Most movies end with the loving couple kissing, the heroes saving the day, or everybody laughing joyfully as they ride off into the sunset. But not everything on the big screen has a happy ending. Sometimes the bad guys win—and it makes for a great story.
The following 32 films all have villains or baddies who come out on top when the credits roll. While this is common in some of the best horror movies, which frequently end on a grim note, other genres—like sci-fi, thrillers, and dramas— can subvert expectations, too. This list of movies includes all sorts of bad guys, and for the most part, tries to avoid films that just end with an implied evil victory. It's not enough for a bad guy to have maybe not been defeated; to be on this list, the baddies need to unequivocally have won.
Sure, maybe they'll get bested in the sequel. But, for now, they are the cinematic champions.
32. Little Shop of Horrors
Year: 1986
Director: Frank Oz
Little Shop of Horrors may seem like an odd choice here if you've only watched the theatrical cut of this adaptation of the off-Broadway horror-comedy musical (after all, it had a happy ending). In the most known version of the film, Seymour (Rick Moranis) and Audrey (Ellen Greene) defeat the singing, talking, man-eating plant and live happily ever after. However, the original ending, which matched the comedically dark finale of the play, had the plant eat the protagonists and then take over the world in a 23-minute special effects spectacular. Test audiences didn't like that the bad guys won, and the entire ending was scrapped, available now only as a director's cut. However, it is the superior ending.
31. Parts! The Clonus Horror
Year: 1979
Director: Robert S. Fiveson
Even if you haven't seen this '70s sci-fi flick about cloning, you might be surprised by how familiar it seems. The Michael Bay film The Island basically ripped its plot off, to the point where the studio settled a copyright infringement case out of court. Parts! The Clonus Horror's ending is much bleaker than the blockbuster do-over, though. The film follows Richard (Tim Donnelly), a man who discovers that he and everyone he knows are actually just clones, created so that they can be harvested for organs if the rich elite who commissioned them ever get sick. He escapes the facility only to be lured to his death. Sure, the covert cloning operation gets exposed, but Richard ends up a frozen corpse.
30. Life
Year: 2017
Director: Daniel Espinosa
When the crew of the International Space Station encounters an alien lifeform, the creature soon proves to be a dangerous, deadly threat. After it kills the rest of the crew, David (Jake Gyllenhaal) makes a plan to sacrifice himself to save the planet, trapping the alien in an escape pod with him and launching off into the void of space while the other survivor, Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson), takes a pod to Earth. But, in a sadistic twist, the pods are hit by debris, and Miranda's pod floats out into nothingness while David and the alien land on Earth, where the creature will presumably take over the planet. Whoops!
29. Planet of the Apes
Year: 2001
Director: Tim Burton
The original Planet of the Apes from the '60s has a famously bleak twist ending, though it's kind of inaccurate to say the bad guys won so much as humanity lost, ages ago, when they "blew it up" and destroyed civilization. Tim Burton's remake, though, has a different ending, as human astronaut Leo (Mark Wahlberg) travels through a wormhole that sends him back to what he thinks is his planet. When he lands, though, he discovers that the Lincoln Memorial now resembles the chimpanzee General Thade (Tim Roth), and the planet is ruled by apes. How, exactly, this somewhat infamous twist actually works is something that's been debated, but you've got to hand the bad ape the victory.
28. Swordfish
Year: 2001
Director: Dominic Sena
Hugh Jackman's hacker protagonist gets his happy ending in this silly tech thriller, but there's no denying that the bad guys get away with it. After forcing Stanley (Jackman) to do their bidding all movie, Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) successfully fakes his death, and he and his accomplice Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) are last seen in Monte Carlo with all of the riches they obtained in the bank robbery. There are no repercussions for the pair whatsoever, and they're free to do stylish crimes—both of the real and cyber varieties— another day.
27. Brightburn
Year: 2019
Director: David Yarovesky
This James Gunn-produced movie puts a horror spin on the classic superhero formula. What if you took the Superman origin story — an alien child lands on Earth and is raised by a kindly couple, only to discover he has superpowers — and removed Clark Kent's innate sense of goodness? What if this superpowered teenager were evil? In Brightburn, what happens is that the teen, Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn), kills his parents, crashes a plane to destroy the evidence, and generally seems like he's poised to do whatever he wants because nobody on the planet is strong enough to stop him.
