This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE listed below is a spoiler by default and will be unmarked without a tag. Only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.
Cruel Twist Endings in Live-Action Films. open/close all folders
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- Subverted in 13 Sins. At the end it turns out Elliot's wife got challenged as well, but she declined to eat the fly and threw it away. The movie ends with Elliot sporting a relieved smile in response to this.
- After.Life: Deacon ensures that Anna gets buried alive with Paul thinking she was already dead. Then Deacon tells a drunk (and possibly drugged) Paul to go see for himself that she's really dead. He goes and digs her up just in time to save her from suffocating and everything seems like it will end well. Then it turns out it was all a hallucination and he ends up on Deacon's morgue table with Deacon telling him he really died in a car crash on the way to the cemetery before injecting him with the same drug Deacon injected Anna with at the start. So Anna dies in a grave, Paul will join her soon, and Deacon gets away with everything.
- After Midnight (the 1989 movie): An anthology horror film, the first and third stories have cruel twist endings. In the first one a man is taken by his wife to a surprise party he doesn't know about. The wife and all their friends subject him to a cruel series of practical jokes in a haunted mansion, and by the end he is so paranoid he's carrying around an antique two handed sword. Just as the wife is about to reveal the joke, the husband takes a swing with the oversized, ungainly weapon and lops off her head. In the third story a woman is being stalked by a serial killer at her office night job. She thinks she sees him coming and stabs thru a frosted window with a broken crutch, accidentally killing the security guard. It turns out the killer is sitting in the dark just behind her.
- Alien: Covenant: Just as it seems like everything will turn out fine in spite of the deaths of most of the crew, Daniels discovers all too late that David has replaced Walter and will continue to experiment on the thousands of colonists aboard the Covenant while they remain in stasis as she herself falls into a cryosleep.
- The film adaptation of As the Gods Will: After surviving a marathon of deadly children's games, Shun, Ichika, Amaya and the other survivors are given popsicle sticks to eat to celebrate their success and own survival... except that one's another Deadly Game which determines whenever you live or die based on what it says on the stick. Only Shun and Amaya get to live as the former's forced to watch Ichika and the others die before they emerge out of the giant cube and find a whole crowd of people cheering for them and calling them 'God's Children'. While Amaya relishes in the glory, Shun cries out there is no God, except he gets told there is a God and it's a homeless man from earlier in the movie (Presumably Kamimaro for a Sequel Hook that never actually got followed up from).
- The Baby: Ann manages to save Baby (a twenty-year-old man forced to act and behave as a baby by his abusive family) from his relatives... except she didn't do it for his own sake, but because she wanted a playmate for her husband, who was reduced to mental infancy after a car accident. Baby is in a slightly nicer Gilded Cage than before, but he's still doomed to being infantilized for the rest of his life.
- Berkshire County: Kylie managed to kill the adult intruders, and is recovering in the hospital. The child intruder is also given a chance at a normal life, only for him to be taken by a man with the same mark on his arm as the other intruders. When Kylie wakes up from a nap, she finds everyone in the hospital except her is dead, and there are more pig-masked killers in the building with her now.
- Brahms: The Boy II: Brahms has been destroyed, Jude has gotten over his mutism, and the family are safe back in their old home... Then after Jude says goodnight to his mom, he gets out of bed, walks over to his closet, and puts on the mask from Heelshire Mansion. He then starts talking to Brahms, who still has some hold over him despite its destruction. He says that everything will be fine if his family follows the rules.
- The ending of Brazil. Hurrah, Sam has escaped from interrogation by torture and left the city with his girlfriend! Except he hasn't. He's gone hopelessly insane in the torture chair, and is hallucinating the whole thing. Ironically, he has escaped the torture...because there's not a lot of point interrogating him any more. The ending is so shocking that some versions of the film delete it.
- Bunni: Paige has survived nearly being murdered by Chris' mom, and despite having recurring nightmares about the ordeal, she seems to have made a comfortable life for herself raising her and Chris' son. Then Chris shows up at her door to take his son away from her.
- As is the last non-infected survivor in Cabin Fever. Hilariously, his last words are "I made it! I fucking made it!"
