Horror movies with open endings

There are 2 things I like in my horror film endings: A sad ending where evil wins (Jeepers Creepers) or an open ending where you and your imagination decides what really happens at the end of a film (Of course this only works if there is no sequel).

John Carpenters The Thing is a great example of a perfect open (and sad) ending. With our 2 heroes sitting in the freezing snow, not knowing if one or the other is "the thing" and knowing that they're gonna die by morning... man, what an ending!

I like open endings in horror movies becauseit usually adds to the unsettling nature of them. So many are confined to the usual narrative of providing a big closure at the end so we go out feeling great after going through the trauma, and while those are enjoyable, especially in flicks like Jaws, it's nice to have an ending where the killer isn't found, where the horror doesn't end. A great example is Halloween. Laurie is saved, but Myers is gone, and it's not over. Along with the genius montage at the end, it's a really effective ending.

Wouldn't a better question be: when was the last time there was a horror movie that DIDN'T have an open ending? It seems that everything is left open for a sequel these days, even the direct to video movies.

I would make a distinction between movies like "Pet Sematary" and "Dawn of the Dead" that are genuinely open-ended, and movies like "Genero-Slasher Part IX" that just have a 5-second "he's not really dead!" bit tacked on to the end. The latter has become depressingly common, and long ago lost whatever meager scare value it might once have had. It's such a cliche that it sometimes seems like a tradition that people follow long after forgetting why, like knocking on wood. "Don't forget to stick the 'he's not dead' bit at the end of the movie, or it's 7 years bad luck!"

Stephen Kings "Storm of the Century" had a brutal ending. It was very refreshing. I caught part 3 on ABC last night. I think It is the best televised thing King has written

Damn straight on Storm of the Century (I caught it again last night, too)

Extremely cruel ending. Tim Daly is a fantastic actor and really deserves to be big time.

Not to defend the people that don't understand the non-endings of chapter movies (Empire Strikes Back is another example), but there is a difference between these endings and the horror films we've mentioned. In the latter case, the story has ended. We have come to the conclusion of a story, but at the end a final twist has told us that a new story is beginning. Or, in the case of The Ninth Gate, the ending is a beginning of a new chapter in the character's life. But we have reached a point where this phase of this story is over, and we can see a new story beginning. [for the record, I found the ending of 9th Gate unsatisfying, but that's a different discussion]. In the case of the ending of FotR, we really are in the middle of a story, and we're waiting to find out what happens next.

But how else are the FotR-movies supposed to end? In the books there are no closure, actually the second book end on such a cliffhanger that if Peter Jackson would have done it like the book, the fans would strangle him.

As for open horror endings, I like endings that present a mystery, something for the viewer to think about. Ninth Gate, The Shining, Blade Runner (ok, not a horror, but the directors cut has one of the best endings in the world) all has good endings.

Yeah. In the best movies, the story continues indefinitely and doesn't simply stop happening at the final frame. Closure is a myth; nothing worth worrying about ever stops neatly or suddenly ceases to matter to the people involved at some arbitrary point of a director's choosing.

Good stories reflect the messy nature of reality, the lack of closure and satisfaction that real experience usually entails, the way mysteries tend to avoid simple resolutions and usually just spawn further uncertainty and confusion. The way fantasy often leads to disappointment, delusion, or even death, instead of fulfilment.

Some excellent suggestions, for starters:

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Rosemary's Baby

Don't Look Now

The Shining

The Blair Witch Project

Ring

Dawn of the Dead

The Wicker Man

The Vanishing (The good one)

At a stretch, you could mention The Thing. And Halloween, if we ignore the sequels, of course, which isn't hard to do.

Pet Sematary was pretty awful though, and I'm not sure it really belongs here, just considering matters of quality alone. And The Ninth Gate was pretty flimsy, story-wise, but I guess it qualifies.

Yeah, I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that it's two different things. FotR ends in the middle of the story, because it's only one chapter in a larger story. 9th gate ends at the end of a story, and the potential begining of another, different story.

Ditto on Englebert's excellent post.

But I think sometimes, albeit rarely, there IS closure in reality. And sometimes I can even accept it in a horror movie. For me, Jacob's Ladder was a great example of true closure. What I call feelgood horror.

I think movies with open ending are two things.
1. The scrrenwriter had no way how to paint himself out of a corner..that is how I feel with the end of the original Jeepers Creepers

2. They have a contract to wrtie three movies and need segues into sequels

Can someone explain to me the ending of Dark Water? I can't figure it out right.

