By Rish Outfield
The hero holds the heroine in his arms, finally together after so long. The world
around them has been thoroughly destroyed, the few survivors in a state of mental
and physical anguish. And though the onslaught of the insect attack has been too
terrible for words, in the tiny shelter, safe in each other's embrace, our hero sighs
in relief.
But then, he hears a sound. A skittering sound. From the air duct high above them,
something rustles. And emerges.
He sees it drop beside one of the food storage containers . . . a cockroach.
And from the duct, another drops down. And another, and another, and another.
Roll credits.
Someone once said that Horror was the only genre that could be satisfying with an unhappy ending. And while that may not be completely true, it certainly applies in more cases than any other genre (what about tragedy? an evil voice in my mind asks)(well, you have a point there, I admit, but it's not like there's a Tragedy section at your local video store)(maybe there should be)(evil voice, are you finished trying to ruin my essay?)(sorry, I was only trying to help)(I highly doubt that). Audiences may not expect it, but they can accept that in Horror, not everything comes up roses. And if it does, those roses are often sitting on a coffin. Chances are, if you're reading this, you've seen a lot of horror films, and maybe you've noticed that many times, it is the unhappy ending that really sticks with you, really keeps you up at night, really thrills you, rather than the times that everything turns out alright. For fun, let's take a look at just a couple of unhappy endings that really worked and try and think of why (by the way, here there be spoilers).
Carrie (1976) Sue Snell is one of the only survivors of the
Black Prom. After recovering, she goes to the charred ruins of Margaret White's
house and walks up the path. Someone has spray-painted "Carrie White burn in hell"
over the tormented girl's makeshift grave, but Sue has a flower to place there–a
symbol that she understands Carrie, or at least doesn't consider her a monster. She
reverently places the rose on the dirt . . . and a bloody hand bursts through the ground,
grasping her own. Sue wakes up screaming, and we see she's in a bed, being attended
to, and clearly has lost her grip on sanity.
Carrie's ending is one of the best I've ever seen. We, the audience, think the
terror is over, and what happens is shocking both by the way it's presented and also
because it doesn't fit with the rules the film has set up before. It's surreal, slow, the
music is sad and reflective, not at all scary, and then it just comes out of nowhere. Plus,
Sue is a "good" character, someone sweet and kind, who never meant Carrie any harm.
Though it turns out to be just a dream, it totally works, giving me nightmares for at least
a week as a kid. I was unable to expunge the image of Carrie White's dead hand grasping
Sue Snell, trying to pull her down to the dark depths with her. It's been imitated countless
times, and rightly so, but I don't know that any that came later equalled it.
The Terminator (1984) Kyle Reese is dead and the Terminator
destroyed. The now-pregnant Sarah no longer lives in a bright, peaceful, innocent
place, her eyes are filled with the pain and knowledge that the world is going to end
one day soon. "A storm is coming," the little Mexican boy shouts. Sarah says, almost
to herself, "I know."
Terminator has both a happy ending and a sad one, and it works because
everything else in the film has been fatalistic, bleak, and violent, and we understand
that tomorrow holds more of the same. Sarah Conner has survived, but has become
a sort of Cassandra figure because she knows that a war is coming, she knows nearly
all of humanity is going to be wiped out, she knows the why, the when, and the how,
but there's nothing she can do about it. At least not until the sequel . . .
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) Julie James has
survived the psychological and physical pursuits of the Fisherman, and a year has
passed since they had their bloody confrontation. She's safe, alone, and talking to her
boyfriend on the phone. She also wears only a towel in a public shower. Hanging up,
she's about to step into the shower when she notices a chilling message scrawled in
steamy glass: "I STILL KNOW." There comes a familiar sound. She turns around.
And the Fisherman bursts through the shower at her. Roll titles.
I often receive criticism for my love of this film, but I completely adore it. Part of the
reason was that great ending. Clearly, the danger is over, the movie is over, and they'd
never kill the heroine after all this time, right? Wrong.
Though the sequel utterly obliterates the power of this ending (and then has the
temerity to try and replicate it), I Know What You Did Last Summer's
denouement is really, really effective . . . and a good scare.
King Kong (1933) The mighty Kong falls from the Empire
State Building, the deadly fall ending his reign of terror. Fay Wray is safely reunited
with her man, none the worse for wear. Humans have triumphed over the giant ape,
but has Good triumphed over Evil? In the end, our hearts are tugged when we realize
that it wasn't the guns, it wasn't the planes, it wasn't the fall. It was beauty that killed
the beast.
The ending of King Kong worked because the audience felt for the monster,
understood the monster, rooted for the monster, and the filmmakers killed him anyway.
It's human nature to destroy that which we don't comprehend, and as an audience, we
took the superior position of seeing that the monster wasn't evil and that the people were
wrong. But in the end, something amazing and beautiful died anyway.
Friday the 13th (1980) After the massacre at Camp Crystal Lake,
there's only one survivor. Alice has beheaded the evil Mrs. Voorhees, and passes
out in a rowboat, drifting in the water. She awakens, all alone, to find that all is well,
the horror has passed. She brushes her hand through the water, in a surreal peace,
until . . . something bursts out of the water at her, something horrible and misshapen.
