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    #0- 9 
  • The French film 8 Women: A man is found murdered and the suspects (the titular eight women), trapped in the house by a snowstorm, go round and round in circles revealing secrets and trying to figure out who killed him. In the end, we find out the man and his younger daughter staged the murder to give comeuppance to all the other women, who used him and treated him horribly. Fair enough, not so bad. However, after the girl reveals that the murder was a hoax, that she was the only person who cared about her father and that she's going to take him far away from all of them, she opens the study door just in time to see her father blow his own head off.
  • 12 Monkeys accomplishes a nearly unbeatable Downer Ending by way of a story about a time traveler who goes off-mission to try to save the world, even though his superiors in the dystopian future have told him You Cannot Change the Future. It turns out they were right, and all he gets for his efforts is a ringside seat to The End of the World as We Know It.
  • 13/13/13 establishes that there are two people not affected by the hate plague. One of them is dead by the end of the film.
  • While 28 Days Later ends on a fairly upbeat note (the Finnish jet pilot requests evacuation for the survivors), the sequel 28 Weeks Later ends with a shot of the Infected exiting a subway in Paris, implying that the survivors got mainland Europe infected instead of just Great Britain.
  • 976-EVIL: Hoax is completely possessed by the evil force, and slaughters the majority of the named characters. His cousin is forced to throw him into Hell to stop Armageddon. Meanwhile, the man behind the phone line answers another call, preparing for more corruption...
  • 976-EVIL 2: The Astral Factor: While Grubeck is defeated, Spike died in the effort and Robin is taken in by the cops for being suspected in killings done by Grubeck.
  • 999-9999: All the group of students are dead. Rainbow moves to other school just like the beginning of the movie, and it's implied that the new group of the student fell for the curiosity.

    A 
  • Ace in the Hole (1951) ends with the victim and the Villain Protagonist dead.
  • The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad: Sort of. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow lets the viewer decide if Ichabod simply moved away from Sleepy Hollow or was actually "spirited away" by the Headless Horseman. Whether it was a harmless prank or not also tends to alter whether or not the viewer feels that Crane had it coming.
  • The Afflicted: After Kathy and Carla are killed by the abuse, Maggie pimps Grace out to keep the money flowing. This causes her to snap and shoot Maggie dead, also killing her brother due to mistakenly believing that he enjoyed being forced to beat Carla. Pastor Jon arrives just after this, and tries to convince Grace to let him take the fall for the killings, but she shoots herself instead.
  • After School Massacre: Anderson manages to kill everybody except Jess, who narrowly escapes before getting hit by a car carrying her mother and his date. While she survives, she's gravely injured and traumatized. Anderson frames the only guy at the party and flees into the night.
  • Against the Wall: The riot fails to accomplish anything, and negotiations break down, resulting in the prison being raided. The raid results in a chaotic battle that winds up killing most of the hostages and several prisoners. Smith barely survives being shot and subsequently washes his hands of the prison system entirely, while Jamal is shot and left lying in the dirt, with his fate left ambiguous.
  • Aguirre, the Wrath of God: The entire expedition goes horribly wrong and everybody dies. The last scene of the film is Aguirre completely snapping, surrounded by monkeys and corpses.
  • Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. David, the little robot boy, was programmed to love his human mother like a real child would, and when she abandons him in the woods (to save his life, but he doesn't understand this) he spends the rest of the film trying to find the Blue Fairy, thinking she can turn him into a real boy that his mother will be able to love. In the end, he finds an underwater statue of the Blue Fairy, and stays there wishing to be human for so long that he gets frozen inside a developing glacier. Two thousand years later, when humanity is now long extinct due to an ice age, he's discovered by advanced aliens, who use his mother's DNA to create an imperfect clone who will die once it falls asleep. David spends one idyllic day with her and then, as she dies, decides to die as well.
  • Akira Kurosawa's Dreams: "Mount Fuji in Red" ends with the man, the woman, and her child trapped on the edge of the ocean, doomed to die as they're enveloped by a radioactive cloud.
  • Alatriste (the movie). In the last hour or so, the guy loses everything he cared about: The woman he loved and never married now is syphilitic; his friend Quevedo was sent to jail and his squire to galleys. Meanwhile, as a parallel, the Spanish Empire crumbles, and even the villain-ish mastermind Count-Duke Olivares is senile. The main character fights to the bitter end for a country that never loved him in a doomed battle.
  • Alma: Alma becomes trapped inside the body of her doll, alongside many other children who have met the same fate. Another doll appears in the storefront to lure in the toy shop’s next victim.
  • The Alphabet Killer: Detective Paige figures out the identity of the eponymous killer in the end, however she is unable to communicate it to her colleagues as she is in the midst of a violent psychotic break. She is put in isolation and on medication that makes her unable to speak, where it is implied she is left for years as the serial murderer claims more and more victims.
  • Alien:
    • Alien³. The second film ended with Ellen Ripley, her new "surrogate" daughter, a Space Marine, and a battered android finally getting a happy ending... until everyone but Ripley is arbitrarily killed off in an escape pod crash at the opening of the next movie. Making matters worse, she's stuck in a penal colony at the "ass-end of space", the prisoners have no weapons, every prisoner (save for one) is killed by the final scene, and Ripley ends up taking a swan dive into a leadworks to stop her employer from harnessing the Xenomorph species. The film ends with the hulk of her escape pod sitting in silence, until her final transmission from the original movie plays in the background.
    • Many fans of the rousing and inventive Aliens prefer to assume the second movie is the end of the series and what comes after is to be ignored.
    • Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. The Predator who comes to Earth (Wolf)? He's Dead. The town sheriff who valiantly tries to hold off the xenomorphs, along with most of Gunnison, Colorado's surviving police force? They get nuked. The hospital full of pregnant women and babies? Face-hugged/killed/vaporized. The pizza guy's love interest (who he spends most of the movie chasing)? Impaled on a wall. The surviving characters don't get any resolution, as army forces arrest them and take the Predator weapon the main character was holding onto when they escaped. As the final scene shows, the heroes have now unwittingly helped the newly-formed Weyland-Yutani Corporation get a headstart on backwards-engineering advanced technology for their own means.
    • Alien: Covenant ends with the crew and colonists on the Covenant held captive by an insane android who intends to experiment on them with Xenomorph eggs.
  • Alien 2: On Earth (not a part of the below mentioned franchise), ends with what appears to be a Hope Spot as it appears that Thelma has successfully defeated the creature. Then, once she exits the bowling alley, it becomes clear that she is the only person still alive within the city limits, and it's implied she may also be the last surviving member of the human species.
  • All Hallows' Eve:
    • "The 9th Circle": The heroine is raped by Satan.
    • Untitled second segment: The alien drags the woman away to an unknown, but definitely not pleasant, fate.
    • "Terrifier": The heroine is dismembered and mutilated by Art.
    • Framing story: Sarah saves herself from Art (or at least manages to stall him), but is too late to save the children, and is likely to either face charges for the murders or be killed herself.
  • All My Loved Ones: David Silberstein is the only one from his large and loving family who survived the Second World War. All his loved ones died in concentration camps. His close friend Sosha whom he considered his "wife" and who he promised to never leave didn't get on the rescue train heading to Great Britain.
  • Amen: All of Riccardo and Kurt's efforts come to naught, Riccardo is gassed at Auschwitz, Kurt is implicated by the Denazification courts for his membership in the SS, despite his efforts to expose the Holocaust, and he commits suicide out of guilt and despair. In the final scene, the Doctor is shown preparing to catch a boat to Argentina.
  • American Beauty was originally going to end with Jane and Ricky being arrested for the murder of Lester when they were innocent of the crime, thanks to an incriminating video tape they made.
  • American History X ends with the protagonist's brother being shot by black students, just after he was starting to change his life and turned from his racist ways. (And, in fact, the original cut ends with the protagonist becoming a neo-Nazi skinhead all over again.)
  • American Nightmare (2002): Most of our heroes are dead. Jessie is tricked into killing her own sister. All the survivors are traumatized, and at least one is going to prison. Then we cut to our killer, taking some medication and bawling on her bed in an oddly sympathetic moment. Her father comes in, and sings her a lullaby. End film.
  • An American Hippie in Israel: In spite of their preaching peace and love, the four hippies give in to their primal natures and destroy themselves, meanwhile the two "mimes" are seen driving away in the four's vehicle.
  • An American Werewolf in London has a downer ending that comes across as sort of a whack in the face, in spite of the fact that the main character David was pretty clearly doomed. He is shot (in werewolf form) right in front of his lover Alex, who begins to sob over his dead body (now human)... and it cuts straight to the credits, no resolution except that the werewolf's curse is implicitly broken. Neither Alex nor the audience has time to reconcile with what happened.
  • A.M.I.: Artificial Machine Intelligence: Cassie manages to get away with murdering her friends, her father, her boyfriend, her boyfriend's father, and some rando who saw her first murder. All she got was a limp courtesy of her boyfriend. At the end of the movie, she's shown to be living in her house, surrounded by phones with A.I.'s programmed to sound like her parents, her boyfriend, and a baby, and is basically completely lost in her madness.
  • Amistad ends with Cinque and his fellow captives going free back to Africa. In the final shot of Cinque on the ship looking hopefully (or wistfully) ahead, we read some text on a screen saying that, after getting back to Africa, Cinque finds that his whole tribe and everyone he knows has been captured by slavers. It's even more depressing since apparently it's based on a true story. The book doesn't mention that sad part, it merely ends with a sea captain bombing a Spanish slave-trade fortress and seeing clouds in the shape of a lion in the sky.
  • In Angel Heart, Harold Angel is really Johnny Favorite, and had sold his soul to the devil. He'll likely be executed for the murders he committed under Satan's influence, and burn in hell for eternity, to which he is actually well on his way at the very end.
  • Anger of the Dead: Alice finally reaches the pier the departing ferry's supposed to be at, only to discover it's not there. Not only that, but Rooker's former prisoner, now a zombie, seems to have found Alice and charges at her from behind. Alice just closes her eyes and awaits her fate. Roll credits. After the credits start rolling, to gunshots are heard, then it cuts back to Alice. She turns around and sees the zombie killed, and then she sees the men who killed it. The men smile quite menacingly at Alice, and then manhandle her into the back of the van. Roll remaining credits.
  • And Now the Screaming Starts!: The ghost successfully impregnates Catherine with his child, driving Charles to madness and leaving Catherine a broken shell of a person.
  • Annihilation Earth ends with a Hope Spot where the Geneva particle collider is apparently shut down before it goes critical. Just as the protagonist and his family are leaving, the entire facility melts down, incinerating everyone and everything for hundreds of miles around. A shot from space shows a huge fissure forming in Europe, which expands outward and tears the Earth's crust apart, causing the entire planet to explode. The movie then ends with a blank screen that simply reads "Extinction."
  • Another Time, Another Place ends with Luigi in jail, Janie more miserable than ever and the unknown rapist apparently getting off scot-free.
  • The Public Service Announcement film Apaches ends with Michael as the Sole Survivor after his five friends all died horribly. (Kim was run over by a tractor, Tim drowned in a pit of cow slurry, Sharon died in agony after consuming pesticides, Robert was crushed by a fence, and finally, Danny died by crashing a tractor down a hill, with his narration being posthumous.)
  • Apocalypse Now: Similar to the vast majority of American soldiers who survived the Vietnam war, Willard leaves even more deeply disturbed that when we saw him, having seen three of his allies die and the only remaining one lose his sanity.
  • Apocalypto: After escaping from the brutal Mayan slavers, Jaguar Paw and his family seem now destined to live Happily Ever After, right? Cue the Spanish ships...
  • Apollo 18: All three astronauts die, and the government covers up their deaths so that no one will ever know the truth. Even worse, it is implied the hundreds of Moon rocks mentioned at the end as given to dignataries all over the world might contain creatures among them.
  • The Apparition ends with Kelly trapped in the Dark World; friendless, but with the Apparition right behind her.
  • Arlington Road: Professor Michael Faraday dies in the bombing of the FBI Headquarters, and is labelled as the "lone nut" terrorist responsible for it. His partner Carver also died in the explosion, along with hundreds of other people. Grant, looking devastated, is driven off to live with relatives, having seen the deaths of his mother, his stepmother, and his father. The terrorist organization really responsible for the bombing (and for framing Faraday) has pulled off their plan without a hitch, and we see Oliver and Cheryl Lang contemplating their move to another city. The organization's plots have succeeded before, and there will be another one.
  • Army of Shadows: Jardie's unit end up breaking apart when Mathilde gets arrested and seemingly forced to collaborate with the Gestapo who promise her that if she refuses they will force her daughter into prostitution. They are then forced to execute Mathilde and drive away. Then titles inform us that all of them would eventually die in horrific ways before the war ends. The only silver lining is the Foregone Conclusion, that the Nazis eventually lost, and France would be liberated, but none of them would live to see it.
  • Assault on a Queen: Half the crew are dead, the sub has been sunk, the survivors have nothing to show for their efforts, and are stranded in a raft attempting to paddle to South America, where they'll have to spend the rest of their lives, because if they return to American or British territory, they'll be arrested for piracy.
  • Asylum (1972 Horror): By the end, Byron has succeeded in murdering Rutherford, has been killed himself by the destruction of his mentally controlled doll, and Martin — the closest the film has to a hero — has been murdered by Starr, who is last seen welcoming another man into the asylum, presumably to kill him as well.
  • Atonement is incredibly bleak, even for a story about star-crossed lovers. At the end of the movie, it is revealed that Cecilia and Robbie both died in WWII. The final scenes of them together were entirely imagined by Cecilia's sister, who had years earlier given false evidence against Robbie that led directly to their separation and indirectly to their involvement in the war and subsequent deaths.
  • At Play in the Fields of the Lord: When the helicopters arrive to begin bombing the Niaruna Indian Village.
  • Au Hasard Balthazar: After getting assaulted by Gerard, Marie is sent off somewhere and her father dies shortly after. Gerard then tries to use the titular Balthazar the donkey for smuggling, which results in Balthazar getting shot and dying the next day. Gerard doesn’t pay for his crimes.
  • The Autopsy of Jane Doe: None of the main characters survive to the end, and now Jane is being taken elsewhere, no doubt where she'll terrorize more people.
  • Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos brutally murders Vision by ripping the Mind Stone out of his head. He uses it to complete the Infinity Gauntlet, snapping his fingers and engulfing everything in a bright light, then escapes before Thor can kill him. At first, nothing seems to have happened as Cap slowly gets up... But then Bucky crumbles to dust. Then Groot. Then Mantis, Drax, and Quill. And then the realization sets in: Thanos actually won. Scarlet Witch clutches Vision's body as she dies. T'Challa tries to help Okoye to her feet as he fades. Falcon vanishes in the long grass, just out of sight of the other heroes, as War Machine continues to call out for him. Peter Parker goes out terrified and weeping, clutching at Stark as he crumbles. Even Thanos lost almost everything to accomplish his goals and is left satisfied it's over, but also contemplating the cost. In The Stinger, we see the same fate befall Nick Fury, the Big Good of the entire franchise, and his right-hand woman Maria Hill. The only implications that hope isn’t totally lost are Fury's distress call to Captain Marvel and Doctor Strange’s cryptic final words to Stark: “There was no other way.” No Creative Closing Credits, no uplifting ending. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has truly reached its Darkest Hour.
  • The Aviator ends with Hughes relapsing into his madness.

    B 
  • Babysitter Massacre: The killer kills all but one of the victim pool, and burns himself alive with his last victim. The sole survivor, who already has severe survivors' guilt from a prior event, is last seen crying over the flames.
  • Bad Lieutenant ends with Harvey Keitel's character forgiving the rapists and finally redeeming himself. His reward? "Hey, cop!" (bang)
  • Bad Reputation: Michelle goes completely insane in her vengeance quest, ultimately trying to kill the relatively innocent Wendy. Wendy has to kill her in self defense, and the film ends with her crying over Michelle's corpse.
  • The Akira Kurosawa movie The Bad Sleep Well is more or less a redux of Hamlet in corporate Tokyo, until the end wherein not only does the hero die but his revenge plan against the company responsible for his father's death fails completely and ends with the villain getting away with everything.
  • The Bagman: The majority of the victim pool are killed off, and the killer forces the final girl to watch as he burns himself alive.
  • Ballad of a Soldier, a Soviet film set during World War II (but is not really a war film) focuses on a young soldier, who asks his commander for leave in order to visit his mother and fix the roof on her house. The commander gives him 6 days (2 days for travel, 2 days to fix the roof, and 2 days to return). As the young man journeys through the wartorn countryside, meeting a young woman, he gets delayed by circumstances. He eventually reaches his mother... on the 4th day of his leave. He immediately tells her goodbye and leaves to return to his regiment. The film ends with an old woman, his mother, looking at the street every day, waiting for her son to come home. The narration reveals that he never will. Additionally, while he parts ways with the young woman, it's implied that she may have fallen for him, but his single-minded focus on returning home and obliviousness to everything else make it impossible for him to realize it until well after she leaves.
  • Banshee!!!: The banshee kills our heroes and escapes to continue killing.
  • Banshee Chapter has the sort of ending one would expect from a Cosmic Horror Story: Anne solves the mystery, but her friend James is dead (after being possessed and transformed), Renny is still missing, presumed Fate Worse than Death, Anne's friend and co-investigator blew his brains out, and the police believe she's either crazy on the whole thing was a drug-fueled hallucination. Oh, and it turns out that destroying the transmitter she found didn't actually stop the transmissions, and they're about to get her anyway.
  • The Banshees of Inisherin: Colm and Pádraic don't reconcile and likely never will. Colm has lost his home, is now down five fingers of his own choosing which means he can never play the fiddle again or have the same kind of life he did prior, and his sense of despair still there. Dominic drowns; whether by accident or suicide is never determined. Pádraic has lost his only two friends, his sister, and his beloved donkey, and his experiences over the film have left him bitter and vengeful towards Colm and unhappy with his life as a whole. Both men are ultimately stuck perpetuating a pointless feud on a miserable island they hate, but can't bring themselves to leave. The only bright spot is that Siobhan has apparently found a fulfilling life on mainland Ireland.
  • Barton Fink has a very grim ending, with the titular protagonist having the script he struggled with for ages rejected, his boss hating his guts and telling him he'll conform or else, his home burned down by the only person he could really identify with, who turned out to be a serial killer who also murdered the woman he loved, one of his heroes and possibly his family. And all he has is a package from the killer, which is heavily implied to contain a human head.
  • Batismo de Sangue: The Dominican friars are arrested by the Brazilian Military Regime and sentenced to four years in jail. Only one gets released early due to an deal with a Swiss ambassador and finds refuge in Europe. Unfortunately, the trauma he underwent at the hands of Fleury pushes him to the edge and he is Driven to Suicide, while the regime remains in power for the next few years. If there is an silver lining to this story is that one of his fellow friars is eventually released from jail and Fleury dies due to an unrelated incident and his name becomes vilified when democracy is restored.
  • The Beatniks: Eddy sacrifices his career to atone for his past crimes.
  • Beau Is Afraid: As if he hasn't gone through enough, Beau is killed at the movie's end when the motorboat he charters from his mother's mansion explodes in the arena.
  • Beautiful People (2014): Brett, out of nowhere, rapes Elena, and then caves her head in with a rock. Meanwhile, the military find the family's youngest child, and shoot him. Finally, zombies overrun the country.
  • Being John Malkovich: John Cusack goes through the portal a bit too late, and is forced to live in a little girl's brain, watching his now lesbian wife and lover living happily, unable to do anything. Malkovich himself did nothing to earn such a fate, so these people who control him practically pulled off a Karma Houdini. The next person is heavily implied to be Emily, Malkovich's daughter (and Craig's unwitting host). The movie ends with her swimming innocuously, completely unaware that a) there's another, entirely helpless person trapped inside her and b) she is Being Watched, until she is old enough to become the next vessel.
  • The Beyond: The entire town is missing, presumed dead. Liza and Richard, while fleeing the zombies, make the mistake of going into the basement, where they enter the Gate, and are trapped in the Beyond forever.
  • The Italian film Bicycle Thieves tells the story of a man who has his bicycle stolen when he needs the bicycle for his job. He and his son look through Rome and when they finally find the thief, they can't prove anything. At the film's end, the man decides to steal a bike, but people catch him in the act. Even though the owner doesn't press charges, we are left with the protagonist who lost his dignity in the eyes of his son, about to lose his job, and have his family starve to death because he is unemployed.
  • The Big Doll House: Everybody except Collier is killed in the prison break and ensuing shootout. Bodine gives Collier a letter to her lover on the outside and makes her promise to deliver it. She narrowly escapes the carnage, only to be picked up by a guard who takes her right back to prison.
  • A rather mild example in The Big Lebowski. It turns out that there was no money in the first place, the Dude's car finally gets destroyed, Donny dies and the Dude doesn't even get his fucking rug back! But, life goes on, man. Probably one of the few examples where a Downer Ending gets Played for Laughs.
  • The Big Short: The housing market collapses, and nearly takes the US economy with it. The protahonists are left either morally broken, ruined in their careers or both. The bankers responsible for the entire conflict make off with government bailout money, and start the entire con over again in a few years.
  • Black Death: Almost all of the protagonists die horribly, but that's just the beginning. The main character, a conflicted young monk, is led to believe that his girlfriend Came Back Wrong after being resurrected by a witch, leading him to put her out of her misery. While making her escape, this "witch" later taunts him with the revelation that the girl was never dead in the first place and was simply babbling incoherently as she was coming down from the drug that had kept her subdued. He is consumed with grief, but rather than blame himself this proves to be his Start of Darkness as he goes on to become a heartless Knight Templar, burning and torturing innocent women across the land in pursuit of the one that wronged him.
  • The Blair Witch Project: Every film in the franchise ends like this, although in two of the cases it was basically a Foregone Conclusion, since it was stated at the beginning that the footage shown was "found" in the woods, which doesn't exactly bode well for any protagonists surviving.
    • The first film ends with Josh still missing, presumed dead, and Mike and Heather coming across a dilapidated house in the middle of the forest. The two enter the basement looking for Josh, where the two are attacked by something and then both the cameras go dead.
    • Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2: After seeing footage of themselves going naked and murdering five people, an event they have no memory of, Jeff, Stephen, and Kim accuse Tristen of being possessed by the Blair Witch, kill her after she goads them, and are then arrested by police, who show security camera footage of Kim killing a cashier, Jeff killing Erica, and Tristen pleading for life before they killed her, events that they also do not remember.
    • Blair Witch: The film group is gradually picked off by unseen malevolent forces, until only James and Lisa are left, now both inside the dilapidated house from the first film, and hunted by a tall, slender, humanoid creature. The two figure out that it can't hurt them as long as they don't look directly at it, but the creature tricks them into turning around by mimicking the voices of their friends, and then the camera goes out. What's more, the reason they even came to the woods, to find out the truth about James' missing sister Heather, who seemed to still be alive in footage newly discovered in the woods, is revealed to have been All for Nothing, as it turns out the footage of the woman that looked like Heather was actually Lisa from the future, via a Stable Time Loop.
  • Blonde: In this case, a Foregone Conclusion. Norma Jeane, upon learning that Cass was the one who wrote all of the letters that were supposedly from her father, is so shattered by this that she overdoses on pills and dies alone in her home, all while having a hallucination of the father that she never knew taking her to the afterlife.
  • Blood Bags: Tracy only imagined escaping from the killer, and comes to strapped to a table when a machine starts draining a pint of her blood. She screams for help, only to be held down while the killer takes an axe to her face.
  • Blood Cult: Ron's daughter is revealed to be the killer. She then kills herself, leaving Ron grieving and the rest of the cult to get off scot-free.
  • Blood Monkey: Most of the cast is killed, but the last two survivors manage to escape the mad Professor Hamilton after one of the monstrous apes kills him. Hopelessly lost in the jungle, they try to hide in a cave network, only for it to be the apes' lair. Naturally, the apes show up and kill them too.
  • Blood Was Everywhere: Most of the cast are dead, and the killer's identity is never revealed to the characters or the audience. The killer manages to kill the only witnesses to his crimes before driving into obscurity.
  • Blood Widow: Laurie has a chance to escape the killer after supposedly killing her. She sees Hugh's crossbow and decides to take it and train it on the killer. The killer gets back up, swats the crossbow away, and then beats Laurie to death. The last shot is of the killer leaving the basement and closing the door behind her.
  • The 1981 thriller Blow Out, about a sound man who accidentally records a presidential candidate's assassination, ends with the hero arriving too late to stop the bad guy from killing his love interest, the assassin has also just destroyed every existing copy of the recording and by killing the assassin the hero has ironically tied up every remaining loose end for the conspirators and as such the cover is ultimately a success.
  • Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed: Steve Ross loses his lawsuit against Bob Ross Inc., and the Kowalskis, who own the company, continue to make money off Bob Ross' likeness while his family doesn't see one red, cent, against Bob Ross' wishes.
  • Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: While it's mostly a No Ending kind of movie, the reveal makes it a huge downer ending. There was no killer. The whole movie the gang has to find who murdered the first character, David, but in the end it turns out David was a colossal moron and killed his own self by accident. They then kill one guy because they assume he did it, one falls down stairs from her own fault and the last two are accidents or self-defense. The last two survivors were in a relationship, but after a secret affair is revealed with one of the girls and a mean girl, that relationship is pretty much tarnished. Well... at least the internet and power is back on.
  • Bokeh: The film ends with Riley discovering that Janai committed suicide and he is left to survive alone as seemingly the last human on earth.
  • Bonnie and Clyde: The titular Outlaw Couple ends up on the receiving end of an absolutely disproportionate amount of dakka. Truth in Television.
  • Bostock's Cup features two of these. Firstly, the Film Within a Film detailing the titular football team's unlikely FA Cup win in 1974 ends with Bostock Stanley going out of business months later, meaning they never got the chance to defend their trophy. Secondly, the framing story reveals that the film's host and producer used dirty tricks (involving hypnotising an opposing team, bribing a referee, and illegally smuggling a Brazilian player into the country to secretly act as a ringer) to get Bostock to the final, then was secretly the person who put the team out of business, and committed adultery with the wife of the team's manager to boot. The only bit of solace for the Bostock players is that he reveals they won the cup final itself fair and square.
  • The Box (2018): The boy is mysteriously replaced by his Doppelgänger, who tricks the boy's mom into reading the same spell to summon her own.
  • The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is an all-around Downer Ending, probably even worse then the source book. The movie ends with the protagonist and his Jewish friend both being gassed to death when they accidentally enter a chamber, trying to find the latter's father. The protagonists family figures out he's missing and have the appropriate reactions.
  • As Boys Don't Cry is based off a real murder case, the protagonist dies at the end of the film. And by "murdered", we mean "brutally raped and beaten to death onscreen".
  • The Boys in Company C: Brisbee is shot and killed after he guns down a South Vietnamese officer for killing a young boy earlier. Afterwards Foster died jumping on a grenade to save two children, leaving Washington and Fazio to return to Vietnam. In the ending text, it states how Washington was killed and Fazio was institutionalized. The ending text also states that most of Company C were hurt or killed.
  • BoyTown ends with the eponymous Boy Band being killed in a plane crash, most of them leaving families behind.
  • Brake: It's more than likely that Jeremy ends up getting killed, and the terrorists get the information they wanted to carry on with whatever terrorist attack they plan against the President.
  • Brazil (1985) by Terry Gilliam. You know it's a Downer Ending when the fact that the protagonist goes insane in the torture chair (and will probably be executed soon thereafter) can be considered the most merciful thing to happen to him!
  • The Bridge Curse: The Intrepid Reporter's cameraman is revealed to be one of the studentgs from the 2016 hauntings, and is now acting as the ghost's newest aid. He then attacks her, and then Smash to Black. We then see another group of students taking part in the bravery test, which will continue the haunting and murders.
  • Brightburn: Brandon kills both of his adoptive parents and destroys the ship that brought him to Earth, the material it was made from being the only thing that could hurt him, by crashing a plane into his parents' farm. A sociopathic Superman Substitute is now free to terrorize humanity with no way to stop him. And then it's revealed that not only is Brandon not the only superhuman, but that others, including Expies of Aquaman and Wonder Woman, are also evil. And the only one who seems to give a shit is a Conspiracy Theorist.
  • Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Everyone dies.
  • Brokeback Mountain ends with Jack dead (presumably killed by violent homophobes, although the true nature of his death is never confirmed) and Ennis is left sad, bitter, and alone. The final scene has him holding Jack's old shirt; the old memento he has of him, and with tears in his eyes, ends the movie with this line:
    "Jack, I swear..."
  • Broken Blossoms ends with Lucy being been beaten to death by her father. Her father is then shot by Chen, with Chen killing himself soon afterwards.
  • Bug ends with Agnes becoming delusional and in love with Peter, and is convinced that bugs are living inside her through Government interference; and that in order to prevent this they must set themselves on fire, which they do.
  • Buried features a fantastic downer ending. A truck driver in Iraq is buried alive in the desert. As he uses all his wits and resources to try to get help, help appears to arrive – and then hasn't, in a super sucker punch at the end of the film.
  • Burnt Offerings: Marian becomes the new Mrs. Allardyce, Ben and Davey are killed and the evil house rejuvenates itself, awaiting its next victims.
  • The Butterfly Effect:
    • In the director's cut, Ashton Kutcher's character realizes that everyone – and we mean everyone – would be better off without him. He goes back to the womb and asphyxiates himself with his umbilical cord, resulting in happy endings for all but our nonexistent protagonist. It actually gets slightly more downer if you pick up on the infrequently mentioned fact that the protagonist is said to be a 'miracle baby' on account of his mother's numerous miscarriages/stillbirths before he was born... which implies that the whole "go back and kill yourself in the womb because your very existence brings misery to your friends and family" thing has already been played out X number of times by his would-be siblings. And then more so when you pick up on the even less mentioned fact that his Dad had to keep going back so that the protagonist would NOT die in the womb.
    • The theatrical ending's no picnic, either. The hero discovers that everyone's problems stemmed from the fact that he "clicked" with his future girlfriend when they were little, so he averts this by being mean to her on the first day they meet. They never become friends, she has no reason to stick around when her parents divorce and leaves with her mom, her brother doesn't get molested by his father, no one gets blown up, no one becomes a hooker... fast forward to the "present", where both the hero and the girl are both beautiful, successful people but wouldn't she wouldn't even know him if they passed in the street (which they Anviliciously do).

