Image via Fox Searchlight
By
Luc Haasbroek
Published 3 minutes ago
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
Sign in to your Collider account
Summary
Generate a summary of this story
follow
Follow
followed
Followed
Like
Like
Thread
Log in
Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:
Try something different:
Show me the facts
Explain it like I’m 5
Give me a lighthearted recap
As Shakespeare knew well, sometimes the only satisfying way to end a story is to kill everyone off. With that in mind, this list looks at some of the very best movies in which all the characters die (or, at least, are strongly implied to die). There are no survivors, no last-minute rescues, no false hope.
These are films that stare directly into the abyss and refuse to look away. They range from satire to horror to sci-fi, but what unites them is their grim audacity. These are some of the most pulse-pounding movies where pretty much nobody makes it to the end credits alive.
10 ‘Don’t Look Up’ (2021)
Leonardo DiCaprio in Don't Look UpImage via Netflix
"We really did have everything, didn’t we?" Don't Look Up manages to be both funnier and bleaker than your average apocalypse movie (even if it falls short of its ambitions as a political statement. When two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling toward Earth, they try to warn the world, only to find that no one cares. Politicians turn it into a PR stunt, billionaires see it as a business opportunity, and the media treats extinction like entertainment. Director Adam McKay uses this premise to comment on real-world denial, a culture too distracted, too self-absorbed, to save itself.
The film’s humor is sharp and nihilistic, but its ending is shockingly sincere: a quiet family dinner as the world ends, prayer and panic blending into acceptance. Then the screen goes white, and humanity is gone. No miracles or deus ex machina salvation. Just the silence after too much noise.
9 ‘Melancholia’ (2011)
Image via Nordisk
"The Earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it." In Melancholia, Lars von Trier makes Armageddon personal. The film begins with dreamlike slow-motion images of destruction, then rewinds to tell the story of two sisters (Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg) as a rogue planet named Melancholia hurtles toward Earth. Dunst’s character, Justine, is clinically depressed, but as the end draws near, she grows serene; for her, annihilation feels like relief.
Melancholia is a very weird movie, but a surprisingly poignant and profound one, with a lot to say about despair and grace. The cinematography is breathtaking, the music (mostly drawn from Wagner) is operatic, and the finale is simultaneously grim and strangely peaceful. As the planet looms larger and the sky begins to tremble, the sisters build a makeshift "magic cave" to face the end together. When Melancholia finally collides with Earth, the destruction is silent and sublime.
8 ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)
A horde of zombies walks towards the camera in Night of the Living Dead (1968).Image via Continental Distributing
"They’re coming to get you, Barbara!" Some zombie tropes had been rattling around the fringes of cinema for decades before Night of the Living Dead but, with this movie, George A. Romero crystallized them into the form we know today. Shot on a shoestring budget, this black-and-white nightmare traps a handful of survivors in a farmhouse as the dead rise outside. Paranoia, mistrust, and human folly eat them alive long before the zombies do. It all culminates in one of the most shocking endings in horror history.
After surviving the night, the lone Black protagonist, Ben (Duane Jones), is mistaken for a ghoul and casually shot by a white posse. His body is tossed on a fire with the rest. In that single moment, Romero turns pulp horror into social commentary, linking racism and violence to the very concept of apocalypse. A lean, mean classic; one of the most influential genre movies of all time.
7 ‘Sunshine’ (2007)
Cillian Murphy looking at the camera against a bright green screen in Sunshine (2007)Image via Searchlight Pictures
"At the end of time, a moment will come when one man remains. Then the moment will pass." In Sunshine, Danny Boyle fuses psychological horror and cosmic awe, all packaged within a sci-fi shell. Set fifty years in the future, the story revolves around a team of astronauts on a desperate mission to reignite the dying sun. As they approach their target, paranoia sets in, the ship malfunctions, and something (or someone) begins sabotaging the mission. The cramped confines of the spacecraft become a pressure cooker.
As the tensions rise, the crew sacrifices themselves one by one, each death bringing them closer to success, until only Cillian Murphy’s Capa remains. He plunges into the sun's surface, completing the mission as his body disintegrates into light. The world may be saved, but every human being who made it possible is gone. A desolate but fitting ending to this story, which is modeled closely on classic sci-fi.
6 ‘Cloverfield’ (2008)
'Cloverfield' promotional picture has the headless Statue of Liberty with New York City smoldering in the backgroundImage via Paramount Pictures
"It’s alive. It’s huge!" Found footage meets monster mayhem. The setup is simple: a going-away party in Manhattan turns into chaos when a colossal creature attacks the city. What follows is pure adrenaline: terrified civilians running through the dark, explosions shaking skyscrapers, glimpses of something vast and incomprehensible. The decision to tell the story through handheld footage was a masterstroke, making it all feel disturbingly real. Countless movies to follow would borrow from this approach.
By the end, the survivors huddle under a bridge, whispering their final words as bombs fall overhead. Ironic that they're killed by the monster but by the government's response to it. The last image of the scene is the camera buried in rubble, still recording. Then the movie cleverly shows a clip from the month before, where, in the background, an object can be seen falling from the sky into the ocean. Their fates had been sealed for weeks.
5 ‘The Hateful Eight’ (2015)
John "The Hangman" and "Crazy" Daisy walking into a cabin in The Hateful Eight.Image via The Weinstein Company
"Let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it way down." The Hateful Eight is a Western fused with a slow-burn horror and a touch of madcap humor. Eight strangers are trapped in a blizzard, doomed by distrust. Set in post-Civil War Wyoming, the film unfolds almost entirely inside a snowbound cabin, where secrets unravel, tempers flare, and blood eventually paints the walls. It’s a story about America eating itself, about vengeance, paranoia, and the poisonous legacy of violence. Tarantino stages it like a stage play, using long dialogue scenes as ticking bombs.
