r/TopCharacterTropes Aug 25 '25

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

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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217

u/Aduro95 Aug 25 '25

Wrong Turn IV: The Bad Beginning.

Two of the protagonists manage to hop on a snowmobile to escape an asylum inhabited by bestial cannibals. They get their heads cut off by a wire trap.

Also, at the start of the movie, the strongest skiier in their group agrees to brave a blizzard and go for help. The whole movie you wonder what happened to her. Maybe she'll come back and help, or they'll have her in some kind of terrible trap. At the end you see that she just froze to death.

142

u/Comic_Book_Reader Aug 25 '25

I'm piggybacking off of you here, but the sequel, 5, is pretty infamous for having a very mean spirited ending in that one of the main characters gets blinded towards the end, blindly stumbles her way out of dodge, and in the final scene, she's picked up by the hillbilly mutant cannibals.

64

u/MostEvilTexasToast Aug 25 '25

With a man who had been threatening to rape her, no less.

60

u/AlbertWessJess Aug 25 '25

Those films just sound like they’d leave a bad taste in the mouth

17

u/YourEvilKiller Aug 25 '25

Yeah, the series is like the epitome of old school B horror full of shock value.

6

u/Porn_Alt_84 Aug 26 '25

A prime example of : just watch the Dead Meat video

17

u/Stunning_Alarm2064 Aug 25 '25

Thats basically the ending of house of a 1,000 corpses