    C 
  • Cabin Fever ends with all the main characters being consumed by the flesh-eating virus and killed off in various ways. The water that contains the virus is made into bottled water and gets shipped off into another place in the country. The sequel doesn't fare much better as only one girl survives her school being quarantined and killed off by a SWAT team as the virus still continues to spread throughout the country. Enjoy your post-apocalyptic, virus-infected world, America.
  • The Cabin in the Woods: Marty and Dana survive getting hunted down by the Facility ensuring they and their friends are sacrificed to appease the Ancient Ones, but the two cause America's ritual to fail, and since the States' ritual was the only one that didn't fail yet when the Facility went after them, the Ancient Ones get angry and cause the world and humanity to end.
  • Cain Hill: By the end of the film, Chester has managed to kill all of the main cast except Mary, who is the Sole Survivor of his murder spree. Marcus is shown in a neck brace, being wheeled into an ambulance on a stretcher. The police speculate he might pull through, but the statement at the end of the movie reveals that he died the following day. Oh, and the police never found a trace of Chester, meaning that he's still out there.
  • The Candy Snatchers is about the kidnapping of a Catholic schoolgirl, and it focuses quite heavily on her plight as well as the complications that arise. It doesn't end well at all. The girl is still bound, gagged, and blindfolded and locked in a box buried in the ground, while the only person who knows she's there, a mentally disabled child, runs off, having forgotten her. She screams through her gag all throughout the ending. And to make that worse, two of the three people who kidnapped Candy (that's her name) are killed when they fall out among themselves, and the third is shot dead by the disabled kid while he's trying to free the girl. Oh, and did we mention that the girl's father (who also buys it - in fact, just about everyone except the disabled child winds up dead or doomed) wanted her gone anyway? Even Michael Haneke would get out the Prozac after this one.
  • Cannibal Girls: Gloria becomes the fourth Cannibal Girl, and the film ends with another couple about to be lured into the Reverend's cult.
  • Carnage Road​: As our last survivor is fleeing the horror, his driver needs to use the bathroom. While the driver is gone, Quiltface shows up and steals the car with our hero inside.
  • Carnival of Souls: Mary is overwhelmed and swarmed by the Undead as she tries to escape. The next day, the car she crashed in is finally drudged up to reveal Mary's drowned body.
  • The first Carnosaur film ends with Doc and Thrush getting shot and burned, because the Government Conspiracy had decided that wiping out women via Tiptree's virus and replacing them with Uterine Replicators was superior to just curing the disease. Had they went with the original ending, DARPA's actions would have been All for Nothing when an unnoticed pterosaur survives the whole ordeal, ready to continue the virus once more.
  • Carrie (1976): After Carrie's efforts to try to fit in and emerge from the toxic influence of her mother seem to be successful, she suffers a horrible humiliation, is driven to near insanity, and takes revenge by massacring dozens of prom attendees. When she gets home, she seeks comfort from her mother, who stabs her. Carrie then kills her mother and herself, taking along their house as collateral damage.
  • Cartouche: Venus dies rescuing Cartouche, who gives the love of his life a lavish funeral and ends the movie vowing to avenge her, a way that he anticipates will lead him sooner or later to the gallows.
  • Carved: The Kuchesake-onna was "defeated" but Noboro dies and Kyoko is possessed in the end of the film.
  • The Champ (1931, remade in 1979) has a notorious Downer Ending in which the boxer protagonist collapses and dies after winning his fight, while his small and impossibly cute son weeps at his side.
  • The Argentinian film Charly: Dias de Sangre (Charly: Blood Days) is about a teenager who's traumatized with the death of his older brother, who died in a fire in their vacation house years ago. In order to cheer him up, his father convinces a friend to invite Charly and some of his friends to the vacation house. It doesn't end well. Charly gets possessed by the spirit of his brother and murders everyone, except for the friend. The friend, understandably angry, tries to kill Charly (who shook off the possession at the last minute) only to be shot dead by the cops. Charly ends up scot free, since everyone believes the friend killed everyone, but now he's more traumatized than before.
  • Cheerleader Camp: Cory successfully frames Allison for the murders.
  • Children of the Corn: Genesis: Tim dies in a supernaturally caused car crash and Allie ends up stuck with the cult.
  • Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things: The zombies kill our main characters, and take a boat to the mainland to continue the madness.
  • The Children's Hour has a major Downer Ending. Martha's and Karen's reputations are forever ruined by a rumor a child started, neither can be teachers again, and they're a well-known court case throughout America. Karen's fiance dumps her, Martha has unrequited feelings toward Karen, and to top it all off she kills herself at the end; in the play though she kills herself before Mary's grandmother comes over, so it turns into an Esoteric Happy Ending there.
  • Chinatown is among the most famous. It turns out Mrs. Mulwray was raped by Noah Cross and gave birth to his daughter/granddaughter. After Noah Cross killed Hollis, she tries to escape to Mexico. But when Noah Cross shows up to stop her, she shoots him and is then shot by the police. Jake is partially responsible for her being shot. Jake finds a pair of glasses in Evelyn's pond and assumes that they are Hollis's glasses, meaning she drowned him in her back garden. He calls the cops on her, only to learn that Cross was behind it all. If he hadn't called the cops, she might have gotten away. And when she was driving away, a cop tries to shoot out the tires. Jake jumps him to let her get away. His partner then steps in and goes for a headshot. Noah Cross then takes her daughter/sister, which was why Mulwray was trying to escape. All while the water conspiracy will never be revealed. The kicker? JJ can't do squat about it. As the quote goes: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." Robert Towne's original script had Mrs. Mulwray escape with her daughter but director Roman Polanski changed it to a more bleak ending.
  • Christine (2016) ends with Christine Chubbuck shooting herself in the head live on television, and succumbing to her wounds later that day in the hospital.
  • Citizen Kane: By the end of the movie, the viewer realizes that, despite being on top of the world, Kane was tremendously unhappy and what he wanted above all else in his life was to be loved. Kane dies alone, as the movie opens, as he remembers the last time in his life when he was truly happy; when he was playing with his beloved sled, Rosebud. Plus the fact that the reporter and the rest of the world never do find out what "Rosebud" is. The only way the viewer finds out is when it's too late; when the sled is being burned, along with some of Kane's other belongings. The real tragedy is that he had the sled as part of his property throughout his whole life. Still, owning it didn't change a thing — the past is the past. This also means that Kane died with one cherished secret only he knew. The press and the populace could never get their hands on what was closest to his heart. And the snow globe, which Kane held until he died, had belonged to Susan, who had loved him for himself. He was thinking of her, too.
  • City of Angels: Seth the Angel is madly in love with Maggie (a human). He gives up his Angelhood so that he can pursue a full relationship with her. After spending their first night together, Maggie is out riding her bike and is hit by a truck. She dies in Seth's arms and he's stuck in life as a human.
  • Dante in Clerks specifically references the Empire Strikes Back ending as a Downer Ending, adding that he likes it because "That's what life is: a series of down endings." This line had more meaning in the original cut of the film, which ended with a random guy robbing the store and shooting him.
  • Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange controversially removed the vital last chapter of Anthony Burgess' original novel, altering the message of the entire work substantially. In the novel, Alex voluntarily relinquishes his former life of ultraviolence and rape after having the effects of the brainwashing "Ludovico technique" reversed, and hence having his ability to act as an autonomous moral agent restored. In the film, he is implied to have simply returned to his previous vicious and amoral state, with the chilling final words "I was cured, alright".

    This is because pre-1986 copies of the novel for the U.S. market, like the one that Kubrick bought, were missing the final chapter. Kubrick became aware of the omitted chapter in the middle of writing the screenplay, but he left it out because he preferred the book without it. Even in the film, however, it was clear that the reversal of the "Ludovico Technique" was not done to right some moral or ethical wrong or to show any true concern for Alex's state ... except as his value as poster boy for one government faction against the other, leaving him still no more than a pawn in the game of life.
  • Cloverfield. Every character dies except one, and the monster responsible might have possibly lived, and New York (and the people living there) has been almost completely destroyed. Word of God does state that the monster died from the saturation bombing of the city.
  • Clown Motel: Brooke follows the mine tunnel all the way to the end, only to find it lead her right back to the motel. The clowns chase her into one of the rooms, and at the end, Brooke and Gemma are trapped in there while the clowns beat against the door, trying to get in.
  • Color Out of Space (2020) ends with the Color finishing its feeding and returning to space, leaving the Gardner family, Ezra, and the local sheriff dead, and Ward permanently traumatized by his experiences. Additionally, despite Ward's best efforts, the water reservoir still gets built, meaning thousands if not millions of people are drinking water that's almost certainly tainted by the Color's presence.
  • Colossus: The Forbin Project ends with the titular AI conquering human civilization, bending the will of the great powers with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Colossus lends credibility to his threat by detonating a pair of nukes (one American, one Russian) that the characters believed they had secretly deactivated. Of course, Colossus only has the best intentions in mind and its final lines predict a rational utopia under its rule.
  • Troma pick-up Combat Shock (original title: American Nightmare): In the last 3 minutes, our main character, a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD, shoots his wife, cooks his deformed baby alive in his apartment's antiquated oven, and drinks some very sour milk (90 percent chunks) before finally blowing his own brains out onscreen. The previous 97 minutes are far from a picnic, as well.
  • Come and See. A downer ending to a downer movie. After escaping death by the skin of his teeth, our protagonist manages to catch up with his partisan unit who have managed to capture some of the Nazi SS unit responsible for burning the population of an entire village inside a barn. Revenge is taken but the damage is done: Flyora is irretrievably fucked up - prematurely aged; a joyless and hardened member of the resistance. The final shot of the film is his unit marching through the forest looking for more Nazis to kill.
  • Come Out and Play. Both Beth and Francis are dead by the end of the film, and the children are heading to the mainland, to infect others.
  • Coming Soon, a Thai horror film. The main character dies a horrible death by eye-gouging. His entire struggle was completely in vain, as he accomplished almost nothing. His ex-wife, who has just regained her feelings for him, is forced to watch him die on a theater screen. The cursed movie gets widespread recognition, and hordes of people watch it, all inevitably ending up doomed to death by angry ghost murder. Oh yeah, and now you're cursed too. Hahahaha... have a good evening. For that matter, same with the original Shutter. In fact, the Thai horror industry seems to be very fond of Downer Endings, "the audience is now cursed" Downer Endings in particular.
  • Coquette, a 1929 drama talkie film, ends with the main protagonist Norma being miserable and withdrawn, her lover Michael murdered by her father, who killed himself out of guilt.
  • Cosmos: War of the Planets: The computer is destroyed, but at the cost of the alien world and all but one of its inhabitants. The computer's mind possesses a crew member and goes on a killing spree in the ship, with the last alien throwing himself out of an airlock to take the computer with him. The rest of the crew heads home, but the computer has possessed the ship's computer, and is preparing to attack Earth.
  • The Cottage: After being rendered the sole survivor of our victim pool with the death of his brother, Peter snaps and kills the farmer. In the course of these events, Peter falls into the basement, which is closed with the farmer's corpse and a large dresser on top. Unable to escape through the cellar door, Peter decides to investigate the rest of the room for an escape route, only to find the farmer's equally insane and cannibalistic family down there, who have decided that he's their next lunch.
  • The Count Yorga films loved doing this
    • Count Yorga, Vampire: Nearly all the human characters are killed or turned. The last surviving one, Michael, manages to confront Yorga and stake him (or rather Yorga stupidly ran into the stake while trying to choke him). He thinks he's saved his girlfriend Donna and manages to ward off Yorga's two remaining vampire brides (one of which was his friend Erica). However after he does so he drops his cross and thinks its over, only to turn around and see Donna, now bearing fangs, lunge for him. The final shot of the movie is his bloodied corpse with bite marks all over his face.
    • The Return of Count Yorga: As with the first movie, nearly everyone is either dead or turned (considering there were more females in this movie, Yorga practically has an army of undead women at his disposal). The last remaining humans, Cynthia and Balwin, try to escape the manor but are eventually cornered. Yorga leaves his brides to deal with Balwin while he takes Cynthia for his own. Before he can bite her, Balwin somehow escapes and comes gunning for Yorga. Theres a brief chase to and fight on the top floor balcony of the house. Cynthia, whose been brainwashed for much of the movie, remembers it was Yorga who killed her family and manages to stake him allowing Balwin to throw him from the balcony. Cynthia then hugs Balwin...only for him to reveal that he's now a vampire. Cynthia can only get out a "No!" before he bites her. The final shot is especially chilling as Cynthia's adopted brother, Tommy, who wasn't turned but brainwashed by Yorga, is playing with his ball in front of Yorga's house implying that he continues to serve the vampires there, among which is no doubt Cynthia, who will continue to feed and add more unopposed.
  • The Counselor: Reiner and Westray are killed. Multiple people, civilian and criminal, are killed in the delivery of the drug shipment to Chicago. Laura is killed in a gruesome, Nothing Is Scarier manner off-screen. Her death is likely recorded as a snuff film. The tape is sent to the Counselor who has a Despair Event Horizon moment. He'll likely be killed soon after. Her body is thrown in a garbage dump. Malkina, who set the whole plot in motion with the theft of the drug shipment, gets off scot-free with Westray's money.
  • The Crazies features all of the main characters except for David getting killed off by the military. The only character to find the cure ends up dying in the very end. Not much better in the remake, either. The two protagonists escape, but their hometown, and everyone they knew is killed in a nuclear explosion. Oh, and the government is still hunting them. Not only that, but some crazies have also escaped the explosion, spreading the plague to a major city.
    • The remake has everyone David and Judy knew is now dead since the government nuked their home town after indiscriminately killing EVERYONE inside. Even when they escape to Cedar Rapids, a satellite catches sight of them, and the military initiates the same containment protocol once more. The Stinger then shows a Crazy appearing on the news, so the Trixie Virus somehow got out despite the military's efforts. According to the original script, this is because David is infected.
  • Creep Van: Since Campbell managed to kill the killer at the end, Bittersweet Ending could apply... If the bitter didn't outweigh the sweet by as much as it does at the end. To go into detail, Campbell accidentally killed Amy with a pipe, his coworkers and his boss are dead, and when the police show up, it looks to them like Campbell committed all the murders, so he gets sent to jail.
  • Cries and Whispers: Agnes is dead, Anna is fired with very little care given to her future, and Karin and Maria go their separate ways with no improvement on their situations or their frosty relationship with each other.
  • Crocodile: The crocodile is finally killed, but all of the protagonists die as well.
  • Crimes and Misdemeanors: The murderer gets away with it. And since an earlier scene in the movie had a character saying "God sees all," Woody is implying that there is no God.
  • Cube: Characters are repeatedly set up as heroes in an escape for their lives from a mechanical maze, but they all end up dying or being killed by another character, except for the mentally disabled character. He would be the only person who could sound the alarm or summon help, but would not be able to communicate the situation, assuming he understood it at all.
  • Cure: Mamiya finally manages to break Takabe, who snaps and kills him. Takabe then proceeds to become the exact same sort of monster Mamiya was.
  • The Curse of El Charro: El Charro is destroyed, but not before he kills all but one of the cast. Maria, the Sole Survivor, is driven insane and blamed for the murders, locked in an asylum forever.