By the time the carnage ends, everyone’s dead or dying: racists, bounty hunters, liars, victims. Yet there’s a strange catharsis in that final image of two dying men, once enemies, sharing a bitter laugh as they bleed out beneath a false letter from Abraham Lincoln. The Hateful Eight is nihilistic, yes, but also weirdly poetic.
4 ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ (2016)
Riz Ahmed in Rogue One: A Star Wars StoryImage via Walt Disney Studios
"Rebellions are built on hope." For all its starships and lightsabers, Rogue One is a pretty grounded and fatalistic tale. The space opera trappings hide a gritty, tragic war story. One of the very Star Wars movies of the post-Force Awakens era, it tells the story of the Rebel spies who stole the Death Star plans, a mission we know is doomed from the start. Felicity Jones and Diego Luna lead a ragtag crew who fight not for glory, but for the chance to make victory possible for someone else.
Every character finds a small redemption before the inevitable: a blinding beam of light obliterating everything. Yet their sacrifice gives birth to hope, linking directly into A New Hope. Rogue One’s power lies in its ending: no survivors, no medals, just purpose fulfilled. In many ways, this was the first Star Wars movie to really reckon with the cost of rebellion.
3 ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ (2012)
The hand of an Ancient One reaches out to destroy the world at the end of The Cabin in the Woods.Image via Lionsgate
"You think you know the story. You think you know how it’s going to end." What begins as a routine slasher setup turns into one of the most audacious genre twists of the century. The Cabin in the Woods starts with five college friends heading to a remote cabin for a weekend of cliché horror. Then the curtain lifts... literally. It's revealed that the characters are pawns in a ritualistic system run by technicians who manipulate monsters to appease ancient gods. The result is a meta-horror masterpiece, serving up everything from force fields and merfolk to werewolves, zombies, and Lovecraftian horrors.
By the final act, the survivors realize the only way to end the cycle is to end everything. They light a joint, hold hands, and watch the world collapse. The film’s closing shot, a giant hand bursting from the earth, is pure chaos and cosmic comedy. The Cabin in the Woods kills everyone and the genre with them, gleefully.
2 ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999)
The Blair Witch ProjectImage via Artisan Entertainment
"I'm so scared." The Blair Witch Project is a genius exercise in viral marketing and a solid horror to boot. Shot for almost nothing, it became one of the most profitable and influential films ever made. The conceit is bare-bones but effective: three film students venture into the woods to investigate a local legend and vanish without a trace. We find only their footage. The genius of the film lies in what it doesn’t show. Most of the terror comes from the viewer's own imagination.
The shaky camera, the sobbing confessions, the growing hysteria; all of it builds toward an ending that still chills decades later. The final moments, a man standing motionless in the corner of a dark basement, are burned into horror history. Everyone dies, but we never see how, and that makes it worse. For all these reasons, this movie feels cursed, and was an instant sensation on release.
1 ‘The Descent’ (2005)
Shauna Macdonald swimming in an horrifying pool of red fluid in The Descent.Image via Pathé
"It’s down here with us. It’s down here!" Few modern horror films are as suffocating or as cruel as The Descent. Directed by Neil Marshall (who directed Dog Soldiers and the killer Game of Thrones episode 'The Watchers on the Wall'), it follows six women on a caving expedition gone disastrously wrong. When they become trapped underground, they discover something worse than the dark: a colony of blind, flesh-eating creatures. That said, while the monsters are definitely scary, the real horror is psychological.
The stress of the situation causes the group to implode, survival rapidly turning to savagery. The U.S. release ends ambiguously, but the original British cut is merciless: everyone dies, the last survivor (Shauna Macdonald) hallucinating freedom before waking in pitch blackness, alone. All in all, a grim but highly entertaining movie that crams a lot of frights and mayhem into just 100 minutes.
Like
The Descent
R
Horror
Adventure
Thriller
Release Date
August 4, 2006
Runtime
99 minutes
Director
Neil Marshall
Writers
Neil Marshall
Cast
See All-
Shauna Macdonald
-
Saskia Mulder
Expand
Collapse
-
Movie
-
Sunshine
-
Cloverfield
We want to hear from you! Share your opinions in the thread below and remember to keep it respectful.
Be the first to post Images Attachment(s) Please respect our community guidelines. No links, inappropriate language, or spam.Your comment has not been saved
Send confirmation emailThis thread is open for discussion.
Be the first to post your thoughts.
- Terms
- Privacy
- Feedback
1 day ago
Collider Recommends: Jump Into the Holidays With the 3 Best Movies to Watch This Weekend
1 day ago
’A Man on the Inside’s Ted Danson Was Almost Killed on Set By Glitter
1 day ago
Epic New Teen Fantasy Series Unveiled in First Trailer for 'The Wayfinders' [Exclusive]
1 day ago
The 3 Best Movies To Watch on Netflix This Weekend (#3 Is Already Getting Oscar Buzz)
More from our brands
The Best Movies To Watch On Netflix Tonight
50 Best New Movies on Streaming to Watch Right Now
Best Games Of The Decade So Far (2020-)
The Open-World Games That Take The Longest To Beat
The 55 Best Movies of All Time, Ranked
20 Underrated Horror Movies That Are Flawless From Beginning to End
The Best Movies of the Last 25 Years, in Chronological Order
What To Watch
July 20, 2025
The 72 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now
Trending Now
Stephen King’s Most Unsettling Sci-Fi Fantasy Series Will Be Much Easier To Watch This December
The Worst-Reviewed Series of Ryan Murphy's Career Is Also a #1 Hit on Streaming
This Underrated Sci-Fi Series Left Fans a Four-Word Rallying Cry for Our Times
