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"Sir, we asked to be horrified, not traumatized!"
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00:00Don't you just love a horror movie that has a truly bleak ending?
00:04Just me?
00:05Okay, right, well, I will talk to a therapist about that.
00:08No, but sometimes you get horror movies that have original ideas
00:13that for whatever reason just didn't quite make it to screen.
00:17Perhaps test audiences didn't like it,
00:19perhaps somewhere in the scripting process it just sort of fell apart.
00:23This is a list of movies that whatever you think you saw
00:27and whatever you think affected you, it was once upon a time so much darker.
00:33I'm Sean Ferrick for WhatCultureHorror
00:35and here are 10 horror movies that originally had a much darker ending.
00:40Number 10, Leatherface.
00:42Serving as a prequel to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise,
00:452017's Leatherface didn't exactly wow the critics.
00:48Much of the movie's criticism came from its overly sanitized tone
00:51which made the movie feel at odds with the disturbing grindhouse atmosphere of the original movie.
00:55Had the movie kept its original ending, however,
00:58this particular critique would have been harder to justify.
01:01In the movie's original cut,
01:03final girl Elizabeth Lizzie White
01:05is swiftly decapitated by Leatherface's infamous weapon of choice.
01:08Horrible, yes,
01:10but when you remember the brutality of the eponymous villain inflicted on his victims
01:14in the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
01:16you could almost argue Leatherface was being merciful in granting Lizzie a quick death,
01:20especially when you see her fate in the alternate ending.
01:23In this deleted scene, the camera pans around to Elizabeth's body,
01:27stuck in a meat hook,
01:28missing a leg and having had the skin around the lower half of her face pulled off
01:32to make Leatherface's mask.
01:33The worst part is she's still alive to suffer through all this.
01:37This gruesome, inhumane treatment of his victims
01:40is far more in character with the Leatherface of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre
01:44and would have gone some way to silencing critics of the prequel's relatively lighter tone
01:49with heavy emphasis on the word relatively.
01:53Number nine, Dawn of the Dead.
01:55The original Dawn of the Dead is rightly seen as one of the greatest horror movies of all time,
02:00but it's interesting to think how it would be perceived today
02:03if the film had kept its horrifically dark original ending.
02:06The Dawn of the Dead that horror fans have come to know and love over the past 45 years
02:11sees surviving protagonists Peter and Fran make their escape on a helicopter,
02:15but in the movie's original ending, the chopper served a far darker purpose.
02:19As reported by Screen Rant, in Romero's original script,
02:22Peter simply gives up and blows his brains out.
02:25This leads to Fran becoming overwhelmed with despair,
02:28ending her own life by inserting her head between the spinning helicopter blades,
02:32just as she was on the cusp of freedom.
02:34These needless deaths would have led to a far darker movie,
02:38and arguably a worse one.
02:39Peter and Fran's escape from them all is one of the most triumphant moments in horror movie history,
02:44and without it, Dawn of the Dead would be just another bleak, post-apocalyptic zombie movie.
02:49Number eight, Carrie, 2013.
02:51The original Carrie has one of the all-time great endings.
02:54Even knowing it's coming, your heart will still skip a beat
02:57when Carrie's hand raises from the grave in one of cinema's greatest jump scares.
03:00The 2013 remake, by way of contrast, simply ends with Carrie's tombstone cracking.
03:06A pale riff on the original movie,
03:08the remake's disappointing ending is an apt summation of why it's largely forgotten in modern movie discourse.
03:14Things could have been very different, however,
03:16if the movie studio had been brave enough to go with the remake's original ending.
03:20The remake was meant to end with Carrie's classmate Sue dreaming that she was giving birth,
03:24except, instead of a beautiful bouncing baby,
03:26Sue's natal exertions resulted in Carrie's bloodied arm emerging from her former classmate's birth canal.
03:32Carrie's viscera-soaked hand then grabbed Sue's arm, in a neat callback to the original movie,
03:37while Sue, understandably, screamed her head off.
03:40The reveal was that it was all a dream,
03:43does nothing to diminish the disturbing nature of the scene,
03:45and it's baffling as to why it was left out.
03:47Maybe the studio thought they were doing everyone a favour by protecting them from the thousands of
03:52talk-to-the-hand memes that would have surely followed.
03:56Number 7, 1408.
03:57From one Stephen King movie to another,
03:591408 is a decent enough yarn that tells the tale of Mike Enslin,
04:03a paranormal investigator who, following his daughter's death,
04:06desperately investigates reported supernatural sightings,
04:08in the hopes of finding proof of the afterlife.
