then they throw a twist, wherein she was the trucker the whole time somehow. Our hero is now full-on batshit, and gets stabbed by her girlfriend. Next, we see them in a psychiatric hospital with our hero locked up.

I'd dive into the incredible number plot holes this creates, or discuss how it retroactively makes great scenes silly, but I'd rather point out that it doesn't fit the sweet simplicity of the rest of the movie - a much greater crime than some logic gaps.

It's frustrating. It's frustrating when a movie opts for a simplified, clean storytelling, full of a limited set of characters with understandable motivations (girl wants to save her lover, murderers tend to murder etc.) the entire run, then makes a sharp turn into nonsense. The crime here is being too clever for its own good, which highlights how little is on its mind. Up until this point, the movie reveled in its simplicity. We're guided by a character arc wherein a woman learns to be brave and fights for the one she loves is understandable and progressive. It also harkens back to the exploitation era Quentin Tarantino is so fond of, when ass-kicking chicks show the patriarchy they don't need them in various ways. It's kind of just an added bonus that our two female leads are lesbians, and this relationship treated like any other love.

When it becomes about a lesbian lover going crazy, killing her girlfriend's family (who didn't seem to even protest their love formally) and abducting her, it all becomes a sick conflation of lesbianism and mental illness. A simpler ending wherein the killer gets killed and the girls get patched up at the hospital would have left all that human motivation in there, but instead it becomes something laughable at best and homophobic at worst.

This is the worst of shock endings - the kind that is done without any legwork. We never feel like our narrator is unreliable. When we begin, she is understandably terrified by the killer. As the story continues, she remains scared of him, but she's fighting to overcome it. By the end, she's on the hunt. No longer is it just about a hero trying to save her princess. No longer is it about female empowerment. The film was elevated by its execution of its simple story - it didn't need one cheap last scare.

There's also something to be said for secondary viewings. In The Sixth Sense, a second viewing will remain creepy, but give you a new perspective on the proceedings. Haley Joel Osment and his Ghost Pal are still playing Ghost Detectives, helping dead people cope, while also trying to give themselves the same closure. By the end, a mangled ghost is no longer a terrifying threat to Haley - it's just a reality of his life. In High Tension, the twist makes all the previous scenes feel retroactively silly, and leaves a viewer listless. If our hero is also the killer, then there's nothing to fear when she's hiding from the killer. She's just standing in a closet now.

There are financial considerations to a secondary viewing as well. The Sixth Sense went on to become the second-highest grossing movie of 1999 (after Star Wars: The Phantom Menace), for many reasons, notably that audiences came back multiple times with the twist in mind. I don't doubt that the creators of High Tension thought having a complicated, "chewy" ending would drive viewers back again and boost some ticket sales. When a tale feels complete on one viewing, why come back for more?

SIGNS

No single writer has been more thoroughly maligned for his twist endings as M. Night Shyamalan. His name is become a Family Guy punchline, a meme, a shorthand for lazy shock value in movies. There's a reason he's making big budget, linear adventure stories like After Earth and The Last Airbender - he's been shamed out of his schtick. Apparently he's off shooting a smaller little horror story now, as a way of reconnecting to his roots. If it has an ending like Signs, it'll prove he's learned nothing from being culturally pilloried.

The amount of shit thrown at the guy is a bit obscene, in that it buries the perfectly solid work that got us impressed initially. He was never going to be the next Spielberg, but Signs certainly deserves to be remembered as a solid horror-thriller sunk by a tone-deaf ending.

Something terrible happened between Signs and The Happening. For a few moments, M. Night knew how to play with tone and characters, and then promptly forgot. There's a remarkably scary scene that the movie is best remembered for, wherein our protagonist family is stuck to the TV, cloistered in their secluded country home, watching the news with terrified anticipation. A clip comes on, a genius little recognition of the found footage phase of horror that was in its nascent stages in 2002. It's of a children's birthday party, which quickly devolves into a room full of screaming kids as a bipedal monster, obscured by the digital noise of a crappy handheld camera, walks right into view and right back out in the backyard. It's not the only scare in the movie, but its an effective, sharp one, and coolly lets the director take advantage of the trend for just a single moment. Other than that, its a classically shot, vibrantly colored horror thriller, that uses wide angles and long cuts, and in no way feels like the cheap, tossed-together found-footage movies like The Devil Inside.

