Low- or no-budget horror movies are becoming more and more popular, regardless of their quality. There are plenty of good ones to choose from, but the one that started it all was “The Blair Witch Project,” which still holds the record for high box office based on budget.
As one of the very first found-footage films, it follows a group of students who go looking for the “Blair Witch,” a being of myth and legend. To their horror, they find her and find themselves picked off one-by-one until the final shot reveals that no one is safe. The ending was a shocker, but it’s simple to understand: the characters are dead.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Since the movie was written by Charlie Kaufman, it’s pretty easy to know going in that “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” was going to leave us feeling confused. It begins with a young woman going to meet her boyfriend’s parents during a winter storm and gets weirder and weirder as time goes on. The woman’s name constantly changes, time flips back and forth, even things like backstories, outfits, and sets change on what seems to be a whim.
It turns out the whole thing is a fantasy of a lonely high school janitor...and the movie seems to end with the janitor killing himself, but nothing is on screen, and the final scene is the boyfriend giving a long speech from another movie.
The Thing
The seminal horror flick “The Thing” will make it hard to trust your friends. It’s an exploration of paranoia and loneliness set inside of a terrifying scenario. As an alien creature wrecks havoc on the team of researchers in the arctic, it transforms into friends and foes at the drop of a hat, which not only creates some wonderfully disgusting scenes but makes every character fear for his or her life.
In the end, as the survivors fly away in a helicopter, it’s never made clear whether or not the alien menace was actually destroyed. To the characters - and the viewers - it’s all-too-possible for the creature to still be alive.
Krampus
Christmas horror movies are nothing new, which is a good way overall to explain “Krampus.” The Krampus is a mythical beast that sort of exists as the antithesis to Santa Claus, punishing bad children in December.
The 2015 “Krampus” movie is one that should stay in the bargain bin, and the ending is no help - it seems as if the characters are trapped in a loop of reliving Christmas day over and over, with more and more horror added every time, but it’s also possible that they’re now free to escape from the horror of the Krampus, but he’ll always be watching over them. The movie doesn’t want to explain, and viewers were quick to move on.
Us
No one can deny that “Us” is a great film, and even though it didn’t gain the critical acclaim of the director’s earlier work “Get Out,” it still brought fans in droves. The ending of the film is even rather clear: the underground version of the lead female character, Adelaide Wilson, was actually living aboveground the entire time.
Yet it’s still the kind of movie that will send one to random pages on the internet trying to figure out all the little twists and turns, and viewers are known to have spent hours falling down Youtube theory holes in an effort to better understand everything they just witnessed.