    D 
  • Daft Punk's Electroma. The gold and silver robots are exiled from their town, and while hiking in the desert the silver robot asks the gold robot to kill it by activating a self-destruction timer on his back. Shortly afterwards, the gold robot attempts to do the same on himself but cannot reach the switch, so he smashes his helmet and uses a shard as a burning glass to light himself on fire. The film ends with it, completely ablaze, walking in slow-motion into the distance.
  • In Dagon Paul loses everyone he knows and loves, finds out he's a monster, and is forced to live in the sea and marry his sister.
  • Dancer in the Dark. An immigrant woman, going blind from a progressive genetic disease, works under exploitative conditions at her factory job, is saving up money doing some kind of terrible laborious piecemeal work at home to pay for an operation for her son so he won't go blind from the same disease she has, has a landlord who finds out about her son's operation money and steals it to pay for his wife's shopping debts, ends up killing the landlord by accident, goes to prison and gets hanged while singing tragically.
  • The Dark (2005): Adele manages to take Sarah back from Anwynn, and she's reunited with her father. However, she discovers that she's dead, and the Dark has possessed her daughter.
  • Dark Skies: The eldest son is taken by the antagonists and the parents couldn't do anything to stop it.
  • Dark Star: Bomb #20 explodes, destroying the ship and killing its crew.
  • Dark Touch: Ends with Niamh having killed the people who were fostering her after she assumes they would hurt her like her parents, and having engineered the deaths of all of the children in town to save them from being abused. And now, she's headed into the greater world to continue fixing the situation.
  • Das Boot. All the German submariners survive their dangerous mission (by a hair), only to get bombed by the Allies as they return to the shore. Most of the crew runs to shelter, some of them apparently wounded. The war correspondent runs back to the dock to find three of the most characterized of his fellow submariners dead, and the mortally wounded captain keeling over just after he watched the submarine we've been following the whole movie sink in its dock. The captain isn't mortally wounded though. Word of God says he survived. The real life counterpart, Captain Heinrich von Lehmann-Willebrock survived, and he survived the war. After the war he became a merchant marine captain.
  • Daughters of Darkness (1971): Valerie manages to escape her abusive husband and the vampire countess, with both dying at the end. However, she's been turned into a vampire herself.
  • The Day After, being about a nuclear apocalypse, naturally had one hell of a downer ending, and similarly, near the end, had a woman dying in childbirth, the baby presumably dying as well.
  • The Days of Our Years:
    • Joe and Helen are madly in love and can't wait to get married. Joe is so excited that he crashes his car, permanently injures himself, and has become so traumatized that he's no longer able to enjoy life, and he and Helen end up miserable together.
    • Lifelong best friends George and Fred can't wait to spend their retirements with their families. George accidentally kills Fred in a train accident when he has a heart attack at the controls, and becomes a shut-in convinced that Fred's family will never forgive him.
    • Charlie just can't wait for his wife to give birth to their first son. When he gets a call at work saying the baby has been born, Charlie startles a welder and gets blinded, robbing him of the opportunity to ever see his baby boy like he wanted.
  • The Dead Don't Die: Even though it's a comedic zombie movie, it doesn't have a happy ending; nearly everyone is killed horribly and Cliff and Ronnie, aware they're characters in a movie and are going to die no matter what, go out in a blaze of glory and take as many zombies with them as they can until they're inevitably overwhelmed. Zelda, the eccentric Scottish mortician who beheads zombies with a katana, is revealed to be an alien who leaves Earth on a UFO, leaving the remaining four survivors (three kids from the local juvie and a hermit who lives in the woods) to fend for themselves. And given the sheer scope of the outbreak and what's causing it, there's no indication that they aren't doomed along with the rest of the planet.
  • Dead Silence: Mary Shaw succeeded in killing off the Ashen family line, with Jamie being saved for last.
    • The alternate ending was no better, despite Jamie still being alive, though unresponsive.
  • Dear God No!: The bigfoot ends up massacring the Impalers, seemingly to protect Dr. Marco's kindly daughter, but he then punches her head off and continues his own rampage.
  • Death Note (2006): If one views Light as the villain of this adaptation. The ending has Light pulling off a successful plan that kills off Naomi and Shiori due to him writing both their names in the 'Death Note'. And since Light now has an alibi, and a fake motive to stop Kira via Shiori's death, he easily joins the Investigation Team. The worst part is that he doesn't even care about his girlfriend dying, only seeing it a means to an end, showing us that he has embraced being 'Kira'. Misa also ends up receiving another 'Death Note' that falls from the sky, which will complicate things for the authorities. The only consolation is L hinting to Light in their first meeting that he still suspects Light is Kira, but that isn't definitive proof.
  • Death on Demand: The Big Bad kills everybody in the house and continues to haunt it.
  • Death Stop Holocaust: Both girls are killed by the gang, and the only one who could have stopped them kills himself in his grief. While the gang are down a few members, they continue their killing spree with complete impunity.
  • Death Sentence: Nick Hume has managed to kill the gang member responsible for his older son's murder, but in the process incurred the wrath of the rest of the gang, who kill his wife and render his younger son comatose. Nick kills them all but suffers grave injuries in the process, then he himself dies.
  • Deathdream: Andy's father commits suicide when his mom refuses to let him be put out of his misery. She goes on a high-speed chase with the police, but to no avail, as Andy finally wastes away in a cemetery, the film ending with her breaking down over his corpse.
  • Def-Con 4: The unlaunched nuclear warhead in the space station's remains explodes and kills the whole cast.
  • The Defiant Ones: Joker and Noah are captured.
  • Delusions of Grandeur: While not quite as bad as the original play (where Ruy Blas willingly takes poison after killing Don Salluste, the Queen having forgiven his impersonation), the ending still has Blaze not only arrested, but also stripped of his titles and sent to a Saharan prison... and Doña Juana follows him there.
  • Demons: George and Cheryl escape from the theater after dispatching all of the demons and the mysterious mask man, only to find out that the city is over run with demons (one had escaped early in the movie). George and Cheryl manage to escape with a family and as the credits roll, we see Cheryl has turned into a demon and is quickly shot to death as George looks on in shock.
  • The Descent: In the original ending, everyone save Sarah and Juno is dead. Sarah cripples Juno and seemingly escapes... but it was just an hallucination. The edited ending has Sarah escaping for real, but it isn't a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination.
  • Devdas, the Bollywood analogue to Romeo and Juliet. The male lead goes through ordeal after ordeal to find his love, then dies in a drunken stupor right outside her gate. The gate shuts in her face, right before she would have seen him.
  • The Divide ends with Eva escaping from the bunker with signs of radiation sickness and limited supplies only to find the surface uninhabitable.
  • Djinn: Salama's family has been killed, her husband Khalid is revealed as a djinn after she realizes the entire thing was a trap, and he throws her off the roof of the apartment building. The end.
  • Doctor in Trouble ends with Dr. Burke loses Ophelia to Dr. Houston, and to rub salt in his wounds has to share a crowded taxi home with a common Cockney family.
  • DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story originally had a dark ending in which the team loses the game, with the film ending abruptly after the line, "Average Joe's has come here for nothing. Absolutely nothing!" But, due to higher forces, this ending was scrapped and the happy one shown in the film was included. This is arguably just a joke ending, as evidenced by all the story threads that are only wrapped up through the theatrical ending. The commentary reveals that the original ending was to be set up as Average Joes does lose the tournament, but Steve the Pirate returns with the money needed to save the day in a Deus ex machina.
  • Donnie Darko has the title character killing himself to save the life of his girlfriend and the mysterious Frank. Because he wasn't around to burn his house down, the pedophile remained undetected. According to the website, the pedophile committed suicide after the events of the film. The sequel S. Darko shows that Donnie's death broke the family, Samantha becomes distant and at the end of the sequel the mentally ill Iraq war veteran kills himself, the child in the mine starves to death and presumably nobody finds the body, the priest never got his comeuppance, the alien rash thing just got passed onto somebody else but hey, at least Sam is going home.
  • Don't Look Up: The comet strikes the planet, killing everything except for several elites who were able to leave in a spaceship in time. The only comforts are that Randall, Kate, and their family and friends enjoyed one last dinner together and died with dignity, and that the aforementioned elites eventually get their commeupance after dooming all of Earth to die due to their own greed and stupidity. The post-credits scene reveals that Jason somehow survived the comet, meaning that there's the possibility of other survivors, but it's unlikely they'll last very long due to the planet now being a barren wasteland.
  • Duel (not to be confused with Steven Spielberg's debut film as a director) ends with the titular original character dying and her clone surviving and getting away with it and pretending to be the original character. Not through battle, but because she was poisoned. It was a plan by her clone, her scummy boyfriend and her mother. The clone didn't win either though. Having to deal with a naggy mother and annoying boyfriend. It ends with the clone crying alone.
  • Drag Me to Hell. Not uncommon in horror films, a curse is bestowed upon the heroine, which she spends the movie trying to get rid of. A creepy looking old woman takes a button from her coat, puts a curse on it and gives it back to her. Later she learns that if she gives away the button the curse is given to the new owner of the button, but she only has till the end of the night to do it, or she will be dragged to hell the next day. She gets her own back by going to the now deceased woman's tombstone and returning the button to her. Believing everything was behind her, she discovers the next morning that the button she thought she gave to the old woman was still with her. She gave the wrong item (it was sealed in an identical looking envelope to the button). She then gets dragged to hell.
  • Dread: Quaid, after helping Stephen with his essay on people's deepest fears, begins torturing their subjects and their consequences are made evident by the end of the film: Abby poisons herself and is hospitalized, barely clinging on to life; Joshua is shot in the ears, is made deaf and eventually goes mad with vengeance; Cheryl, who was helping Quaid and Stephen, is locked in a room for several days until she overcomes her fear of meat and eats a now maggot-ridden pork chop in exchange for her freedom. Stephen confronts and corners Quaid and, just as Stephen is about to kill him, Joshua comes between them and kills Stephen, unaware that Quaid is behind him with a gun and is promptly shot in the head. Quaid then takes Stephen's corpse and dumps it in a small room, where Cheryl is handcuffed to a pipe and is forced to eat the body while Quaid presumably carries on his gruesome agenda.
  • In Dresden the main character (a British pilot) manages to laboriously live through the bombing of Dresden with serious injuries and escapes back to England. After the war, he flies back to see his true love (and, OMG, their child)... when his plane crashes. So, he is killed... in the post-script... by a voice-over.
  • Dr. Strangelove: Despite the attempts of both sides, a single nuclear warhead passes through, triggering a doomsday machine which will render the Earth's surface uninhabitable for decades. The final scene is a series of mushroom clouds, accompanied with the song "We'll Meet Again", implying that even centuries after we're all dead and gone, humans will still be trying to kill each other over appallingly petty reasons. And yet, it still remains hilarious.
  • Drive-In Massacre: The killer manages to kill the main two suspects and evade the police without even being identified. He takes his slaughter to drive-ins across the country.
  • Dumb and Dumber: A comedic example - not only does Mary, Lloyd's love interest, have a husband, he and Harry stupidly turn down the job opportunity of a lifetime that involves rubbing tanning oil on supermodels' bodies.
  • Dust Devil: Wendy kills the host body of the Dust Devil, but Ben dies having failed to neutralize the spirit, who jumps into Wendy’s body and leaves Mark to die chained to a car before going out to claim more souls.

    E 
  • Earth 2100 shows the life of a woman named Lucy in an Earth where environmental problems such as disease, pollution, and Global Warming keep getting worse. By the end of the film in 2100, the government has pretty much disintegrated, the Caspian Fever epidemic has killed more than half of the human population, while other parts of the world have wiped themselves out over wars over resources, and most technology has broken down, with only the elite able to use it. Society has become the Cyberpunk equivalent of the Dark Ages as cities become fortress communities, and the environment will likely take centuries to heal. Lucy herself laments what kind of knowledge to pass onto her grandson in this new world.
  • Easy Rider ends with a textbook example of Diabolus ex Machina when Wyatt and Billy are killed by a group of rednecks just when they decide to leave the drug business behind and live a life of luxury.
  • Eden Lake is a perfect example. After Steve is burned and tortured to death by the boys and Jenny finally escapes the camp after being hunted down, she appears to have found help in a nearby house until it becomes apparent that she has fallen into the hands of the gang's parents in the last scene, where she is dragged off to be killed not long after. The mobile phone videos containing footage of the gang torturing the couple get deleted.
  • Eloïse's Lover: Àsia kills herself, with her loved ones left behind devastated. Rubbing it in, the film ends with a fantasy sequence where she goes off with Eloïse on a trip instead
  • Evil Dead:
    • The Evil Dead (1981) ends with all of Ash's friends dead, and while it seems as though Ash has won, since he burned the book (not technically the Necrinomicon, it wouldn't be that until the sequels), he still gets attacked by the evil forces at the end.
    • In Evil Dead 2, it ends with all of Ash's friends/allies dead, with his hand missing this time, stuck in the past, and being revealed to be the man from the sky, who we know actually failed in defeating the Deadites since they still exist in modern times.
    • The original ending of Army of Darkness would've been where Ash takes a potion to sleep until his time, but wakes up 100 years too late, in an apocalyptic setting, with everyone else seemingly gone.
  • In Ex Machina, Ava manages to escape. This means that the scientific breakthrough of artificial intelligence will never be discovered, and even if Ava reveals herself to the general population, the only person who has any clue how she was put together is now dead. Worse still, Caleb is left for dead by Ava, trapped inside of the facility. And the film makes it uncomfortably clear that he has no chance of getting out.
  • The 1926 silent comedy Exit Smiling is a fun, light-hearted film about a bad actress in a traveling theater troupe. After she brings to light a conspiracy that was going to send the man she loves to jail, she runs off to find him - only to see that another woman has told him the good news and he intends to leave the troupe and stay in town. He's so happy about going home that she can't bear to tell him how she feels. The last shot of the movie is him obliviously stepping off the train and tears rolling down her cheeks.
  • Eyes of Laura Mars: Laura survives, but everyone she loves is dead, with Laura herself having to kill Neville at his own request to stop him from killing anyone else. The final shot of the movie is Laura talking with the police operator, barely able to even remember her own name from the trauma.

    F 
  • In the Cold-War era film Fail Safe, the Pentagon accidentally sends a squad of bombers out to nuke Moscow, only to revoke the order due to a routine radar mishap. However, the bombers do not receive the order due to Russian communication jamming, and proceed to bomb the living daylights out of Russia's capital. The President of the United States then works out a deal that to repay the Russians, he will give an order...to nuke New York. To make a horrible situation even worse the President is well aware that the First Lady is visiting New York on a shopping trip. Additionally, the pilot of the bomber ordered to drop the bomb is dropping it on his wife and children and commits suicide immediately after delivering his payload.
  • Fallen. The main character sacrifices his life to kill an ancient demon, only to fail in the end, leaving himself dead and the demon alive. The upside is the demon no longer has any motivation to threaten his family.
  • The end of the Fantasia segment, "Rite of Spring", could be seen as a downer ending, since all the dinosaurs die. Even the Tyrannosaurus rex, who had brutally killed the Stegosaurus earlier, gets a heartbreaking death. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for the Executive Meddling, Walt Disney would have kept the happier ending where a band of early humans start a bonfire and then dance in celebration of their discovery.
  • Father's Day (2011): Ahab, Father Sullivan, and Twink try to return to Earth, but the final scene is a lingering shot of their corpses sitting in their chairs, heavily implying that they didn't make it. At least Chelsea is alive, although it's never made clear if she got an abortion, which would spare the world another Fuchmanicus.
  • The Favourite: Abigail burns Sarah's letter of apology to the queen, so they never reconcile and Anne is clearly heartbroken. Convinced by Abigail that Sarah stole from her (whether she actually did is ambiguous), Anne banishes Sarah from the kingdom. Abigail seems bored and frustrated with caring for an increasingly cantankerous and senile queen. When she is caught crushing one of Queen Anne's beloved rabbits, Anne finally starts to realise how fake Abigail's affection for her is. The film ends with rabbits flooding the screen, a symbol of the endless madness and monotony of life at court, or perhaps Anne's declining mental state. Despite being a film premised around competing factions, it's clear by the end that no one has truly won.
  • In The Fearless Vampire Killers (and the musical it inspired), near the end Professor Abronsius and Alfred have apparently succeeded in saving Sarah from Count von Krolock and other vampires, until she reveals her new vampire fangs and bites Alfred. Ominous narration tells us that Alfred and Sarah abandoned Abronsius and started spreading vampirism around the world.
  • The Final: The outcasts die, but not before mutilating several of their classmates, leaving the whole town in mourning. Worse, it is revealed that everyone in the town more or less missed the point of the whole thing, painting the entire affair as being completely unprovoked and portraying the victims (whose jerkass behavior was responsible for everything) as saint-like.
  • The Final Destination series has plenty of downer endings.
    • Final Destination sees Alex, Clear and Carter cheating death and believing they have beaten the system when Carter is crushed by a falling theater sign six months later, and Alex and Clear are far from safe.
    • Final Destination 2 has Kimberley believe she's found a loophole in death's design and that her and Officer Burke are saved. While enjoying their lives, they are invited to a barbecue dinner with the family whose farm they crashed into earlier in the film. Unfortunately, the son of the family had cheated death in that incident and is killed in an explosion in front of everyone. To add insult to injury, a piece of his charred remains lands on his mother's plate.
    • Final Destination 3 has Wendy, Kevin and Julie cheating death and walking away until they reunite, by chance, a few months later on a subway train. The train crashes and kills everyone except Wendy, who is then hit by a train coming from the opposite direction. This turns out to be another premonition of Wendy in the theatrical release but the premonition comes several seconds too late, and Wendy is unable to prevent it from happening.
    • The Final Destination sees Nick, Lori and Janet sat in a cafe after surviving not just the initial accident but also their own individual demises...and then a truck crashes into the cafe and into the table where they're sat, killing them instantly.
    • Final Destination 5 is actually a direct prequel to the original movie, so you know what's going to happen when Sam and Molly board a plane in which seven people are kicked off moments before takeoff. Nathan, who accidentally killed someone and therefore took his victim's remaining years in place of his own is seen at the end of the film attending a wake, only to discover that the deceased had a medical condition that meant he could have died any day and is immediately crushed by debris from Flight 180.
  • First Blood: The original ending was going to be this, with Rambo urging Col. Trautman to kill him, and the latter obliging Rambo's request. It was eventually changed to Rambo simply turning himself in at Trautman's request (and paving the way for the sequels), since the producers felt the movie was already bleak enough.
  • Five Easy Pieces: Robert and Rayette stop at a gas station. He abruptly hitches a ride on a logging truck, abandoning her.
  • Flesh for the Beast: All the parapsychologists are killed, except Erin, who is revealed to be another succubus. The succubi kill the man who had ben trying to control them, and wait for others to enter the house and be killed.
  • The Fly (1986): Seth Brundle loses his humanity as he turns into a monstrous man-fly hybrid. He tries to fuse his DNA with that of Veronica and her unborn child, but fails and ends up fused with the teleporter instead. Brundle collects his last remaining shreds of humanity to silently beg Veronica for death by pointing her shotgun to his head, and Veronica reluctantly complies. The last shot of the movie shows Veronica crying over the remains of the creature that was once her friend and lover.
  • A Fool There Was: The Vampire gets away clean, while her lover John Schuyler loses his family, his job, and his social standing, is reduced to poverty and alcoholism, and is perhaps even dead (although the quoted poem line "some of him lived but the most of him died" suggests not).
  • Foxcatcher, being based on a true story, ends like this regarding the relationship between John du Pont and the Schultz brothers. He eventually alienates Mark into retiring from Olympic wrestling (after previously selling himself Mark's only real friend) and murders Dave in cold blood.
  • Frankenstein's Bloody Terror: Waldemar is rescued and destroys the vampires holding him captive, but his werewolf curse drives him to attack his girlfriend, who is forced to kill him in self-defence.
  • Free Jimmy: Jimmy dies from a lethal overdose after being shot. Since his body was buried in a rock avalanche shortly afterwards, the stoners don't realize that he's dead when they get there, so they leave back to their apartment. After the stoners assault Roy for forcing them into the situation, Roy wanders off into a blizzard looking for Jimmy, not knowing that he's already dead.
  • Free State of Jones: Although the Free State of Jones manages to hold out to the end when the Confederates lose the civil war and slavery is abolished, former Confederates retake control of the South, murdering the former slaves who try to assert their rights, while suppressing the votes of them and white supporters like Knight. Sadly, Truth in Television.
  • The French Connection: Charnier gets away, the other drug runners have their charges dropped or receive brief prison sentences, and Doyle and Russo are transferred to another department of the NYPD. And, apparently, the heroin was stolen afterwards.
  • The Friends of Eddie Coyle. In that Eddie Coyle, played by (by far) the film's biggest star (one Robert Mitchum), and also (by far) the film's most likable character, is killed at the end without any trouble, and the bad guy gets away with it absolutely scot free.
  • Frightmare (1974): Debbie has been fully inducted into her mother's cannibalistic ways, and Edmund can only watch as the two butcher Jackie, his only other daughter.
  • From Beyond: Crawford sacrifices himself to destroy Pretorius while McMichaels destroys the Resonator. Unfortunately, the latter is driven utterly mad and the film ends on her having a trauma-induced breakdown.
  • In The Korean War film The Front Line, at the end of the battle of Aerok Hill and the war itself, the protagonist Eun-Pyo is the only survivor left standing on the hill as he walks away shell-shocked.
  • Female Agents. Although the mission succeeds, all of the operatives but Louise die.
  • Funny Man: The Funny Man kills all but one of the survivors, the final one being tortured into insanity. Neither he nor his master are punished for their crimes, and the demon sits back and waits for more victims to enter his lair.