- In Canyon, the female protagonist performs a mercy killing on her dying husband, only to have a rescue chopper appear seconds after he dies.
- Carnosaur. The protagonists manage to defeat all the dinosaurs threatening their town and kill the Mad Scientist who unleashed them. Government agents and soldiers burst in, execute them all, and burn the town to the ground to prevent news of the incident from spreading.
- The Cavern. The two remaining survivors find a leaf, which they try to use to get out of the cave and call for help, only for them to be dragged back in by Petr, and later towards the end of the film, he brutally kills one of them and rapes the other, with the film ending right there.
- Claw (2021): Julia and Kyle have survived their ordeal with the raptor, and make it back to civilization. However, it's shown that at least Julia was very traumatized by the event, having nightmares about it for what might be a year afterwards. When Kyle is comforting Julia from one, we learn that the scientist's raptor was caught, and it's unlikely the scientist made any more. Then their room starts shaking, and they open their window curtain. They see nothing... then a T-Rex appears in the window.
- Clawed: Sheriff Reynolds seems pleased that he's at least not the sole survivor of the Bear Claw Massacre. However, then Dark Annie informs him that the other survivors died later on at various points, and that one of them ended up raped by The Shadow Of Death and gave birth to the baby in four months. Dark Annie is the baby, and she proceeds to slash up Sheriff Reynolds.
- The original ending of Clerks: After Dante goes through hell on Earth during what was supposed to be his day off, a robber comes in and murders him. The end. An earlier scene where Dante chose The Empire Strikes Back as his favorite Star Wars movie specifically because 'it ended on such a down note' can be considered a twisted form of Foreshadowing to this.
- The Count Yorga series loved these in its movies despite all the heroes' efforts and killing the title character. Endings are as followed...
- In the first movie Two of the male protagonists are dead and the last one finds the damsel with Yorga. He manages to stake Yorga (albeit accidentally) and saves the girl. However even with Yorga dead, his victims don't go back to normal. Meaning a female friend who was turned by Yorga remains as an evil vampire. She and another vampire bride come after the two but the protagonist chases them off with a cross. No sooner then when he turns around however, the girl he saved reveals she's now a vampire and lunges at him. The last shot of the movie is the bloodied face of the protagonist from the aftermath of the feeding.
- The sequel once again had nearly all the rescuers dead and a number of their female friends turned into vampires and under Yorga's command. The last rescuer is able to find the girl and they try to escape. Only to be cornered by Yorga. He takes the girl and leaves his vampire brides to finish the rescuer. Just as Yorga is about to bite the girl, the rescuer escapes and chases the two to the balcony. A fight ensues where Yorga is staked and killed. All seems well and the girl hugs her rescuer, however she pulls back and sees that he's deathly pale and has bite marks on his face (apparently having been bitten by the brides and the vampirism just now taking hold). Instantly he forgets about rescuing her and goes for her neck, dooming her to become a vampire which he was trying keep Yorga from doing not seconds ago. If that wasn't bad enough, Tommy, an orphan Yorga hypontized to help him is still under the vampire's control and stripped of his morality meaning he's not afraid to kill. Plus none of the vampires in the movie save Yorga was staked. Meaning they'll soon spread their vampirism to the defenseless orphanage next door and likely to the rest of the town as well. Just...sheesh.
- The Crazies (2010). By the time the movie's over, the two surviving residents of Ogden Marsh have been through hell and back just to survive the events of the movie, watching every single one of their family and friends die. The movie ends with the two finally making their way to an adjacent town free of infection, only for it to be revealed that a military satellite has been watching their every move, and now the military is going to repeat the exact same "containment protocol" all over again — but this time, in the much larger city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It's even worse than if the movie had ended with everyone dead. In this it follows the beats of the original, where by the end the hero—and the only character shown to be immune to the maddening virus—refuses to help anyone else out of anger and despair when his pregnant fiancée dies.
- At the end of Dead Snow the last survivor Martin has appeased the Nazi zombies by giving back the gold they were after and weakly makes his way to his car. Then he finds the coin Hanna hid in his pocket. Cue Oh, Crap! face and zombies smashing through the window. The end.
