From Terrifier 3 to Dawn of the Dead to John Carpenter’s The Thing, some of the scariest horror movies ever made end on a hauntingly ambiguous note. A cliffhanger ending can serve a few dramatic purposes. In the horror genre, the most common function of a cliffhanger is to leave the audience appropriately unsettled as they exit the theater. After finding out that Sarah is still trapped in the cave at the end of The Descent or David has switched places with Walter at the end of Alien: Covenant, the audience is left deeply disturbed.
There’s a sense of comfort and closure in a definitive ending like Sally escaping from Leatherface at the end of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Chris being saved by his best friend at the end of Get Out. It’s much more discomforting to get no closure whatsoever in an ambiguous ending like The Shining or The Birds. Cliffhanger endings can serve other purposes, too; they can set up a sequel, like Evil Dead II’s time travel twist or Terrifier 3’s portal to Hell. Some of the best horror movies end on a hair-raising cliffhanger.
10 Terrifier 3
The final act of Terrifier 3 sees avenging angel Sienna Shaw confronting Art the Clown and his latest sidekick, Victoria. Sienna manages to decapitate Victoria, but it has a dire ramification: Victoria’s blood burns through the floor and opens up a portal to Hell. Sienna’s younger cousin Gabbie falls into the portal and takes Sienna’s magical sword with her. Before the end credits roll, Sienna vows to find her and save her.
This cliffhanger sets up an awesome story for the cliffhanger ending of Terrifier 3 sets up her most daring adventure to date. Terrifier 4 will see her battling Satan’s minions in Hell on her way to save the cousin who looks up to her.
9 Alien: Covenant
Ridley Scott’s second Alien prequel, Alien: Covenant, sees a space crew answering a distress signal and getting more than they bargained for. Their benevolent android, Walter, clashes with David, the malicious A.I. from Prometheus who wants to wipe out humanity. At the end of the movie, when the xenomorphs have been killed and David has seemingly been defeated, Walter sees the survivors off to their cryosleep chambers. But just as they’re drifting off, they realize it’s not really Walter — it’s David. He swapped places with Walter as part of his diabolical plan.
This set up a chilling storyline for a third Alien prequel that, sadly, never got made. It’s a haunting twist on its own, with some really frightening implications, but Michael Fassbender really sells it with a creepy smile. Based on that smile alone, the audience figures out the ruse just as the surviving crew do.
8 28 Weeks Later
28 Weeks Later covers the zombie apocalypse on a much larger scale than its predecessor, 28 Days Later. 28 Days Later showed the apocalypse through one survivor’s eyes, and that survivor wasn’t even around for the initial outbreak. 28 Weeks Later shows the zombie uprising from multiple different perspectives across a sprawling ensemble cast. The ending sets up an even larger scale for the sequel, as the survivors escape across the English Channel and make it to — only to find that the virus has spread there, too.
This is an incredibly bleak and depressing ending. After London has been destroyed due to zombie attacks and firebombing, the only shred of hope is that the rest of the world might be okay. When they get to and find that the virus has reached continental Europe, that hope is crushed. There’s no escaping this virus.
7 It Follows
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is a poignant horror metaphor for the dangers of STDs. It revolves around a parasitic entity that relentlessly pursues whoever it’s attached to, never giving them a second to rest, and it’s ed between young people through sexual . At the end of the movie, Jay’s friend Paul offers to take the parasite by having sex with her, then Paul is seen contemplating hiring a sex worker. But as Jay and Paul walk through town, holding hands, a mysterious figure is seen approaching behind them.
This could be a totally innocuous ending. Maybe Paul ed on the parasite to a sex worker, he and Jay became a happy couple, and the person walking behind them is just a person walking behind them. But it’s equally possible that Paul couldn’t go through with ing on the parasite to another innocent soul and he’s just accepting his grim fate and allowing the entity to get him.