04:11In the movie's original ending,
04:12Enslin, having spent most of the movie trapped in the eponymous Haunted Room, 1408,
04:18burns it down to free the ghosts trapped there,
04:20before making a last-minute escape alongside a recording
04:23of his deceased daughter's voice talking to him from the other side.
04:26This discovery allows Enslin to move on with his life,
04:28and also repairs his relationship with his wife in true Hollywood fashion.
04:32The ending shown to test audiences, however, was much more bittersweet.
04:36In this version of the film, Mike dies in the fire that he started,
04:39but achieves a victory of sorts
04:41when the fire both frees the ghosts trapped in room 1408
04:44and allows him to join his daughter in the afterlife,
04:47a fact made explicitly clear
04:48when his ghost walks towards his daughter's voice
04:50in the final shot of the movie.
04:52Honestly, it's hard to see why test audiences were so down on this ending.
04:55The horror genre is the wrong place to look for unreservably happy endings,
04:59and as Alan Wake recently reminded us,
05:01the heroes in a horror story seldom win without great sacrifice.
05:05Number 6, Hostel.
05:06The first Hostel movie is already an uncomfortable spectacle,
05:09with Eli Roth's tale of dismemberment, murder, and suicide
05:12guaranteed to turn all but the most cast iron of stomachs.
05:16But the original ending left audiences feeling queasy
05:18for reasons beyond simple violence,
05:20as it turned the movie's hero into just as much of a monster
05:23as the psychotic millionaires who murdered his friends.
05:26The Hostel that was released in cinemas
05:27saw sole survivor Paxton track down and murder the businessman
05:30who killed his friend Josh in a brutal but understandable act of revenge.
05:35Roth's original ending, however,
05:36saw Paxton opt to emotionally torment his adversary
05:39by kidnapping his daughter.
05:42In the original script, Paxton even went as far as to slit the girl's throat,
05:45but in the version that was filmed, he merely absconds with her.
05:48Test audiences hated the ending,
05:50feeling that Paxton's abduction of an innocent girl
05:52was a heel turn too far for the supposed hero of the movie,
05:55and that it made the movie's villain too sympathetic.
05:57Having spent most of the movie firmly establishing the divide
06:00between the good guys and the bad guys,
06:01Hostel's last-minute decision to blur the lines
06:04was an unnecessary wrinkle in the story,
06:06and one that felt wholly out of place
06:08with the knowingly straightforward grindhouse nature of the film.
06:11Number 5.
06:12Happy Death Day.
06:13Given the time-bending premise behind Happy Death Day,
06:16wherein the improbably named Tree Giltman
06:18finds herself stuck in a Groundhog Day-style loop,
06:21except each day ends with her brutal murder,
06:23it's somewhat ironic that the original ending
06:25found test audiences feeling like the entire movie
06:28had been a waste of their time.
06:29Happy Death Day's original ending is a perfect fit
06:32for its PG-13 rating,
06:33as Tree takes a leaf,
06:35I'm sorry, I couldn't resist,
06:36out of Bill Murray's book by breaking free of her time loop,
06:39getting the guy,
06:40and becoming a much better person
06:42than she was before the loop began.
06:44As endings go, it's a crowd-pleaser.
06:45Simple, straightforward, and satisfying.
06:47The alternate ending, not so much.
06:49During the course of the movie,
06:50it's made clear that Tree's repeated deaths
06:52are taking a physical toll on her body,
06:54and that if she dies one time too many,
06:57she'll be killed off for real.
06:58This comes into play during the film's unused climactic scene,
07:01where a hospital-bound Tree,
07:02having successfully dealt with her killer,
07:04is confronted by the wife of the college professor
07:06she's been sleeping with.
07:08Said wife then brutally murders Tree,
07:09while the latter lies in bed,
07:11and the movie ends with the implication
07:13that this was Tree's last life.
07:15As reported by Looper,
07:16test audiences were beyond pissed
07:18that Tree's trials and tribulations
07:19ultimately led to nothing,
07:21leading to the canon ending
07:22where Tree gets to celebrate her happy life day.
07:25Number 4, You're Next.
07:262011's You're Next offered a neat inversion
07:29to the standard home invasion formula.
07:31In this particular film,
07:32it's the protagonist who is the deadliest person in the movie,
07:35not the masked killer's haunting her.
07:37You're Next sees its heroine, Erin,
07:39dispatch her assailants via a series of brutal and bloody traps
07:42over the course of the film's runtime.