- The UK Ending to The Descent. Sarah merely hallucinated escaping the cave; there is no exit. All along the characters have only been descending further down, without any way out. Waking up right where she lost consciousness, Sarah goes on to imagine her dead daughter sitting in front of her with a birthday cake, as the crawlers are homing in on Sarah to eat her alive.
- The Descent Part 2. One character escapes the caves alive, but then out of nowhere, a minor character appears, knocks her out with a shovel, and drags her back to the cave. The best explanation critics have come up with for this is that it's a Sequel Hook.
- Drag Me to Hell has Christine apparently having escaped being pulled into hell by the Lamia, by posthumously gifting the cursed artefact that summoned it to the dead gypsy woman who cursed her. Unfortunately, the ending reveals that the envelope she stored the artefact in was swapped with another one, meaning she gave the wrong item to the gypsy and is pulled to eternal damnation anyway. Even if
Word of God tries to imply it's a Karmic Twist Ending as Christine is a nice gal who starts doing terrible things to save herself, it's still one hell of a Gut Punch. - In Dresden, the main character (a British pilot) manages to laboriously survive the bombing of Dresden with serious injuries and escapes back to England. After the war, he flies back to see his true love (and their child)...when his plane crashes. So, he is killed...in the post-script...by a voice-over.
- Eden Lake: An oncoming vehicle hits Jenny's stolen van on the side as she drives it to escape Eden Lake, and she crashes into the yard of a house during a party. The party members assist her within the house and reassure her. Then, as they learn via phone call of the children Jenny killed, Jenny learns that the owners of the house are Brett's parents and that Paige and Cooper's parents are among the guests. Brett's father takes her into his shower with two other men, all but confirming her death.
- Ex Machina first appears as though it will end on a happy note, with Ava free, her abusive creator Nathan dead, and she and her rescuer Caleb becoming a couple and starting a new life together. It appears to be leading that way in the closing scene of Ava putting on skin and clothes to cute music, in a Call-Back to a previous scene where she dressed and asked Caleb to be her date, until she locks him in Nathan's room and leaves. He has no hope of escape with the power out, Nathan dead, the windows too tough to break, and no one else in the world knowing he's here or what was happening in the compound. Word of God is that is this is unintentional, as he expected the audience to be firmly on Ava's side.
- In Fallen, Denzel Washington's character Hobbes sacrifices his life to destroy the villain. The villain escapes at the last minute; this was foreshadowed in the opening of the movie. Not to mention that Hobbes' reputation is completely destroyed—he'll be remembered as a psychotic cop killer who murdered his own friend. It's also implied heavily that Azazel will spend the rest of his son's life hunting him in order to visit the same fate upon him.
- Final Destination 5. So the movie sets up the main couple overcoming a breakup and surviving Death's design and coming through stronger than ever...until it's revealed the movie is a Stealth Prequel to the first Final Destination and the couple dies horribly in the first movie's plane crash accident. All the films end this way, but this one burned, considering it was a Surprisingly Improved Sequel. And the only other character who survived Death's design by accidentally having someone else take his place is sitting at a bar and talking to another dude...who reveals that the guy who took his place was terminally ill and about to die anyway, and then the plane turbine crashes through the ceiling, killing him.
- Fractured: Ray manages to rescue his wife and daughter from the Organ Theft hospital and they drive home...only for the audience to learn that Peri actually died from the fall that broke her arm and set the trip to the hospital in motion, and Ray accidentally killed Joanne when he had a serious concussion from the fall. Ray actually kidnapped an emergency patient and his family's bodies were in the car's trunk the whole time.
- The Funhouse Massacre: In the aftermath of all the carnage, Laurie and Sheriff Kate are carried off in an ambulance together. Then Laurie spies the knife hidden up the sheriff's sleeve, and screams. The first stinger reveals that "Sheriff Kate" was actually Eileen "The Stitch-Faced Killer", wearing the sheriff's face as a disguise.
- Ghosts of War: Chris, realizing his squad mates are still inside the simulation with the angry spirits of the Helwig family, demands to be put back in so he can help them. The people comply and he goes back in. Unfortunately, his memories are suppressed by the system, and the next scene implies things are just going to repeat in a loop.
