Secret Horror Movie Endings You Never Knew Existed

The Shining might have the most analyzed ending of any movie ever. After the murderous Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) freezes to death outside the Overlook Hotel, he somehow appears in a creepy black-and-white photo from the 1920s. Endings don't get any more ambiguous than this, and with an old jazz song playing over the soundtrack, the final shots of a smiling Jack will haunt you long after the credits roll.

But while the photograph was always part of the ending, Stanley Kubrick considered quite a few scenes that would've made the final moments incredibly different. In one version, Wendy (Shelley Duvall) manages to kill Jack, and that's when the hotel possesses the heroic Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), turning him into the film's big bad. That scene never made it out of an early treatment, but Kubrick did film an additional scene that showed what happened to Wendy and Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd) after escaping the Overlook's evil influence.

According to Entertainment Weekly, in this deleted sequence, Wendy and Danny wind up at a hospital, where they're greeted by Ullman (Barry Nelson), the hotel manager from earlier in the film. That's when Ullman drops a bombshell: he can't find anything to support Wendy's story. No ghosts, no bloody elevator, nothing. Was it all just in her mind? That's when the ominous Ullman hands Danny the same exact ball that freaked the kid out earlier in the film. So is Ullman part of the Overlook's supernatural plot? Nobody knows for sure, and the scene caused such confusion among early viewers that Kubrick cut it out and had the footage destroyed.

Friday the 13th Part III is the film that gave Jason Voorhees his iconic hockey mask and reinforced the lumbering butcher as a bad guy who just won't die. In the film's final showdown at Crystal Lake, the slasher is chasing after final girl Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell), who's doing everything in her power to escape. She stabs him in the leg, bashes him with a shovel, and hangs him outside a barn before finally planting an ax in Jason's head. And even then, she can't escape a creepy dream sequence where she's dragged underwater by Jason's undead mom. When she finally wakes up, she's absolutely traumatized, and chances are good she'll be dealing with some PTSD for quite a while.

Still, that's a pretty uplifting finale compared to the alternate ending. Similar to the theatrical version, this finds Chris crawling into a canoe and paddling out into Crystal Lake. Eventually, she returns to shore and makes her way back to the abandoned vacation house where Jason massacred all her friends. She hears a noise inside and, thinking it's her boyfriend, runs to the door. But the course of true love never did run smooth, especially when there are psycho killers involved. The door swings open, and there's Jason. This time, there's no escape for Chris. Jason grabs her by the hair and lops off her head with a blow from his machete. Sure, the theatrical ending is pretty grim, but it's way better to have Jason in your head than for Jason to be walking around with your head.

"What's in the box?" That iconic line from David Fincher's Seven has become part of the pop culture consciousness because we all know what's in that box. Taking inspiration from the seven deadly sins, serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) has decapitated Tracy, the wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) of Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), and placed her head inside a package. Despite the pleas of Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), Mills grows so enraged that he gives way to the seventh deadly sin — wrath — and puts a bullet in John Doe's head.  

It's a truly disturbing ending, one that cemented Seven's status as one of the all-time great horror films. But studio executives were incredibly squeamish about these final few moments, worrying that if you decapitated Gwyneth Paltrow, put her head in a box, and then have Brad Pitt fall into the bad guy's trap, disgusted audiences might stay away from theaters. So the studio brass did their best to get Fincher to change the ending. They considered a version of the film in which Somerset kills John Doe, thus foiling the killer's plans, and there's another version showing Doe murdering Mills before getting shot by Somerset.

In one of the more ridiculous alternate versions, the studio wanted Mills and Somerset to save Tracy before Doe cut her head off. According to Pitt, the producers were so worried about the ending that they actually considered putting a dog's head in the box. But ultimately, Fincher and the actors refused to bend, although the director did acquiesce a little by putting the Ernest Hemingway quote at the end. In true depressing Fincher fashion, he originally wanted the film to go black right after Mills gave way to wrath.

A horror milestone, The Exorcist has scared countless moviegoers since 1973, but you've got to wonder if the original ending would've dulled the film's head-spinning impact. In the version that hit theaters, young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is packing her bags and about to leave her house of horrors when she's gifted an amulet by the kindly Father Dyer (Father William O'Malley), the only priest who gets out of this movie alive. As Regan and her mother drive away, Father Dyer watches their car disappear into the distance, and that's when those eerie tubular bells start chiming.

Sure, Regan is okay now, but there's a slightly ominous feel as the credits start rolling, leaving films fans to mull over the nightmare they just witnessed. However, director William Friedkin originally ended the movie on a much more upbeat note. In this alternate version, Father Dyer watches Regan drive away and then runs into Detective Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb). The two strike up a friendship, start cracking jokes, and then Kinderman invites Father Dyer to see a movie with him. Stranger still, as the two walk down the road together, the detective quotes an iconic line from Casablanca: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Fortunately, Friedkin cut this scene due to time constraints, but Exorcist author William Peter Blatty thought it left audiences feeling more hopeful. Years later, Friedkin came to agree with Blatty's POV, and in the director's cut of the film, Friedkin put the meet-cute back in, minus the Casablanca line. Of course, not everyone was happy with this cheerful finale, including film critic Roger Ebert who described it as "a guest who keeps talking after the party is over."