Alice awakens, shrieking, being attended by medics, but has the horror passed?
Like Carrie, this is another slow-motion, dream-like ending, with the last
survivor being attacked one last time by a being from beyond the grave. It's both
predictable and unpredictable. Since we've seen it before, we know SOMETHING
is going to happen, but not what, and it takes so long to happen, when it does, it really
elicits a scream. The difference between this ending and Carrie's is that
here, we are left wondering if maybe, just maybe, it WASN'T a dream, and Jason
Voorhees might still be out there, waiting for his turn to enact revenge.
If only there had been a sequel, we might have known for sure.
Seven (1995) "What's in the box?" Detective Mills wails. Beside
him, John Doe kneels, calm in spite of the danger of his situation. He even dares to
smile, for he knows what's coming. Detective William Sommerset looks away from
the box, managing to wipe away the shock and horror from his face, and speeds
toward his partner. "No!" he shouts, but he can't stop things from running their twisted
course.
This is a big daddy of unhappy endings. An ending so bleak and stark that it beggars
comparison. All the characters have lost something, and evil has TOTALLY won.
The audience members, pale and unnerved, trudge back to their cars in sickening
silence, like holocaust survivors. I know, I was there. Amazing.
There are lots of horror movies with great endings (almost as many as there are with terrible endings), but I chose these couple examples to highlight yet another delightful quality in my favourite genre. In most cases, these endings all play on the same theme, that what you thought was over isn't. In Seven Mills and Sommerset have the Deadly Sins killer in custody, then . . . In Carrie, Carrie White is dead, but the nightmare isn't over (no pun intended for the final scene). In I Know What You Did Last Summer Julie and Ray have put the horror of the man with the hook behind them. In Friday the 13th, Pamela Voorhees has lost her head, and Alice is alive and safe Many, many other examples come to mind, playing on the audience's belief that the terror has ended, lowering their guards so one last scare can really take them out.
One more film I would've liked to have talked about was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's interesting because it has two endings: the originally-conceived unhappy-as-hell ending, and the studio-imposed things-are-going-to-be-alright ending. Weirdly, both of them work, probably because the original ending is retained, only followed up on. It isn't revealed to be a dream, it isn't the fevered imagination of a lunatic, it's really happening. Having seen it both ways, I prefer the bleaker, more open to interpretation ending. It's more daring, and it's the one you remember. "They're here already! YOU'RE NEXT!" The 1978 remake has no such ambiguity. It gives us that same moment of hope, that maybe things will be alright for humanity (at least for some) and then smacks us in the face with a board full of rusty nails. I could be forgetting one, but I think that's my favourite horror movie unhappy ending of all.
Horror film unhappy endings, at least in my mind, tend to fall into one of four
self-explanatory categories:
The Evil Isn't Dead ending: Halloween, The Evil Dead,
A Nightmare on Elm Street, Candyman.
The And It Never Really Ends ending: Invaders From Mars, Evil
Dead 2, The Beyond, Needful Things, The Ring, The
Devil's Advocate.
The Good Wins, But At What Cost? ending: Hell Night, either version
of The Fly, Tourist Trap, The Bride of Frankenstein, An
American Werewolf In London, maybe Night of the Living Dead too.
And the Evil Wins ending (which seems to be pretty rare): Invasion of the
Body Snatchers (1978), The Omen, Pet Sematary, The Stepford
Wives, the aforementioned Seven.
There could be many, many more examples of great shock or "Good loses" endings, but hey, they ain't paying me by the word here. If they were, I suppose we could talk about happy endings that work (like Scream and Scream 2, Poltergeist, Aliens, and House), and endings that just plain don't (like A Nightmare on Elm Street and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and Cutting Class), and that would open up another essay's worth of worms.
The power of the unhappy ending is that it's unexpected. Due to television and the controlling influence of the Happily Ever After Syndrome, the vast majority of films are released with warm and fuzzy finales. We, as moviegoers, have grown up in a cinematic world where Good is rewarded, Evil is punished, and everything works out in the end. But life's not like that, is it, boys and girls? In reality, there's a big X on a calendar with our name on it, and hearse out there waiting for every one of us. Horror, and the unhappy ending, is a way of helping us deal with the universal fears we share. We're not in control of our destinies, we can't predict the horrors of real life, nobody knows when or how death will come, and the fact that it's out of our hands is both fascinating and terrifying to people. We read in the paper about someone who is murdered by a naked clown, or eaten by barracuda, or molested by demons from the fourth circle of Hell, and we wonder, "How would I have reacted in that situation? How would it be to go out that way?"
The unhappy ending in film has become harder and harder to come by, even in Horror. We, as a society, are so used to everything working out alright in the movies (which isn't necessarily bad), that studios and filmmakers feel pressured to stomp out the hero's problems, bring him out triumphant, and let him get the girl. They want to please their audiences, who see movies as escapist entertainment, and virtually demand feel-good finales in return for their ticket stubs. That's where all those Unbelievably Happy Endings come from, I guess. It's frustrating, but understandable. And it makes those good bad endings all the better.
Rish Outfield
November 2002