    G 
  • Gallipoli. Archy is gunned down as he tries to run for the trench and the worst part is: he didn't have to.
  • The Dan Aykroyd flick Getting Away With Murder ended with him getting away with murder out of a technicality. His character (an Ethics professor) is so disgusted that he quits teaching Ethics and start studying Law.
  • The Ghost Dance: Nahalla's spirit is seemingly destroyed, at the cost of Ocacio's life, and Tom and Kay prepare to burn the body to prevent him from coming back again. However, the body suddenly springs up and Nahalla's wife possesses Kay again, both spirits preparing to kill Tom.
  • Ghost World ends with both the male and female lead worse for the events that happened in the movie's Darkest Hour. Enid, who leaves town on her own to an unknown destination, lost her art scholarship, is still estranged from her father, and despite patching things up with love interest Seymour and best friend Rebecca, one gets the feeling things will never be the same for them again. Meanwhile, Seymour is in therapy, even more broken than he was at the start of the film.
  • The Ghost Writer ends with the protagonist being killed to cover up the conspiracy without accomplishing anything, while the villains get away with it and destroy the evidence that could have exposed them. The only silver lining is that Lang is shot dead by a protester, and even then he'll be remembered as a hero because os it.
  • Ginger Snaps ends with Brigitte infecting herself with the werewolf curse before Ginger transforms into a full werewolf and kills Sam, before getting killed by Brigitte. Brigitte survives, but her sister and multiple other people are dead and she's badly traumatized. The sequel reveals that monkshood didn't fully cure Brigitte, either, it only slowed her transformation.
  • The sequel, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, sets up the claim that Brigitte changed her mind about becoming a werewolf, takes monkshood solution in an attempt to delay the onset of lycanthropy. But then after all she's been through, she ends up not only becoming a total beast but also locked in a basement by a delirious headcase supporting character (looking to live out her comic book fantasies, no less) who uses Brigitte to murder people For the Evulz.
  • In the 1968 movie Girl on a Motorcycle (also known as Naked Under Leather, because that's what she is), Marianne Faithfull as the titular girl rides around Europe wearing black leather having sex with her two lovers and generally being tremendously liberated. Then she gets too carried away thinking about all the great sex she's had, doesn't notice till it's too late that a truck has pulled in front of her, crashes into it, flies off her bike and plunges headfirst through the windshield of an oncoming car. The car she hit collides with the truck and another car runs into it from behind, rolls over and explodes. Because liberated women riding around on motorbikes spoil it for everyone.
  • The 1988 movie Glory. First the main two characters die horribly. Then everyone else dies horribly. Then it turns out the fort wasn't taken in any case. Any movie that ends with your protagonists getting buried en masse is a bit of a bummer.
  • The Godfather:
    • Part II ends with Michael ordering the assassination of his enemies (including his own brother Fredo), but in the process he's become a bitter man, estranged from his own family. To drive the point home, the movie ends with a flashback in which the Corleones celebrate Vito's birthday.
    • Part III ends with an attempt on Michael's life in which his daughter Mary is killed, with Michael cradling the body of his daughter and screaming in rage and agony. The Distant Finale then shows Michael, who's now an elderly person who by this point has become an Empty Shell of his former self, spending his last moments sitting alone before dying from his age, with nobody to mourn him.
  • The ending for Gojira falls under this trope. Not only does one of the main characters sacrifice himself to stop Godzilla but it's also heavily implied that Godzilla isn't the only member of his species. In other words, Japan's efforts to stop Godzilla are in vain. More specifically, it was implied that if mankind continued testing nuclear weapons, another Godzilla would likely appear. It wasn't so much of a foregone conclusion but more of a thinly-veiled message about the evils of nuclear weaponry. On top of all of this, Godzilla is depicted as a tortured Tragic Monster, leaving little room for satisfaction in its agonizing death.
  • Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell ends with the flight attendants and the pilot making their way to civilization only to find everyone dead and the Gokemidoro aliens make the chilling declaration that it is too late for humanity to stop them, due to their propensity for starting wars. The film closes by zooming out into space, where an armada of Gokemidoro spaceships turn the earth into a barren wasteland.
  • Gone Baby Gone doesn't end well for anyone, except the possibly least sympathetic character in the movie. Remy Bressant and Nick Poole are dead and Lionel McCready and Jack Doyle are in jail. Despite being revealed as being behind the plot to abduct Amanda, all four spent the movie as sympathetic characters and their motivations were at least understandable. Bea McCready is completely estranged from Helene and probably will never be able to see her niece. Angie Gennaro has left Patrick Kenzie because of the decision he makes at the end of the movie. And Patrick has to live with the death of Corwin Earle on his conscience and the realization that he made the wrong choice in returning Amanda to her mother. The only person who gets a happy ending is Helene McCready who is reunited with her daughter who she thought was dead. But instead of changing her ways as she promised and Patrick had hoped, she goes right back to being completely self centered and a terrible, irresponsible mother.
  • Gone with the Wind is known for Scarlett O'Hara's optimistic closing line: "After all, tomorrow is another day!" What those who haven't seen the movie don't realize is how hollow that note of hope is. Scarlett ends the movie pathetic, a selfish woman alone with her misery. She's just driven away the only person who still loved her; her daughter, her parents, and the whole world she was raised in are dead. However, a lot of people think she gets exactly what she deserves, reserving all their sympathy for Rhett as he verbally lashes out at her for the last time and walks away heartbroken. And yet the screenplay and ending as originally shot put Scarlett in a green dress (her favorite, lucky color) walking triumphantly toward the restored Tara. The implication in this ending was that her "tomorrow is another day" motto is not only hopeful but accurate: just as Tara (and the South) could rise from the ashes, so could Scarlett's life. Even the shorter version of the "tag" scene strongly suggests a triumphant note: the luscious matte shot of restored Tara and the surging major-key restatement of the "Tara" theme.
  • Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum: All of the crew have either been possessed by, or taken away by, the ghosts of Gonjiam Asylum, with Ha-Joon being seen chained to a wheelchair and wheeled into Room 402, screaming. Meanwhile, it turns out that the livestream cut out after Sung-Hoon admitted to Je-Yoon and Ah-Yeon that they were faking the hauntings to rake in viewers, so most of them have left in disappointment, with the 500-or-so remaining just deriding them for the lie. Thus, no one knows the ultimate fate of the crew.
  • Goodnight Mommy: Elias ultimately doesn’t believe his pleading mother’s claims and sets fire to the house. The mother burns to death, and it is implied Elias has too.
  • Goth (2003): The Big Bad tricks the protagonist into committing a mass murder, making her snap and become just like her nemesis.
  • Grandmother's Farm 2: After finding out Khalid brought Noora to his grandmother's farm, allowing the djinn to wreck it, the group gets into a huge fight and break off their friendship with each other.
  • Grave Encounters: The sole survivor, Lance, is shown having been lobotomized in the last scene.
  • Grave of the Vampire: The Big Bad manages to turn The Hero into a vampire before he's killed.
  • The Great Silence ending was so bleak that an alternate, upbeat ending had to be created. In the original ending the sheriff is dropped through the ice of a frozen-over lake, the hero is killed by Loco, and the hero's girlfriend is killed 5 seconds later while trying to avenge him. And all those villagers the hero was trying so hard to save? The bounty hunters gun them all down before riding off.
  • The Green Inferno: Justine survives, but her friends are all pointlessly and brutally killed, while Alejandro apparently assimilates with the tribe and is revered by the new group of activists back on campus.
  • The Green Mile, where affable Magical Negro Coffey is still executed even though he is 100% not guilty of his crime, but not before he accidentally gives Edgecombe possible everlasting life, cursing him to have to watch all his friends and loved ones die around him while he continues to survive.
  • Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes ends with Tarzan and Jane forced apart: she can't survive in his wild world, and he's spent most of the movie learning the hard way that he can't survive in her "civilized" one. Also, some of the humans killed Tarzan’s adopted gorilla father Silverbeard. He takes off his clothes and goes back into the jungle, alone.
  • The Grudge, being classic J-horror, doesn't end happily for any of its characters. If you encounter the specter of Kayako Saeki or anyone she's turned into an extension of the curse, you will die. Period. Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome happens to Karen and Jake, the "survivors" of their respective films, fairly quickly.
  • Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment: The film ends with Yegg's presumably-dead body hanging from a tree in a bag, and the men getting off scot-free. There is a slight Hope Spot in a text scrawl stating the text is under investigation, but nothing comes of it due to the sequels having no plot connection.
  • Gut-Pile: The ghost kills everybody but the man who killed him, whom he frames for the murders despite his remorse.
  • Guyana: Crime of the Century: After the death of O'Brien and other people in Port Kaituma, and knowing that the Guyana Defense Force would arrive at Johnsontown, Johnson announces that the only way to escape punishment from them is to commit suicide, which leads to the then-inevitable tragedy. Also, Susan Ames and her children are murdered in Georgetown by two of Johnson's henchmen.

    H 
  • La Haine ends with two of the three protagonists dying in the last scene.
  • Halloween:
    • In the oddball installment of the original series, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the protagonist discovers the plot of bewitching all the Silver Shamrock masks, killing those who wear it on cue from a TV commercial. He manages to get the TV station on the line, but is more than likely, unsuccessful in his attempt to get them to stop broadcasting. Killing millions.
    • Depending on which cut you watched, Halloween II (2009) either ends with the death of all of Laurie's friends and her going crazy after stabbing her murderous brother to death with a Bowie knife, or with her being gunned down for making a threatening gesture towards Dr. Loomis, who had made a (frankly pitiful) attempt at heroism and gotten stabbed. Oh, and the sheriff has failed to keep his daughter and her best friend alive. Take your pick.
    • Halloween Kills has one of the Cruel Twist Ending kind, as a crowd gangs up on Michael and beats him until he's in the ground with a knife on his back. He gets up, uses the knife to slice everyone, and still manages to get to his old home to kill Laurie's daughter Karen.
  • Halloween Night: Chris kills everybody but David and Shannon before being shot in the chest. However, he survives the gunshots and puts David in his costume before escaping. The next morning, when the cops arrive, Shannon sees David in costume and kills him in her panic. Last shot of the film is Chris being picked up by a hitchhiker.
  • Hands of the Ripper: Anna throws herself off a balcony to stop her split personality from killing. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist who's been trying to treat her the whole film bleeds out from a stab wound she gave him earlier.
  • The first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has Dobby's Heroic Sacrifice, milked for all its tear-jerking worth, and then the Big Bad Voldemort scoring a powerful doom device. Fun stuff.
  • Hatchet ends with the last two survivors of the party impaling the killer. They then get on a boat to go home, when one of them falls off. Desperately trying not to drown, she grabs onto the hand of the other survivor.. which it turns out was removed by the still-living killer. Both survivors are revealed to survive in later films, but still, harsh.
  • Every one of the teenagers die by the end of The Haunting of Whaley House with Penny condemned to spend eternity as a ghost after all of the other ghosts have escaped.
  • Hausu: Gorgeous is possessed either by the spirit of her aunt or the house or both, and all of her friends are dead or have dissapeared, with Fantasy being the last to die off-screen. Meanwhile, their teacher, Mr. Togo, who was trying to save the girls, never gets to the house and turns into a pile of bananas. Gorgeous' would-be mom Ryoko shows up in the morning after and gets set on fire after a brief talk; the house presumably will keep killing any unwed women who stumble upon it.
  • Havenhurst: Elinore and her kids succeed in killing Jackie, and evade being arrested by hiding all the entrances to the torture chamber. They've also brought Sarah into their family, and plan to groom her into continuing their legacy of murdering any tenant who falls back into the vices they came to the building to get rid of.
  • Hazmat: Just as it seems Brenda is about to escape from the building as the Sole Survivor of Jacob's Roaring Rampage of Revenge, Jacob grabs her, pulls her back, and the final image is a bloody splatter from Jacob bringing his axe down on her.
  • Head in the Clouds: Both Gilda and Mia end up dying during wartime. Guy is left alone in Gilda's ransacked apartment, reading her last letter to him.
  • He Knows You're Alone gives us a Hope Spot in that Ray is arrested, and Amy and Marvin get together. However, on the night of their wedding, Amy is murdered by a jealous ex-boyfriend.
  • Hell of the Living Dead: All of the main cast is eaten by the zombies. Meanwhile, the zombie plague is spreading across the world.
  • In the Twist Ending of Hellraiser: Inferno it's revealed that Joseph has condemned himself to Hell for eternity and is stuck in an endless loop where he hunts himself and watches people get butchered around him.
  • Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, in addition to being one of the most horrifying horror movies ever, throws out a false hope (a fool's hope) that Henry might change at the end and live with the woman he rescued. Then he leaves her body chopped up in a suitcase by the side of the road.
  • Hereditary: The Leigh-Graham family is butchered by Paimon, who forces Peter to watch his own mother saw her head off. He desperately tries to escape, but is captured by Paimon's worshippers and given up to be possessed.
  • Heroic Times: The main character ends up as a bitter elderly madman fleeing to his deathbed after committing multiple public murders, asking for final forgiveness. His ideals and noble intentions were in vain, he lost his would-be love, his faith in his king and most of his home to the plague. While he lived to see the start of a new age of prosperity, the days of knights like him were over and the "heroic times" he dreamed about were only a fantasy.
  • Hidden Agenda: The attempt to uncover a government conspiracy entirely fails, with the investigator blackmailed into silence and the informant who revealed it killed, leaving no way to authenticate the tape he provided as evidence. The conspirators get away with everything, in short.
  • The Hideous Sun Demon: Gil turns into the Sun Demon and goes on a rampage, killing a lot of people. He's eventually cornered by the police, and shot off a gasometer where he falls to his death. Gil's friends are left grieving, with the possibility of his body used as a cure being left ambiguous.
  • High School Big Shot: Vince kills Sam, and then brutally guns down Betty by emptying his gun into her for putting him up to the whole scheme. Vince, in turn, is shot and killed by the police while trying to make off with the money. Marv's father commits suicide, and the film ends with Marv not knowing this and tearfully calling out to his father as he's arrested and led away from the scene of his robbery attempt by the police.
  • High Sierra: Roy Earle is shot by the police, the note he wrote exonerating Marie blows away, and she's take away by the police, to prison and/or a nervous breakdown.
  • Higher Learning: Remy and Deja are dead, Kristen's dream of bringing peace to the campus has been cruelly shattered, and Malik decides he's had enough and decides to drop out of school.
  • The Hole: Liz gets away with three manslaughters and a murder by framing the psychiatrist she confessed everything to for her own kidnapping, making sure that nothing she would say to anybody would be believed, because she also placed the only incriminating evidence on her murder victim. One of the nastiest Karma Houdinis of all time.
  • The Holy Office: The movie ends with all the Jews burning at the stake.
  • The House (2022):
    • Chapter 1: Raymond and Penny are completely corrupted by Van Schoonbeek and reduced to furniture before (in all likelihood) being burned alive; Mabel and Isobel are able to escape unharmed, but are left alone in the world, not to mention stranded in the middle of a snowy wilderness with no help in sight. Van Schoonbeek suffers no punishment for his crimes, and worst of all, the House survives the fire long enough to continue to make life a living hell for others in the other two chapters of the story.
    • Chapter 2: The Developer's dreams of finanical success end in failure, the House is claimed by the insects and their giant cousins, and the Developer is driven so insane that he reverts to animal intelligence. And once again, the House lives on.
  • Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses has this, multiple, multiple times. Just when you think the bad guys are going to get caught by the cops, they KILL the cops, mercilessly and brutally, and they get away with it scot free. You also find out they come from a long line of serial killers, and it runs in the family.
    • The Devil's Rejects averts this however, as all the bad guys are killed over the course of the film.
  • The House of the Devil: Thanks to the Satanic ritual, Samantha is impregnated with (presumably) The Antichrist. During her final showdown with Mr. Ulman, she shoots herself in the head to prevent the birth from happening. However, not only does it put her in a coma instead of kill her, but the final scene reveals that she is still pregnant, indicating that to some extent, the Ulmans were successful in their mission.
  • House of Games: Margaret gets revenge on Mike for conning her, but she herself has become a villain, as the last scene suggests.
  • House of the Witch: The titular witch kills all the teenagers, and is last seen leaving the premises in Lana's body after killing the policeman who was in the squad car with her.
  • House of Usher: Madeline is driven mad and kills her brother as the house collapses around both of them. The relatively kind butler perishes with them, and Philip only barely escapes himself.
  • How Green Was My Valley: Huw's father is killed in the mine and his brothers have scattered off around the world due to the lack of good jobs in Wales. Mr. Gruffyd and Angharad don't get together — in fact, Mr. Gruffyd leaves the town, disgusted with the small-minded people in his congregation. And in the Framing Device, when Huw is leaving the valley as an old man, it's been spoiled and befouled by the pollution of coal mining. The last line is "How green was my valley then."
  • The Howling (1981): Karen, after losing her husband, manages to escape the werewolf colony and kill them all before they go on a rampage. However, she decides she has to expose the existence of werewolves to the world, and then transforms on live television. She is shot by Chris as a Mercy Kill, and the public believes it's special effects. Meanwhile, one of the colony werewolves survived, and continues on her merry way.
  • The Hunger: On the one hand, John and the other lovers take revenge on Miriam and are able to perish while she experiences their And I Must Scream fate for herself. On the other, rather than dying, the turned Sarah moves to Paris (taking the imprisoned Miriam along) to start anew with lovers of her own. The novel's ending, in which the revenge fails, Sarah dies, and Miriam starts over is no picnic either.
  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire the protagonist nearly dies, then learns that her love interest got captured by the forces of evil and finally is being told that her home district got massacred.
  • The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 1 has the protagonist nearly murdered by her love interest.
  • Hunting Scenes from Bavaria: Hannelore is killed while trying to prevent Abram from leaving the village, the villagers gang up on Abram and corner him in the nearby forest, and Abram is arrested and sent to prison as the villagers celebrate.
  • The Hustler (1961) has an irony-laced downer ending — Eddie Felson eventually achieves his dream of beating Minnesota Fats, but only because his unfettered drive to play drove Sarah to suicide. After the game, he realizes that it's a meaningless victory.

    I 
  • I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang ends with its protagonist clandestinely meeting one last time with the girl he'd hoped to marry during a period of (all too temporary) freedom and respectability; having escaped from the chain gang a second time, he's now a bitter, frightened, impoverished wreck of a man, and when the girl asks how he lives as he's running away into the shadows, he famously whispers, "I steal!"
  • I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House: Lily is frightened to death by Polly's spirit. Soon after, Iris dies of old age. Lily ends up haunting the house, her anguish not letting her pass on.
  • I Sell the Dead: Despite saving Arthur from the last member of the House of Murphy, Willie ends up being consumed by his zombie hunger and trying to kill him, to unclear fate. Also, the lead hatchetman of the Murphies has become a super-strong, sentient zombie.]
  • I Shot Jesse James: Just as Robert Ford's life starts to come together, he discovers that his best girl Cynthy is leaving him for John Kelley. Insane with grief, he tries to kill Kelley, but Kelley gets the drop on him and shoots him first. As he lays dying in the street, he confesses to Cynthy that he's ashamed of killing Jesse James and wishes things could've been different. The film ends just as he takes his last breath and dies right in Cynthy's arms.
  • I Want to Live! is based on the true story of Barbara Graham. It ends with her in the Gas Chamber.
  • I'm Not Ashamed: Columbine high school students get slaughtered in cold blood.
  • I'm Thinking of Ending Things: We find out that both Jake and the young woman were just the creations of the Janitor, a lonely elderly man who has spent decades imagining the life he could have had in the form of Jake, and their weekend has been imagined as a way of the Janitor struggling with his suicidal thoughts with the finale implying he will take his own life.
  • The Ice Harvest. The movie isn't so bad, but the alternate ending, including the canonical one from the books, pretty much defines downer. In the book, the main character kills his corrupt boss, kills the woman he's been fantasizing about because she has a razor to his throat, kills his partner who was going to kill him too, manages to get rid of the hitman, and survives to morning with the money and is in the middle of making his getaway, only to die via camper crushing his chest after stopping to help the owner because he was writing on the back of it with a marker.
  • The Iceman: After being arrested for his crimes, Kuklinski is abandoned by his family and sentenced to two life sentences wracked in guilt. He decides to turn state witness on a Gambino family underboss, but dies in prison days before he can, with foul play being suspected.
  • Identity: All of Malcolm Rivers's alternate personalities are dead except for one. Unfortunately, that personality is that of the psychopathically murderous Timmy York, who proceeds to kill the Final Girl Paris, take over Malcolm completely and make him kill his therapist before making his way out of the hospital.
  • In a Lonely Place: While the killer is caught, his victim is still dead, and nothing can bring her back. Dixon has also driven away everyone close to him, even Laurel.
  • In the Loop: Malcolm ends up doing the dirty work of that "boring f star star cunt" he swore he didn't work for; After repeatedly waffling, Simon's career is all but finished when he's sacked rather than being able to resign to make a statement; Clarke's resignation loses its power when Miller refuses to do so; Liza's working for a man concerned with which movies are on a soldier's approved roster; Toby's career is over before it even begins and he leaves quietly when the new aide arrives. And everyone has to live with the inevitable war that's going to happen, and one Miller knows no one is prepared for.
  • In the Mouth of Madness: Sutter Cane's latest novel succeeds in driving humanity insane and summoning Lovecraftian horrors into our reality, causing the Apocalypse. Trent, one of the few surviving humans, stumbles into an abandoned cinema, where the film of Sutter Cane's book is being projected. The film in question? The very film you just watched. The very last scene shows Trent's mind snapping like a twig as he realizes he's been a character in Sutter's novel all along.
  • The Incredible Melting Man: Most of the characters are dead by the end of the movie, including the titular character, who...well...melts into sludge.
  • The Incredible Shrinking Man, which has a false ending part-way through, suggesting that he will just have to learn to live with being child-sized. Then it all goes wrong, he keeps shrinking, his wife thinks the cat ate him and he gets trapped in the basement. But it's okay, right? Because he's struggling to survive and climb the stairs so he can get his wife's attention when she comes in. No. His wife leaves with his best friend, never knowing he wasn't eaten, and he realizes he's going to shrink away to nothing. All his struggling has achieved nothing and it ends with him getting philosophical and accepting the coming end, staring at the stars. An equally valid interpretation (one which was endorsed by Richard Matheson, who after all wrote the source book) is not that the hero dies: rather, his continuing shrinking takes him to whole new possible levels of existence - the closing words of the film, let's not forget, are "I still exist". If anything, a pretty damn hopeful ending, in its own odd way. Both of those theories are less depressing than the other logical conclusion that he simply was left trapped in his vacant house as a microbe.
  • The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies: Jerry is shot and dies. The end.
  • The Innkeepers: Luke's lost both his friend Claire and, given that the inn is closing down, his job.
  • The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) had a terrifying one, but then bookended the movie with added footage showing the protagonist getting the authorities to believe him.
  • The remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978): The protagonist is caught and his pod duplicate outs the one known remaining human.
  • Infernal Affairs. Yan is killed before he can expose Ming as the mole, and Ming is able to blame B for being the second mole and Yan's killer. Depending on how you interpret his character, either Ming is a Karma Houdini who was able to get away with his crimes scot-free, or he's a broken man who genuinely desired to become a "good guy" cop, and is now in a self-made hell, consumed with guilt and regret over how things ultimately turned out. Infernal Affairs III confirms that it's the latter - he eventually goes completely insane.
  • Mexican movie El Infierno (literally: Hell): After our Villain Protagonist Benjamín 'Benny' García finds out that his boss, Don José Reyes, had Benjamín's brother murdered because his wife cheated on him, he decides to take revenge. He goes to a police station to confess about his crimes, and those of his boss, but the cop he talks to is a Dirty Cop, so he is tortured a bit, before being taken to Don José to be killed. Benny tries to lure the cops taking him to Don José into a trap, by offering them money and cocaine he had stashed in the grave he built for his brother, but they shoot him, and leave him for dead. He doesn't die, so he goes to his home to look for his girlfriend and flee, but she had been murdered. Having passed the Despair Event Horizon, he goes to his mother's house, to say goodbye, before enacting a Roaring Rampage of Revenge at the Independence Ceremony that was being held at the town square, killing Don José, and then dying from his wounds and despair. Then, a short scene plays, in which he and his girlfriend's tombs are shown before a scene in which Benny's nephew kills the remnants of Don José's men, and falls into a life of crime, which is the destiny Benny tried to shield him from.
  • Inside Llewyn Davis: Llewyn ends the film having achieved nothing and in an even worse state than before, lying bruised and bloody in the alley and with his career doomed to amount to nothing while Bob Dylan is about to achieve the success and icon status Llewyn could've had were it not for a combination of bad luck and his own personality flaws.
  • In the Fade: Katja, having her last hope dashed as the murderers of her family are acquitted, goes after them herself. She makes a bomb, killing them and herself with it.
  • The Irishman; Frank kills Jimmy Hoffa on orders from the Mob and gets away with it, but doing so ruins his relationship with his family (especially his daughter Peggy, who had befriended Hoffa). Frank's compatriots and wife all die ignoble deaths either due to crime or old age, and the movie ends with Frank slowly Dying Alone in a nursing home. Furthermore, the march of time means that barely anyone remembers or cares about Jimmy Hoffa and the events leading to his disappearance, rendering Frank's actions meaningless
  • Iron Sky ends with every nation’s spacecraft obliterating each other in a fight over the moon’s helium-3 reserves while nuclear ICBMs strike all around the globe to a minimalist piano score. Especially jarring because the movie started out as a wacky comedy, essentially Stupid Jetpack Hitler: The Movie.
  • Irréversible: Marcus is taken away on a stretcher, Pierre is arrested for his brutal murder of the man attempting to rape Marcus and who Pierre and Marcus believed raped Alex, and there's no evidence shown that Alex is going to recover, if she hasn't already died. And to top it off, Alex's real rapist, Le Tenia, gets off scot free.
  • It's Alive: Frank manages to find an emotional connection with the baby, but the police kill it minutes later. Not to mention his wife has been driven insane due to the whole ordeal, and another mutant baby has been reported born in Seattle.
  • It's My Party and I'll Die If I Want To: Sara opens the door to escape Burkitt Manor, only for her friends the ghosts didn't kill to all pour in. The door closes, the ghosts lock it, and then they kill everybody.