- Subverted in Green Room when one of the Neo-Nazi's vicious attack dogs seems to be about to kill the injured two survivors of the carnage after going missing for half of the film, only for the dog to instead lay down next to its dying owner.
- Halloween Kills leads up to the populace of Haddonfield ganging up on Michael Myers, beating him until he's on the ground, culminating in Karen the daughter of his 'nemesis' Laurie Strode knifing him in the back. But then Michael wakes up, takes that knife and slices up the angry mob. And still makes sure to kill Karen.
- R. L. Stine's made-for-TV-movie, The Haunting Hour, had this ending. The protagonist reads a poem out loud that, when done so, awakens a murderous, man-eating monster. After it captures a popular girl from school, a pizza man, and the protagonist's brother, she and her male friend pour blood on it, causing its multiple heads to kill each other in hunger, and free the victims. She and her brother then burn the poem in the fireplace before going up to her room to sleep. Later that night, the parents discover the poem, having reconstructed itself, in the ashes, and read it out loud. As they laugh about how silly the poem sounds, there's a creaking noise on the porch...the protagonist opens her eyes in terror...and all the lights in the house go out. Cut to black. Voiceover: "Happy Halloween..."
- I, Daniel Blake: After months of misery, the titular Daniel has finally got the appeal he needs to get his benefits sorted...only to suffer a massive heart attack and die minutes before its due to begin.
- Identity, it appears that Ed has managed to kill Malcolm's murderous identity while sacrificing his own life and leaving only one survivor, making the movie seems like a Bittersweet Ending. But then it turns out that Ed had killed the wrong person, his sacrifice was in vain, and the murderous identity was still alive to kill the Final Girl while causing Malcolm to kill one of the psychiatrists.
- Insidious:
- The first movie has the main male protagonist, Josh, save his son, Dalton, who was trapped in a Dark World known as The Further. After finding their way back and Dalton returns to his body (they were astral projecting), Josh is faced by a lady ghost he had once met as a child. Josh then confronts her, affirming that he is unafraid of her. Cut to Josh's family having dinner in the kitchen while he has a conversation with the lady who had helped them. As the lady feels something amiss and grabs a camera, she is strangled to death by Josh. Josh's wife then enters the room to find the dead lady and the camera. She picks up the camera and is shocked when she sees, not a picture of Josh, but of the lady ghost. And then "Josh" grabs her by the shoulder...
- Subverted by the sequel: it turns out that Josh doesn't kill Renai at the end of the first film. Elise's spirit not only forgives him for murdering her (since he was possessed by an evil spirit and was trapped in the Further), but helps him break free of his possession by killing the movie's Big Bad.
- The ending of the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the heartbreaking scene where Bond and his newly wedded bride Tracy are sitting in his car when Blofeld, Bond's archnemesis, drives by and has her assassinated, and she dies in his arms.
- The Lair of the White Worm has an example overlapping with And Then John Was a Zombie. One of the heroes takes a serum to prevent a Viral Transformation after the leader of the vampiric Snake People bites him. At the end of the movie, he finds out that the drug he took wasn't the antidote after all, and the final shot shows him baring his new serpentine fangs.
- Although the 2006 version of Last Holiday offers a happy ending, the original 1950 version follows this trope. Having reinvigorated his life, terminally ill George Bird discovers that he was misdiagnosed. He’s not going to die after all. And then he’s promptly killed in a car accident.
- Life (2017) has this. The plan for the two surviving members of the crew is to take the ISS's two remaining escape pods, shooting one into deep space with a crewman and the extremely voracious hostile alien life form while the other escapes to Earth. However, collision with debris causes the plan to go the opposite direction. The guy in the pod with the alien is sent to Earth where he's freed by a pair of well-meaning Vietnamese fisherman, while the other female crewmember is sent flying into deep space with her pod's navigation systems out, leaving her to scream helplessly as her pod takes her off into the black with no apparent way home. Plus the end of humanity is likely assured by the alien's presence on Earth.
