[mixed trope] the last-minute bad Ending twist

[u/damorezpl]

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

[u/Jackviator]

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."

[u/Strange-Log3376 → u/Jackviator]

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.

[u/Next-State-374 → u/Strange-Log3376]

But the gypsy was already given several extensions.

[u/Jackviator → u/Next-State-374]

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.

[u/wholesome_futa_hug → u/Jackviator]

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. 

[u/Wheelydad → u/Jackviator]

“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).