El Orfanato - If memory serves,The mother realizes she inadvertently caused her adopted sons’ death, but also realizes the ghosts of the orphans want someone to take care of them, so she kills herself and becomes their caretaker.
Huh - never noticed that before. Cite?
Recent might be relative, but the OP clearly defined the term.
On the IMDB trivia page, it’s the sixth item under “spoilers.”
Or, alternately, you can netflix the movie and just fast-forward to the very end of the credits and just listen to it.
Are those human or dog years?
The Lost Boys, perhaps? (turns 30 y.o. on Harry Potter’s birthday)
Also: Sweeney Todd (almost 10) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (aged 24 come October).
I haven’t seen any plans for Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2. Peewee Hermancula was clearly not going to get better.
What? I thought that was a downer.
Heck, there are several zombie movies that end on high notes - the zombie wave is being brought under control, there might be a cure or vaccine etc.
As I recall:
28 Days Later
World War Z
Warm Bodies
Well, it certainly left no possibility of a sequel.
Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, if a comedy-horror film counts.
Tremors** , although hilarious in places, was also out-and-out terrifying…but still had a happy, all-wrapped-up ending (although that didn’t stop them from making a sequel).
Not really a “happy ending” in the spirit of the OP, but you have a point – the horror turns out to be an Owl Creek Bridge hallucination, so the protagonist’s death does end it all.
The Conjuring ends happily doesn’t it? As does “The Others” and “signs” although those aren’t typical horror movies.
Sixth Sense too
That’s true in the book version of World War Z as well (which to my understanding was very different from the movie). In the book, humans defeated the zombies. There had been a huge amount of casualties and there were still a few pockets of zombies left to be cleared up but the book made it clear the humans had won the war.
Well…
Bruce Willis’s character realized he was dead and finally got closure with his widow, and the kid’s mom accepted and understood the kid’s “talent,” but he was still going to spend the rest of his life, it’s implied, having (sometimes horribly mutilated) dead people coming up to him to chat. If I were him, I’d move to Antarctica or some other really, really isolated place with no or few(er) ghosts!
I suppose technically at the end of The Mist, things are getting better in general. Just not at all for that particular guy.
But their arcs ended with them both in better places. Man that was a great movie.
How about “Tucker and Dale vs Evil?”
Add What We Do in the Shadows (2014) to that category.
The Frighteners ended with the hero escaping the muderous ghost and he even got to share his gift with his girlfriend.