26. The Curse of the Golden Flower
Year: 2006
Director: Zhang Yimou
Thousands of soldiers die in this epic wuxia, an extravagant, beautiful, and bloody tale of rebellion. But, when all is said and done, Emperor Ping (Chow Yun-fat) still sits on his golden throne, the sons who rebelled against him are dead, and the conniving Empress Phoenix (Gong Li) is defeated. The visual of the Emperor's attendants removing the countless dead from the palace courtyard, scrubbing away the blood, and setting everything back up with pristine flowers as though the entire rebellion never happened, is supremely effective.
25. The Vanishing
Year: 1988
Director: George Sluizer
This profoundly disturbing Dutch psychological thriller was remade by its original director, George Sluizer, in English. The 1993 remake may have Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland, but it does not have the original's ending. When Rex and Saskia (Gene Bervoets and Johanna ter Steege) are on a bike holiday, Saskia goes missing, and Rex spends the next three years trying to find her. He eventually encounters Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), who claims to know Saskia's whereabouts. It turns out that Raymond is a sociopath who kidnapped and murdered Saskia just to see if he could—and he subjects Rex to the same fate, burying him alive.
24. Revenge of the Sith
Year: 2005
Director: George Lucas
If the original Star Wars trilogy didn't exist within the Star Wars timeline and it was just the prequels, then Revenge of the Sith would be a bummer of a finale. Even knowing that Luke Skywalker and Co. will eventually defeat the Emperor and bring balance to the Force, Episode III still ends on a dark note. The Jedi have all but been eliminated, Palpatine controls the galaxy, Padme has died of a broken heart, and Anakin has killed younglings and become Darth Vader, a black-clad cybernetic villain. The Sith certainly got their revenge!
23. Saw
Year: 2004
Director: James Wan
Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) absolutely wins the deadly game in the first Saw movie, which mostly follows Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Gordon (Cary Elwes) as they're trapped in a grimy bathroom — and some painful choices appear to be their only way out. Gordon makes gruesome use of the film's titular tool and attempts to crawl out of the bathroom, but Adam remains locked up, only to discover that the body that's been lying on the floor this entire time is, in fact, not a corpse but the man responsible for orchestrating this test. Jigsaw would go on to play games and kill again in several sequels (including after his character dies, somehow), but nothing competes with Saw's reveal, which has the killer calmly exiting the room and leaving his victim in the dark.
22. Alien: Covenant
Year: 2017
Director: Ridley Scott
Alien: Covenant has a dastardly ending. Danny (Katherine Waterston) has gone through hell after her space colonizing mission makes a stop on a potentially viable planet, only to encounter Xenomorphs and David (Michael Fassbender), a maniacal android who first appeared in the previous film, Prometheus. Danny and a few members of her crew manage to safely get off the planet, in part thanks to Walter, their android, who looks identical to David but is not insane. Then, just as she's about to enter cryosleep, Danny learns in horror that it's David, not Walter, on the ship with her. The film ends with an entire ship of sleeping colonists at David's mercy, and he plans to use them for Xenomorph experiments.
21. Funny Games
Year: 1997
Director: Michael Haneke
The bad guys almost don't win in Michael Haneke's home invasion horror movie, which he remade in English in 2007. Peter (Grank Geiring) and Paul (Arno Frisch) come to an unassuming family's house and take them hostage, toying with them and playing sadistic games. When the mother, Anna (Susanne Lothar), sees the chance, she lunges for an unattended shotgun and manages to shoot Peter—only for Paul to grab a television remote and rewind the actual events of the film in a cruel breaking of the fourth wall. Funny Games invites questions of reality and how complicit viewers are in violence. Are we, the audience, the "bad guys," and we win every time we watch a horror movie?
20. The Usual Suspects
Year: 1995
Director: Bryan Singer
The Usual Suspects' plot twist is one of those shocking revelations that's so famous you're probably aware of it even if you haven't seen the movie. Kevin Spacey's con man, Roger "Verbal" Kint, spends most of the movie telling the story of how more than two dozen people ended up dead on a ship in the Port of LA—a job for the fabled crime lord Keyser Söze that went south. Turns out he made it all up on the spot while being interrogated, and he is Keyser Söze. As Verbal walks away from the station, he smoothly drops his act, no longer limping as he strolls to freedom, having totally gotten away with it.
