I’ve seen threads asking for movies where evil triumphs. In my experience, most modern horror movies end with evil triumphant or, at best, evil still alive. Michael Myers and Jason are never really dead, the demon is never truly vanquished, the monster you thought was dead is still twitching (or has made babies), the psycho slasher has escaped, the vampire turned one of the Good guys before dying… you just KNOW going in to most horror movies that there can’t be anything like a conventional happy ending in which the bad guy or monster is dead at the end, and the danger is over for good (after all, you can’t moisten more sequels if evil is beaten).
What horror movies in the past 35 years had good defeat evil, without hinting that maybe the monster or killer is still alive or will return?
Near Dark.
Technically, Aliens ended this way, but we know how that turned out when they decided to make another movie…
Carrie
It
The “Carrie” remake? The original had her hand coming up out of the ground. Stephen King commented that he knew it was coming, and still scared him. I haven’t seen the remake.
The original. All the bad characters were dead. Carrie was avenged but dead. The grave scene happened only in Sues dream.
One earlier this year; I’ll spoiler-tag it JIC:
Get Out
No true horror fan wants an Unambiguously Happy Ending! We would be very UN-happy if we thought evil was vanquished forever!
Sorry, I don’t mean this as a thread-sh&t, it’s just that what you are asking for would be very unpopular with the true fans, and therefore would be very hard to find.
I should have remembered that. But it’s been years since I’ve seen it.
Hang on; does Scream count?
How happy are you with Dracula?
That’s immediately what I thought of as well! (An excellent movie too, btw!)
That may be true, but it doesn’t affect my question.
It strikes me that, nowadays, it’s VERY rare for the monster or serial killer to get killed off at the end, and to have the danger completely over. Perhaps that’s because horror filmmakers know there are fans like you who WANT the monster to survive, or perhaps it’s because they want to be able to make 10 sequels.
Regardless, nowadays, happy endings in which Freddy Krueger or Hannibal Lecter (or whoever) is dead and buried and no further threat at the end seem to be very rare.
In the 2011 remake of Fright Night, the vampire next door unambiguously dies.
He dies in the original as well, but the original implies that the hero’s friend has become a vampire and is on the loose.
Jacobs Ladder.
I’d say the remake of CARRIE- She is in a good place in her last moments & ends it all on her own terms, with a show of kindness to her only real friend.
Since most people here ignored “recent”- I’ll add “The Bride” with Clancy Brown, Jennifer Beals, & Sting. The happiest Frankenstein movie ever.
Actually, the mistitled “Victor Frankenstein” with McAvoy & Radcliffe ended happily.
Recent is relative. Recent to Old Guy might be the 50s.
In the original Friday the 13th the killer was Jason’s mom, who unambiguously died at the end. According to the backstory Jason had been unambiguously dead for years. The scene at the very end where Jason came out of the water, like Carrie’s hand coming from the grave, was Alice’s bad dream. (If it had been real she would have been dead, rather than waking up in the hospital.)
Actually, it doesn’t quite. Y’see, it’s a little-known fact that “Aliens” has a subtle end-credit “bit”, it isn’t even a scene. As the final credits are rolling across the screen and the soundtrack music fades out, there is the sound of humming machinery over a black screen. Then there’s the weird sound that’s a bit like the pods opening. That was James Cameron’s way of leaving the film open for sequels: another alien creature got aboard the escape ship and was on the loose as Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and Bishop were all asleep in cryo-chambers.
Does “Shaun of the Dead” count as a horror movie? It’s a little intense (and sometimes even scary) to be labeled an out-and-out parody film. But it does end with (spoilers for a decade-plus old movie) Shaun alive and reunited with his girlfriend and…his best friend. The zombie apocalypse has come and gone and zombies have been ‘normalized’ as part of society.
Jaws
Poltergeist
I realize they both had sequels, but they didn’t end as if they had sequels (also playing fast and loose with “recent”).