Unpacking the secret meanings behind horror's most infamous "WTF" closing scenes...
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00:00The scariest thing in the horror genre is the unknown, and the very best horror movies know that the audience's lack of control is a tool to be used to disarm them and, yes, absolutely scare the willies out of them as well.
00:13For good or bad then, all of the following horror movie moments left the audience scratching their heads.
00:18I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are 8 horror movie moments nobody understands.
00:23Number 8, what does the ending mean? Martyrs.
00:26Martyrs is one of those classic horror movies that's been talked about to death, which is why it's even more impressive that nobody has been able to come down conclusively on its ending one way or another.
00:38Though the film starts off relatively simple with a woman invading a house to murder the people responsible for keeping her captive as a young girl,
00:45it quickly moves into the surreal as the woman is killed off and her friend Anna is recaptured and subjected to torture.
00:53Her captors have a pretty nuts goal behind her suffering too, to figure out once and for all whether there is life after death.
01:02In order to achieve this answer, they need to create a martyr.
01:06Someone who is tortured so extremely that they essentially become a being caught between two worlds,
01:12in a frightening liminal space of being not quite dead, not quite alive.
01:17After being gruesomely flayed then, Anna achieves this liminal state and whispers the secret of the afterlife she discovers into the ear of the organization's leader,
01:28who then promptly kills herself.
01:31Without being privy to what that secret actually was though, audiences are left to ponder what does come after death, if anything.
01:39Number 7, what does the picture mean? The Shining.
01:42A classic of the genre, The Shining's ending will be debated for all time.
01:47You know the story of this movie by now.
01:49In a snowed-in old hotel in the mountains, family man Jack Torrance torments his wife and son with an axe,
01:56driven mad by the spirits, both the drinking kind and the ghostly kind, housed within the building's walls.
02:03Eventually outsmarted by the quick thinking of a five-year-old boy,
02:07Jack freezes to death after becoming lost in the hotel's garden maze.
02:11That's not the end though, as we then cut back into the building and zoom in on a particularly e-reframed photograph hanging on the wall.
02:19As we get a close-up of what turns out to be a photograph of a dinner party,
02:23we see that Jack is actually there in the image, front and centre.
02:28The only issue is, well, this picture was taken in 1929,
02:32and the movie takes place 50 years later, and Jack hasn't aged a day.
02:37So, what's the deal here? Was Jack reincarnated? Was he a ghost the whole time?
02:43Was he assimilated by the hotel after dying?
02:46It's an ambiguous note that's been hotly debated for years, with no official answer coming either way.
02:536. What is The Doppelganger? Annihilation
02:56Annihilation is a truly underrated sci-fi horror film from Alex Garland.
03:00A pretty dense flick, all things told, it follows a group of scientists as they venture into The Shimmer.
03:07An alien, environment-changing phenomenon that causes a break in reality itself.
03:12Inside The Shimmer, pretty much anything can happen,
03:16as the world mutates and births some terrifying creatures,
03:19with one bear in particular guaranteed to keep you lying awake for weeks on end.
03:25While there are concrete explanations for virtually everything in the novel that the movie is based on,
03:31Garland actually decided to pretty much rip those details up for the movie,
03:35and opted for a more metaphorical film, rather than hard sci-fi.
03:40As a result, the ending has left anyone who's seen it scratching their heads.
03:45And that ending sees the only scientist who hasn't succumbed to The Shimmer, Natalie Portman's Lena,
03:50encountering a shimmering, oi oi, humanoid in a lighthouse.
03:55This being mimics every move Lena makes,
03:58before she ultimately manages to escape after hitting it with a grenade.
04:03Exploding it with a grenade?
04:04Whichever one works, and they tell me I'm a writer apparently.
04:08Anyway, back at the base, it's unclear what has actually happened to Lena,
04:12who has now taken on characteristics of the other scientists she was with.
04:16Exactly what the doppelganger was, and how Lena had been changed by her experience,
04:21is never truly explained.
04:23Number 5.
04:24What is The Color?
04:25The Color Out of Space?
04:27The first, but certainly not last, Nicolas Cage movie on this list is a solid HP Lovecraft adaptation.
04:33In The Color Out of Space, a family becomes tormented by a strange, otherworldly purple light
04:39that infects and mutates their bodies,
04:42with each passing day birthing increasingly strange sights.
04:45With this being based on a HP Lovecraft story though,
04:49an author who was famous for using the get-out-of-jail-free horror card
04:53of just describing monsters as being so scary the human mind can't even comprehend them
04:58and then just letting the readers do all the legwork,
05:01so much of the story is left intentionally ambiguous.
05:05As a result, audiences leave the film none the wiser about what the titular color actually was
05:10or how it really works.
05:12Hell, the wiki for the story quite literally describes it as a quote,
05:15force of unknowable.
05:17So when it takes the characters in the film away towards the end,
05:21nobody has any idea where they're actually going.
05:24Number 4.
05:25Was Child's The Thing?
05:26The Thing?
05:27The ending of The Thing is another classic,
05:29and leaves viewers with a question that nobody has been able to concretely answer one way or another.