- Little Shop of Horrors: both the original 1960 non-musical film and the musical stage play end with both the protagonists Eaten Alive by the killer plant, and (in the case of the musical) an army of murderous plants rampaging across America with the goal of wiping out all of humanity. This was filmed for the much better-known 1986 musical film but then was replaced with a more heroic ending after screen tests showed it caused audience opinion to plummet. The original ending was retained as an alternate ending which becomes an extremely cruel twist for anyone used to the regular version of the film (although some consider it Fan-Preferred Cut Content, especially since its production values are remarkably high as it was fully intended to be the original ending). Ironically, for anyone who was used to the original versions, the released 1986 version would have been seen as having a positive twist ending.
- Living Dead Series:
- The last survivor in Night of the Living Dead (1968) is mistaken for a zombie and shot dead. It's deliberately left unclear whether the protagonist was actually mistaken for a zombie, or if the rednecks saving the day just saw a good opportunity to shoot a black guy without a fear of punishment. It wasn't originally deliberate, since Ben's part was written for a white man. George Romero was fine with taking credit for the alternate interpretation anyway.
- And in Night of the Living Dead (1990), the black guy really was a zombie, while the Jerkass who'd left the others to die spoke when the heroine found him, proving himself to be alive. She shot him anyway, as payback.
- The Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake ended this way through the credits. The heroes escape via a boat. Then during the credits, a few very short scenes play out. They start off celebratory and quickly devolve into them having no provisions that aren't full of maggots, finding zombie heads in a cooler they hoped was full of food, infighting, and then finally ending in a Bolivian Army Ending as a incredibly large horde of zombies descend on them when they try to debark.
M-Z
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos succeeds in acquiring the Infinity Stones. Then Thor appears and impales Thanos. Unfortunately, Thanos still had strength to use the Gauntlet; all it took was a snap from his fingers, and half of all life in the universe is wiped out. This includes most of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Hawkeye’s family, and most tragically, Spider-Man, who fades away in Tony Stark’s arms. The film then ends with Thanos smiling at his victory as though he had been the hero. Fortunately, the sequel manages to reverse most of the damage Thanos did through the snap by bringing all of its victims back to life.
- Ant-Man and the Wasp: In an overlap with Yank the Dog's Chain, the first of the two post-credits stingers consists of Scott going to the Quantum Realm to retrieve "healing particles". Seconds before he is due to be returned to the normal world, "The Snap" from Infinity War occurs, vaporizing the entire Pym/Van Dyne family and leaving Scott stranded in the Quantum Realm with seemingly no way out.
- Spider-Man: Far From Home is just as cruel as Ant-Man and the Wasp. Spidey's saved the day, got the girl, had a vacation. What could go wrong? Oh, how about J. Jonah Jameson suddenly showing up with doctored footage framing Spider-Man for the death of Mysterio and revealing his identity to the world, courtesy of Mysterio himself even if he really might be dead?
- In The Mist the main characters leave the doomed grocery store in a car. When the car runs out of gas, the father takes a pistol and Mercy Kills everyone in the car, including his own son. Out of bullets and unable to kill himself, he notices the mist dissipating, and hears a strange noise which turns out to be the military, destroying the monsters. So, if he had waited literally one minute before killing everyone, they all would have survived. What makes it worse was the realization that one of the objects in the background of the reveal scene is army-standard temporary housing. They weren't being followed by the military, they were driving through a military outpost! One film critic was so bothered by the ending that he spoiled it (with ample warning) in his review to keep people from being blindsided by it.
- In the original novel it ends more ambiguously, with the father, son and some extras having fled the grocery store to an uncertain fate. Stephen King has gone on record saying that he absolutely loved the film's ending, however, and wishes that he'd thought of it himself for the novel.
- In the Our Werewolves Are Different flick Mulberry Street, the protagonists discover that the infected rat-people become human again at sunrise just minutes after they finish killing off their own rabid-rodent loved ones in self-defense.
- The ending twist in Murder by Numbers (2002) seems a heck of a lot like one of these. Yay! The evil villain who reminded Cassie of her abusive husband has met his richly deserved death! Justin's turned to the side of good! He was just a misunderstood and lonely teenaged boy! PSYCH. It was him all along, sorry. Have fun in prison. (Though it's not exactly a twist at all if you have enough knowledge of foreshadowing and/or the Leopold and Loeb case. Which, sadly, did not end in a shootout in an abandoned cabin.)
