The Most Shocking Movie Endings

Ending with one of the most genuinely surprising twists in modern cinema, Bryan Singer's neo-noir classic The Usual Suspects follows the interrogation of seemingly helpless Roger "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey), one of only two survivors of a devastating fire on a ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles. Spacey spins the detectives (and hapless viewers) a long and twisted tale of drugs, deceit and death, explaining that everything comes back to a mysterious mob boss by the name of Keyser Söze. The twist? Spacey's character is Keyser Söze all along, which the officers realize just a few moments too late. As Kint exits the police station and shuffles off down the street, his awkward gait starts to straighten out and we realize we've been had. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist, after all.

Loosely based on French author Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel La Planète des Singes, this seminal sci-fi was included in Empire's Greatest Movies of All Time list and contains one of the most famous examples of a shock ending. Charlton Heston leads a group of astronauts stranded on a strange and seemingly deserted planet after a crash landing. The crew soon come to realize that they are not alone, however. Apes with human-like intelligence dominate this world and they don't take kindly to the arrival of their otherworldly guests, though it turns out Heston and his team are far from alien. As he escapes the apes and makes his way along the shoreline with returning home on his mind, he comes across the sandy remains of the Statue of Liberty and discovers he's been on Earth the whole time, trapped in a future devastated by nuclear war.

The first Star Wars sequel picked up three years after the destruction of the Death Star, the exciting climax of the first film. Luke Skywalker and the Rebel assault squadron bearing down on the superweapon's weak spot remains a memorable finale, though it pales in comparison to the closing stages of The Empire Strikes Back, known for its double-blow ending. Han Solo being frozen alive in carbonite by Darth Vader and carted off was quite the shock for fans of the dashing pilot, though the real jaw-dropper comes when Luke arrives at Cloud City, spurred on by a premonition of Han and Leia in pain. The young Jedi falls right into Vader's trap, losing his hand during the lightsaber battle that ensues and still refusing to join the Dark Side of the Force. In a moment that would be quoted, referenced and parodied countless times over the years that followed, Vader reveals to Luke that he is actually his father.

South Korean director Park Chan-wook made inroads in Hollywood in 2013 after helming two English-language films, the psychological drama Stoker and the Chris Evans-led sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer. While both drew praise from critics (the latter has an impressive 95 percent Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes) most reviewers agreed that Park's best work was done domestically, and the jewel in his Korean filmography is undoubtedly Oldboy. The film follows a drunk named Oh Dae-su who's framed for the murder of his wife and imprisoned in an iron-doored hotel room by an unknown man. When he's randomly released 15 years later, he aims to track down his captor with the help of a young female sushi chef who takes him in after his ordeal. The woman and Oh Dae-su fall for each other and begin a sexual relationship, though unbeknownst to the pair this is all part of the captor's grand plan. Oh Dae-su and the young woman are actually father and daughter, which Oh's tormentor takes great pleasure in revealing.

Best known as "the one with the funny voice" from the Police Academy movies, Bobcat Goldthwait really should get more credit for the work he's done behind the camera. He has a "well-crafted, slow-burning horror" on his résumé in 2013's Willow Creek and was able to get a fine tune out of the late Robin Williams in the "startlingly excellent dark comedy" World's Greatest Dad. Between these two features, he directed another movie—one with a real shock ending. God Bless America follows Frank (Joel Murray), a terminally ill man who's had just about enough of celebrity obsession and the decline of American culture, and Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a high-school student with a similarly weary world view. Together they embark on a nationwide rampage, gunning down rude civilians and celebrities alike. We always expect Frank to go down in a hail of bullets, but it's a shock to see schoolgirl Roxy also torn apart by police marksmen during a shootout at an American Idol-style TV talent show.

Another Scorsese-DiCaprio collaboration with a shocking ending, psychological thriller Shutter Island follows U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) as they visit Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane to investigate the disappearance of a woman incarcerated there for drowning her children. While perhaps not the directors' best, Scorsese still delivered a "brilliantly constructed mystery" that leads viewers down a winding path with an unexpected end. Just as Teddy believes he's about to solve the puzzle of the missing woman, he discovers his real name is Andrew Laeddis and he's actually a patient at the hospital, sent there for murdering his wife after she drowned their children while suffering from manic depression. The whole investigation was a ruse by the head of the facility, designed as a last-ditch effort to snap Laeddis out of his conspiracy-obsessed insanity.

Based on the life and travels of American hiker Christopher McCandless, Sean Penn's Into The Wild is a biographical survival film that spends 148 minutes building up to a happy ending that never comes. Through a nonlinear timeline we watch McCandless (Emile Hirsch) living in complete isolation in the Alaskan wilderness intercut with the steps he took to get there, abandoning his comfortable existence to hit the road and be closer to nature. As the film draws to an end and the harsh winter sets in, McCandless begins to realize that true happiness can only be shared with others and plans to return home to his family, though the river he crossed four months earlier has become impassible. On the point of starvation, the young backpacker is forced to gather roots and plants to eat, accidentally consuming a poisonous one in the process. He crawls into his sleeping bag to die.