A big strength to the movie is the small world it inhabits. We never see spaceships blowing up the White House like in Independence Day, or giant alien combines sucking up humans for later study/extinction like in War of the Worlds. It doesn't show us what's happening much outside of the farm where Mel Gibson and his family lives. Other than a few short trips to town, our primary flashes of the outside conflict comes through the TV, and it only seems to terrorize the family more, the more they watch. That's precisely the point, though. By keeping our story small and human-level, it's giving itself strength to terrify us. Every reveal is given piecemeal, from the opening crop circles, to the climax with the confronting the actual aliens themselves. It's not an aggressively stimulating movie. There's no shock every 10 minutes to keep us from getting bored.

The family watching TV is key to the movie. After the droll, self-serious The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Signs has a really funny moment. Mel Gibson comes home to see his two kids and his washed-up brother are sitting in front of the TV, wearing literal tin-foil hats, rapt in terror. This is the movie having a laugh at its audience, which is particularly interesting given the fact that 9/11 happened during the filming. After the attacks, 24 hour news broadcasted a seemingly endless stream of developing facts and knee-jerk speculation in equal measure. Everyone was terrified and confused in the wake of a very real, very terrifying threat. The movie isn't poking fun of its audience for merely being afraid - that would be inhumanly cruel. Instead, it very effectively draws up the sort of terror people experience after the bubble of their perception is popped, and they need to contend with reality all at once. The movie pokes fun of and comments on the irrational madness that we succumb to, and TV's role in playing up that terror. It's all very Night of the Living Dead, and M. Night happily cribs from the best. This scene isn't tonally discordant either - Mel Gibson's primary struggle in the movie is to contend with fatherhood when he's lost his wife in a terrible, pointless accident. Also, Mel has lost his faith in God, but that's kind of secondary.

This smallness, though, lead M. Night to one of his silliest endings. Mel Gibson's struggle is dealt with throughout the movie by flashbacks to his wife's last words before she died, in an admittedly melodramatic and totally contrived scene. In the final moments. Mel Gibson's final words aren't a bit of encouragement and guidance for Mel to trust in himself or whatever - it's literally just veiled instructions on how to defeat the monsters. With water. Not holy water or anything, just water. Like in our atmosphere on any given day. Mel Gibson's struggle to contend with outside forces to keep his family together and safe is instead circumvented by a need to tell the audience how they'll beat the monsters, a plotline the movie happily steers clear of the rest of its runtime.

M. Night's goal was noble: end the movie on a simple, small, poetic struggle between Mel Gibson's family and a monster. No Randy Quaid flying a plane into an alien ship to sacrifice himself and save the day. No laser battle. Just a man defending his family. It's satisfying, too, to watch them fight back against their fear and conquer it. I'm fine with them fighting and killing the monster. To be honest, Mel Gibson beating a monster to death with a baseball bat without all the dead-wife-water-revelation would have been even better. It's an unnecessary complication, and detracts from the real purpose of the plot. M. Night was clearly going for a poetic ending like in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, where the martians win and win and win, until earth microbes they're not used to end up killing them. An ending that's surprising, but not out of left-field. The natural world steps in saves humanity's ass by happenstance. Something symbolic he could work with. Instead, it comes across as false poeticism, which just feels pretentious and laughable.

This is the opposite problem High Tension has, in that it sets up the twist, but that doesn't mean its a good one. The legwork, like the daughter's obsession with putting water glasses around the house, is compellingly weird and gives you something to chew on, but after the big reveal, it all comes across as too painfully literal and contrived. He was shooting for the sort of ironic endings Twilight Zone used to have in its best episodes, where the protagonist's character faults are broadcast into a reality they have to contend with. Instead, he got one of the lesser episodes, where it felt like it was all set-up, no punchline.