- No One Gets Out Alive: Ambar survived her encounter with the Eldritch Abomination and killed Becker and Red. However, when she's about to leave the building, she feels compelled to stay, implying she may now start sacrificing other tenants to the monster now.
- In The Orphanage, it turns out at the end that the protagonist's child, who vanished early in the film and inspired a long and arduous search effort, was accidentally locked in a secret room in the basement and died there. Then again, the protagonist seems relatively happy when she kills herself and becomes matron of an orphanage of ghost children.
- Peelers: Blue Jean and Logan ride off on Blue Jean's motorcycle with Carla's baby after blowing up the strip club, hopefully destroying any remains of the pathogen still inside. However, on the road, Logan notices the black substance on his body, indicating that now he's infected. Possibly due to the infection, he then drops the baby on the road while they're still moving.
- Extraordinarily cynical WWII movie Play Dirty has the British raiding party arrive at the German fuel dump they've been sent out to destroy, only to find that their superiors back at base have decided that they no longer want it destroyed (the Allies have broken through German lines, and they want the fuel for themselves) and leaked their mission to the Germans. The mission goes disastrously and the only two survivors flee to nearby Benghazi. Their arrival coincides with the British Army invading the city, and since they're wearing German uniforms they're "accidentally" gunned down by their own side while trying to surrender.
- Rabid Dogs (aka Kidnapped), directed by Mario Bava, ends on an incredibly grim and ironic note. The film centers around a savage gang of robbers who take a father and his sick child hostage while trying to flee Rome. Towards the end, the father suddenly pulls out a gun and kills off the remaining gang members. And so it seems like his and his son's ordeal is over. Until it's revealed that the "father" is actually a kidnapper who's been holding his so-called "son" for ransom the whole time.
- In The Rapture, Sharon, a former swinger who joined a Christian cult, has a vision of her dead husband beckoning her to the desert. This is interpreted as God asking for her to wait for Him there so she can be taken up to Heaven when the Rapture happens. She and her daughter go to a desert and wait for a couple weeks, but she starts to question if the Rapture will actually happen. When Sharon runs out of food and loses her patience, she shoots her daughter, is arrested, and loses total faith in God. The twist is that the Rapture actually happens; when she and the officer who arrested her are in Purgatory, the daughter shows up and says they can get into Heaven if they love God. The officer states his love for God and goes to Heaven, but Sharon refuses to love God after what has happened to her. Her daughter then fades away asking if she knows how long she'll stay in Purgatory, and she replies "Yes...forever." Then it slowly fades to black with no music playing over the credits. The feeling you get after watching this movie is similar to getting slapped in the face.
- The Bruno Mattei killer rat movie Rats: Night of Terror. It seems the protagonists have been rescued at the last moment by other people who survived the nuclear holocaust. Then one removes his gas-mask revealing they're Rat-People.
- The French black comedy The Red Inn is about a family of 19th-century innkeepers who kill their guests to steal their money. The only guest that knows the truth is a priest who can't expose them because he got the information during a confession he was tricked into performing. The plot devolves into a series of progressively wackier shenanigans as the priest tries to get the other guests out of the inn alive, leading said guests to think first that the priest is crazy, then that he is the serial killer. The police are called and they arrest the priest. Thankfully, they discover an older body, free the priest and arrest the innkeepers instead. In the final scene, the guests pack and leave the inn, only to fall down a ravine to their deaths when they cross a bridge the innkeepers had sabotaged earlier just in case their planned victims managed to escape.
- Redwood Massacre Annihilation: The killer has been killed, and government officials have answered Laura's and Gus' distress call, having sent some people to get them. Then it turns out the government knew what was going on in the bunker, and sent them to kill them because they knew about the killer in there.
- Remember Me, if not for the ending, is a heartwarming tale about a man's path towards rekindling his connections to his family. What happened to him? Well, he was told by his father to go to his office one Tuesday morning. And he did. Said Tuesday was on September 11, 2001. Guess where his father's office was.
- The Return of the Living Dead. The protagonists evade the zombies and send a message to the military, asking for help. The town gets nuked in response. Worse yet, it's implied that the zombie infection is now going to spread via the nuclear fallout. That's right: even nukes can't stop it.