6 Evil Dead II
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II is essentially a zanier remake of its predecessor with a lot more slapstick humor, but its cliffhanger ending introduced a more serialized element to the franchise. After attaching a chainsaw to his severed arm and sawing off his shotgun barrel, Ash Williams manages to vanquish the deadites from the cabin. And then he and his Oldsmobile Delta 88 are sucked through a time vortex and transported to the Middle Ages.
Like the cliffhanger endings of Terrifier 3 and Alien: Covenant, this one was intended to set up a sequel. It led into Army of Darkness, the threequel that saw Ash battling demons in 1300 A.D. while trying to get back to his own time. Evil Dead II’s time travel twist provided a suitably bonkers ending to one of the most bonkers movies ever made.
5 The Birds
After surviving the night, the characters of Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless gem The Birds decide to leave town and try their chances elsewhere. They’ve heard over the radio that the birds have attacked other nearby communities and the military is considering an intervention. As they quietly walk out to their car and drive away, the birds — which have been mindlessly attacking people all day and night — are calmly congregated all around the property, ominously looking down at them.
The lack of any kind of explanation in this cliffhanger ending makes it all the more unsettling. Somehow, birds that aren’t attacking anyone but look like they could at any second are much scarier than birds that are just randomly attacking people. It’s unclear why the birds are so still — maybe they’re establishing their dominance over humanity as the humans cower in fear around them.
4 Dawn Of The Dead
George A. Romero’s second zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead, is a biting satire of consumerism about a group of survivors who hole up in an abandoned shopping mall. At the end of the movie, the remaining survivors fight their way to the roof of the mall, get in a helicopter, and take off. They made it away from the zombie-infested mall, but they’re low on fuel and their fate is uncertain.
The beauty of this cliffhanger ending is that whether it’s bleak or hopeful is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe they’ll run out of fuel and crash, or they’ll land somewhere that’s similarly overrun with the undead and get promptly devoured. But it’s just as likely that they’ll find a safe haven away from the threat of the zombies and start a new life.
3 The Descent
American audiences got a much happier ending to Neil Marshall’s The Descent, in which Sarah escapes from the cave and gets away from the bloodthirsty mutants dwelling within. The original ending is much more ominous. Sarah makes it out of the cave, gets back to her car, and races out of the woods. But it turns out this was all an extended hallucination. She didn’t really escape from the cave; she’s still trapped in there, surrounded by the terrifying sounds of mutants trying to sniff her out.
This ending is similar to that of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a character on the gallows is shocked to realize that he imagined his escape and journey home in the seconds before the noose broke his neck. In both cases, the happy ending was all in the protagonist’s head as they tried to mentally escape from their bleak reality. Suffice to say, it’s not easy to sleep after watching this movie.
2 The Shining
There’s an apparent sense of closure at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Wendy and Danny manage to avoid Jack’s wrath and escape on the snowcat. As Jack flails around in the blizzard, he eventually gets tired, falls to the ground, and freezes to death. It seems to be a happy ending in which the heroes get away and the villain is punished. And then Kubrick pulls in on an old black-and-white photo from a Fourth of July ball in 1921, with Jack standing at the front of a crowd of partygoers.
This calls the entire movie into question. The story of a frustrated suburban dad losing his mind in extreme isolation and trying to murder his wife and son suddenly becomes a lot more complicated. Was Jack a reincarnation or has he been haunting this hotel the whole time? The Shining leaves viewers with so many unanswered questions that it leaves them deeply disturbed.
1 The Thing
At the end of John Carpenter’s The Thing, MacReady and Childs manage to kill the pesky alien entity by blowing up the station. But as they settle down, they realize the futility of their situation. They have no way of knowing if either of them have already been assimilated by the entity. And even if neither of them got assimilated, they’ll likely freeze to death before being rescued. So, they decide to just split a bottle of Scotch whisky and wait to die.
The Thing is a quintessentially nihilistic movie about how quickly humanity could be completely doomed. This cliffhanger ending hammers home the nihilism as, even after triumphing over the alien, the characters still have no hope of survival. Like Dawn of the Dead, the ending of The Thing leaves it up to the audience to decide whether to be optimistic (but it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to be optimistic about this ending).