    J 
  • James Bond films:
  • 1973 teen romance Jeremy ends with Susan reluctantly leaving him at the airport when neither can figure out a way to escape the inevitable move of her family to Detroit. Jeremy leaves the airport crying as the uber-tragic theme song plays and Jeremy makes the long walk home as the credits roll.
  • The obscure Polish film Jeszcze Tylko Ten Las (Just Beyond This Forest) tells the story of a young Jewish girl in WWII being hastily escorted out of the Warsaw ghetto to the countryside for safety, by an old Aryan washerwoman who is only doing it for the money. But just as the washerwoman warms up to her, things go rapidly downhill when they are stopped by German patrol. The washerwoman is willing to risk her life for the girl, but the girl has grown tired of the struggle and willingly turns herself in.
  • In the end of the Japanese horror film Jigoku, everyone goes to Hell after eating poisoned fish. Even worse, Shirou's quest to save his baby daughter from suffering the same fate of everyone else in Hell fails when he is unable to reach her.
  • In Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, Méliès' Show Within a Show is about a romance between a diver and a two-headed mermaid. It ends with the diver drowning because of a severed air hose and falling into an underwater chasm.
  • Jennifer's Body: Some of the main cast are killed (Jennifer and Chip), and Needy gets put in a prison psych ward. On the plus side, Karma Houdini was averted since Needy gained some of Jennifer's powers (Super-Strength and levitation, at the least) and proceeded to escape and murder all of Low Shoulder.
  • Joker (2019): Arthur snaps and becomes the Joker, killing several people before confessing to his first three murders and then killing Murray Franklin on his own talk show. His actions subsequently spark a riot that leads to the death of Bruce Wayne's parents, which of course puts the boy down his fated path. Arthur is then arrested and gets locked up in Arkham, having completely lost his mind. And since he is in Arkham, he is last seen running from an orderly after apparently killing his therapist and presumably escaping to cause more chaos. The only silver lining is that Gotham may be at its breaking point now, but one day, a protector will rise up when the city needs it most.
  • Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter's Cove: Our heroes stop Roger, only for him to suddenly return from Hell and kill them.
  • Jug Face: Ada fails to escape her fate, and is sacrificed to the Pit, thus making the other deaths in the film completely pointless.
  • Jules and Jim: Catherine and Jim die, Jules visits their cremation, which the film shows in detail, including the bones left over and then he walks out of the graveyard, carrying the urns of the ashes of his friends.
  • The Jurassic Dead: By the end of the film, North American society has been crippled by an EMP blast caused by a meteor impact, and the remaining survivors of the film have become intelligent zombies. Plus, Dr. Borge has mentioned that his plan involves releasing more zombie dinosaurs in other cities.

    K 
  • Kagemusha: All the main characters except the Big Bad are slaughtered in the final battle.
  • Kamen Rider Zero One Others Vulcan Valkyrie: Despite Yua Yaiba's Kirk Summation trying to tie everything together, Vulcan & Valkyrie (and by extension Kamen Rider Zero-One as a whole) ultimately ends with 85% of the main cast dead, the relations between man and machine they fought all season to improve upheaved by a bad actor and new anti-A.I. legislation all-but-slated to be on the horizon thanks to the rampage of the Tragic Monster created by the bad actor to be the ideal opponent; kicking off the entire season's conflict all over again with new players while rendering everyone's struggles pointless.
  • Karate a Muerte en Torremolinos: The heroes fail to stop Malvedades, who laughs with a harem of resurrected girls; only Jess has survived. Jocántaro wrecks havoc in the city (and even fights the aliens from outer space, apparently winning because they are not in the next scene, and Jocántaro is). Jocántaro later kills Malvedades.
  • Keeper of Souls: The protagonist is brainwashed into joining the demon cult and stabs her husband to death. The cult leader is then revealed to be her apparently deceased grandmother.
  • The 1995 film Kids ends with Telly, Casper, Jennie and Darcy getting AIDS. Telly's final narration states that without sex he has nothing implying he will further spread the disease. Or that he just will end his life when he finds out. He'll die anyway, so...
  • Kill List: Jay unwittingly murders Shel and Sammy and is indicted into the cult, which is what they wanted all along.
  • Kill the Messenger ends with Webb's life and reputation ruined by both the CIA and jealous newspapers out of spite after he exposes the conspiracy. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals he committed suicide in 2004.
  • The Killer (1989): The Hero Dies. His eyes are useless, so Jenny will inevitably go blind. Even the death of the Big Bad is a Pyrrhic Victory, since Inspector Li executed him in cold blood in front of the whole police force, meaning he'll be arrested.
  • The Killing of a Sacred Deer: After Bob's eyes begin to bleed, the final stage of the curse that would lead to death, Steven ultimately opts to fulfill the prophecy and allow Martin to get his way by killing Bob.
  • King of the Lost World: Ed blows up the crashed plane to kill the gorilla, leaving him, Rita, and Dana trapped in the jungle.
  • Kingdom of the Spiders ends with the tarantulas having killed almost everyone in town and turned Verde Valley into a Cobweb Jungle, with the outside world oblivious. Plus, the heroes are left trapped in a motel that the spiders are rapidly breaching, and it's implied the threat will spread across the world.
  • Kisapmata ends with Mila and Noel attempting to escape Dadong's abusive household once and for all. They fetch their belongings from one of the bedrooms only to be stopped by Dadong, who, after failing to convince Mila to stay, proceeds to murder his wife, Mila, Noel, and then himself.
  • Kwaidan:
    • "The Black Hair": The samurai realizes the folly of his greed and returns to his first wife. After a night of passion with her, he awakens to learn he slept with her corpse, and her vengeful spirit kills him via Rapid Aging.
    • "The Woman of the Snow": After ten years of marital bliss, Minokichi tells his wife about his encounter with the Yuki-onna. She then reveals she is the Yuki-onna, and abandons him in a rage, threatening to kill him if he harms their children. In his grief, Minokichi leaves out a pair of sandals he made for his wife, and ohs takes them, indicating she's not happy with the situation either.
    • "In a Cup of Tea": Sekinai gets in an epic battle against Shikibu's retainers, slowly going mad... Cut to the story's publisher looking for the author, who went missing. After finding a note where the writer describes his writer's block, the publisher and the writer's wife are horrified to see the writer's own soul has been trapped in some tea.

    L 
  • The French film La Haine ends with one of the three main characters, Vinz, being killed accidentally by a police officer. The cop and Vinz's friend Hubert point their guns at each other, and a shot is heard right as the film cuts to black.
  • Lamb: Ingvar is shot in the neck by Ada's biological father — a hulking half-ram, half humanoid creature — right in front of her eyes, and can only bleed out as he watches her fearfully escorted into the wilderness. María arrives on the scene just in time to watch him die, and the movie ends on her tearful horror as she wanders the hills alone.
  • The Land That Time Forgot: Just as Tyler and Clayton are hurrying to reunite with the U-Boat and its crew, Dietz stages a mutiny, shooting Captain von Schoenvorts dead, and taking command in an attempt to escape. However, the U-Boat cannot function in the boiling waters, and the entire crew are killed by the intense heat as the U-Boat explodes and sinks. Tyler and Clayton are now the only survivors of the group, and are left stranded in Caprona, forced to keep moving northward in order to stay alive.
  • Last Clear Chance: A distracted Frank Jr. drives into the side of a train, killing himself and possibly his fiancée, while his brother helplessly watches.
  • The Last House on the Left: Mari, Phyllis, and Junior are dead, and even though Mari's parents have vindicated them, they're possibly going to prison due to the stupid sheriff.note 
  • The Last Man on Earth: Morgan learns he killed people who had managed to regain their sentience, not knowing they were vaccinated, and that they view him as the monster. Soon after discovering his blood is a cure, but before he can communicate that information, the vaccinated people kill him.
  • Last Tango in Paris: The film ends with Jeanne killing Paul after she revealed her name to him, leading her into a Heroic BSoD.
  • In The Last Voyage of the Demeter, all of the heroes' efforts to kill Dracula fail and the Demeter is lost with all hands save Clemens.
  • Four Laurel and Hardy films have the most creepy downer endings where Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's bodies were tortured leaving Ollie telling Stan "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!" And Stan would whine, "But I couldn't help it, you always picked me!" The four films were Going Bye-Bye (where they sat in a couch with their legs tied to their neck), The Live Ghost (where their heads were backwards), The Bohemian Girl (where Oliver was stretched as a giant and Stan was flatten as a dwarf from the tortured chamber), and The Bullfighters (where the boys were skinned alive as skeletons). These are now known as The Bad Guy Wins.
  • The Leech Woman: June commits suicide after realizing her murder of Sally (and by extension the others as well) was All for Nothing. The secret of naipe (which could've been studied and replicated) is almost certainly lost forever to the world, since the only people who knew about it and believed it was real are all dead, and the surviving Nandos are probably going to be even more isolationist than before. Finally, Neil's obsessive, controlling girlfriend is dead, as is the lady he instantly fell in love with, who was never actually real.
  • The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: Emmet causes Armamageddon by destroying Queen Watevra and Batman's wedding, the Apocalypseburgers and Systarians are sucked up into the Bin of Storaj, and Rex Dangervest — revealed as an evil Emmet from an alternate future — banishes present Emmet to Undar of the Dryar so he'll become like Rex. The End. Subverted when Lucy speaks up and refuses to let it end that way, ultimately defying this trope.
  • Another downer Bio Pic is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, as the film is less concerned with his successes as an actor and friend than his failings as a sometimes abusive husband and father and his prickly relationships with directors, the result of a permanent Manchild nature induced by an indulgent mother. By the end, he's depicted as a man who's almost completely alone in life because he's alienated everybody else; although he does fulfill his dream of starring in Being There, it turns out to be his second-to-last film. The death isn't depicted on screen, but a text crawl reveals the following: he gets nominated for an Oscar for Being There but doesn't win, he left his kids token sums in his will (the fourth wife he was preparing to divorce got most of the rest), and he apparently was pining for his first wife until he died.
  • Leviathan (2014): Lilia commits suicide. Afterwards, Kolya is arrested and charged with murdering her. This allows the mayor and his Church ally to proceed with their project, building a cathedral where Kolya's house was.
  • The Lie: Rebecca and Jay are about to get arrested for Sam's death and/or interfering with the investigation, Kayla is going to be left without her parents, and Britney is about to discover that her father is dead thanks to her and Kayla pretending that Britney was pushed to her death.
  • Life (2017): The last two crew members, David and Miranda, hatch a plan to lure Calvin into one of the space station's escape pods, whereupon David will shoot himself off into space with it while Miranda returns to Earth in another pod. As one pod spirals away from the planet after colliding with debris, the other pod lands in the ocean. Vietnamese fishermen come to investigate... And see David webbed up in some kind of organic material, apparently from Calvin reproducing. That collision and Calvin's intelligence caused the plan to backfire horribly; Miranda is literally sent screaming in the blackness of space with her pod's navigation system broken, dooming her to a slow death by asphyxiation. The fishermen, who can't understand David's warnings, open his pod as more boats approach, oblivious to the danger they're all in.
  • Lifeforce (1985): The vampires are stopped from harvesting even more people by the end, but at what cost? The entire population of London is doomed, and the infection may spread even further if the army can't contain it. Carlson has either somehow turned into one of the vampires, was consumed along with the other humans' life energy, or is now captive aboard the vampire's spaceship, and Caine's chances of survival don't look too good with the remaining vampire zombies roaming the ruins of London. And the ship itself regenerates and returns to Halley's Comet, so it can return in another 95 years to do it all over again.
  • Lions for Lambs: Arian and Ernest both get killed because The Cavalry Arrived Late, Janine is unable to convince her boss they should be questioning Senator Irving's "new strategy" instead of reporting it, meaning nothing will change with The War on Terror, and Senator Irving will likely not be harmed by the failure of the Afghanistan mission. The only hopeful note is maybe Todd will start to become less apathetic.
  • A Little Bit Zombie: Penelope Pendleton plans to use Steve's condition to develop a cure for zombification, only for Tina to shoot her in the head so she can get married to Steve and have her perfectly planned wedding with him.
  • Little Dogs on the Prairie: "Stanza By Me" ends with Stanza leaving Prairie Town as a result of the other citizens boycotting Hollister's general store due to his (Stanza's) presence. Everyone else also realizes too late that Stanza was the one singing opera every night; after failing to find him, they listen to a phonograph recording of Stanza's singing that Sport made and regret having been unable to overcome their prejudice.
  • Little Odessa ends with the protagonist's brother being shot due to his brother's criminal activities and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, their mother dies of cancer.
  • The original ending to the 1986 film Little Shop of Horrors, which is exactly the same as the stage play. Audrey II eats human Audrey, and then eats Seymour after he tries to attack it. Miniature Audrey plants are sold all over the city (if not the country), and the plants take over New York just before the end credits roll. The film ending was changed (using reshoots and edits) due to the disastrous reception it got at test screenings, though the final musical number "Don't Feed the Plants" did make it to the soundtrack album.
  • Logan: Judging by how Logan, Charles, Caliban, and Laura live in a crapsack world, the whole film is already a downer to begin with, especially with Charles suffering from dementia and constant seizures, creating burst of potentially lethal telepathic energy (one of which was heavily implied to have killed nearly all the X-Men), while Logan deals with post-traumatic-stress-disorder, suicidal thoughts, alcoholism, depression, and fatal Adamantium poisoning. By the end of the film, Logan, Charles, and Caliban are all dead and while it should be noted that Zander Rice, Donald Pierce, X-24, and the Reavers are also dead, that doesn't necessarily mean that Laura and the the other children are completely safe. In fact, the film heavily implies that Eden doesn't even exist in the first place, and that the children could easily be pursued by other forces in Canada. What's more is that, with Logan and Elizabeth dead, Laura has now lost the closest thing she had to a family and her and the other children are now completely on their own.
  • The Long Good Friday: Harry devolves into a completely vicious bastard and just when he thinks he's won, he's abducted by the IRA and driven off to be executed, emotions flashing over his face as he contemplates everything that brought him to that point. The final shot of the film is Harry's resignation and acceptance.
  • Look Who's Back: Sawatzki discovers that Hitler is the real deal, and as such is deemed insane and locked away in a mental hospital as Hitler's popularity soars, and he's likely to rise to power again.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: The Fellowship breaks. Gandalf is apparently gone. Boromir is killed. Merry and Pippin are captured by the enemy. Frodo finally accepts his burden and makes for Mordor alone, Sam follows. Sam almost drowns. The two Hobbits have a real "we're never going to make it out alive" moment. Aragorn has to choose between following Frodo and Sam or trying to save the other two Hobbits.
  • By the end of Lord of War, due to his career in weapons smuggling, Yuri's uncle and brother are killed, his parents have disowned him, his wife has divorced him and taken his only son with her, and the Interpol agent chasing him through the whole film has him dead to rights thanks to bullets in his brother's corpse. However, he manages to escape a trial because he acts as a proxy for the United States Government. The film then ends with Yuri continuing his trade, supplying weapons to various armed conflicts in the world. Yuri is also fully aware that he'll likely be taken out once he's no longer a net asset to the US Government.
  • The Losers (1970): Due to faulty intelligence, the biker gang ends up attacking a diplomatic mission to get China out of Cambodia. The military has to launch a desperate rescue attempt, and the entire biker gang gets killed in the process. The Sole Survivor is the Jerkass diplomat, who has a diplomatic mess to clean up when he gets home.
  • Lost and Delirious: Tori has broken up with Paulie as she's afraid of her homophobic family rejecting her. She's with a guy, likely pretending to be straight. Paulie is devastated by this and eventually kills herself.
  • Love Story: Jenny dies and Oliver is left heartbroken.
  • Loving Annabelle: Ms. Bradley is arrested over having sex with Annabelle (who's underage), and will likely go to prison or at least get registered as a sex offender. Certainly her teaching career is over, along with their affair. Annabelle can only watch heartbroken as the police escort her lover away, placing her most prized possession, the prayer beads that her girlfriend gave to her, in Ms. Bradley's hand before they've taken her.

    M 
  • Mad Dog Morgan: Morgan is fatally wounded at his last stand, and the Big Bad orders his corpse mutilated.
  • Manborg: Manborg kills Count Draculon, but he manages to gravely wound Mina before he dies. Manborg is forced to sacrifice his own life support to stop her from dying, only to learn Heaven doesn't exist as he dies. The rest of our heroes are then surrounded by Draculon's surviving henchmen, and prepare to die fighting.
  • Manila in the Claws of Light: Julio learns Ah-Tek has killed Ligaya. Julio kills Ah-Tek in revenge, but is then targeted by an angry mob. The last scene of the film is of his tear-streaked face as the mob closes in on him.
  • Manos: The Hands of Fate ends with the main character becoming a slave to the villain, the wife and five-year-old girl becoming the villain's concubines and the movie being seen by a few poor, tortured souls. And Tom Servo.
  • The Man Who Fell to Earth's final third is one grim march to misery for Alien Among Us Thomas Jerome Newton: He is betrayed to the U.S. government (who already wanted to move in on his MegaCorp) by a confidante who knows what he is, and captured just as he's about to return to his home planet and rescue his dying race — which includes his wife and children. For years, he is subjected to They Would Cut You Up experiments by scientists who even take advantage of his acquired weakness for alcohol to do them. While he is reunited with his human mistress for a time, they fall out of love; she ultimately marries his betrayer. He is eventually freed, but as he is unable to return home he can only attempt to send a goodbye message to his people, whom we already know are dead (it gets worse in the source novel — Thomas's mission might have averted a nuclear war on Earth had it succeeded). We Are as Mayflies to him, and he has no friend but the bottle. The End. Lightened by the fact that the entire film is a metaphor for becoming rich and famous. There's a reason David Bowie was cast in the role.
  • The Man with the Iron Heart: Heydrich dies, but so do pretty much every Czechoslovak character involved in the operation bar Anna. And about 5000 Czech people were murdered in reprisals, with the village of Lidice practically wiped from the map most notably. And it was all Truth in Television.
  • The 1994 adaptation of Mario and the Magician ends with Mario being accidentally killed by his spouse, while the Magician (whom she tried to kill) doesn't get a scratch an will continue to use is Mind Control on other people. This is radically different form the novel, which has a Bittersweet Ending.
  • Martyrs: Anna manages to witness the afterlife and tells the Mademoiselle, who kills herself before she can reveal it to the rest of the cult. The other cultists get away with their scheme, and Anna is left catatonic with her skin removed.
  • The last line of dialogue in the 1977 Made-for-TV Movie Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night — about a troubled young mother and the titular little daughter who she takes out her problems on — is "Mary Jane Harper died last night."
  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller totally embodies this trope. Though McCabe manages to kill the three gunmen sent by the mining company, he himself is gravely injured and barely able to move. Nobody else in the town comes to his aid as they're all working to put out the fire in the church that broke out during McCabe's battle with the gunmen. Because of this, McCabe can only crawl a little ways through the snow before he succumbs to his injury and the cold, dying only a few feet from shelter. Meanwhile, Mrs. Miller (who McCabe had feelings for) drowns her sorrows in an opium den as she comes to accept the death she (correctly) assumes is coming for McCabe. Given that this was meant as a Deconstruction of the Hollywood Western, the Downer Ending makes sense as an inversion of the typical happy endings present in the genre.
  • Mean Creek. One character tries to futilely dodge the consequences by robbing a liquor store and going on the run, thus either living the rest of his life on the run or being caught and facing far more severe consequences. And then the revelation that the character killed by the actions of all of them was actually just a troubled young man and the characters have to deal with the death of another person on their hands for the rest of their lives.
  • Meatball Machine: Yoji is forced to kill both Sachiko and himself to prevent the Necro Borgs from controlling their bodies. This doesn't work, as the aliens who created the monsters resurrect them both as test models for their new line of weapons, called "Meatball Machines." It's also revealed that all the chaos is nothing but a game to the aliens.
  • Megan is Missing ends with both Megan and Amy dead at the hands of the internet predator that took Megan. Worse, Amy winds up being Buried Alive in truly nightmarish fashion after being put through hell by the predator, stuffed inside a barrel with Megan's decomposing corpse.
  • Melancholia: After finding out the Earth is doomed, Claire's husband John commits suicide. Claire, her son Leo and Justine spend their last moments together as planet Melancholia collides with Earth and destroys it.
  • Memento is actually very depressing. It's suggested in the film that Leonard killed his own wife accidentally, and that Leonard's already killed the man he's been looking for, and is basically going around killing innocent men (or at least, men innocent of the crime in question), just because Leonard needs some purpose to drive him in his life. Not only that, but he lies to himself (by manipulating the evidence before he can forget to do so) so that he'll have some meaning in his life when he finds out he's already found the "rapist."
  • Men Behind the Sun: After Japan is defeated, Ishii orders the prisoners gassed and the experiments destroyed. He then swears the rest of the unit to secrecy under pain of death. Ishii is captured by the Americans, and works for them, introducing biological weapons to Korea. While Ishii dies free, the rest of Unit 731 live lives of drudgery due to their education not being acknowledged by society.
  • M.F.A.: Noelle's lost her friend Skye to suicide, gotten arrested by the police, and will probably spend the rest of her life in prison for killing the rapists.
  • Midnight Cowboy: Joe and Rizzo take a bus from New York City to Miami to fulfill Rizzo’s dream of living there. When the bus gets closer to Miami, Joe discovers Rizzo has quietly died in the seat next to him. The film ends with Joe mourning his dead friend as the bus continues towards its destination.
  • The Midnight Meat Train: Leon manages to kill Mahogany, but is soon captured by the conductor who's the true mastermind. It turns out these murders are to feed a race of subterranean monsters, and Mahogany let leo kill him because he was getting too old for the job. The conductor than kills Maya and forces Leon to eat her heart, mystically brainwashing him into becoming the new Butcher.
  • Miracle Mile: Just as it looks like Harry, Julie and the helicopter pilot will escape Los Angeles before it gets hit by a nuclear bomb, the bomb hits. This causes the helicopter they were flying in to crash into the LaBrea Tar Pits. As they are slowly roasted/drowned in the hot tar, they actually make a feeble attempt to console themselves with the fact that "maybe someday" they'll be discovered as fossils. Yes, you read that right.
  • Mirrors ends with the main character, Ben, seemingly becoming trapped in the realm of mirrors or somewhat similar. He just saved his wife and kids from the fate his sister met at the hands of an evil demon who lives in mirrors, and now they may never see him again.
  • missing. (1982) ends with Charlie confirmed dead and Ed unsuccessfully attempting to sue the US government for their complicity in his son's death. To this day, the State Department denies any involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. Worse, years after the film's release, with the advent of advanced DNA testing, it was determined that the body shipped back to the United States (as seen in the film's final image) was not that of Charles Horman.
  • Missing Link is a tragic tale of a primitive hominid who is rendered the Last of His Kind after more advanced early humans murder his tribe. The film ends with the Man-Ape mournfully watching the sunset as he sits alone on the beach, his species doomed to extinction.
  • The Mist. The hero leads an escape voyage. As expected, not everything goes according to plan. Mere minutes after killing the religious zealot, Ollie is killed by a giant enemy crab. The main character and four others (two elderly people, a young lady, and his child son) escape in a car. Driving miles and miles through the mist, they find no survivors. The main character happens upon his house, where he sees his dead wife strung against the wall with the acid-web. They continue driving until they run out of gas. The main character has Ollie's gun, and while his son is asleep, silently agrees with the other three that death would release them. He holds the gun to his son's head, and shoots just as he's waking up. Then he kills the other three. Turns out there were only four bullets. None left for him. He falls out of the car on purpose, in his distress, screaming for the monsters in the mist to come claim him. He hears some noise behind him... When army folk in gas masks and flamethrowers come. He stares dumbfounded at them. He just killed his own son, and for no reason at all. Gets even better when you notice the army drove up from behind his car. He had been actively driving away from help the whole time, and would likely have been rescued very shortly had they stayed at the store.
  • Model Shop: George breaks up with Gloria. Cecile, as she told him she would, heads straight to the airport and leaves for France (she was already packed). As we see George talking on the phone with Cecile's roommate, his car is repossessed. And in a couple of days he's going to be inducted into the army.
  • Played for Laughs in Monty Python's Life of Brian: Brian gets crucified, abandoned by everybody in his life. Then he and the other victims start singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of life."
  • More Dead Than Alive: The entire movie focuses on a guy known as "Killer" Cain trying to settle down with an honest living after spending 18 years in jail for a string of murders he committed prior to the movie. Being an ex-criminal, it's hard for him to find work. The only job he can keep is one at a shooting show. However there, he has to put up with an insolent young co-worker of his. To make things worse, he's made plenty of enemies in the past. By the end of the movie, he not only gets the ranch he wants, but he gets to marry the woman he loves in a classic Western movie fashion. But then one of his old enemies (apparently the guy's father was one of Cain's victims) shows up and guns him down. Also counts as Shoot the Shaggy Dog.
  • The Mosquito Coast ends in Allie dying and his family being left on their own. Could arguably be seen as more of a Bittersweet Ending since the story ends implying that the family will return to America and, if nothing else, they are now at least free of Allie's control freak insanity.
  • mother! (2017): After her child's brutal murder and cannibalism, mother flies into a rage and burns the entire house down, leaving Him as the only survivor. Afterwards, Him rips her heart out of her charred body, revealing a gem inside which he uses to begin again, restoring the destroyed house to brand new after placing it on a pedestal. Furthermore, he now has an even younger wife, and it's very likely that everything that happened will ultimately repeat itself.
  • Moulin Rouge (1952): it plays out like the typical last-minute catch, with Toulouse-Lautrec racing to find and apologize to his love... and he doesn't make it. He goes into an absinthe-induced stupor and dies, while people misunderstand his art and motivations. Before he dies, the dancers from the first scene in the Moulin Rouge come back to dance for him one last time before fading out as he dies. The only thing that stops it from becoming a total Downer Ending is the hint that he will go to Heaven.
  • Moulin Rouge! (2001) also ends sadly, with Satine dying in Christian's arms. But it's a Foregone Conclusion anyway, since the whole film is told as a flashback as Christian follows Satine's Last Request and writes the story of their love. There's also a hint of bittersweetness in the end, because it's implied that the act of writing their story has enabled Christian to deal with his grief and that he will now move on with his life as a successful writer.
  • Mutants: In the end, the protagonist is rescued, but she had to sacrifice her husband, all the other characters are dead, and her baby may be a zombie... or dead, considering all the damage she's been through.
  • My Little Sister: After escaping and killing Little Sister, Sheila washes up by the lake, where she encounters the crazy woman in white who is regularly seen playing in the woods. The woman, who was Little Sister's mother, tricks Sheila into drinking acid, killing her.

