But thankfully, some movies break this mold and surprise audiences by letting the bad guy win for once. It makes the movies feel a lot more realistic and impactful. Let’s take a look at some of the best movies where the bad guy ends up winning.
Saw
No matter how hard those people try to make it out of the death puzzles alive, they just can’t pull it off. The Jigsaw killer has pretty much always won, despite being genuinely evil. Sure, he can claim he’s giving them a fair chance, but most of those devices and traps just seem like unnecessarily cruel torture instead of a fun riddle to solve with some friends.
Unbreakable
It’s hard to not root for Samuel L. Jackson, and thankfully in this movie you only find out he’s the actual bad guy right at the time when you find out he got what he wanted. The disappointment of his character, Mr. Glass, being an evil mastermind gets immediately countered by how happy you are that Sam Jackson gets to win.
Ex Machina
The problem with artificial intelligence is that humans generally aren’t smart. That is setting the bar for artificial lifeforms very low if they want to outsmart us. Naturally, that’s exactly what happens in Ex Machina and the last fifteen minutes of that movie are so mind-blowing it should be illegal. And who knows, maybe this article was also written by an AI. You’ll never know.
Watchmen
Watchmen was never one of the happy superhero movies, but boy did that ending kill the mood. Once we finally find out who’s behind the death of a fellow superhero and a couple of threatening incidents that look like Dr. Manhattan wants to nuke everyone, people seem to somehow think he has the right idea and support him. And then they kill Rorschach like he was nothing. Everyone loved that guy!
The Wicker Man
If you’re going to end up with a weird pagan community that just loves burning people inside a huge wicker man, you probably shouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the movie you find yourself ending up inside the wicker man as they burn it. Someone had to be it, and they weren’t going to burn one of their own if they had the chance not to.
The Omen
You don’t often get to see an exorcism-style movie where the Devil ends up winning. It’s honestly kind of refreshing, usually they get rid of whatever unholy thing they’re dealing with by the end of the movie, everything goes back to normal and they just do something else for the next movie. Not with The Omen though – it took them a whole three movies to get rid of Damien. And even at that point, it’s not clear if the little devil kicked the bucket or not.
Alien: Covenant
Just a word of advice: if your android looks like Michael Fassbender and seems too polite, he probably is too polite and he’s going to sacrifice your bodies to an alien lifeform that gestates inside of your belly until they’re mature enough to burst out of your sternum. That’s pretty much the entire movie.
The Cabin in the Woods
And in today’s episode of “horror movies that ended with a curveball”, we have The Cabin in the Woods. Right as some of the somewhat tormented teens are about to escape their cabin of death, where they were hunted by zombies, monsters and hormones, they find out that some sort of ancient cult wants them dead as a sacrifice for the ancient gods. The ceremony goes wrong and the slumbering titans wake up to purge the planet. The End.