STAKELAND

American indie film has grown to develop its own language as production & distribution are further decentralized. Cheaper handheld cameras capture seemingly-random objects, like a lonely basketball discarded by the side of the road, or the close-up of a flower field. The editing too, speaks of more deliberate pacing - a Hollywood movie rarely lets a moment linger very long. Little moments might not come to fruition in bigger productions, because there are more sets and more characters and more ground to cover, and why waste time on a landscape establishing shot when it could be better spent on a bigger, splashier effects?

So it's especially interesting when the indie film market expands enough that these techniques start showing up in horror movies. Traditionally the cheapo, high return-on-investment projects of big studios who want to diversify their roster for the year, horror movies have grown a healthy, ardent indie film community. Jim Mickle made Mulberry St., a zombie movie set in New York, on the cheap and focused on a community of neighbors in a single apartment building instead of giving us a sweeping apocalyptic picture. While genre pictures went indie, and indie techniques entered the mainstream.

Stakeland, his follow-up, follows a vampire-hunter and his protege across saturated midwest landscapes and small towns. It's a road movie with modern concerns, and the "badass vampire hunter"character is more along the lines of a tough, working class guy than some sort of special ops commando. Before everything collapsed, he probably did much the same: traveled from town-to-town, looking for work. He just happened to become very useful when it all went to shit. The movie focuses on that sort of smallness. He's not a noble hero killing vampires and marauders for the sake of fighting some universal war between good and evil. He does what goodness he can, evidenced in a scene where he saves a woman from being raped by two assholes, and brings her with him to the next town. Earlier, he picks up an apprentice (our protagonist) to help him in his hunts, but mocks his naiveté in thinking he can save the whole world. Naturally the apprentice rubs off on the hunter and vice versa, and the hunter is softened somewhat to the world.

Stakeland pulls from a rich history of horror, which is especially clear in the zombie movie trope that humans are actually the real monsters, man. It's done mostly to highlight moral consequence in horror movies, that this isn't just a tale of literal survival, it's about humanity itself pushing to survive. When the hunter and his apprentice come across a fundamentalist death cult, they angrily push back against their inhumanity and it helps define them as characters. Up until this point, the vampires have been seen as mindless threat, so the rationalized evil of the cult feels far more threatening. The cult even uses the vampires as a weapon against a peaceful community in a long-cut sequence that warmly calls upon Children of Men, with an eruption of violence sending screaming families trying to gather up each other and run away in a frenzy. It's a remarkable, jaw-dropping sequence, and marks the level of seriousness the movie takes in the project. It wants to make this world feel real and tangible to build up the terror. The vampires in this situation were merely inert forces of danger, unable to attack the humans behind the safety of their walls. The true evil was man here, leaving the vampires to just be arbitrary objects of destruction, feeding themselves as they pathetically wander around and occasionally proving destructive.

The final confrontation takes this basis of a well-grounded, tangible horror, and falls prey to the sort of ending a big, bloated Hollywood production would have. Rather than a scaled ending matched to the size of the world they set up, we get the lead cultist's transformation into some kind of elite vampire that can talk. This is given short shrift - the movie seems utterly unconcerned why we would need to know that he's stronger and smarter than any other vampire we've seen so far, other than a plot contrivance. The snarling villain's ability to speak doesn't come off as a menacing revelation, but as a hilarious miscalculation. This kicks off an extended battle between the monster hunter, his apprentice and the lead vampire, wherein the monster explains his plan to the characters and has the sort of epic final argument with them you'd expect in a Star Wars prequel. This happens in a movie full of bluntly violent, sudden confrontations. The vampires were never the real threat, so conflating the two is pointless. The vampires are just a new obstacle for the living - just a new survival threat, like finding food and shelter. People are the real monsters, working by no rules and committing evil for no discernible reason. It reeks of inconsistency.

Clearly, the writers or producers felt that the end needed to have our heroes score a big win against the vampires (which they spent a great deal of time explaining wasn't the real threat). Sure, having the kid getting abducted is fine, leading the hero to prove he does not care only for survival. The harsh survivalist going out of his way to save someone he cares about and truly risking his life is a fine ending tonally, but not against a threat this obvious and logic-breaking. This is a world of brutal, sudden, and deadly consequence, and having a typical "epic" ending wherein the villain clashes philosophically with our hero is deeply wrong. This wasn't a movie of moral disagreements; it was a movie about surviving man's worst nature.