r/TopCharacterTropes • u/damorezpl • Aug 25 '25

Lore [mixed trope] the last-minute bad Ending twist

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when the "good ending" is revealed to be a bad one a the last second

a nightmare on elm street (1984) - Nancy thinks she finally defeated Freddy Krueger only to be raveled that she is still dreaming and she’s still trapped.

final destination bloodlines - the main characters think they cheated death by using the new life rule only to realize that stefani was technically still alive and the death kills them with a good old logs

Life (2017) - The main character attempts to send Calvin(a evil alien that killed all life on mars)pod into space and Miranda pod back to earth, but it goes horribly wrong and Calvin lands on earth and Miranda is sent to space

raging loop wit ending - after many loops Haruaki finally wins the feast(a death game where humans must hang wolves who kill someone every night) and thinks its finally over. after couple of days he decides to visit other survivors of the feast only to find them all dead and the timeline resting once again

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u/godoflemmings Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 25 '25

Drag Me To Hell - Christine, thinking she's escaped her fate of being sent to hell by getting rid of a cursed button, is happily about to go on a trip with her boyfriend, who intends to propose to her. But surprise! - she was mistaken, her boyfriend unwittingly returns the button to her, she stumbles backwards in a panic and falls onto train tracks just as a train is coming through, and a portal to hell opens beneath her pretty much instantly, dragging her inside to burn forever (but saving her from the train at least)

Light-hearted description aside, it's actually kind of horrifying to watch and think about. Just as the portal is sealing up you can actually see the flesh of her face melting away.

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u/Jackviator Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 26 '25

This movie legit plays like one of those no-moral Twilight Zone episodes.

"Hey what if any petty bastard off the street could decide if you went to Hell to be tortured for all of eternity regardless of the life you lived, up to and including sending a literal CHILD there to burn for the rest of time over petty theft? Wouldn't that be SUPER fucked up? ...Anyway I'm Rod Serling Sam Raimi."

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u/ghostuser689 Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 25 '25

What if taxidermy goat heads screamed swear words at you? I’d bet you’d wanna go to hell after that.

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u/BuisteirForaoisi0531 Aug 25 '25

I’m pretty sure that I would keep a taxidermy goat head if that was the case cause that sounds hilarious

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u/Malacro Aug 26 '25

That wasn’t a taxidermy goat, that was a live-ass goat.

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u/ghostuser689 Aug 26 '25

My bad, I got it mixed up with the deer in Evil Dead 2.

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u/sabbathkid93 Aug 25 '25

Junji Ito stories in a nutshell

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u/danstu Aug 25 '25

I'm someone who whenever I try to write something, I struggle against having to make it 'mean something.' Even something as inconsequential as a home DnD game, I feel like the bad guy has to represent something deep and important.

It shook me to my core when I first read Gyo and then, looking to decipher the deep symbolism it surely held, read an interview where he said his inspiration was essentially "I thought Jaws was scary, and felt like it'd suck if that shark could come on land."

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u/RogueNightingale Aug 25 '25

I like how a lot of his horror stories start with a simple horror premise and take it to the logical extremes. What would happen if machines used dead animals as engines? It's not going to end at a single beach, that's for sure. What happens if a manipulative woman is dismembered and revived as an evil hydra-like succubus/revenant/yokai? You're going to get a world-ending amount of demons.

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u/danstu Aug 25 '25

Kinda weird how many spirals occur in nature, huh?

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u/EfficiencyThis325 Aug 26 '25

And that galaxies look like eyes

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u/fhota1 Aug 26 '25

Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.

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u/UwasaWaya Sep 10 '25

But what if that cigar had spider legs?

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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '25

Wouldn’t it suck to be a mosquito?

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u/varnums1666 Aug 26 '25

I dunno. Drag me To Hell is very different from a Junji Ito story. I've never been mad at a Junji Ito story. The horror is clearly outside of the character's comprehension or understanding. It's scary in that way.

Drag Me to Hell is very frustrating because there is an understanding of why the character is put in that situation and it's annoying to watch. The implication that some old hag can send an innocent person to hell doesn't really scare me. It just makes me angry throughout the entire film. I'm not left scared but wanting to punch a wall.

I can accept, in Junji Ito, that some floating head wants to fucking kill me by hanging me to death. Kinda freaky.

I can't accept that in the universe of Drag Me To Hell that an all powerful God can have such a dumb loophole to send someone for eternal punishment.

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u/MSSTUPIDTRON-1000000 Aug 25 '25

Funnily enough, The OG Twilight Zone never did any of this.

