Ten films with the most brutal endings, led by The Mist

Collider published a list of the ten most brutal movie endings, placing Frank Darabont's The Mist at No. 1. The roundup covers a range of genres and eras, from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead to Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, Brian De Palma's Scarface, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, David Fincher's Se7en and Coralie Fargeat's 2024 film The Substance.

The article summarizes notable finales: Day of the Dead ends with Captain Rhodes and his men devoured in a bunker; Drag Me to Hell sees Christine pulled into hell from train tracks; Dead Alive finishes with Lionel mowing down his mother and the undead; Scarface closes with Tony Montana's bloody last stand; The Wild Bunch's survivors are wiped out in a final gunfight; Oldboy reveals Mi-do is Dae-su's daughter, after which Dae-su cuts out his tongue and Lee Woo-jin kills himself; Se7en concludes when John Doe reveals he killed Mills's pregnant wife, prompting Mills to kill him; and The Substance ends with a mutant falling apart onstage and its head being cut off as blood sprays the crowd.

The piece emphasizes The Mist's finale as especially devastating: after the group's last survivor, David, mercy-kills his son and others to avoid fates in the mist, the fog clears and the military arrives, leaving him devastated.

Key Topics

Culture, The Mist, Oldboy, Scarface, Dead Alive, Frank Darabont