- Fixxxer

Pederast- I assumed that, but I can't figure out why the mother would leave her real daughter like that. I didn't make sense to me, especially when she said stuff like "All I need is you". It really seemed out of order to me. Was there a previous connection between the zombie kid and the mother?

- Fixxxer

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Sometimes, sure, to a degree, there can be a sense of conclusion or completion of something, but the kind of neat completely clean-slate finality that movies and lifestyle gurus sell as the ideal of "closure" is a fantastic, almost fairy-tale ideal. It's like "happily ever after"-- it's unrealistic, and I think there's something unhealthy in this idea that there should always be some kind of satisfaction to be derived from everything that happens to us, a reward to be gained for ourselves or a guarantee--a guarantee that when something good begins for us it will always stay that way, or that when something ends it will be over for good.

<strong> It's a great movie, indeed, and I didn't mention it for exactly the reason you bring it up. There is a real sense of finality and fulfilment at the end of that movie; however, it's a sense not only of an ending but of the beginning of something else--another great mystery to us. At first I didn't like this ending at all, it seemed too pat, too convenient and excessively sweet and sugary. I still think there's a little too much sweetness and light on display there--probably the movie's one major fault in my book--but the ending itself I can't really fault. It's near perfect.

If I could pop in and give you my view...

I believe that the mother knew that if she didn't go with the ghost, that the ghost could possibly do something to her daughter (whether on purpose or accidently). Also, the husband would be available to take care of the daughter, in fact he was trying his hardest to get custody, and it looked like he would eventually get full custody of the daughter.
Maybe the mother felt that she had to help the ghost child because she was going to lose her daughter to her ex-husband.

That's how I took it. It was a really sad ending. I felt a bit choked up myself.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR Dark Water

You might want to go back and put some warning ahead of that there post for folks who haven't seen this movie yet. Luckily enough for me, I managed to catch it a few days ago--excellent ghost story, and certainly one of the best horror movies I've seen in a good long time. As for your question...

It was pretty clear that Yoshimi was soon going to lose custody of her daughter, given her husband's earlier attempts to portray her as mentally unstable, along with her recent freak-outs in her new apartment, not to mention her "losing" her daughter on a couple of occasions. This realization was playing on her quite heavily throughout the film.

Now, when confronted with the ghost in the elevator in the film's final moments, no doubt she was hardly acting rationally in any sense, and in any case she was pretty much at the mercy of the ghost. However, it's possible that she also realized at some point that the ghostly child, who seemed to be doomed to wander her old rooms endlessly seeking her lost mother, would, if convinced that Yosimi was indeed her lost mother, never leave her--she would be the daughter that nobody, not the law, not her husband, not time itself, could ever take away from her--and therefore perhaps in some rational sense Yoshimi did choose the ghost over her own daughter. In the end, who can really say?

That said, personally I think the film should have ended on the final shot of the water tank. Nothing shown after that really needed to be stated outright--it would have been much more powerful to leave the rest implied.

SPOILERS**

But why not just move? If the Ghost was going to be a problem/threat to the real daughter, then why not move? Hell, they were going to, but didn't.

I can understand where you folks are comming from, and while there may be no "real" answer, I can't buy the fact that she would just give up on her daughter like that, even if she was close to loosing her custody. I'm not argueing that you all are wrong, but to me that just doesn't make sense.

- Fixxxer

SPOILERS FOR Dark Water
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Move? Why? And how do you know it was even an option? They'd just moved into that apartment, and she still needed to get a job.

And where do you get the idea she was convinced there was a ghost or that she believed it to be some kind of threat to her or her daughter? Towards the end of the movie, sure, a lot of things seem to come together for her, but prior to that she at most might have suspected something was wrong with whoever was in the flat above them.

Meanwhile you claim that she "gave up" her daughter at the end like it was something she did willingly, something she deliberately chose as if she fully understood what she was doing and what it might mean. You even seem to suggest maybe it was something she'd thought through beforehand and something she wanted to do, for some reason.

I don't see it that way at all. To me it looked like a decision she'd made on the spur of the moment, most likely in a (perhaps misguided) effort to protect her daughter, and probably without any time to consider what it might mean for herself in the long run. One might imagine she was also frozen with horror by that stage, and could hardly be expected to know exactly what she was doing in any case. (I know realistic behavior and unpredictable response mechanisms are concepts as alien to most horror viewers/readers/writers/etc as the idea of intelligent, non-formulaic writing, but hopefully a good horror movie should be expected to surprise us from time to time.)

