Recently, as a family we were going through our movie collection to find a movie to watch that evening. We found an old one that none of us could remember, so we watched it again. Big mistake – it was terrible. It was a low budget movie with a an awful double twist of an ending where the hero was first miraculously saved from certain death, only to be murdered shortly after in an ambulance by someone he would never have suspected. It was a kind of ‘gotcha’ moment where I can imagine the screenwriter thought – ‘you never saw that coming’. Well, he/she might be right. But from my perspective it made for a lousy ending – and the video is going in the bin where it properly belongs.

The purpose of this blog is not to critique that particular movie, but to look at all movies with dark endings and to look more closely at the ‘Monster in the House” genre.

Movies with dark endings are mainly associated with the horror genre. But not all horror movies have end that way. For example, “Alien”, a science fiction horror story, is full of excitement and tension and a great movie. But it has a positive ending, with Ripley pushing the Alien out of her craft into space in the final scene. Basically, the good guys win.

Compare the ending of “Alien” with that of “Alien:Covenant”. At the end of Alien:Covenant, Daniels, the heroine, after being put into her cryopod realises that the synthetic Walter has been replaced by his evil synthetic twin, David, leaving the crew, the colonists and human embryos at his mercy. And the movie ends with David contacting Weyland-Yutani back on Earth, stating that majority of the crew were killed in the neutrino blast, and they would continue to their destination planet, Origae-6. Basically the bad guy wins and is left to continue experimenting with breeding new alien life forms from the human embryos. Not the ending I would have hoped for. But then again, I’m not a fan of dark endings.

Let me be clear, the fact that the hero dies doesn’t make it a dark ending. It could simply be a sad ending. A dark ending is when the forces of evil win.

I’m not sure what type of person likes this type of ending. Presumably someone that loves the excitement of horror movies and has a vivid imagination. Some might argue that dark endings are more representative of the real world. That is, that good guys don’t always win. But I would argue that stories are meant to entertain and to make us feel better. From the early days of humanity when stories were told around the campfire, they were about heroism, achievement and the best of humanity, and to warn us from straying away from a code of honour. In Shakespeares days too, his comedies and tragedies all had a subtle moral theme. The tragedies, in particular, were about a kind of karma that leads to the downfall of the bad guys: for example Macbeth, and Julius Caesar. Other tragedies were simply that tragic and sad – Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare never wrote horror, but if he did I would suspect it would have an element of karma in the storyline.

I am not a great fan of horror movies so I did a little research on the genre. In “Save the Cat Goes to the Movies”, Blake Snyder describes a popular movie type. This genre is much wider that what most people would identify as the horror genre. But Snyder gives us an insight into how these particular story lines work. He says that the genre is distinguishable by three common characteristics; a monster; a house; and a sin.

The monster is someone or something that has incredible power – a super beast like jaws, or the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, or the human kind as found in “The hand that rocks the cradle”, a knife wielding slasher type, supra natural monster.

The house is simply a closed environment in which the monster roams and from which its potential victims cannot escape, such as a creepy hotel, a town, spaceship, a diving bell, or basement prison.

And the sin is that the victims aren’t without guilt. They maybe guilty of greed, hubris, selfishness, infidelity, betrayal, cruelty or ignorance, even if that sin in minor. For example, they may be guilty of letting in the monster into the house or bating it by ignoring it. This is an interesting idea, and it is indeed present in a lot of these monster in the house movies.

So, let’s take a look at some “Monster in the house movies”. They might be more common than you think:

Pure monster:
Alien
Jaws
Tremors
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Godzilla

Domestic monster
Fatal Attraction
Play Misty for me
The hand that rocks the cradle

Seria monster
Scream
Psycho
Halloween
I know what you did last summer
Friday the 13th

Supra-natural
The Ring
The Exorcist
The Shining
Poltergeist
Amityville Horror
A nightmare on Elm Street

Nihilis monster
Saw
American Psycho
The Grudge

Did the list of movies surprise you? I would never have classed Jaws or Jurassic Park in the horror genre, but they both meet the Snyder’s wider “Monster in the house” definition. Both exhibit the three elements.

So, what was the sin in Jaws? Well, the sin was the greed of the local officials that would not close the beech and brought the shark attacks upon the townsfolk. In Jurassic park it was the hubris that thought man could bring back dinosaurs and contain them. As Dr Ian Malcom (Jeff goldblum) said, life will always find a way.

Note however, that not all these movies have dark endings. But they do all exhibit a kind of karma. The guilty are punished or must learn from their mistakes. A little bit like life. What do you think?