Denis Villeneuve's abduction thriller Prisoners follows desperate dad Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) as he hunts his daughter's kidnapper, though while he finally succeeds in solving the mystery of her disappearance, the audience is left with a huge unanswered question of their own. Dover gets himself locked in a backyard bunker by the kidnapper, with his only hope of survival being the tenacious Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). The bunker's entrance is covered by a truck, however, and Loki is about to unwittingly leave Dover to rot when the latter begins to frantically blow a whistle. Loki stops as if he hears something, and then we fade to black, with Dover's fate left unknown. It's the kind of shocking ending that has audiences waiting for a post-credits explanation, though one is never offered. Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski even admitted that he expected studio resistance to the planned final scene: "I was very surprised that we were allowed to keep that ending. I was surprised I was able to get the movie made, actually."

Frank Darabont's adaptation of the Stephen King novella The Mist caused controversy before it was even released, due to the director choosing to go with a different ending. King fans were put at ease when the author gave his approval of the changes, though only a man who has spent a lifetime delving into the bleak could claim to enjoy it. The film follows a group of people trapped in a supermarket by a deadly mist full of tentacled creatures, one of whom is dad David (Thomas Jane). In the end, David and his young son manage to escape in a car, though when they run out of gas the father is forced to use his remaining four bullets on his child and passengers. After shooting them all, he steps out of the car to accept his gruesome fate at the hands of the monsters, only for the mist to clear and the U.S. Army to appear. The shock ending was so powerful that it left viewers fighting back the urge to punch their TV screens.

Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out was the most profitable film of 2017, generating an incredible 630 percent return on initial investment. Made for a modest budget of $4.5 million, Peele's social thriller raked in over $255 million at the worldwide box office. A number of factors contributed to Get Out's success, but it was the movie's shocking ending that guaranteed it would live long in the memory.

When Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young black man, meets the parents of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) for the first time, we soon come to realize that something isn't quite right with her family. After Chris meets a peculiar black guest at the family's garden party, viewers are led to believe that the protagonist is about to be brainwashed into some kind of modern-day slavery, but the final reveal is even more mind-blowing: It turns out Chris is in the clutches of the Order of Coagula, a cult that transplants the brains of old, rich white people into the bodies of young black people.

Unlike those that came before him, Chris manages to escape this awful fate, stuffing his ears with cotton to avoid being hypnotized. He fights his way outside and is ultimately rescued by his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery). This wasn't the original ending, however — Peele shot a version in which the cops show up instead of Rod and an innocent Chris is jailed for killing his kidnappers.

The fact that Alejandro Amenabar's The Others managed to shock audiences even though it dropped just two years after M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense is a testament to Amenabar's deft approach to the horror genre. The Spanish-Chilean filmmaker told Combustible Celluloid that when it came to writing the script, he began with the twist ending. He then wrote the beginning, and finished with "all the stuff in the middle." When you watch The Others again, you realize that the first two acts are full of subtle hints at what's to come, but the finale left the majority of first-time viewers in shock.

Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the film follows Nicole Kidman's Grace, a devoutly religious woman who moves into a remote island house with her two children. Grace's daughter has repeated encounters with an otherworldly family (the eponymous "others") who claim the house belongs to them. She's skeptical to begin with, but when she witnesses a piano seemingly playing itself, she becomes convinced that the old Victorian mansion is haunted. She's correct, of course, but she and her kids are the ones doing the haunting — it turns out Grace murdered her children, and all three of them are ghosts.

It's a shocking, but well-earned twist. "Most of the time it's not about the surprise, but how you set up the surprise, so that when you get there, everything makes sense and it's integrated with the soul of the story," Amenabar told Hollywood.com.

Jordan Peele's follow-up to Get Out was less a thought-provoking social thriller and more a straight-up horror movie, but the ending was just as shocking. 2019's Us begins with a little girl named Adelaide wandering off from her parents and entering a spooky beachfront funhouse, where she meets her doppelgänger. When her parents finally locate her, she's unable to speak. Fast forward a few decades and Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) is all grown up, though she remembers that day all too well. When her husband (Winston Duke) suggests going on a family vacation to the same beach, she reluctantly agrees. Before long she realizes that she should have listened to her gut.

Adelaide, her husband, and her two kids are soon terrorized by a family of red jumpsuit-wearing doppelgängers. It turns out that every one of us has a mute double living in the abandoned and forgotten (but very real) underground tunnels that span the length of the United States. That's not the big twist, however. In the final moments of the movie, it's revealed that Adelaide's double choked her out and switched with her the day they came face to face in that hall of mirrors. The leader of the Tethered is actually the real Adelaide, which is why she's the only one who can speak. "This movie's about maybe the monster is you," Peele said on the Empire podcast (via Vice). "It's about us, looking at ourselves as individuals and as a group."

The ending of Ben Affleck's directorial debut Gone Baby Gone was divisive to say the least. The movie, based on Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name, is about the kidnap and subsequent search for missing child Amanda McCready (Madeline O'Brien). Private investigators Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) are hired to find her, and they do — she just isn't where you'd expect her to be. We're led to believe that an associate of Amanda's degenerate mother is responsible, but it turns out that retired police captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) took the girl, believing that she'd have a far better life with him rather than growing up in a rundown part of Boston with an unfit mother.

Fans of the movie are still arguing about what comes next. When Kenzie discovers the truth, Doyle attempts to convince him that he should walk away and allow Amanda to grow up under his care. Kenzie's romantic and professional partner Gennaro agrees with the former cop, and she threatens to leave him if he takes the girl back to her drug-abusing mother. He takes her home anyway, believing it's the right thing to do. "You see the squalor the girl lives in and your heart goes out to her for where she used to live, not only where she's been taken to," Ben Affleck told NPR. "So it raises all kinds of questions about how we're living and how we're treating kids."