Does anyone else remember when a film ended? I mean really and truely ended. Where you got up and walked out of the cinema or ejected the DVD and could give a satisfied sigh at the fact that they knew it was over. Enthusiastically, unequivocally finished? There are of course a few such films, how could there not be, but the horror genre is quickly finding itself in that most challenging of places, the eternal continuation. Some will object that they don’t want to see their heroes or villains killed off, that the franchise tag is more important than resolving a story, or even that the cool twist of the ending is paramount to making the film cool. People who say this have clearly not felt the satisfaction of actually having a movie end. We would hardly take it in any other genre, so why do we accept it so openly in horror?

Imagine for a moment, if I may just lead you down an obvious road perhaps, that Rambo has just blasted his way through the entire Cambodian army, slinging arrows into people left right and center, taking up the biggest and shiniest gun known to man and slaughtering people at a rate that makes chicken farms look like chicken spas. People are sliced, diced, spliced, and made into mince. Could you really possibly condone at the end of such a film, anything but Rambo walking homeward, back in the United States, his job well done, his reward not quite there, but the bad have been vanquished. Would the film have lived long if just before the end credits roll, Rambo is walking through the forest and is snapped up by a big net and surrounded by armed Cambodians? You’d be furious! Now why is it the case that when we watch films like Saw, Hostel, Nightmare on Elm Street, and countless other franchise horror films, we allow this little final scene of moderate suspense, mild confusion, and frequently a bit of disappointment? What does it do for us?

There are a few obvious problems with horror films that create this issue. The most obvious one, in the case of things like Hostel and Saw (contracted up to 6 seasons!) is that they need the sequels. They need somehow to show us that there is more to come. They are, effectively, teasing us into wanting more. But can you really get away with that one-trick pony as many times as horror has? Surely at this point we’re almost always expecting the revealing ending, that if it takes too long to come we are almost on edge. Imagine if the credits began to roll and there wasn’t a mystery twist to end it with? What would we do? Would we come back for more? Hell yes we would. We’re not some cheap pervert who needs to be teased and lead on to spend our money. We’re horror fans! We love the genre, we love the films. We’ve gone to see all manner of horror films when they were new, and we’ve gone to see sequels of films that had ended as though that were the be-all and end-all of films. In that sense, the people who make horror films give us very little credit. There is a great deal of enjoyment that can come from a franchise taking itself as finished and finding a way to resurrect itself every bit as much as the films that end on a cliff-hanger.

The second problem for horror and the cliff-hanger ending is that it is the best way to get a last little scare or shock out of a typically serene point in a film (a normal film anyway). Back in the day, I’m sure there were scores of fans who leapt out of their seats, and possibly out of their skin, when at the end of Carrie two arms shot up from the grave. The same is true for Friday the 13th, where a little Jason jumps out to grab the leading lady and drag her into the lake. These are moments where, just when you thought you (and the characters) were safe, it all goes right back to hell. That is, in fact, a very good idea in principle. If we expect things to be resolved, that final twist can be intensely effective. But the trouble now is that so many films have done this with such successs early on that it becomes a virtually standard part of a horror films. At that point, the twist is lost, because it’s already expected. The only way we can revert back to it being a shock is if everyone gives up the big finale twist for a few years, and then suddenly one director perhaps can shock us with it. Perhaps.

So where can we go from here? Well, Rob Zombie, that creator of great horror, showed us that it isn’t wrong to end a film with an ending. I hope not to ruin the film for anyone (so please if you haven’t seen The Devil’s Rejects, stop reading, and go find that film and watch it) because everyone should see this film with fresh eyes and no misconceptions. Hopefully this little warning will have gotten rid of those unfortunates who haven’t seen it. We all know the ending. The family which through House of 1000 Corpses and this masterpiece are shot to hell and go out guns blazing, charging down what I can only guess is the entire state Police Department firing at them. It’s Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid in a horror film, a final and unbelievable adrenaline fuelled good-bye. There is no coming back from that, and there shouldn’t be, it’s a film that finally has an ending. There isn’t a twist where you then see the family in the car, and Captain Spaulding suddenly opens his blood red eyes and gives out a laugh. Such a cheap twist would undermine the glory of the entire ending sequence. It isn’t wrong to end a film, and if more people would take a cue from Rob Zombie on this one, we’d have more good horror films.

I have every bit of faith that actually making a true ending, even if it is an unhappy one, can really be an integral part of horror. Easily. I think that saying that we need real endings doesn’t mean we need real Cinderella stories that end every time in the good guys winning, the bad guys losing, and the moral of the story is so clear and so pathetically obvious that we could’ve read it on a cereal box. We have a whole host of non-horror films, plays and books that we can look at which all resolve in the most twisted and bizarre ways, but which do still end. We have greek tragedies whose real moral is that the Gods are Cruel. There are tons and tons of great endings that are tragic, dramatic, cynical, crazy, and outright astonishing. Horror directors need to stop relying on cheap twists and tricks and start giving us the good stuff, give us Endings or give us Death! So will they?

If there is anything we’ve learned from Hollywood over the decades, it’s that producers and directors are not risk-takers, they try to repeat success and they try to make trends that work. With Japanese horror turning into American horror, we had a whole slew of films in succession. Remakes became profitable, and have remained so since. So what do we need for this to work? Simple, we need one or two directors to have the daring and the willingness to make a film that doesn’t end with cheap tricks, promises of sequels, or a last little jump, and to give us a real, good, thought-out ending, and then we all need to grab our friends and family and everyone we can find and get them to go see it. With success, that formula of giving us credit as an audience and of giving us some substance will become the norm. Of course, before we can support a great film with no cheap trick to end it, we need to get a director who dares to give us what we want. When someone wants to finance my first film, I’ll show the way.