19. The Omen
Year: 1976
Director: Richard Donner
A series of macabre, eerie events convince Ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) to look into where his adopted son, Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens), came from. He discovers, to his horror, that Damien is actually the spawn of Satan, and Robert takes it upon himself to kill Damien to prevent the Devil's ascendance. However, when the police arrive just in time to see a man about to kill a child, they shoot Robert before he gets the chance, and The Omen ends with little Damien smiling at his parents' funeral.
18. Drag Me to Hell
Year: 2009
Director: Sam Raimi
Drag Me to Hell has one of the most deliciously mean endings of any film. When bank loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) denies a Roma woman an extension on her mortgage, the old lady places a curse on her. The curse is awful, but by the end of the movie Christine believes she's broken it and all will be well… only for it to be revealed that her boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), mixed something up, and the curse has not been broken. Christine is dragged to hell by flaming skeletons as Clay helplessly watches on. (Is there a case to be made that Christine is actually the film's bad guy because of how she denies the loan? Sure! But we're still putting this movie on the list.)
17. Speak No Evil
Year: 2022
Director: Christian Tafdrup
As is often the case, the American remake of this European horror movie changes the ending to something much happier. The 2024 remake has its merits, but the 2022 Dutch-Danish original is the one that's on this list because the bad guys win in a truly disturbing way. Danish couple Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) meet Dutch couple Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) on vacation and hit it off, eventually accepting Patrick's invitation to visit them in the Netherlands. Once there, Patrick and Karin slowly begin acting strangely—and threateningly—eventually culminating in the reveal that they're killers who have done this before. Bjørn and Louise are only their latest victims, and they meet a brutal end.
16. Avengers: Infinity War
Year: 2018
Directors: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
The heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do eventually save the day in Avengers: Endgame, which was released a year after Infinity War. That doesn't change how monumental their failure was in Infinity War, whose ending came as a shock—especially to fans who weren't familiar with the comic book storyline the film was based on. Thanos (Josh Brolin) manages to acquire all the Infinity Stones despite the heroes' best efforts, and the movie ends with him snapping his fingers and eliminating half of all life in the universe. A wounded Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) holds young Spider-Man (Tom Holland) in his lap as the scared teen disintegrates; Thanos retires to a farm, his life's work complete. That's a pretty definitive supervillain victory!
15. Brazil
Year: 1985
Director: Terry Gilliam
The totalitarian state wins at the end of Terry Gilliam's singular sci-fi movie. Bureaucrat Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) finds himself swallowed up by the Kafka-esque system, and although there's a lengthy sequence where he escapes torture and rides off to a happy ending with the girl of his dreams (Kim Greist), there's a devastating reveal: Sam is still trapped in a torture chair and what we've just seen is just in his imagination. Some readings of Brazil interpret this as a happy ending for Sam—does it matter if it's not real if he's happy? Ultimately, though, the dystopian government is the villain, and they certainly don't lose in Brazil's reality.
14. The Strangers
Year: 2008
Director: Bryan Bertino
The only explanation the three masked home invaders give for their actions in this upsetting psychological thriller makes their choices even scarier. After tormenting the couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) whose house they've targeted, the invader known as Dollface simply says, "Because you were home" when asked why they've done this. The three attackers don't have a good reason, nor do they face any consequences. Having done their bloody work, they just leave—presumably to do it again to some other unsuspecting people who have the misfortune of being home.
13. Athena
Year: 2022
Director: Romain Gavras
When their brother is killed following a beating by police, Lieutenant Abdel (Dali Benssalah) and Karim (Sami Slimane) find themselves on opposite sides of a war, as Karim and other members of the apartment complex where they grew up barricade themselves in protest of the authorities' brutality. Athena is an intense, visually stunning experience that feels like a Shakespearian tragedy at times. However, its big gut-punch of a moment comes with the final tragic reveal. The police who killed Abdel and Karim's brother were not actually police but far-right agitators who hoped to spark this exact sort of racial unrest.