- In Right at Your Door, the main character spends the entire film scrupulously keeping his home sealed from the toxic ash outside his house, only to be told by The Government that actually, this just incubated the virus, making him doomed to Death by Irony. Then they cart away his wife, hit him on the head, and suffocate him.
- This kind of ending has happened in several Saw movies.
- In the first film, Zep, the presumed Jigsaw killer, has been killed, and Gordon has escaped to seek help for himself and Adam... only for the dead body that's been in the room the entire time to get up, reveal he was Jigsaw all along, and leave Adam to rot.
- In Saw II, when it looks like Eric, the SWAT team, and Amanda and Daniel are going to meet, it's revealed that they're all actually in different places; Eric was in the Nerve Gas House, but Amanda and Daniel (as well as Xavier) weren't there at the same time, with Daniel being shown to be in Jigsaw's lair, and the SWAT team had just entered a decoy building of the house where they can't find any of the dead victims nor Eric. Not only that, but it turns out that Amanda is an apprentice of Jigsaw, and she locks up Eric in the Bathroom from the first movie as he loses contact with the rest of the police.
- Saw IV had Rigg charge in to save the day, which ends up resulting in the death of Eric, the electrocution of Hoffman, and Art and Rigg himself both being fatally shot. Bad enough by itself, but that's when Hoffman disconnects himself from his own trap and reveals himself to be another apprentice of Jigsaw.
- In Saw VI, William manages to make his way through his tests alive and having learned the lesson he had been meant to learn about respecting life... only for the son of a man who died because of his past decisions as an insurance agent to kill him when given the choice between that or forgiveness.
- Screamers: The last survivor escapes the planet after a number of horrifying revelations (and gruesome deaths) and falls asleep, safe at last...turns out, the teddy bear he kept as a souvenir is also a Screamer.
- The movie was based off of Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety", where the girl the protagonist saved was actually one of the Second Variety robots, but that story straddles the line between cruel twist ending and Karmic Twist Ending, with its closing revelation that the robots, once they destroy humanity, are already preparing to destroy one another.
- The sequel, Screamers: The Hunting, reveals that the last survivor deliberately caused his ship to burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Possibly a case of Heroic Sacrifice, although the true cause is not revealed. Plus, he fails to tell anyone about the new varieties of screamers. And the sequel ends with our heroine (the daughter of the hero from the original), leading a really advanced, human-like screamer to Earth. And she's pregnant with his bladed robot offspring.
- Smile (2022): Rose seems to get over her trauma over her mother's suicide, defeat the Smile Entity and reconcile with Joel...only to discover that it was all a hallucination, that she's still inside her old house and that Joel has just arrived, giving the Smile Entity a witness to pass the curse on to.
- Strange Nature: All of the births of deformed creatures in Kim's hometown have been exposed, the Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a thorough investigation into the cause, and Kim, Brody, Joe, and Michelle have moved to a new town, away from all the contamination. Plus, Kim's given birth to a new healthy baby, so it all seems alright, right? Well, the baby has a functioning eyeball on the back of her left shoulder. When Nikki and Jodie gave birth to their deformed children, they had seizures, their skin started peeling off, and they died. So chances are the same fate now awaits Kim.
- Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood: Evil vampire queen is defeated and the film's love interest is rescued. Except it turns out she was vampirized and was living in sunlight using sunscreen lotion. Which makes no sense considering the evil vampire queen had set her up for some sort of ritual and her and her entire clan was wiped out, so if she was vampirized why did she stand there while all her brethren were being slaughtered?
- Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, has this example in the third and final story. A down on his luck artist witnesses a gargoyle-like creature killing and eating one of his drinking buddies late at night. He tries to run, but the creature captures him. The creature agrees to spare his life, if he promises not to tell anyone what he witnessed. He agrees. Not long afterwards, he meets an attractive woman walking alone at night. He takes her back to his place, warning her that it's dangerous. The two get to know each other and soon enter a relationship. Because the woman happens to have connections in the art world, she helps his career take off. Years later, the artist is now rich. He marries the woman and has two kids with her. Not able to get what he witnessed that night out of his mind, however, he draws the creature in perfect detail. He tells his wife about it, making it clear that the creature was the reason he insisted she come home with him that night. The twist comes in, when the women reveals that she is the creature in human disguise and that he broke his promise. She transforms back into the gargoyle creature. The children also turn into gargoyle creatures. She kills him and flies off.
