The 5 Most Horribly Inevitable Movie Endings

By Akela Talamasca on September 18th, 2009

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WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. If you haven’t seen one or more of these movies, skip their entries!

My definition of a good movie ending is one that proceeds naturally from the events of the story. The ending should make the viewer feel that it could only have happened that way, given what went before. Too many movies try too hard to make sure things end up happily for the protagonists, and thus leave the audience feeling cheated. A great example of this is the Matrix series. It could have gone any number of ways, and ended up choosing one of the worst to end the series. I’ve written about my idea for how it should have gone here.

In my mind, only a small handful of movies have gotten their endings right. And by “right”, I don’t necessarily mean “happy”. These five movies demonstrate the power of poetic inevitability, and I’ve never been happier to see it coming.

5. The Blair Witch Project

I don’t know if I’ve made my feelings about this movie apparent here on Manolith, but I loved the hell out of it. Of course, I saw it before finding out that it was fiction, so that might have something to do with it. Why this flick makes the list is because of its ending, which was the second most terrifying moment of the film for me. But to really get the full effect of what happened, you have to correctly perceive just what it was that Mike was doing in the corner. It turns out that the majority of people thought he was swaying in place after being hung from the ceiling, when in reality he was standing, facing the corner after being told to do so by Rustin Parr, who always killed his child victims in pairs. That was the true horror of that moment, and elevated the movie from being a mere gimmicky slasher flick into a well-told tale whose structure hearkened back to the kinds of ghost stories we’d tell around the campfire. If “The Blair Witch Project” was a trifle long, it didn’t dilute from its overall impact.

4. Requiem For A Dream

As soon as I saw the name “Hubert Shelby Jr.”, I knew I was in for a tough time. I wasn’t disappointed. Ostensibly a long anti-drug public service announcement, the awful four-way climax burned itself into my psyche and left lasting scars. All I wanted to do was go home and curl up fetus-like, just as the four protagonists of the movie did. Director Darren Aronofsky truly understands how to film the downward spiral, never once letting you forget that these characters are doomed from the very beginning. As powerful as it was, it was really not much more than a snuff film without actual death, lovingly and artistically shot, leaving the audience feeling simultaneously unclean and cathartically glad that our lives were in far better condition than those of our hapless heroes.

3. Angel Heart

What starts out as a simple detective story, a Southern Gothic noir about a missing persons case inevitably declines, tipping its protagonist into the waiting mouth of Hell. Director Alan Parker’s masterful use of sound, a washed out color palette, and the amazing Mickey Rourke all serve to immerse the viewer into an atmosphere choked with tension, stemming from a single terrifying secret that the main character has kept even from himself. As Harry angel gets closer and closer to the truth, he becomes more and more desperate, clawing vainly at his own personality in a trapped animal’s frenzy to escape his fate. But in the end, he gives the Devil his due, and rides the descending elevator to his predetermined fate.

2. In the Mouth of Madness

Any fan of the writing of H.P. Lovecraft knew full well how this John Carpenter joint would end. Less of a story than it was an homage to the great horror pulp writer, the movie was packed full of nods and references to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, right down to the way that the grotesque abomination that chases John Trent near the end of the film is never directly seen, a favorite ploy of the writer’s. It should be noted that the movie would not have been half as successful were it not for the brilliant Sam Neill, who portrays a professional skeptic eventually transformed into a gibbering lunatic, harrowed and overwhelmed by the fact that his entire life is no more than a fiction in the hands of a madman. The climactic scene inside the movie theater puts the perfect bow on the entire performance as Trent, watching his life unspool on the silver screen, gives out with maniacal laughter that degrades into helpless sobbing and becomes laughter again.

1. Seven

This is the movie that brought David Fincher to prominence, though his later “Fight Club” may have resonated more strongly with a wider audience. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more satisfied by a movie’s close than I was with this one. What starts as a police procedural quickly becomes a morality play as two detectives track down a serial killer who stages his victims as perpetrators one of each of the seven deadly sins. Before the officers can catch up with the criminal, however, he gives himself up in order to enact the final stage of his master plan, involving one of the detectives and his wife. As the final gambit is revealed, we watch the jaws of the trap snap neatly shut on Brad Pitt’s Detective Mills, and he loses his struggle between being an officer of the law and being a vengeful husband. In the end, there is nothing left but the final words of Morgan Freeman’s Detective Somerset as he quotes Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls: “‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”

Comment with your favorite inevitable endings!