See the excellent Fletch Talks post for his original article which inspired your friendly neighbourhood Ocelot to compose this personal rundown of memorable horror film endings.
They may not be great movies or even good horror flicks, but by Hitchcock the last scenes stayed with me.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Fuck that shit. |
Seriously, sod that for a game of soldiers. No 12-year old child should have been allowed up late to watch that ending on telly. I blame the parents.
See also: The Night My Parents Came To Kill Me
The Fly (1958)
"heeelp meee," |
The ending to The Fly is this: the horrific, tragic scientist-with-the-head-of-a-fly is dead, released from its suffering by a hydraulic press and a concerned wife. Hey, we've all been there. But in the epilogue, Vincent Price and some other dude go outside and discover, trapped in an ordinary garden spider's web, a teeny tiny fly with the head of a man, trapped in silk with a dirty great spider bearing down on him.
"heeelp meee," it cries, in a tiny high pitched wail, "heeeelllppppmeeeee!"
Skip to 1:26:36 for the full horror
Unnamed movie from the 70s where the puppy has glowing eyes
Grrr. I want Schmackos. Grrr. |
Actually come to think of it, it probably was Zoltan: Hound of Dracula.
See also Rosemary's Baby and the final shot of Michael Jackson's Thriller. It's all about the evil eyes.
So Professor Cushing finishes telling his tale of an evil prehistoric giant skeleton that regenerates when it gets wet, and how it menaced him and his daughter. Then the barred door to his 'lab' slams shut and we get the shock reveal that the prof is in a mad house run by Christopher Lee, his brother! Or is he his brother? And the prof's supposed daughter is just some crazy woman in another cell and it was all the ravings of a madman. Or was it? What about the prof's missing finger? The one that he claims the giant regenerating skeleton monster took to replace its own foul, amputated digit? Who knows?
I'm confused and scared all at the same time. Aaaah!
I was going to go with the ending to The Awakening (1980), the remake of Blood From The Mummy's Tomb with Remington Steele's Stephanie Zimbalist where she gets taken over by the evil Egyptian queen and gets a hot makeover with Bo-Derek-in-10 hair, but I went with this one instead. Yes, it's more of a sci-fi like Body Snatchers and Fly in its mechanics I guess, but the feeling of sheer horror it gave the young me at the end is still palpable all these years later.
Having defeated his nemesis, a spider in the basement, poor inch-high hero Scott continues to get smaller, realising that he will keep on shrinking forever. Jeez. Apparently, thanks to the closing voiceover, Scott's cool with that, but I bloody wasn't. I was so traumatised by this downer ending that for years I was convinced that it actually finished with him starting to get bigger again. I must've rewritten the ending - with a more heroic Hank Pym resolution - in my head afterward.
The Creeping Flesh (1973)
Pete gives him the finger |
I'm confused and scared all at the same time. Aaaah!
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Another giant spider menace. There may be a theme here. |
Having defeated his nemesis, a spider in the basement, poor inch-high hero Scott continues to get smaller, realising that he will keep on shrinking forever. Jeez. Apparently, thanks to the closing voiceover, Scott's cool with that, but I bloody wasn't. I was so traumatised by this downer ending that for years I was convinced that it actually finished with him starting to get bigger again. I must've rewritten the ending - with a more heroic Hank Pym resolution - in my head afterward.
5 comments:
Brilliant choices - by God that ending to The Fly is like my absolute worst nightmare. That doggie one could be Zoltan - or ZOITAN as the guy from Salem's Lot keeps calling him! The Body Snatchers one is so bloody chilling it's untrue - one of the best remakes ever, that's for sure!
What was that British one about dudes in an asylum trying to work out which of them is the doctor and which one the patient and it ends with one if them brutally strangling the other then laughing maniacally as he listens to his victim's dead body with a stethoscope?
Was fucked up.
It was totally Zoltan Hound of Dracula
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is a deceptive and upsetting film. As a kid I watched the B&W original and had the screaming dibdabs at the scene where they're falling asleep and there are pods in the greenhouse. It was even scarier than the Red Weed theme that my dad always had to skip if he was listening to his War of the Worlds album.
... I think I've just traced my inbuilt deep suspicion of Nature.
Smitt, that asylum one you describe sounds memorably bonkers. Sounds to me like the end of the Amicus portmanteau horror Asylum (1972). Have a YouTube and let me know.
Andy Raff, I am so tempted to hum the spooky slurred wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaah of the Red Weed theme to you now. But I won't coz that'd be wrong and you might do a tiny man-fly impression back at me.
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