- Talon Falls: When it seems like Lyndsey is safe with the police, who can now move in and shut down the park, we learn that the guy who picked her up on the road was in cahoots with them the whole time, and actually brought her back to it. Worse, she's now strapped into a chair in one of the torture rooms, and is about to be slowly and painfully murdered for the entertainment of other park attendees who think its pretend.
- Time Bandits: You think it's all over with a nice Or Was It a Dream? The Wizard of Oz type ending—then the parents open the microwave "Mum, Dad! It's Evil, Don't Touch It!" So of course they touch it- BOOM!! smoke rises from two black spots where the kid's parents used to be. End film.
- The Tortured (2010): In this Robert Lieberman film, a man who kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a six-year-old boy is kidnapped and tortured by the boy's parents. Except not. Towards the end, we find out that the prison transport (which the parents crashed in order to get their hands on the murderer) was in fact carrying two inmates: the killer, and a man who was there for mere tax evasion. Due to his injuries from the crash, the couple mistook him for their target. So they've spent half the movie horrifically torturing an innocent man, who manages to escape only to kill himself because the torture psychologically broke him into thinking he was a monster. The real killer is taken back into custody to await parole, and the couple disappears to avoid getting caught, with the implication that their actions will take a serious toll on their mental health.
- Trick or Treats: Linda and Christopher have managed to kill Malcolm, and Linda goes to report his death to the police. Then Christopher takes an interest in Malcolm's knife, picks it up, and jumps at Linda to attack her with it. Freeze frame, end movie.
- The ending of Troll 2 was probably trying for this, but it ended up not really making any sense.
- A Wakefield Project: Eric and Chloe managed to survive their encounter with Nathan Cross' ghost, and are now married and expecting a child. They decide to have a little fun, only for Eric to start hurting Chloe. Chloe then looks at the TV, which is playing one of the tapes from the inn's basement of Nathan chewing her out for cheating on him, revealing that Nathan's ghost is possessing Eric and using him to get his revenge.
- In both the original book and first (American) adaptation of The Wave (1981), the moment that the kids that are members of the titular school movement discover that their teacher has essentially converted them into thinly-veiled Hitler Youth as a social experiment to demonstrate how peer pressure can cause bad things, they all collectively do a My God, What Have I Done? In the German remake The Wave (2008), this revelation causes Tim, the loner of the class, to instantly Freak Out and pull out a gun because being part of the movement had finally allowed him to connect with his peers and he desperately wants to not be alone again. When the teacher manages to talk him down from hurting anybody else, Tim instantly shoots himself. The film cuts to credits as the shell-shocked teacher is arrested and taken away.
- Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is the story of a kind philanthropic woman who literally throws Christmas parties for orphans, with deep mental health issues stemming from the death of her own child. She becomes convinced one orphan is the reincarnation of her child, keeps her at her house after the party to dote on, and ends up unintentionally feeding the Hansel and Gretel-themed delusions of the girl's brother. Instead of becoming a threat to the children & putting them in genuine peril as one might expect of the framing, she consistently remains caring & motherly right through to the very end and never once shows any intent to harm either of them, despite increasing mental duress and actual violence from the boy. He, conversely, understands the reality of her mental health problems well enough to exploit them, and ultimately re-enacts the fairy tale by gleefully burning down her house with her in it. He also steals her valuables, feigns trauma when the authorities come, gaslights his sister into playing along, and - upon seeing evidence that he WAS just plain wrong... shrugs without a shred of remorse. This is the scene the film then has the gall to call a "Happily Ever After" before rolling the credits.
- The Wicker Man (1973) is iconic for its use of this trope. The protagonist rescues the missing child he's been searching for, only to discover psych! She and the entire island were in on it the whole time! The letter he received was part of an elaborate ruse to lure him there so that he can be offered as a sacrifice. He is then burnt alive as the islanders sing merrily.
- Would You Rather: Iris wins Lambrick's twisted game, only to return home and find that her brother Raleigh, who she did this for, has committed suicide.