    N 
  • Subverted in The Natural. In the original novel by Bernard Malamud, Roy Hobbs strikes out to end the game and the season for the New York Knights. However, in the 1984 film adaptation directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert Redford, with the Knights down 2-0 in the ninth inning and with two outs and two men on base, Hobbs launches a monster home run to right field, hitting a light tower and causing it to explode as he rounds the bases, and the Knights win the game 3-2 and capture the pennant.
  • Nazi Overlord: Captain Rogers manages to kill the Nazis and stop the plague, but realizes far too late that he had some of the plague-transferring bugs placed in him as a failsafe, and the zombie virus consumes the Earth.
  • Ned Kelly (1970): Ned is captured and hanged after his backup guys kill each other due to thinking they're gonna get captured.
  • The Night Flier: Dwight forces Dees to give him the incriminating photographs, accidentally driving him insane in the process. In his madness, he gets gunned down by the police, thinking he's the killer. Catherine goes with it, despite knowing the truth, and becomes the new star reporter for the Inside View, have finally been corrupted by the system.
  • Night of Dark Shadows: Alex and Claire leave, thinking that Quentin and Tracy will be following right after. But then Quentin decides to step into Collinwood one more time to grab a couple of things; after waiting in the car for a while, Tracy goes in after him and finally locates him in the gallery. He's pulled out the stitches from his face (guaranteeing that he'll end up with the same scar his ancestor Charles had) and is walking with a pronounced limp (again, like Charles.) And then the ghost of Angelique appears. While we don't see Tracy's total fate, it's implied that Quentin, now fully possessed by Charles and under Angelique's power, kills her. A bit of pre-credits text in the form of a news service report also reveals that Alex and Claire were killed in an apparently supernaturally motivated car accident that same day.
  • Night of the Demon (1980): Every member of the expedition is killed except for Professor Nugent, who suffers severe facial burns courtesy of Bigfoot. When Nugent tries explain to the authorities what happened, he's deemed criminally insane.
  • Romero's Living Dead films:
    • Night of the Living Dead (1968) had the main character get shot and killed in a zombie-cleanup mistake less than a minute from the ending. Both a downer and very disappointing. It adds salt into the wound by allowing for a very possible interpretation that it was racially motivated.
    • The sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978) was originally going to have a downer ending too. The two surviving characters were each going to kill themselves. Instead, just as one of them is about to, he gets a sudden burst of adrenaline (or something) and runs out and takes off in a helicopter. Still a little downer since it has very little fuel left. The remake got full downer, though. The survivors go in a boat to an island...where there's more zombies. Although the deaths aren't shown, not much they can do by this point. Ironically, this is a direct inversion of the original's last-minute change. In the sequel's "pre-test-audience edition", the movie ended when the boat left the dock, allowing for at least a glimmer of hope.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) ends with a Hope Spot where Nancy believes Freddy is dead and gone, it's a bright sunny day and she waves goodbye to her mother before getting in a car with her friends... and then the car morphs into Freddy's signature red and black stripes and the doors lock, trapping the four teens and carting them away to their doom, while Nancy's mother is dragged screaming into the house by Freddy. Wes Craven originally planned the film to end on a happy note but Executive Meddling resulted in this confusing resolution instead. The sequels reveal that Nancy survived but her friends and mother died, only raising further questions.
  • In The Night Stalker Kolchak is able to kill vampire serial killer Skorzeny, but the ungrateful Las Vegas authorities blackmail him and several other witnesses into leaving town, including his girlfriend Gail who he had just proposed too, and silence everyone else who could reveal the truth so they don’t look bad. Kolchak is left broke and jobless, but powerless to do anything about it.
  • No Country for Old Men. The hero dies. Offscreen. His wife dies. The villain escapes with nothing more than a broken arm. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell visits his elderly friends. On top of that, Bell has a dream which could be interpreted as being about his father preparing for his arrival in heaven. Bell's conversation in the end relates how he's come to the nihilistic conclusion that despite his Nostalgia Filter, the world is, has always been, ands always will be a brutal and horrible place.
  • Not Okay: Danni ends the movie as a pariah without a friend in the world, fired from her job and her employment prospects incredibly bleak, forced to move in with her parents with her mother hating her, too, getting death threats and hated by seemingly the entire world, her future uncertain at best, her relationship with Rowan completely unsalvageable, and unsure if she's even really learned anything. It's implied she's learned more than her self-loathing will let her admit, but any change for the better will come too late because she'll forever be known as the girl who faked being in a terrorist attack for attention. She will likely have to live with crippling guilt in silence and with no opportunity to make amends for what she did, because any sincere attempt to talk about or own up to it, including an apology to Rowan or any genuine survivor of the Arc de Triomphe attack, will likely be seen as an insincere grifter's narcissistic pity party, as it was in the online shaming victims group. Meanwhile Rowan herself has to cope with her trust having been grossly abused and might also have to worry about her own cause, already an uphill battle because of the inherent political minefield, being undermined by association with Danni.
  • The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill ends with Kissey Hill being murdered by the Duchess of Roxbury, and Kissey's lackey reciting a poetic farewell to his late mistress.
  • Nudist Colony of the Dead: Shelly is rescued by the park ranger, and the nudists return to their graves once more. She returns to confront the reverend at her church over why he knowingly sends his parishioners to die, only to learn he's one of the zombies. The film ends with the parents of our victim pool driving to the retreat to be killed themselves.

    O 
  • Oculus: Both Kaylie and possibly her fiancé are dead, Tim is arrested for their murder, and the mirror is free to strike again.
  • Carol Reed's 1948 film Odd Man Out follows a gang member, badly injured in a botched armed robbery, as he tries to board a ship to safety before low tide at 11 o'clock. The police shoot him and his girlfriend as the ship pulls away in the background. It verges on a Bittersweet Ending because you know his suffering's over and no-one can bother him any more.
  • The Omen (1976): Katherine and Robert Thorn die while Damien lives with his new parents, nobody realizing his true nature as the Antichrist.
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Billy kills himself after being humiliated by Nurse Ratched. McMurphy attacks her and is lobotomized, leaving him catatonic for the rest of his life. The Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow to relieve him from his suffering. However, in the final scene, Chief does bust out of the hospital thereby preventing the movie from being a complete and total downer.
  • Ong Bak 2: The first movie had a Bittersweet Ending. In this prequel, the hero fails in his quest, and suffers Heroic BSoD just in time for the movie to conclude on the Big Bad ordering him to be tortured to death.
  • The Open House: Logan mistakes Naomi for the intruder and stabs her, and is later strangled after fleeing into the woods. The intruder gets off scot-free and drives to another open house event for the next unsuspecting victim(s).
  • Open Water: The husband dies of a combination of exhaustion and blood loss after a shark takes a chunk out of his leg. The wife, in despair, chucks her flotation gear and dips under the surface for good. Just to twist the knife, there's a brief Hope Spot where it looks like the Coast Guard might at least reach her in time. Not if you watched the DVD: the chapter in which their absence is realized and the distress call goes out is called "Too Little, Too Late." Oh, and for a further knife twist? This was based on an actual case. The real-life couple was never found, and despite some speculation they might have staged a disappearance, have been declared dead.
  • Outlaw: Gangster VIP: Sugiyama is killed by Ueno assassins, and Goro lies to his and Sugiyama's wives so they'll still leave town. After completely massacring the Ueno clan, a severely-wounded Goro crawls into an alley to bleed out. Undercut by the sequels, which show that he survived.

    P 
  • PG: Psycho Goreman: Played for Laughs. PG wins his fight against Pandora, leaving him free to conquer the earth and the rest of the universe, which he follows through on, though he agrees to spare Mimi, Luke, and their parents.
  • Paranormal Activity: Every movie ends with the paranormal forces/demons prevailing and the protagonists dead.
  • Paranormal Asylum: Andy was killed by Mary-in-Michelle's-body, Mark has been sealed in a mortuary container for Evelyn to consume his youth later, and some ghost orderlies are seen prepping Michelle for operation. The final shot is of the camera zooming out on the monitors in Andy's and Michelle's house recording the insides of the hospital, which then glitch.
  • Parasite (2019): Despite being eventually released from the authorities when their crime was caught, and regretting it enough to commit only to honest work from then on, the Kim family lost Ki-jeong along with their newfound wealth, Ki-taek is stuck living in the bunker below the Parks' home forever to avoid being imprisoned, the Parks lost their father and patriarch, and both Moon-gwang and her husband died tragically, without ever being able to tell their misgivings to the world. Ki-woo has a fantasy of working hard and becoming rich to rescue Ki-taek from the house, but it is just that, a fantasy.
  • Pawn Sacrifice: Fischer manages to beat Spassky in the World Championship, but doesn't seem to feel the elation he hoped. On top of that, he's alienated and pushed away everybody who cared about him, leaving him alone and empty. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue makes it even bleaker, revealing that Fischer's madness left him homeless and penniless by the time of his death in 2008.
  • Pearl: Multiple people, including Pearl's parents and Howard's sister, have been murdered by Pearl, Pearl's audition goes nowhere, and the audience knows she will never escape the farm to a more glamorous and exciting life.
  • Just when you think Pay It Forward is going to end with a happy hugfest, Haley Joel Osment's character dies.
  • Peeping Tom: Mark confesses his crimes to his girlfriend, before being consumed by madness and nearly killing her. He kills himself to stop it, but his girlfriend collapses in grief immediately afterwards.
  • A Perfect World: Though Phillip is reunited with his mother at the end, he has to deal with the trauma not only of shooting Butch - to save Mack and his family - but also seeing Butch shot again in front of his eyes. Plus, Red and Sally were both hoping to get Butch to give up peacefully, and are devastated and angry when Agent Lee shoots him.
  • Pet has Holly escaping captivity, and returns to her life, with Eric again, who stills cheats behind her back. Seth is somehow alive, given he had his throat slashed, and is being kept in cage by Holly, who tortures him whenever her impulses rise up again.
  • Phantasm: The Tall Man is trapped in an abandoned mine shaft! Woo-hoo, yay! Then our hero wakes up, the adventure seemingly being All Just a Dream. Also, his brother was Dead All Along. However, as he's processing this, the Tall Man suddenly shows up, and drags his nemesis into a closet. Luckily, there were sequels.
  • Phase IV: The two surviving cast members resign themselves to the fact that the super-smart ants are effectively well on their way to conquer the world, and Lesko decides to continue his work on making contact with the ants... so he can take their orders.
  • The Pit: The tro-lo-logs are killed, and Jaime moves to his grandparents, having pulled a Heel–Face Turn. He even gets a new playmate. She shows him her pit of tro-lo-logs and pushes him in to be eaten.
  • The short version of Pixels ends with the world turned into a giant pixel, with everything on it implied to be dead. The longer version the short inspired, however, has a happy ending.
  • The adaptation of Richard Adams' novel The Plague Dogs uses the storyline of the original novel, however, the publishers and friends convinced Adams to give the dogs, who have come through so much suffering and lost their only friend and ally, a Happy Ending. Adams couldn't think of a way to make the Happy Ending seem natural, and so used a Deus ex machina in a form of a passing boat to rescue the escaping dogs from drowning. So what does the film do? Remove the Deus ex machina and all of the Plot Twist that appeared in the last chapter of the book, letting the dogs to drown in the open sea instead.
  • Planet of the Apes:
    • Beneath the Planet of the Apes ends with Taylor, his girl, and the guy who came to rescue him dying - and while falling, Taylor triggers an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, rendering all of his struggles in this and the previous film (and, incidentally, the entirety of human and ape history) futile. The Insignificant Little Blue Planet speech that follows makes it even worse.
    • Possibly averted by the events of the next three movies - we don't know if we're in an altered timeline or not, and at the end the mutants still have the bomb.
    • In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar and his apes managed to escape into the California redwoods, and tells Will, by speaking, that he is home. However, Robert Franklin, the chimp handler, had died from exposure to the virus that made the apes smart, and he had passed it on to an airline pilot before dying. Also qualifies as a Diabolus Ex Machina.
    • Tim Burton 's Planet of the Apes (2001) had Mark Wahlberg's astronaut character leave the titular planet, to end up back through the portal bringing him to present day Earth. Which has been taken over by apes like the ones he left behind, because the Big Bad traveled farther back in time and staged an ape rebellion.
  • Possession: Mark and Anna are both gunned down by the police while the doppelganger escapes. Bob drowns himself in the bathtub and the doppelganger waits behind the door as Helen witnesses World War III begin outside.
  • Possessor: Vos kills her husband Michael before then shooting and killing their son Ira. In the de-briefing after Colin expires and Vos is pulled out of the machine, she's shown the pinned butterfly from the beginning. This time around, she doesn't mention that she felt guilty about killing the insect, indicating that she's lost any remaining empathy and compassion she still had.
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946): They got away with the murder, but Cora is now dead. Frank is convicted of murdering her, even though she died in a car accident that genuinely was an accident.
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981): They aren't caught, but Cora is killed in a car accident soon after being acquitted. In the book, however, Frank is convicted for Cora's murder; in this adaptation they left that out.
  • The Poughkeepsie Tapes: The serial killer is never caught.
  • Primal Fear. Martin ends up helping a brutal killer play the legal system with success and get away with his crimes. Martin and everyone else attached to the case is disillusioned by the outcome, or don't care anymore. The film ends as he leaves the courtroom building through the side door, not wanting to face the press. He stops to contemplate, and My God, What Have I Done? is written all over his face.
  • Princess: Mia is killed in the explosion that destroys Charlie's mansion and August presumably succumbs to his wounds not long after. Charlie himself wasn't in the mansion and is still alive in the end.
  • Psychos: Norma is revealed to have become a psycho because of what her father put her through, and Sasha and JJ are products of her mind that compel her to torture him for it. The movie ends showing her in a mental hospital.
  • The Pumpkin Karver: The killer is defeated, but soon afterwards it's revealed that the ghost who's been tormenting Jonathan was Real After All. It then possesses Jonathan and makes him murder his sister.
  • The Purple Rose of Cairo ends with Mia Farrow going back to her abusive husband. It's a terrible downer — but courageous on the director's part, since it's the only believable conclusion to the events of the story.
  • PVC-1: Despite all the efforts to remove it, the pipe bomb strapped around Ofelia's neck detonates, killing her and possibly the officer who was trying to remove it. The fate of the gang who placed the bomb (in an attempt to extort money out of Ofelia's family) is left unknown, suggesting that they may have pulled a Karma Houdini instead of facing justice.

    Q 
  • Quills, a film based on the (highly fictionalized) last years of the Marquis de Sade, ends with an incredibly cynical Downer Ending. The innocent chambermaid Madeleine is raped and murdered, the Marquis has his tongue cut out without an anesthetic and later commits suicide by choking to death on a crucifix, the progressive and kindly Abbé du Coulmier goes mad and is locked away in his own asylum, and the wicked and hypocritical Dr. Royer-Collard lives happily ever after, using the asylum's inmates as slave labor to print the Marquis' books, from which he profits. The real Marquis de Sade would have approved.

    R 
  • Race with the Devil: After being seemingly in the clear, the characters hitch their vehicle in a field, only for the group of Satanic worshippers who had been trailing them all movie to surround their RV and trap them in a ring of fire.
  • Ran: Hidetora reconciles with Saburo, and they ride off to settle the rebellion once and for all... then Saburo gets shot. Hidetora then dies of a heart attack. The comic relief character is left crying and questioning if the gods even exist and, if so, whether or not they're just sadists. Jiro finds out that Kaede has been manipulating everybody, has her killed, and goes off to an uncertain fait at the hands of the Ayabe forces.
  • The Rapture ends with the main character stuck in Purgatory for eternity. Some backstory: Sharon, the protagonist, is a former swinger-turned-fundamentalist christian who has a vision of being taken up to Heaven in the desert when The Rapture happens. She takes her young daughter with very little supplies and camps out for a while expecting to be taken up to Heaven, but when she runs out of food and money and her faith starts to waver, she shoots her daughter and is then arrested and thrown in jail. The Rapture suddenly happens, and she then finds herself at the entrance to Heaven and is greeted by her deceased daughter; the only catch is that she must declare her love for God in order to get inside Heaven. After the events of the film, she can't bring herself to do so, which brings about the conclusion of her being trapped in Purgatory.
  • Ratter: Emma is kidnapped by her stalker while her mother watches helplessly via webcam, crying and begging in vain for the stalker to let her go before he slowly closes the laptop.
  • Re-Animator: After Hill is seemingly killed, his zombies go on a complete rampage, with one strangling West last we see of him. A zombie manages to kill Meg, whose desperate boyfriend Dan tries to inject her with Re-Agent. Film fades to black in the middle of the zombie rampage, as we hear Meg's screams. Mitigated by the sequel, where we learn that West and Dan survived.
  • [REC]. Everybody Dies.
    • REC 2. Everybody Dies or gets possessed.
    • REC³. Everybody gets possessed and then dies
  • The Red Shoes (1948): Victoria, unable to choose between her love and her career, throws herself off a balcony in front of a train. The ballet carries on with an empty spotlight in her place
  • The 2010 film Remember Me, starring Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame, ends with Pattinson's character getting killed on September 11.
  • Requiem for a Dream. The main character gets his left arm amputated, his best friend is stuck in a southern prison apparently without a trial and suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, his girlfriend is condemned to a life of prostitution, and his mother is locked up in a loony bin after an ill conceived weight-loss treatment and electroshock therapy. Remember kids: Drugs are bad!
  • Requiem for a Heavyweight: Luis doesn't get the girl, and he seems doomed to a humiliating life as a wrestler, playing an ugly stereotype.
  • Reservoir Dogs: All the principal characters are shot to death by police except for Mr. Pink, who is presumably arrested. The real downer is that Mr. Orange, the one heroic character, ultimately dies because he trusted a criminal too much.
  • Resolution: Our protagonists manage to escape, leaving a few assholes to die in their place. But then the entity itself shows up, enraged. Last shot of the film is them begging for forgiveness as the entity bears down upon them, their deaths inevitable.
  • The Return of the Living Dead: The government nukes the zombies, taking the heroes with them. This would be a Bittersweet Ending, but the zombie chemical is sent into the rain, raising even more dead for a feast. Worse, the President is heading to the area for a speech.
  • Revolutionary Road caps off a rather depressing plot with a downer ending. April dies trying to use a home abortion kit. Frank moves out of the house with the kids and continues the job that he hates. Living around the Wheelers has caused all their former neighbors to question their own lives, which leads them to be depressed about their idyllic suburban hopelessness.
  • Rise of the Scarecrows: By the end of the movie, the Scary Scarecrows have killed most every major character. This also includes Sheriff Howard, who'd been stranding people in town to have the scarecrows kill them for years.
  • River's Edge: Feck kills John, both to spare the teen from prison and because Feck realizes the boy is becoming a monster. In a twist, Feck is last seen getting arrested with the implication that he's actually looking forward to it, knowing he had done the right thing killing John as well as finally answering for killing his own girlfriend decades earlier.
  • The Rizzle: Elena, after daring to dance The Rizzle, soon finds herself targeted by the Dancing Man on the video, and ends up becoming his latest victim, imprisoned in the Rizzle video as the new dancer.
  • Rocket Attack U.S.A.: The spy flick portion of the movie ends in failure as the attempted bombing of the Russian missile site fails and all the western spies are captured and killed. New York City is destroyed by an atomic bomb, with the implication that America is going to retaliate and the world is going to be destroyed.
  • Rocketship X-M: Several expedition members are killed by the Martians. The remainder return to Earth only to have their rocketship crash because they've no fuel to land, or even put themselves into orbit.
  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Riff Raff murders Frank, Rocky, and Columbia before forcing Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott to evacuate the castle/spaceship. The spaceship takes off revealing Brad and Janet singing/lamenting (at least in the UK version of the film) about how they are broken/confused over what has happened to them. "And crawling on the planet's face. Some insects called the human race. Lost in time, and lost in space....and meaning."
  • Rojo Amanecer. It starts as a normal day for a Mexican family, and then it gets worse. A shooting starts outside the apartment building and the mother and youngest child can do nothing but stay home while not knowing about the rest of their family (the daughter went with a friend to do her homework, the grandpa went to pick her up, the two other sons attended the rally and the father is unable to communicate because there was no light or phone service in the whole Housing Unit). By night the two sons arrive home with some students (one of whom is wounded) and eventually so does the daughter and grandpa while being escorted by soldiers. As the sublieutenant asks for documents, some rugged men (snipers) beat up some students and "take them with the others". Eventually the light and phone go back on and another shooting ensues. The father arrives and they watch some news that say that the shooting was "provoked by students. As they try o sleep, a woman searching for her son cries outside the apartment. As the sun comes out, the snipers bang on the door. The students hide in the bathroom and ask not to open the door. The father opens the door anyway and the snipers act harshly. They pistol-whip the eldest son and discover a Che Guevara poster and a blood-stained blanket (where the wounded guy laid). The snipers shoot down the lock on the bathroom and discover the students. After a skirmish they shoot the whole family and the students except for the eldest son and the daughter, who escape. The youngest son gets out from under his bed, where he was hiding, and sees the corpses on the floor. He gets out of the apartment and walks down the stairs as he sees his brother and sister's corpses: they were killed as they ran down the stairs. He gets to the bottom floor and keeps walking while a government janitor cleans the evidence of the shooting. It's even more a downer because, while not directly stated, the firemen cleansed the floor with the hoses while raining, and the garbage trucks took away the corpses of the people on the ground (which is what will likely happen to the family after someone discovers them).
  • A Room in Town ends as Francois is fatally wounded during a strike, and Edith kills herself rather than live without him.
  • The Room (2003). Johnny discovers Lisa's infidelity with his best friend Mark. In a fit of despair, he's Driven to Suicide and eats his gun. Lisa and Mark find his body and feel responsible for his death, destroying their lives as well.
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, although really, that's a Foregone Conclusion. They both die by trying to rail against fate due to finally giving up.
  • The cheesy sci-fi movie R.O.T.O.R. ends with the protagonist getting killed because He Knows Too Much.
  • Rue des Plaisirs tells its story (of a handyman who works at a whorehouse, the prostitute/singer who works there and who he loves, and the gangster who she falls in love with) through flashbacks as another prostitute tells two colleagues about how the girl made something of her life... it's the last scene, the three principals are happy in the countryside. Suddenly, the villains who they believe they left far behind catch up with them and gun the girl and her lover down, leaving the handyman (and the audience) alive and miserable. (Even director Patrice Leconte later regretted this.)