Perhaps at some point there--probably after the ghost had latched onto her as its mother, if at all--she realized that here was a child that would always be hers, that she wouldn't have to fear losing like her real daughter, and maybe that realization provided her some consolation in the end. The (probably unnecessary) coda that closes the film some ten years or so after Ikuko loses her mother seems to bear out this idea, though even there a palpable sense of menace still lingers, suggesting that Yoshimi's fate is not one she welcomed as willingly as you suggest.

Personally, I loved the ending for Jeepers Creepers. The idea that there was simply no way to win against the thing, that it was going to get what it wanted no matter what was just beautiful...

On a related note, I really loved the ending to Season of the Witch. The rest of the movie was okay, but just the thought of all those little children all across the country dying horrible deaths all at once, made me feel all warm and squishy inside...

Whoa, am I sensing angst? Dude, why COULDN'T she move? She was packing their stuff when the lawyer came over. Apparently, she was ready to move then. I'm sorry, but if I felt my child was in danger, I would do what ever I could to get her away from there. I wouldn't "sell" myself to some dead girl, for any reason, and neither would anyone who I present that situation to.

My problem with this, is that you could say "well maybe she did that because she knew she was going to loose custody of her daughter", but at that time, she didn't. She still had custody. I could understand that if she had already lost her, but she was still in her custody. In other words, I see that as a cop-out ending. It doesn't present any closure, and didn't seem logical to any of the people who was watching it with me.

I'm not saying your wrong, I just don't think that makes any sense. And I'm all for being "unpredictable", but at least either explain it, or make sense. If what you say is correct, I'm not going to argue that, I just don't think the writer did a good job of making things clear. If that was his mission, then I do think he did a good job, and so personally, I have a problem with the ending.

- Fixxxer

Dark Water SPOILERS
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So she didn't run off right away. Didn't the lawyer talk her out of it, and get her to calm down and cool off first? I don't understand why you're fixated on this point. Could she have moved? How the hell should I know?

And you must have skipped the rest of my message. Forget the "she did it because blah blah" argument". Maybe this just happened because she was suddenly cornered by a SCREAMING DEAD LITTLE GIRL. Why are you such a stickler for things making "sense" in such a situation?

And where on Earth do you come up with this idea that she "sold" herself to the dead girl, or she voluntarily chose to become the ghost's "mother" and abandon her daughter? Maybe she was somewhat willing to accept the ghost as a substitution, maybe she was not willing but did it thinking she might protect her daughter this way, or maybe, she was scared shitless and reacting to the situation the only way her instincts would allow her to, as a mother.

The only thing clear here is that, when all is said and done, the movie refuses to spell it all out for you in a way that makes your kind of "sense". If you can't tolerate grey areas and lack of "closure" in your fiction, what can I say, this might not be the film for you. But to my way of thinking, a movie that provokes questions like this has succeeded beautifully.

Mrstiffie, check your PMs. I have it.

Englebert-Is this your favorite movie or something? I sense that you are upset that I don't care/understand for the ending of the movie. LOL, I seriously can picture you with an angry expression as you type hard.

Seriously though...Hey, if you liked the movie, then great. I'm not here to bash on a good movie, which is what I think it is. There's some solid atmosphere and acting, plus I love the was the sound/music was used. I just don't think the ending is justifiable ending. I don't mind scratching my head after I've seen a movie, but I still think the ending was bit of a cop-out. I see a lot of errie/slow/good build-up, but then a quick unexplained/unlogical ending. IMO, of course, but that's the way I see it.

So really, if that's the way it is, then so be it. I still think DW is a good, well made movie, but I just can't get past that ending.

- Fixxxer

Angry? Do I look angry to you? Funnily enough, I can't really get upset over disagreements about movies. I mean, I enjoy watching them and all; but opinions is just opinions, even those as misguided as your own.

Hell, Dark Water is by no means a favorite movie of mind. It's not even my favorite ghost story on film, although it certainly figures prominently in that group--and it is unquestionably the best horror film I've seen for goodness knows how long.

So while I do find it a little exasperating to see a very decent horror movie like this, one of the best things done in the genre for years, as far as I'm aware, being judged--and found wanting--according to the expected standards of the usual artless garbage associated with the horror genre, my response to this is hardly anger. If anything, I find it amusing that an actual good movie will tend to get ripped on by horror fans at a time when fan-pandering tripe of the Freddy Vs Jason variety is the biggest thing going in the field.