07:44By the end of the movie,
07:45audiences are left in no doubt
07:47that Erin is capital A, alpha,
07:49which likely explains why the filmmakers
07:51never even bothered to shoot the movie's alternate ending.
07:53This version of You're Next would have finished
07:55with Erin being instantly anticlimactically shot in the head
07:58by a police officer who arrived on the scene
08:01just as Erin had finished mopping up the last of the bad guys.
08:04Such a pointless, frustrating death
08:06for one of horror cinema's most capable protagonists
08:08would have been eye-poppingly,
08:10expletive-inducingly frustrating to witness,
08:13and it's understandable why it was never filmed.
08:16Knowing this does, however,
08:17make it easier to feel less guilty
08:19about laughing over the poor cop's fate
08:21in Your Next's actual ending,
08:23where he blunders into one of Erin's traps
08:25and gets butchered by a falling axe.
08:27It wasn't manslaughter,
08:28Erin simply shot,
08:29or in this case dismembered,
08:31first.
08:31Number 3, Alien.
08:33Alien is unquestionably
08:35one of the greatest horror movies ever made,
08:37but it's unlikely that it,
08:39and the franchise as a whole,
08:40would have been as highly regarded today
08:41had Ridley Scott gone with his original script.
08:44In an interview with Entertainment Weekly,
08:46Scott revealed that Alien had a much bleaker ending
08:48in its first draft,
08:50with Soul Survivor Ripley's iconic harpoon trap
08:52failing to pay off.
08:53This results in the eponymous Xenomorph
08:54swiftly dispatching the franchise's biggest star
08:57before imitating Dallas's voice,
08:59yes, really,
09:00and sending off a distress call
09:02to lure in more victims.
09:04As well as pre-empting the Predator's
09:05iconic imitation tricks by a whole eight years,
09:08this ending would have been disastrous
09:10for the Alien franchise.
09:11Much of the series' popularity
09:12comes from the 1986 sequel,
09:14and without Sigourney Weaver's bravura performance
09:17as the battle-hardened Ellen Ripley,
09:20there's no way Aliens would have become
09:22the pop culture milestone it is today.
09:24The Alien franchise may have had
09:26more bad movies than good,
09:28but a world without Aliens
09:29would have been a poorer one indeed.
09:30Number 2,
09:31The Descent US version.
09:33Who could forget the ending to The Descent?
09:34After escaping from a monster-infested cave system,
09:37protagonist Sarah reaches her car
09:39and starts driving to safety,
09:40only to be startled by a hallucination
09:42of one of her deceased companions.
09:43For American viewers,
09:45that's where the story ended.
09:46For British audiences, however,
09:48there was one final twist of the knife waiting in store.
09:51In the UK version of The Descent,
09:53the movie continues after Sarah's hallucination.
09:55There, it's revealed that Sarah didn't
09:57just imagine seeing her dead companion.
09:59She imagined the entire escape.
10:01The movie then ends with Sarah imagining
10:03her daughter appearing in front of her
10:04as she mentally retreats into fantasy
10:06while the monsters close in around her.
10:08The British ending is actually the original one,
10:10but in an interview with Vulture,
10:12director Neil Marshall explained
10:14that American test audiences felt
10:16that the revelation that Sarah never left the cave
10:18was too depressing,
10:19leading to it simply being left out of the final cut.
10:22Number 1,
10:22Evil Dead 2013.
10:24Whereas the official ending sees
10:26Jane Levy's Mia chainsaw her way to victory
10:28over her demonic adversary,
10:30director Fede Alvarez
10:31originally had a much more explosive ending
10:34in mind for her,
10:34as in the final seconds of the movie
10:36would have seen Mia literally explode
10:38in a shower of blood and guts.
10:39Alvarez revealed on Twitter
10:40that the original plan was for Mia
10:42to be attacked by the Taker of Souls,
10:44a demon who lives up to its ominous billing
10:47by possessing Mia's body,
10:48levitating her into the air
10:50and psychically eviscerating
10:52the unfortunate heroine.
10:53Thankfully,
10:54original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi
10:55advised Alvarez that,
10:57after everything Mia overcomes in the movie,
11:00drug addiction,
11:00demonic possession and dismemberment,
11:02she deserved a happy ending.
11:04Granted,
11:04it took a while for the message to sink in,
11:07Alvarez actually filmed another ending
11:08where the movie closes
11:09with the revelation that Mia is still possessed,
11:11but eventually he relented
11:13and gave one of horror movie's
11:14most courageous protagonists
11:16the moment of triumph she deserved.
Recommended
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