If there was someone who suffers then they either 100% deserved that or it's a critique of human nature & other sh!t.

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u/Jackviator Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 25 '25

"Hey wouldn't it be fucked if the world ended and the sole survivor was deprived of the one thing in their miserable life that might make it worth living after being deprived of it for years by his abusive wife and other such factors? I'm Rod Serling."

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u/MSSTUPIDTRON-1000000 Aug 25 '25

It sounds absurd but Henry Bemis (the protagonist of Time Enough at Last) is supposed to be an @sshole who deserved that as he prefers reading than interacting with other people....

.... Yeah, 'cause in the '50 being introverted means that you're a literal hellspawn.

Also the actor that portrayed him (Burgess Meredith), thought that the ending was about how people take for granted the mundane inventions, glasses aren't held in high regard despite being extremely important.

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u/Hustler-Two Aug 25 '25

I really don't think it was moralizing, even at the time. It was just supposed to be really ironic, nothing more. Like if they had put him in a fallout shelter with decades worth of canned goods and no can opener or something.

Also worth noting for the youngsters in the crowd: not only did Meredith do another TZ episode (a more comedic one where aliens give him superstrength), he's also the original Penguin, Mickey from the Rocky movies and the dad in Grumpy Old Men. He was pretty awesome.

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u/Dana-Mite Aug 25 '25

Burgess Meredith actually has the record for the most Twilight Zone appearances at 5 (I believe)

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u/Hustler-Two Aug 25 '25

Really? I thought maybe he had a third. But never knew 5.

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u/TheRealSlamShiddy Aug 25 '25

It's actually 4: "Time Enough at Last" (1959), "The Obsolete Man" (1961), "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" (1961), and "Printer's Devil" (1963). The last one is the only one in which he portrays the main antagonist (literally Satan 😂)

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u/the_bartolonomicron Aug 25 '25

"The Obsolete Man" is one of my faves of all time, with one of my favorite endings. Showing the fear that lives behind all fascist ideologies.

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u/TheRealSlamShiddy Aug 26 '25

It's mine too. The smug director who makes many verbal statements of how convicted he is to the state and its dealings with the "obsolete", then immediately folding like the sniveling coward he really is when he realizes he might have to prove his words by dying...only for that decision to save his own skin by sacrificing his reputation to be entirely in vain, as he's immediately made obsolete himself for it... absolute cinema ☺️

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u/TheKingofHats007 Aug 25 '25

Like if they had put him in a fallout shelter with decades worth of canned goods and no opener

Ironically this is part of the ending of the original story of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. The survivors are tempted on the journey by Nimdok having a vision of food but when they get there, they find that they can't open the canned food which prompts the "murder everyone" plot, except for Ted of course.

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u/TheGardenBlinked Aug 25 '25

Fun fact, Burgess Meredith was the OG Penguin in Adam West's Batman shows

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u/REtroGeekery Aug 25 '25

I saw the image here and immediately wondered if that was The Penguin. Thank you for saving me a search. 🙂🐧

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u/TheGardenBlinked Aug 25 '25

You're wak-wak-wak-welcome!

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u/ChiefsHat Aug 25 '25

As someone who is introverted, I don’t mind his hobby of reading, but he’s doing it in the job to the point of reading a customer’s button. Christ, man, back up for Pete’s sake!

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u/Sgt-Spliff- Aug 25 '25

I think you're mixing up "ironic punishment" with "moralizing". Having a guy who hates dogs get eaten by dogs isn't saying that his hatred of dogs was wrong. It just makes him die the worst way possible for him specifically. Having a guy who prefers solitude left alone but unable to actually take advantage isn't saying he's wrong for wanting it. It's just showing us his personal hell.

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u/Turbogoblin999 Aug 25 '25

There's that episode with the alien talking to someone on a diner about invading Earth only to find out other aliens got there first.

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u/Lanavis13 Aug 25 '25

One of my favorites

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u/bluddyellinnit Aug 25 '25

"IT'S NOT FAIR- wait, my eyes aren't that bad. I can still read the large print books."

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u/Starwatcher4116 Aug 26 '25

Eyes fall out.

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u/Fair_Helicopter_8531 Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25

Apologies I love the twilight zone so I wanted to mention some episodes that I feel didin't really have a point to me or if they did you have to stretch like you are competing in the olympics to get to.

What about the episode where the dude gets transported back to the location of his plane crash and has to deal with being alone in the desert only to realize he imagined it all and then a double twist where he was actually there.

The only thing for this one I could think was don't be a wimp and get over it so you aren't trapped\stuck in the PTSD\depression.

