Horror Buff StuffAre you the "horror person" on your virtual trivia team? Meet your new secret weapon: lists about everything even you don't know about movies scarier than the sound of a child's laughter in a cemetery after dark.
Updated November 9, 2020 49.7K votes 10.0K voters 943.8K views
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Vote up the alternate endings that would have made the films unbelievably terrifying.
Horror movies aren’t known for having happy endings. They’re meant to be unsettling, and to leave viewers rattled long after they step out of the darkness of the theater. However, there are a handful of horror films that almost had darker endings than what made the final cut.
Alternate endings in horror films usually come about when an audience finds the original ending to be too bleak, or when an ending is so shocking that it has to dialed back in order to leave viewers with some semblance of sanity. Many horror movie alternate endings are either reshot in response to a super depressed test audience, or are filmed during the original production, then cut after the filmmakers realized that their initial, unforgiving vision was too heavy.Â
In the end of the 2017 prequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface (Sam Strike) finally makes his first mask. He catches a woman named Elizabeth (Vanessa Grasse) and slays her. In the theatrical release, it ends there, but in the alternate ending, he puts her on a hook, similarly to a gut-wrenching moment from the original film.
Hostel follows Paxton (Jay Hernandez) as he and his friends vacation in Slovakia. After a night of partying, they're snatched and locked up in a secret prison where wealthy men get to torment them. Paxton escapes the prison (and offs a bunch of people on his way out) and encounters the man responsible for his pain in a train bathroom. The film ends with him killing the man.
The original ending plays out similarly, except Paxton sees the man with his young daughter. He takes the daughter, suggesting she’s going to suffer an awful fate as well.
The Butterfly Effect is a trippy enough movie with the various realities it presents as Evan (Ashton Kutcher) rewrites his history over and over. There were a total of four endings created for the film, and this one that got cut is definitely the darkest. Released as the director's cut, this ending shows Evan going back to the womb to end himself in vitro.
The Descent is about a group of female spelunkers who get lost in a cave and have to outrun a group of blood-thirsty creatures. The baddies pick the women off one by one until only Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) escapes. She makes it to a car and drives away, haunted by what she's just experienced.
In the international version of the film, Sarah wakes up in the cave after she seemingly makes it to the car. As the camera pulls out, it reveals that she's all alone in the cave, surrounded by crawlers.
Get Out has one of the most intense movie endings in recent history. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) escapes a basement chamber just before his body is jacked by a blind art dealer, and sets out to free himself from the rural neighborhood where he's been trapped.
If that isn't bad enough, Chris then has to eliminate his girlfriend. As he's finishing the job, red and blue lights begin flashing behind his head, signaling the arrival of the authorities. Luckily, it's just his security guard buddy Rod (Lil Rel Howery), who adds some levity to the situation.
That's not how the movie was always going to end. Initially, the actual police were supposed to show up in place of Rod, and the film ended with Chris in jail, unable to convince anyone of the truth. Director Jordan Peele felt that this ending wasn't as gratifying for viewers, so he decided instead to end the film on a hopeful note.
He made a wise choice, as all the horror of the original ending is encapsulated in the moment when viewers first see police lights.
Ellen Ripley is a fan favorite of the Alien saga, but the heroine of the franchise was almost offed in the first installment. There were hiccups surrounding the character of Ripley throughout development and production. Initially, Ripley was supposed to be a man, but producers Walter Hill and David Giler rewrote the role for a woman.
The script warped and changed, and at one point, director Ridley Scott asked for more money to shoot what he called his "fourth act," which was Ripley's demise at the mouth of the terrifying extra terrestrial. The alien was then going to record a last entry in Ripley's log by parroting her voice as the film faded to black.