05:34That of course being,
05:36is Child's The Thing?
05:37But okay, let's back up for a second.
05:39After being terrorized by an alien shapeshifter at a research base in Antarctica,
05:44only two survivors remain by the end of The Thing,
05:47Child's and MacReady.
05:49The latter has assumedly just blown the alien creature to kingdom come,
05:53destroying the whole base in the process.
05:56Sitting by the fire and slowly freezing to death,
05:58he's then greeted by Child's,
06:00who has miraculously survived and somehow caught up to him.
06:04Both understanding that they're totally done for either way,
06:07they tentatively offer each other a drink,
06:10uncertain whether one of them is The Thing.
06:13Now there have been a ridiculous amount of theories attempting to get to the bottom of this mystery over the years,
06:18analyzing everything from the visibility of the actor's breath to the subtitles,
06:23but none have ever provided a real answer.
06:26That of course is kinda the point though.
06:28At this point in the story,
06:29it doesn't really matter either way if one of them is The Thing,
06:32they're both dead meat once that fire goes out.
06:35Number three,
06:36what happened to the world?
06:37Resident Evil.
06:38Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil movie franchise did not care for such things as continuity,
06:44or story,
06:46or characters,
06:47and it laughed in the faces of everyone who assumed that it would.
06:51A big throaty laugh as well,
06:52like the one that Grinch does where he goes,
06:54as a result,
06:55the franchise played fast and loose with coherency and made a laughing stock of anyone trying to piece together a proper timeline or a stable mythology for the whole story.
07:05The biggest headache in the series though regards the state of the world.
07:09While the zombie outbreaks initially started small in the first two movies,
07:12the third movie establishes that the T-Virus responsible for that has somehow gone airborne and devastated the entire world.
07:21Not only has most of the population been killed,
07:24but the virus has actually dried up the oceans and transformed the world into a Mad Max style desert wasteland.
07:30Which is all well and good,
07:32that is a very,
07:33very cool aesthetic.
07:34But then the fourth movie reigns all of that back
07:38and transports our characters to locations with lush environments,
07:42huge bodies of water,
07:43and nary a speck of sand in sight.
07:46So,
07:47what gives?
07:48Well,
07:48nobody knows.
07:49This is just the beauty of this franchise,
07:51I guess.
07:52Continuity does not matter.
07:54The change is actually never even directly addressed in the movies,
07:58so audiences are just supposed to rely on their own imagination to fill in the blanks
08:03as to why the world changes states so dramatically.
08:062. Is it just a drug trip, Mandy?
08:10Mandy was a big part of the Nick Cage resurgence,
08:12and you can totally see why.
08:14It plays to the actor's madcap memeable strengths without falling into total parody,
08:20and straddles the line between being an arthouse horror and a batch bit insane dark comedy.
08:26Essentially,
08:27the general thrust of the narrative sees Cage attempting to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of a sinister cult.
08:33It's easier said than done though,
08:36as Cage's character is forced to fight against demonic bikers,
08:40and later suffers through apocalyptic visions,
08:43with his sanity well and truly slipping.
08:45The film is quite upfront as well,
08:48with the fact that drugs play a heavy part in what audiences see on screen.
08:52Hell, much of the story hinges on characters being dosed up on LSD,
08:57so surely the wider moments can be just chalked up to that, right?
09:00It's all just one bad trip.
09:02Well, it's not really clear.
09:05The movie goes so mad and blurs the line between characters tripping and full-on supernatural shenanigans
09:10that nobody can really pass what's going on.
09:14Number 1.
09:14Were the bugs real?
09:16Bug.
09:17Bug is a horror movie all about delusions and paranoia,
09:20so it's no surprise that it keeps the reality of its story closely guarded.
09:25Ostensibly,
09:26it's about two troubled lovers,
09:27one of whom is convinced that he's been infested with microscopic bugs by the military.
09:33He claims that during his time in the service,
09:35he was experimented on,
09:37and is now being monitored by some unforeseen force,
09:40and that the mortel room he's staying in is littered with these creepy crawlies.
09:46The only issue is, though,
09:48the audience never actually sees any of the bugs in question.
09:51In fact, his lover initially doesn't see them either,
09:54until she also starts to buy into his story,
09:57and starts to spiral into paranoia with him.
10:00Interestingly,
10:01while the movie pushes you into thinking that this dude's story is clearly nuts,
10:05it does also make you second guess whether or not he might actually be onto something.
10:11There's some confirmation bias purposefully left in there,
10:14some coincidences that do line up,
10:16which makes you leave the movie wondering,
10:18were they actually right,
10:20or have I been sucked into their conspiracy as well?
10:23So that's our list.
10:24I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below,
10:26which other horror movie moments are you totally confused by,
10:29and do you think you know the answer to any of these?
10:32Let us know,
10:33and while you're down there,
10:34could you also please give us a like, share, subscribe,
10:36and head over to WhatCultureHorror for more lists like this on the regular.
10:39Even if you don't, though,
10:40I've been Josh,
10:41thanks so much for watching,
10:42and I'll see you soon.