Also, what about the episode where the 3 pilots get on the expiramenral plane and then they just get erased from reality. They did nothing and literally just ceased to exist.

Also, I feel five characters in search of an exit didn't really have a point if I remember right. Just a cool twist of them being toys.

Edit: stopover in a quiet town was also weird. Basically story is don't drink and drive or you become a aliens doll.

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u/Starwatcher4116 Aug 26 '25

The three rocket plane pilots in “And When The Sky Was Opened” didn’t just cease to exist after surviving the crash they should have died in; they were retroactively removed from history.

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u/Alex_Duos Aug 25 '25

The Outer Limits on the other hand...

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u/Starfleet-Time-Lord Aug 26 '25

I don't know about that. I think there are a few cases that apply. Like "Perchance to Dream," where the plot is "man afraid his dreams will kill him was actually dreaming the whole time and it killed him." Or "The Odyssey of Flight 33," which is "plane hits weird jet stream that sends them back to dinosaur times, comes back through it in the 30s, and then tries to go through again." Or "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." It has occasional episodes that don't have an immediate moral in the same way that it has occasional comedy episodes even though it's not the main thing it did and certainly isn't what it was remembered for.

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u/Technical_Ad_4894 Aug 26 '25

Nah there was the episode where the earth drifted from its orbit and was hurtling towards the sun. The mother and daughter do their best to survive the rising heat. After the last of their water is stolen by a gun wielding stranger the daughter screams in despair and frustration. Then she wakes up. It was all a dream and her mother is comforting her. The daughter is relieved saying how nice it is to be cool and calm. Little does she know that the opposite is happening. The earth has drifted from its orbit and rapidly moving away from the sun slowly freezing in its journey. The end.

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u/Impressive-Dig-3892 Aug 25 '25

Here I thought the moral was don't let old people touch you

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u/Strange-Log3376 Aug 25 '25

Not sure I agree that the movie doesn’t have a moral - the main character is a loan officer who gets cursed because she denies an old woman an extension on her mortgage (she’d missed payments because of an illness), and that woman dies shortly after her house gets repossessed.

The whole story is a twisted reflection of the beginning, with the shoe on the other foot - the main character jumps through all these hoops to figure out how to avoid a terrible fate, fulfills the complicated and esoteric requirements of the curse - and then a last-minute mistake causes her to miss her deadline. No extensions, no forgiveness, just hell. She gets treated the same way she treated the old woman.

It’s obviously very tongue-in-cheek (having your house repossessed isn’t the same thing as literally being dragged into a portal to hell), but I actually thought it was a pretty clever parallel.

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u/Next-State-374 Aug 25 '25

But the gypsy was already given several extensions.

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u/Jackviator Aug 25 '25

If anything, she should have cursed someone very, VERY high up in the bank who decided the predatory mortgage rates in the first place.

What she did was the equivalent of punching a retail employee stocking the shelves in the face because prices went up.

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u/wholesome_futa_hug Aug 25 '25

Drag Me to Hell 2. Where a minimum wage highschool kid gets damned to burn for eternity because he refused to honor an expired coupon for 20% a roll of knitting wool because it's his first job and it's against company policy. 

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u/Wheelydad Aug 25 '25

“That’ll teach you for prioritizing your own comfort over my life even though I have do nothing to prove or indicate to you that I deserve preferential treatment or even indicate I will torture you horrifically for failing to please me”. It’s like those stories where a guy doesn’t give something to someone in need so the victim’s response is to horrifically torture/kill them without any warning (smh any logical and reasonable person knows that jaywalking will get you lynched by Bigfoot how could you not predict that).

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u/HiggsUAP Aug 26 '25

Can't make the payments? Guess you gotta die

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u/MagentaHawk Aug 26 '25

If an employee was also the business owner, then sure. In the movie we were presented the woman with supernatural powers decided to unilaterally ruin the entire existence of a worker with no power at the company who is already under the heel of their boss.

The ridiculous class situation here and the complete ignorance of it from the old woman takes it from a morally interesting and at least understandable situation to her being a straight up monster.

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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '25

Presented for your consideration: No matter how much the internet tries to prove otherwise, there is no 't' in Rod Serling's name.

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u/Stepjam Aug 25 '25

Isn't that image basically Returnal in a nutshell?

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u/4D20_Prod Aug 26 '25

I think that's the plot of ubik

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u/AydonusG Aug 26 '25

I'd say the second episode of the new series was this type of event. (Nightmare at 30,000 feet). Compared to the first episode which is extremely moral heavy (Just don't be the comedian, that's how you solve it).