    S 
  • Saint Maud: After murdering Amanda, Maud calmly walks onto the beach and sets herself on fire. While the scene initially portrays a Bittersweet Ending for Maud as she appears to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence (at least in her mind), the final shot reveals she's actually in excruciating pain and dying horrifically.
  • Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom ends with the remaining teen prisoners getting tortured and executed by the four libertines and several of their guards in some of the most brutal ways possible.
  • At the end of Salvador, a film set during the first phases of the The Salvadoran Civil War, most of the supporting characters have died, the protagonist is arrested by US Immigration Authorities, his Salvadoran girlfriend and her children are deported from the US and the war in Salvador rages on.
  • Samurai Rebellion. Our hero's son dies. The son's wife dies. The hero is forced to kill his best friend. Then he himself is killed before he can complete his mission to Edo. A baby girl is left orphaned.
  • Satan's Little Helper: The entire island is overrun with criminals thanks to the police being murdered, Dougie and Jenna's father is dead, she and their mother accidentally murder her boyfriend when he is put in the killer's costume. Oh and the cop that Dougie brings into their house... it's the killer in another disguise.
  • Sappho: Sappho kills herself when Helene breaks off their relationship. Phil and Helene depart for the US with her body.
  • Saw:
    • Saw III. Now, before you say "Well, duh," just read. Throughout the film, the audience is subjected to the plight of Jeff, who has lost his son, and Lynn, whose marriage is falling apart. Jeff is sent through three traps in which he has to forgive the people who he feels are responsible for his son's death and Lynn, a doctor, has to perform very delicate brain surgery on John (Jigsaw) and keep him alive, lest her head explode (they've put a collar on her that's rigged up to John's heart monitor. If his heart stops, the collar goes PLOOIE). At the end, we find out that Jeff and Lynn are husband and wife. Jigsaw's apprentice, Amanda (who has a hero-worship love for John) shoots Lynn just as her husband walks in. Jeff shoots Amanda in the neck, and as she bleeds to death John tells her that he was testing her and she failed. Jeff then cuts John's neck open with a power saw thus, effectively, killing his wife. As John dies, he pulls out a tape recorder, which explains that Jigsaw is the only person who knows the whereabouts of Jeff and Lynn's young daughter. The last shot of the movie is the girl, scared and alone in a dark room, clutching a stuffed bunny. And Jigsaw says she only has a limited air supply.
    • And then the guy gets shot in Saw IV before he can even begin to try and find his daughter. Although it's eventually undone by the beginning of Saw V, where they reveal investigators going through John's warehouse and trying to piece together what happened find the little girl alive and well, as it's implied to take place not long after Saw III. Although as the little girl is carted off into an ambulance, she tragically pleads to know where her parents are. It gets worse when you find out why Amanda killed Lynn.
    • Saw VI, with the nasty ending of the William storyline.
    • Saw 3D and Saw II both had very dark endings too. In Saw II, Eric basically left the site in search if his son, bringing his son's own capturer with him, not knowing if he stayed at the site the whole time, he'd have gotten to have seen his son again. Amanda locks him in the bathroom, and it's revealed he broke his foot to escape in Saw III, only to get captured and imprisoned in Saw IV and eventually, killed off. In Saw 3D, the protagonist's wife burns alive in a brazen bull after he fails to pass the trap he lied about being in.
    • Saw IV. Rigg realizes that he could have been saved himself and Jigsaw's other victims if he's simply done nothing and let them save themselves. Instead, he and everyone else dies. To add insult to injury, Hoffman gets up from the trap and reveals himself to be Jigsaw's true apprentice, leaving Rigg to slowly bleed out.
    • Saw V. Strahm is trapped in a coffin and Squashed Flat, while Hoffman is free to continue his crimes.
  • Sawney: Flesh of Man: Hamish manages to put down the cannibalistic Beans and escape in their taxi, only for the mother of the family to survive and attack him as the film ends.
  • Scalps: Most of the cast is killed, except for the one woman who tried to stop the desecration of Black Claw's grave. Black Claw instead possesses her, and haunts the burial ground, plotting to kill again.
  • Scarface (1932): The film ends with Tony Camonte himself shot dead in the end. Not only that, prior to his downfall, he killed Guino Rinaldo when he thought that the latter was harassing Cesca, his sister, which results in the police chasing after him. His sister was also shot by a stray bullet while she was at his hideout.
  • Scarface (1983): Tony Montana's criminal empire is in ruins, his beloved sister is dead, he kills his best friend, he is disowned by his mother and he eventually gets killed in his Last Stand against Sosa's men. At least he goes down like a badass.
  • Scarlet Street: Kitty is murdered by Chris. Johnny is falsely convicted and executed for the crime. Chris winds up jobless and homeless, and is seemingly doomed to spend the rest of his life tormenting himself with guilt, shame, and the thought of Kitty and Johnny together in the afterlife.
  • Scary Movie: Most of the cast is dead, and the killer has escaped suspicion until literally the minute after he left the police station. The last scene of the film is the killer and his girlfriend driving off into the sunset, and the heroine screaming into the sky before being hit by a car.
  • Scream 4: Jill and Charlie are indeed defeated, but almost all of the new characters are dead, Sidney, Dewey and Gale have been severely injured, the media believes that Jill is the hero, and one day, Sidney will have to have to tell her own family that a member of them has been running around, killing people.
  • Secret Window: Shooter is revealed to be a split personality created by Mort to carry out his crimes, born from his subconscious desire to "shoot her". Her being his ex-wife, whom he caught cheating on him. Shooter then drives Mort to kill both her and her lover, but in stark contrast to the story this movie's based on, he succeeds, buries them in his backyard, and grows a cornfield over it. The police know Mort did it, but since they can't find the bodies and prove his guilt, all the sheriff can do is warn Mort to stay out of town. The movie chillingly ends the way Mort's story does: with the murderous main character enjoying some cooked corncobs fertilized by his victims' corpses, confident that the evidence of his crime with eventually be erased.
    Mort: (narrating) "I know I can do it", Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time, every bit of her will be gone, and her death will be a mystery... Even to me."
  • A Serbian Film. Milos rapes his own son without even realizing it. His wife is being raped by his brother next to him. After a badass moment where he kills everyone on set, he and the fam jam go home, only to not talk to each other for three days. Ruined from what has happened in the days of his signing up for the film, he brings his wife and son into the room and shoots them to death before shooting himself. The last scene of the film shows the gory corpses in bed, with a camera crew and an actor, as the actor takes his penis out and the director says "Start with the little one", implying the whole family will be raped even after death.
  • Session 9: Gordon killed his wife, daughter and colleagues (even if the jury's still out on Hank), during a DID-induced psychotic break. Or, alternatively, after being possessed by Simon.
  • Se7en had the killer John Doe ultimately succeed by having Detective Mills succumb to the sin of Wrath and kill him. How did he do this? He killed Mills' pregnant wife and sent her head to him in a box. The film ends with a catatonic Mills arrested and taken to an uncertain future, and his partner Somerset admitting that the world is a crappy place to live in, but still worth fighting for.
  • Shall We Play?: Stacy gives in to the lures of her malicious great aunts' spirits, embracing the revenge they offer her then dying and becoming a malicious spirit along with them. Not only that, but at the end her younger sister Paula is lured into playing another game just like Stacy did that ended in this, as are other people she knew. Stacy is shown with her great aunts now arriving and tempting them like she was.
  • The Hong Kong film Sha Po Lang ends with all four of the cops assigned to Wong Po's case dying, the most badass of them (played by Donnie Yen) being hurled out a window by Po himself. Wong Po doesn't get out well either, because by throwing the guy out the window, he killed his own wife and daughter when his body landed upon their waiting car. Ouch.
  • She: Ayesha, who was made immortal by passing through the blue flame, encourages Leo to do the same so they can live forever together. They step into the flame together, but the second exposure makes Ayesha mortal again, and she immediately dies as her many years catch up with her, leaving Leo immortal and alone. The film ends with Leo saying that he's going to wait for who knows how long (millennia?) for the blue flame to come again.
  • SheChotic: Maxine's Split Personality kills Lance, and due to other machinations, the case is buried with nobody the wiser. Maxine herself confesses to killing her stepfather to get her brother released, and is committed to a psychiatric institution. Meanwhile, her half-sister by her mother's rapist is on another vengeance quest, and it's heavily implied that she kills her brother.
  • Shinjuku Incident: Jackie Chan's character Steelhead is mortally wounded by gunshot and ends up in the sewers. After giving the cop the incriminating evidence of the antagonists, he drifts away, letting the water carry him deeper into the sewers where he most likely dies. The very end scene showing him and his friends during happier times.
  • The Korean film Shiri works itself up to this. A detective finds out that the North Korean sniper he's been tracking was his fiancee all along, but doesn't face her. He foils the North Korean plot to blow up a stadium, but then has to stop his girlfriend from assassinating the South Korean president, and is forced to shoot her dead. He finds out later that she actually loved him after all and sent him a message with the details of the bomb plot and how to arrest her. Oh yeah, and she was also pregnant.
  • Shivers (1975): The film ends with the parasites spreading beyond the apartment building and possibly going global.
  • François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player ends with main character Charlie's love interest Lena (the one person finally bringing Charlie out of his reclusive shell after his wife's suicide) being shot dead by gangsters. The movie ends with Charlie back at the bar he plays piano for, which he was going to quit from along with Lena earlier in the film, showing that he's once again unable to move on.
  • Shrooms: All of the students except Tara are dead, and then Tara is revealed as the killer. In the final scene, she murders the paramedic and it is implied she is going to escape.
  • Shutter Island: Andrew is so guilt-ridden over what he has done to his wife and children that he chooses to be lobotomized by faking his regression. As a result, the roleplay therapy Dr. Cawley devised has been discredited.
  • Sicario: Kate finds out she was tricked into thinking she was taking part in the war on drugs when in reality, she was being used to help a hitman named Alejandro achieve his revenge on a jefe- and that a corrupt cop who was trusted in the situation was the one who set it all up, picking her because he thought she was easily fooled. Alejandro succeeds, and in the process gets a random Mexican cop (who had a family he hardly attended to) killed for no reason. He then forces Kate to sign a waiver stating that the whole operation was done according to plan. Kate initially refuses, but gives in when Alejandro forces her to at gunpoint. She signs, letting Matt and Alejandro get away with their morally questionable actions. And Juarez is still a Crapsack World, as kids can't even play soccer without being interrupted by gunfire.
  • Sicario: Day of the Soldado: Isabel Reyes, the daughter of the man who killed Alejandro's family, has just witness tons of horrors and is likely to suffer long-lasting PTSD. Alejandro has been betrayed by Matt Graver and the CIA must lie about their part in the kidnapping of a young Mexican-American girl so the POTUS won't be impeached, and Miguel, an impressionable Latino American youth who is likely a minor and has a seemingly bright future ahead of him, is tricked by his sack of shit cousin into immigrant smuggling, still is stuck in a dead end job at a Texas mall food court, and is likely to be groomed into becoming a Sicario by Alejandro, the very man he shot in the face.
  • The Korean movie Silence, which is based on a real life sexual abuse scandal in a school for deaf children, ends on this note. The men charged with the physical and sexual abuse get off with very lenient sentences. One of the two boys abused, whose grandparents settled an agreement with his rapist, decides to take revenge on the man. He ends up stabbing him and they end up fighting, getting into a brawl that makes them fall onto a train track and gets them run over. After a Tear Jerker protest scene, we learn they still haven't been able to get a retrial.
  • The Silent Child: Libby's awful mother ends her sign-language lessons and sends Libby to a normal school where she is completely lost and friendless. The film ends with a crying Joanne on the other side of the school gate, watching Libby through the bars.
  • Silent Hill: One of the main characters gets burned at the stake for being a witch, but the majority of bad guys are killed. The main character thinks she got her daughter back, safe and sound, but of course it's Silent Hill. She ends up driving to her house with her possessed child, still in the dimension that Silent Hill resides, where she will never leave. EVER.
  • Silent Night, Deadly Night: Billy is completely lost to his madness, and is gunned down by the police. His death is played for pathos as he tells the children that they're safe now as Santa Claus is dead, but his younger brother then says his Madness Mantra.
  • A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, a 52-year-old British college professor who is struggling to find meaning to his life after the death of his long time partner, Jim. George dwells on the past and cannot see his future as we follow him through a single day, where a series of events and encounters ultimately leads him to decide if there is a meaning to life after Jim. Ultimately, George decides against committing suicide. Then he has a heart attack and dies. Also counts as a Diabolus ex Machina ending.
  • SiREN (2016): Mac and Elliot are dead, the only people that could have contained Lily are all dead, but hey, Lily promises to leave Jonah alone, and Jonah and Eva eventually get married... oh, and then Lily comes to take him for her own anyway.
  • Skinamarink: There is no escape from the house, and the children are either dead or being tortured for all eternity by the entity.
  • The Skydivers: Harry is killed, leaving Beth alone and jobless as their parachuting business goes under.
  • The Slaughter: After tricking Dana into committing suicide, the Lady of Darkness takes over her body and begins the Apocalypse.
  • Sleeping Dogs (1977) ends with the main character being shot dead just after it seems he escaped to safety with his mortally wounded companion. Roll to credits with the killers standing looking at them.
  • Smile (2022): The Smile Entity possesses Rose and makes her set herself ablaze with Joel as a witness—meaning that he (and however many other people) will suffer the same fate.
  • Sonatine. Bad guys are dead, and the girl is waiting at the other side of the hill. All Murakawa has to do is drive across that tiny little hill to meet her. Instead he commits suicide. Bummer.
  • Sorcerer: Roy Scheider's character is a small-time crook in deep trouble with The Mafia. A friend gives him a plane ticket to Los Piedras; soon he takes the explosives-moving job described above in a desperate attempt to make enough money to pay off his enemies and go home. And as above, he emerges as the sole survivor, returns to civilization and gets his reward. The last scene shows him taking one last drink at the local dive he frequents; the camera then cuts to outside, where a local is pointing out the place to the friend who sold him the tickets...and two hitmen. Don't spend it all in one place, Roy.
  • Sorry, Wrong Number: Leona is murdered, and Henry is arrested for theft.
  • Soylent Green, because Soylent Green is people, and Charlton Heston will probably die for discovering it. Not to mention the fact that Planet Earth is probably doomed.
  • Splice: After a whole movie of treating Dren terribly, Dren turns into a male and kills Clive, Barlowe, and Gavin, and rapes Elsa, who is forced to kill Dren after bonding with them by bashing their skull in. Elsa is then shown pregnant with Dren's child, and, apparently having learned nothing from the whole experience, chooses not to abort the unknown, incestuous, hybrid being developing inside her.
  • Stalingrad (1993), with everyone else either dead or on their way into Soviet captivity, Irina, von Witzland and Reiser try to escape form Stalingrad on foot. Irina dies from friendly fire by a Soviet patrol, who she hoped would rescue her, and von Witland and Reiser freeze to dead. Cue end titles explaining that Everyone Dies in this case was basically Truth in Television.
  • A Star Is Born (2018) has Jackson being irreparably broken by Rez's abusive speech, and like in the other three versions of this film, he dies. And like in the first two versions, it's by his own hands. It's implied that his wife Ally and her career will continue to soar, but she'll forever be heartbroken by Jackson's decision, given the song she sings at the end ("I'll Never Love Again").
  • Starship Troopers: By the film's end, Rico's parents, his mentor and a woman who truly loved him are all dead. Only two of his friends survive and he will see neither of them in the same way again. It is implied that despite their new insights and technology that humanity is losing the war against the Bugs because they can't replace their losses quick enough - which explains the Child Soldiers and the fact all the main characters have found themselves in senior command positions despite their near-total inexperience. And worst of all, Rico has gone the way of Winston Smith and been so thoroughly indoctrinated into the ideals of his brutal society, that he doesn't see this as a horrible outcome.
  • Revenge of the Sith: The Jedi are almost extinct, Anakin becomes Darth Vader, and the evil Emperor begins a reign of opression. Though the Call-Forward in the last scene reminds us that things will get better.. in about 19 years.
  • Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning ends with the P-Fleet wiped out and the three main characters again stranded on Earth... in the middle of an Ice Age. Info suggests shutting himself down to survive the thousands of years until human civilization arises in order to prevent the events of the film. However, the camera than pulls back to space, and we see the remains of Pirk's space station, meaning that they've somehow ended up in the future, where humanity has destroyed itself (likely using the technology Pirk gave them prematurely). This is the last Star Wreck film, implying it really is over.
  • The original 1975 version of The Stepford Wives ends with all the robot wives, including the one that has replaced Joanna, shopping in the town supermarket.
  • Stitches (2001): Mrs. Albright claims every soul in the house. She makes Gray into her new imp and everybody else into paper dolls. The last scene is of her leaving the house and musing about how wonderful the world will be when everybody is dead.
  • Straight Time: Jerry and Willy die, and Jenny abandons Max after being disgusted by his violent nature. The film ends with Max driving off into the Californian desert, now on the run and well-aware he'll be caught by the police, but no longer able to give a damn.
  • The Strange Thing About the Johnsons: Sidney dies after getting hit by a car while trying to escape his sexually abusive son. After his funeral, Joan confronts Isaiah, demanding to know the truth. She is then forced to kill him in self-defense when he tries to murder her. Afterwards, she burns Sidney's manuscript, leaving her as the one left who knows of what her son did to his father and she can never breathe a word of it to anyone.
  • The Strangers: The couple are maybe dead along with their friend, the Strangers get away scot-free to find and torment more victims and a pair of boys have come upon the carnage and are very likely suffering mental scars as a result.
  • The Strays (2023): Ian is brutally killed by Carl in their family gym, and Neve, now with her new life in ruins, runs away with the delivery guy, abandoning both sets of children.
  • The Suckling: The fetus monster kills everybody except its smother, and it returns to its womb. The police, finding no evidence of the creature's existence, lock the sole survivor in a mental ward, where she stays in a state of nightmare-filled catatonia. The monster itself is, of course, waiting in the womb to be unleashed again, and kills a couple of rapist orderlies.
  • Suitable Flesh: Asa and Beth are dead, Dani is trapped in Beth's body and locked up in the asylum, and the body-stealing entity (now in Dani's body) s free to continue its rampage, with it being strongly implied that it's going after a grieving Eddie next.
  • Summer of '84: Davey's still alive, Mackey's been exposed as the Cape May Killer, and at least one innocent life was saved by the boys - but Mackey is still at large, and Davey's living under the threat that he will come back for him. Woody is dead by Mackey's hands, taking away the only good thing in his mother's life, and Nikki is leaving for college, likely driving her and Davey apart.
  • While most of the survivors of a mass-extinction inducing comet impact get a Bittersweet Ending in Super Comet: After the Impact, Fernando’s final fate is solely bitter. All the poor guy wanted was to reunite with his family, who are most likely dead from the impact. The three dogs he took care of abandon him. And finally, he breaks down in despair at the impact crater before finally dying, all alone.
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Even more so than the original play. Anthony manages to get Johanna out of the asylum, but they're now on the run and Johanna is quite obviously scarred for life. Sweeney Todd may get his revenge, but he also unknowingly kills his long lost wife Lucy, and when he finds out Mrs. Lovett knew who Lucy was all along and lied to him, he throws her into the oven to be burned alive. As he begins to sing a reprise of "The Barber and His Wife," Toby, who is implied to have been driven insane by what he has seen and done, emerges from the sewers and kills Todd himself, with his own razor no less. The last shot is the now-dead Todd cradling his dead wife. In addition, the tune at the end is more melancholy, rather than it ending with shock and a reprise of the "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd".
  • In Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, a school bus accident has destroyed the lives of many families in a small Canadian town. A lawyer (played by Ian Holm) intends to get them a cash settlement for the loss of many of the town's children. The time spent by the lawyer building this case takes up much of the movie, and when it finally comes time for a deposition to find the true facts about the accident, it's unraveled by a young teenager (played by Sarah Polley) who lies about what happened that day. She does this to get back at her father (who is in an incestuous relationship with her), thereby robbing the families of any sense of closure. The lawyer's attempts to reconcile with his estranged daughter (see in the beginning of the film) are rebuked, and he is left depressed. The film ends with the lawyer witnessing a bus driver (who was behind the wheel of the school bus that crashed) motioning passengers onto a coach bus.
  • Synecdoche, New York shows the main character spiraling slowly downward, losing his health and the people he loves, and ends with him sitting among the empty ruins of his life's work, given a final stage direction: "Die."