Based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation finds Natalie Portman as a cellular biologist heading into the Shimmer, an ever-growing nightmare realm of slithering intestines and mutated skull bears. Thankfully, Portman's character eventually burns the Shimmer down and reunites with her long-lost husband... sort of. As it turns out, her real husband (Oscar Isaac) died inside the Shimmer, and he's been replaced by a doppelgänger. And honestly, we're not 100 percent sure Portman isn't some sort of alien clone either. All we know is that when they embrace, we can see shimmering lights in their eyes, implying the Shimmer is still very much alive inside their DNA.

It's a mysterious little ending that leaves us wondering about the fate of the world, but in the original script by Alex Garland, things were far less ambiguous. After the two give each other a hug, the film cut to a meteor shower, only these aren't your typical space rocks: When one of the meteorites hits the Earth, it cracks open, and we get a look inside and see a lot of shimmering. Evidently, these meteors are carrying new strains of the Shimmer, and the world is about to undergo some massively creepy renovations. But for whatever reason — possibly to keep that ending enigmatic — Garland chopped out the alien invasion-by-meteorite, leaving us to debate whether Portman actually made it out.  

Michael Mann's Manhunter was the first film to bring Hannibal Lecter to the big screen, and it was also the first time moviegoers met Will Graham. Played by William Petersen, Graham is a legendary forensic profiler, a man so empathetic that he basically becomes the killers he's trying to catch. And that's what helps him track down Francis Dolarhyde (Tom Noonan), a man who butchers entire families. But that extreme empathy also causes Graham to stare a little too long into the abyss, the one that turns you into a monster if you're not careful.

There's a deleted scene in Manhunter that truly shows Graham's troubled psyche, and if it hadn't been cut, it would have been the second to last scene in the movie. After catching Dolarhyde (and getting his face scarred up in the process), Graham visits the next family the so-called "Tooth Fairy" was preparing to kill. He shows up at their doorstep, and when the family learns this is the man who saved their lives, they invite him in. Graham hesitates — wrestling with the demons that connect him with Dolarhyde — before saying he just dropped by to see them. He then turns and walks away in slow motion, and it's a powerful moment that shows while Graham has touched the darkness, he's back on the slow road to recovery.

If you know anything about the real-life Jonestown massacre, then you know The Sacrament isn't going to end well. Directed by Ti West, this found-footage horror movie follows a group of Vice reporters who venture into a secluded forest to do a story on a utopian cult led by the charismatic "Father" (Gene Jones of No Country for Old Men). At first, it seems like the cult is living that easygoing, communal lifestyle, but it turns out Father is a psychopathic preacher who plans on murdering everyone in his compound.

Taking a page from the Jim Jones playbook, Father has all his followers drink poison-laced juice, and we watch in horror as they cry out, convulse, and foam at the mouth. Soon, the compound is full of dead bodies, and only two of the journalists manage to escape, boarding a helicopter and leaving the carnage behind. However, in the original script, there was supposed to be a last-minute twist where the helicopter pilot was secretly a cult member and, in dedication to Father, crashes the chopper, killing everyone aboard. West decided this was just  "too nihilistic"; plus, the folks who actually run Vice didn't want to be involved in a film where Vice reporters are violently murdered, so he obliged.

Based on the novel by Max Brooks, World War Z was plagued with behind-the-scenes drama that forced filmmakers to completely rewrite the ending. As it currently stands, the film has former UN worker Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) discovering that zombies aren't interested in people infected with terminal illnesses. This discovery allows humans to gain the upper hand against the undead threat, and it's considerably more upbeat than what the filmmakers originally had in store.

In the ending that never made it to theaters, Gerry Lane winds up in Russia, where his cell phone is stolen, and he's conscripted into the Russian army. He basically becomes a zombie-killing Rambo, complete with a specialized shovel weapon. During his battles, he learns the undead have a big problem with the cold, and that's the secret that starts turning the tide against the zombie horde.

However, that doesn't mean things get any easier for poor Gerry. Eventually, he gets his cell phone back, calls his wife (Mireille Enos), and discovers she's living in a refugee camp in the Everglades. Unfortunately, this is a pretty rough place, and in order to survive, she's forced to sleep with a twisted soldier played by Matthew Fox. This doesn't sit well with Gerry, and he heads back to America, planning to rescue his wife. So if you're wondering why Jack from Lost only shows up for a few seconds in the theatrical version, it's because he originally had a bigger part to play.