    T 
  • The Korean War film, Taegukgi (Tae-Guk-Gi: The Brotherhood of War in some places), definitely counts. The older brother has pulled a Face–Heel Turn and gone to the North side because he thought the South killed his brother who he tried to work his ass off to get sent home. His brother is actually alive and sees the older brother in a battle. The older brother, now crazy, attacks him. He eventually comes to his senses after a talk with the younger brother. The younger brother pulls out a pen he had received at the beginning of the movie as a gift. The two make promises on the pen that they'll both come back home. The North Korean soldiers then attack, making the older brother send his sibling running away, promising they'll meet again. He picks up a machine gun and kills several soldiers before being killed himself. Fade out to the present, where the younger brother, now an old man, sees the remains of the older brother, and breaks down, crying as he more or less begs his sibling to come back and fulfill the promises he made.
  • Tale of the Mummy: Most downer endings will settle for ruining a few characters' lives, maybe killing the main cast; this film, however, takes it to a new level. By the end, most of the cast is indeed dead. The hero is the last one to go, having just been forced to shoot his girlfriend, before learning too late that it didn't really solve anything. The villain's human servant is locked up as a woman mad, what's left of the cast is none the wiser, and all the character death kind of shrinks into insignificance when you realize that the mummy's got himself a new body, and now he's all set to wreak destruction and misery on the world as soon as the credits finish rolling...
  • A Tale of Two Sisters: Su-mi, whose condition has only got worse ever since coming home, is committed once again to a psychiatric hospital, and it is uncertain when or if she will get better.
  • Tales of Halloween:
    • "The Night Billy Raised Hell": Billy is released from his bounds and immediately shot by the police for the crimes he was framed for.
    • "Grim Grinning Ghost": Our heroine manages to get home and escape the ghost trying to remove her eyes... who's on her couch.
    • "This Means War": What starts out as a comedic battle over haunted attractions ends with a murder-suicide.
  • Tape 407 ends with nearly everyone being killed by raptors, and the survivors are killed by government agents who prevent them from exposing the secret of the raptors.
  • Taps: The main character dies when one of his subordinates opens fire on the Army positioned outside their school and he tries to stop him, getting caught in the return fire. And he failed to achieve his primary objective.
  • Tenebre: Peter is revealed to be the killer and after killing the inspector, he attempts to kill Anne only to get impaled to the wall. While Anne survives, she is the ONLY survivor, and the last shot of the movie is of her in a violent screaming fit of hysterics.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ends with The End of the World as We Know It. While it was always set to happen, some people didn't accept it.
  • Terrifier: Art survives and gets away with all the murders he has committed and Victoria is horribly scarred from Art eating her face and loses her sanity as she maims Monica.
  • TerrorVision: The Hungry Beast consumes everybody in the main cast, including the Kid Hero, and makes its way to a movie studio to continue feeding.
  • These Final Hours - End of the world - check. End of all life - check. People fully aware of whats about to happen - check.
  • They Shoot Horses, Don't They? puts its Depression-era characters through a grueling marathon dance contest, during which one of the entrants suffers a heart attack and dies, another suffers a mental collapse, and pretty much everyone endures staggering physical, mental, and emotional torture. The kicker? The folks running the contest will be deducting the entrants' food, medical, and other expenses from the cash prize they're all killing themselves for, leaving the "winners" with little if anything for their trouble. When one of the characters hears of this it pretty much confirms all of her bleakest and most cynical thoughts about the world she's trapped in, and she begs another character to put her out of her misery by shooting her in the head. He complies, and is arrested and (presumably) given the death penalty (but not before uttering the title phrase when asked why he did it). Meanwhile, the agonizing contest continues, with the remaining dancers unaware of the futility of their effort. Yowza, yowza, yowza! In Horace McCoy's original novel, the marathon comes to a premature end when a fight breaks out and a stray bullet hits and kills an elderly woman in the audience, and the remaining dancers are given $50 each. We still get the "assisted suicide" at the end, though.
  • The Thing (1982). The station is blown up, and MacReady and Childs are both left in Antarctica to freeze to death. It's made even more depressing when it's implied that one of them, or maybe both, are imitations. Mac cared more about stopping The Thing than getting home, and Childs doesn't seem afraid of death. These guys wouldn't want us to weep for them. It goes From Bad to Worse however if you've seen the TV version! Following the final scene, there's a shot of a dog running from the station, revealing that The Thing is still alive. The sequel video game reveals that MacReady survived, while Childs did indeed die before rescue came. A sequel comic shows both of them still alive, only to end up on a Submarine with the Thing, so Childs opens up the submarine, flooding everything on it. Macready ends up soaked, on a slab of ice, on the North Pole, falling asleep.
  • The 1984 BBC telefilm Threads is a nonstop barrage of futility, as the effects of a nuclear strike in Britain are shown in graphic detail. The main characters are a woman named Ruth and man named Jimmy, who has found out Ruth is pregnant two months before the attack. In the background of early scenes with Ruth and Jimmy's family, we see tensions between the U.S. and Russia boil over. In the middle of May, a nuclear strike initiated by Russians hits near the character's home of Sheffield. Jimmy is never seen again, presumably vaporized in the strike, although according to some viewers he appears later in the movie with a badly scarred face. Government teams coordinating relief efforts in the basement of a command shelter are suffocated to death after falling debris blocks all the air vents into their bunker. Jimmy's family, a sweet father and mother, are afflicted with radiation sickness and slowly waste away. Ruth's family, last seen pleading with Ruth to come back as she goes out to search for Jimmy, would have been safe in the basement of their sturdily built, amply supplied house, but looters break in and murder them. Jimmy's teenaged sister may have survived, if the young blonde woman later seen in an internment camp is in fact her. Ruth gives birth to a baby girl, and dies ten years after the strike, having suffered from premature aging. Ruth's daughter, Jane (who knows very little English) is caught stealing food and runs away with another boy, who proceeds to rape her. In the end, Jane (visibly pregnant) wanders through a ruined city, and finds a makeshift hospital, where she gives birth to a stillborn child, who she holds in her arms in the final shot. God damn. Following the original telecastnote  the screen faded to black for ten whole seconds.
  • Tian Di, also known as Chinese Untouchables, ends with Cheung, the main character, capturing the evidence of Big Bad Paul's corruption, drug dealings, and ordering the massacre of 300 innocent people on film, but at the cost of all his friends dying in the process. After knocking Paul unconscious and having Paul arrested, Cheung personally delivers the film to the authorities... only to be suddenly shot and killed by the general he was talking to in the government office. As it turns out, the military has been bribed by Paul, and they are involved in the opium deal Paul was operating, for their own benefits. In the epilogue, its revealed that Paul was released due to lack of incriminating evidence, allowing to be a free man despite ruining thousands of lives with the opium trade and ordering the massacre of more than 300 people, and the main characters literally died for nothing.
  • Time Bandits ends with Kevin waking up in his bedroom and his house apparently on fire; in short order he is rescued by firefighters. The house appears to be a total loss, but Kevin's parents are unhurt. However, against his shouted warning they touch a remaining hunk of Pure Evil and are annihilated, leaving only their Smoldering Shoes. The firefighters leave with only the mildest of reassurances to Kevin, now orphaned.note 
  • The silent film The Toll of the Sea ends with the Chinese protagonist's American husband leaving her for an American. She gives up her toddler son to the woman and tells him that she wasn't really his mother, she was just taking care of him for his mother. Then she kills herself.
  • Tombs of the Blind Dead: Elizabeth seems to narrowly escape the zombies on a train, but some of them manage to climb on and slaughter the passengers. Then the train pulls into a station...
  • Tormented (2009): Justine is framed for all of Darren's murders and Darren is free to continue killing.
  • The Touch of Satan: Melissa is finally freed from her enslavement to Satan after using the last of her magic to kill her murderous sister, but without the magic to keep her young she rapidly returns to her real age and nearly dies. Jodie sells his own soul in order to save her, thereby starting the whole thing over again.
  • Tourist Trap: While the killer is taken down, the Final Girl is driven completely insane by the film's events, and drives away with the mannequins of her dead friends.
  • The Town That Dreaded Sundown: The 1976 version ends with the murderer the film was centred around catching getting away unidentified. The case haunts everybody involved until the day they died.
  • Track of the Moon Beast: The movie is essentially Paul deteriorating before being Driven to Suicide and doesn't even get to die as himself.
  • Trilogy of Terror:
    • "Millicent and Therese": Millicent stabs a voodoo doll of her sister Therese in order to end her abuse, only to kill herself due to Therese being a split personality.
    • "Amelia": Amelia seemingly burns the evil doll alive, only for its spirit to possess her and keep on killing.
  • Trog: Trog is killed by the local army unit and Dr. Brockton walks away from the scene in despair, her work ruined.
  • Troll 2: Our heroes destroy the goblin army and escape Nilbog. They go back home, but the goblins are waiting. The film ends with Joshua entering his kitchen and finding the goblins eating his mother.
  • In The Troll Hunter, we don't actually see the fates of Hans or the film crew, but it's heavily implied that the crew are all murdered by the Norwegian government to cover up the existence of the trolls.
  • True Romance was originally going to end this way, with Clarence getting killed at the very end and a broken Alabama fleeing L.A., but Quentin Tarantino ultimately opted for a happier ending.
  • Turtles Can Fly: As it is a war film, it comes with a heavy message that doesn't give each character their own little happy ending. Agrin kills Riga and then commits suicide while Hengov has a vision of the horrific events but is ultimately unable to save either of them. Additionally, Satellite has grown a pair of Jade-Colored Glasses as a result of the war and especially due to his serious leg injury from a detonating landmine. Most significantly, his love for America shown near the start of the film (the film's main plot point was based around an entire village waiting for the US to invade Iraq and hopefully bring down Saddam Hussein) has all but disappeared, with him turning his back to a group of American soldiers passing by.
  • Tusk ends by revealing that Wallace never regained his sanity and still has the mentality of a walrus, and is even treated like one. While he did manage to kill Howe, this was all part of his plan and he got exactly what he wanted. Sure, he was mostly already an Asshole Victim, but most people agree he didn't deserve a fate as cruel and demeaning as that.

    U 
  • Uncut Gems ends with The Gambling Addict Howard executed by Phil, one of his Loan Shark brother-in-law's mooks, before Phil turns on his brother-in-law as well while they're robbing his store after being locked in his door for several hours and threatening him the entire time. A violent hotheaded mobster who has been constantly butting heads with Howard during the whole movie was not going to be okay with being locked in the room for over three hours no matter how much money Howard just made. In his eyes no amount of money was worth the shit Howard pulled on them.
    • On a somewhat brighter note, Howard's family are safe now (though now without a father) and Julia struck it rich on Howard's bet, which isn't a particularly great thing in itself because Julia is an unlikeable self-centered moron who did nothing to really deserve the money. That said, Howard was earlier diagnosed with colon cancer and died ecstatically celebrating a big win at the happiest moment of his life with no idea Phil was going to shoot him, so maybe you could call it A Good Way to Die.
  • ‘’ Unedited Footage of a Bear'': Donna's addiction to Claridryl likely leads to a psychotic episode in which she murders her own children. The last shot we see is of the original Donna, beaten and bloodied, resting against the stairs to her house while police surround the area, all while weakly whispering, "I don't have a gun."
  • Unfriended: By the end of the film, the only characters left alive are the police officer discovering Val's dead body, the various people Blaire encounters on Chat Roulette, and the police officer that was sent to Jess's house, with the help of someone on Chatroulette. None of the main characters survive and nobody, save for Laura, benefits from the events of the story.
  • Unicorn Wars: Both the bears and unicorns are completely wiped out by the war, and Bluey kills both Tubby and Maria in a fit of rage before being swallowed by the blob that forms from Maria's corpse. The last thing seen in the film is the monster taking on a human form before walking through the desolate wasteland, with the monkeys following behind.
  • Unthinkable ends with the terrorist confessing the locations of the three nuclear bombs he has hidden in three different cities in the US. In the extended version, an FBI bomb squad finds one of the bombs and defuses it and are all celebrating. Then the camera pans to a fourth bomb hidden in the same room which count downs to zero, before the screen fades to black.

    V 
  • The Vampire: Beecher spends the film struggling against his vampiric Enemy Within. The Vampire is taken down by the end, but at the cost of Beecher's life, leaving his daughter fatherless and his nurse presumably jobless. It's also likely that his reputation is ruined, as he dies as himself..
  • The Vanishing: After obsessively searching for his wife, Saskia, for three years, Rex Hofman finally meets her kidnapper, Raymond Lemorne. As Rex has no evidence to expose him, Raymond tells him that the only way he will learn of Saskia's fate will be if he experiences it himself by drinking a cup of coffee with a sleeping pill in it. Rex at first refuses, but then Raymond reminds him of how he will be tormented with uncertainty of having never known what happened to Saskia and missing the opportunity to learn for all eternity. After much hesitation and confliction, Rex finally drinks the coffee. When he awakens, he discovers he has been buried alive. The American remake gives the story a happy ending, with Jeff (the remake's version of Rex) being rescued from his grave by his new girlfriend.
  • Vertigo: Scottie conquers his acrophobia.... only for his love to die for real this time as a result of his actions.
  • Very Bad Things. It has this, although it's meant to be Black Comedy. After Laura has Kyle bury Boyd's dead body in the desert, she wants him to kill Charles Moore (the last other guy at his bachelor party) so that no more loose ends remain to potentially sabotage her perfect wedding. Kyle finds he can't go though with it however and loses focus when he gets into a car accident. The movie ends with Kyle Fisher having lost both his legs, Charles Moore brain damaged and confined to a motorized wheelchair, and the dog now has only three legs. Laura is now forced to care for them in addition to Adam Berkow's bratty sons. As Laura runs out of the house, she knows her life and dreams are totally ruined. Laura suffers a mental breakdown and collapses while screaming in the middle of the street.
  • The Video Dead: Zoe manages to trick the zombies into destroying each other, but her brother is dead and everybody thinks she's insane. Her parents, who were absent for all the madness, wheel the cursed TV in. Last shot of the film is Zoe screaming as the TV turns on and the zombies prepare to escape once more.
  • Viking Wolf: Lots of Nybo's town residents have been killed by Thale and several others by the werewolf before her. More depressingly, Liv—who has been estranged from her daughter since her husband's death—is forced to possibly shoot her transformed daughter to prevent more killings. And if she spared her, then Thale is permanently a wolf and still out there.
  • The Violent Years: Paula gets impregnated by her rape victim, everyone in Paula's gang dies, and Paula herself gets sentenced to life in prison and dies after giving birth to her child.
  • Virus Shark: Kristi, upon learning that humanity is now just 130 people, feels that it's too late to save them. So, she throws the SHVID-1 antidote into the sea, and then dives in herself, ensuring humanity is doomed.
  • Vlad Tepes: Vlad is framed for treason against Hungary and imprisoned for three years. According to an ending scroll, he's released and manages to take back Wallachia's throne, but is killed two months later.

    W 
  • The French film The Wages of Fear is about four men driving two trucks over mountain roads, carrying nitroglycerin, which is needed to extinguish a fire. During the journey, three of them are killed. The only survivor arrives, collects the money, and starts driving home happily. He takes one corner too fast, and falls to his death.
  • The Wailing: Jong-Goo is manipulated by Ill-Gwang to not listen to Moo-Myeong, who was the Big Good all along. The result leads to Hyo-jin murdering her mother and grandmother and then Jong-Goo. It's also implied from the last victim she'll die along with them too, all while Ill-Gwang and the Japanese hermit getting away scot free.
  • Watch Your Stern ends with the HMS Terrier sunk and Blissworth, Captain Foster, and Commander Fanshawe all out of a job.
  • Watchmen: Adrian Veidt detonates a nuclear deterrent that kills half of New York, forcing them into world peace. Dr. Manhattan had a stake in the construction of the bomb without knowing what it was being used for. The heroes are forced to keep their silence, or World War III will start. Rorschach disagrees, and Dr. Manhattan kills him before disappearing to another galaxy. Worse yet, Rorschach has been keeping a journal of his findings and suspicions, which he drops off at a newspaper office. At the very end of the film, the journal has ended up in the paper's "crank file" and a staff member is close to reaching for it, meaning that WWIII may start anyway if it gets published.
  • The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep: There can only be one water horse at a time, and when an egg is laid, the old one dies. At the end, a kid finds an egg, the cycle continues, but that means the one the main character spent the movie raising is now dead. It might be okay if not for the fact that the old man telling the story is the kid who raised the old water horse, and he says that he never got to see it again after letting it go free. It's implied that it came back looking for him more than once, too.
  • The Wave (1981): Mr. Ross shows who the leader of The Wave is at the school assembly: Adolf Hitler. Ross also reveals that the entire thing was a social experiment to prove that fascism could rise anywhere, and it was almost absurdly easy to convince the students to join in on such an ideology. The students are left utterly horrified by the thought that they went along with Nazi dogma, and the entire school tries to pretend like nothing happened. But it's clear that it's deeply affected everyone.
  • Subverted in Wayne's World. It initially ends with the girlfriend not getting a record deal and going with the sleazy villain while Wayne's house explodes and Garth dies. Of course, that ending sucked, so they went with the Scooby Doo ending for a brief period before settling on the "Super Happy" ending. The sequel ends similarly, but with a "Thelma and Louise" ending instead of a Scooby Doo ending.
  • Combined with Gainax Ending in Wendigo. George dies from his wounds, leaving Miles and Kim more or less broken from the experience of the trip (especially Miles). And while Otis does get punished by the Wendigo and is at the verge of death, we're left wondering if everything was in Miles's head or if the Wendigo truly exists.
  • Werewolves on Wheels: The Big Bad mind controls our heroes into being his slaves, steals their leader's body and sacrifices one of them to be Satan's bride.
  • Westworld: Technically it's a Bittersweet Ending in that Peter (presumably) makes it out alive, but it's presented on such a dour note that it might as well be this. Most of the guests and technicians in Delos are dead at the end, and most the robots 'died' when their batteries ran out. Peter finds a woman chained and begging for help, and tries to offer her water... only to short her circuits. He doesn't even get the satisfaction of saving someone else's life, and is pretty much the last survivor we know of at the end of the film.
  • When Trumpets Fade ends with Talbot and Chamberlain dead, and Manning either dead or about to die. To make matters worse, Captain Zenek will likely get all the credit for the successful attack on Schmidt. Oh, and the entire battle was a pointless waste of life anyway, since the Battle of the Bulge began shortly thereafter and made the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest irrelevant.
  • White Dog: Keys' training, for all the hope he placed in it, didn't get rid of the dog's murderous impulses, he just changed them so the dog targets white people instead. The film ends with Keys angrily stumbling away from the dog he had to put down instantly once he killed his first white man, and Julie standing there in shock.
  • The Wicker Man
    • The 2006 remake: The entire time you are watching this film you just feel bad for the protagonist.. Attacked by bees, everyone lies to him, he witnessed a little girl burn to death, his wife and an entire island of people are trying to kill him. And then they do. And he dies.
    • It's got nothing on the 1973 original version. His own faith ends up guaranteeing he will be the sacrifice— and in the end, it probably won't do the islanders any good anyway. And the little girl was in on it. Worse than that, he was vindictive and swearing death on his killers, who'd picked him for the sacrifice because, as a martyr, he'd be accepted into heaven by his religion... except, by his dying words of rage, he's arguably condemned himself to Hell.
  • Wiener-Dog: Wiener-Dog is run over by a truck. Then another truck. Then a car. Then a compact. The next time we see her, she's been turned into an animatronic art installation.
  • The Wild Angels: While burying Joey, the Angels get in a massive brawl with some locals after one throws a rock at them. The police are called, and Blues orders his men to scatter while he finishes the burial. Last shot of the film is Blues leaving the cemetery in resignation, having accepted his imminent arrest.
  • The Windmill Massacre: Abe kills off everybody who survived, and Jennifer is — perhaps undeservingly — Dragged Off to Hell.
  • The VVitch: After her whole family is dead, Thomasin becomes a witch herself at the end.
  • Witchfinder General: Hopkins is dead, but Marshall and Sara are severely traumatised and possibly permanently insane as a result of their terrible experiences.
  • With a Kiss I Die: Farryn dies in Juliet's arms after she's been drained of too much blood by the other vampires. Juliet is unwilling to live if she's dead and drinks it as well. This is poisonous to them as Farryn's got leukemia, and she dies with her
  • The dark comedy Withnail and I ended on a sad note, with Marwood (I) and Withnail likely to never see each other again and only the wolves knowing what a good actor Withnail can really be. But even that's not as bad as what originally happened in the novel, where Withnail pours the wine down the barrel of Monty's gun, drinks it and pulls the trigger, blowing his brains out.
  • Wolfen: The Wolfen escape, unhindered by the main characters, and will continue to kill people.
  • In The Wolfman (2010), Lawrence dies, as does his entire family, and Aberline] ends up infected with lycanthropy.
  • At the end of Would You Rather, Iris wins the game, along with her brother's bone-marrow treatment and enough cash to get out of debt. But when she returns home, she finds that he has committed suicide rather than continue to be a burden on her. Also qualifies as a Pyrrhic Victory.
  • Wrestlemaniac: The killer slays our entire main cast, and gets a vehicle with which to expand his killing spree.
  • The Wrestler: Randy feels he has lost everything, including a relationship with his estranged daughter. He returns to the wrestling ring even though his heart condition has worsened. During the match, Randy becomes unsteady and is urged by his opponent to end the fight. Randy refuses, and decides to do his signature wrestling move, a leap from the top rope. The film ends mid-dive, strongly implying Randy died.

    X 
  • X-Men: First Class in so many ways. Charles is crippled and weary, loses his love interest because he erases her memory in order to protect her (which also ruins her career at the CIA), and also loses his friend, Erik, as he becomes Magneto. And his adoptive sister has run off with Magneto to become a supervillain. Hank is left mutated from his failed serum and has lost Mystique as well after he rejected her true mutant form. Also, despite all their heroic efforts, the government is now hunting all mutants.

    Y 
  • The Yards: Willie accidentally kills Erica and is charged for her murder. Leo "wins" and proves his innocence by denouncing the people, who have cared for him and his mother all their lives.
  • Young & Wild: Daniela loses both Tomás and Antonia since they realize she's been seeing them at the same time. It's implied she's disowned after her mother realizes she's been having more extramarital sex, and when her beloved aunt dies she can't even go to her funeral. At the very end, her last words are saying she just feels lost now.

    Z 
  • Z: After the Public Prosecutor has arrested all the conspirators, the ending crawl says that the junta takes over, pardons everyone involved in the assassination, sends the activists to prison, key witnesses die in suspicious accidents, the prosecutor is removed from the case and the junta proceeds to ban nearly everything they don't like.
  • Z for Zachariah: Loomis gets away with likely killing Caleb, with Ann apparently none the wiser. Having no other alternatives, and despite having stronger feelings for Caleb, she stays with Loomis and the two apparently start a new life together.
  • Zombi 2: Peter and Ann escape the island after burning the zombies alive. Due to the deaths of all of the other main characters, it seems that they are heading for a "Ray of Hope" Ending. Then they turn on the radio, and learn that the whole of US has been, in the meantime, in the midst of a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • The Zombie Apocalypse in Apartment 14F: The zombie attack that Raymond and Joey witnessed with Bradly on the drone footage is revealed to be from a shoot for a zombie movie, meaning they spent three days panicking over nothing. Because of this, when Raymond goes to Red's apartment dressed in goalie garb and wielding a baseball bat, he scares her and causes her to shoot and kill him, which Joey witnesses on the drone and is devestated by. The final scene if Red being interviewed by the police.
  • Zwartboek, by Paul Verhoeven, is one of the most brutal espionage/resistance dramas ever. The only part of the ending which isn't a downer is a last-ditch effort by the main female and an elderly resistance member who find the doctor that betrayed them trying to escape with his ill-gotten gains. He's hiding in a coffin in the back of a hearse. The pair knock out his driver and seal him inside by driving nails into it. He pleads with them to let him go, and he starts pushing out all the valuables he swiped while collaborating with the Nazis, but they push it back in. The woman even adds her father's necklace to the collection, admonishing the doctor to redeem himself by handing it to him in the afterlife. The pair lament that this is the first and only act of justice perpetrated during their lives in the war, as the doctor doomed all others to failure. His accomplice in the resistance does not get his karmic comeuppance either. In a movie involving the SS against a resistance group during World War II, it's mindblowing that the biggest monster is a greedy American doctor. The Nazi who defected to become the woman's lover dies at the hands of a bureaucratic pencil-pusher who wishes to uphold all of Germany's kangaroo court convictions in order to ease the transfer of power to the Allies. Realistically depressing and empty deaths are a hallmark of this film. The 'black book' is a list of the anti-resistance conspirators, who are all dead by the end, and handing it to Army Intelligence is largely an empty gesture as well, done only to give the two survivors a sense of finality and closure.

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