12. Cure
Year: 1997
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
This early J-horror classic follows Kenichi Takabe (Kōji Yakusho), a detective investigating a series of mysterious, inexplicable killings by seemingly random perpetrators in Tokyo. Takabe eventually discovers that all of the murderers had contact with an amnesiac man, Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), but Mamiya holds a dark, hypnotizing secret. Even though Takabe kills Mamiya, he's lost, and the animating force that was driving Mamiya to orchestrate such acts of violence continues through Takabe.
11. Basic Instinct
Year: 1992
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone star in this classic erotic thriller about Catherine Tramell (Stone), a woman who is suspected of murder—and may be connected to a series of similar murders, too. As Detective Nick Curran (Douglas) investigates, he becomes infatuated with Catherine, and although it looks like the evidence points to another woman being the culprit, the film ends with Nick and Catherine in bed together… and the reveal that the murder weapon is under the bed.
10. Gone Girl
Year: 2014
Director: David Fincher
Nick (Ben Affleck) isn't exactly a perfect husband. And yes, it's fun to cheer on the coldly cool Amy (Rosamund Pike) as she enacts her plan. But Amy is decidedly a bad guy, somebody who murdered, lied, and manipulated her way into getting what she wants after she expertly fakes her own death and frames Nick for the "killing". The plan goes awry, but Amy pivots like a pro, getting rid of an ex-boyfriend (Neil Patrick Harris) and pinning her "kidnapping" on him. Then forces Nick to stay married to her by getting herself pregnant. Amy gets what she wants and doesn't pay a price. Slay, girl?
9. Blow Out
Year: 1981
Director: Brian De Palma
John Travolta plays sound technician Jack Terry, who is searching for the perfect scream to insert in a low-budget slasher movie he's working on. When he records audio evidence of what appears to be a political assassination while using his microphone to gather ambient sound, Jack finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy theory. As he tries to expose it, he grows close to Sally (Nancy Allen), an escort who is also involved. Ultimately, though, Jack's tapes aren't enough evidence to expose the assassination, and Sally is murdered, so she can't speak out. Jack records her death, though, and he uses her dying scream for the movie he's working on in an incredibly bleak ending.
8. The Witch
Year: 2015
Director: Robert Eggers
Living deliciously seems better than living as a settler in colonial New England with an extremely strict Puritan father, and Anya Talyor-Joy's Thomasin looks overcome with happiness when she joins the witch coven at the end of Robert Eggers' debut film. But make no mistake: This is a victory for the Devil, who is kind of the ultimate bad guy. It just speaks to how grim existence was in the 1630s—especially with fanatical parents who falsely accuse you of evil—that making a deal with the devil kinda seems like a "win."
7. Se7en
Year: 1995
Director: David Fincher
Kevin Spacey's John Doe is a serial killer who orchestrates elaborate murders inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins in David Fincher's dark thriller. In one of the great twist endings, he gets what he wants and hits all seven sins after he kills Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), the wife of Brad Pitt's Detective David Mills, and sends a morbid package to the unknowingly widowed husband. In wrath, David executes Doe, who was expecting exactly this and counts himself as envy. Doe may be dead, but his plan is complete, and David is ruined. Only Morgan Freeman's Detective William Somerset, now more disillusioned than ever, endures.
6. The Stepford Wives
Year: 1975
Director: Bryan Forbes
The Nicole Kidman-led remake from 2004 has its charms, but not the gut-punch of an ending like the original. Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) is a progressive woman who moves with her husband from New York to the titular Connecticut town. Once there, she discovers that all the women are extremely small-c conservative and oddly subservient to their husbands. Joanna uncovers a sinister plot by the men of Stepford to replace their wives with robot doubles… but she's unable to escape the same fate, and the movie ends with a robot Joanna shopping for groceries with all the town's other wives.
5. No Country for Old Men
Year: 2007
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Not only does the psychotic hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) get away with his crimes after killing No Country for Old Men's ostensible protagonist Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), but the Coen Brothers film ends with the concept of goodness itself basically throwing its hands up. Sheriff Bell, a veteran lawman whose job it is to stop criminals like Chigurh and the drug dealers he's working for, is hopelessly outmatched and ends the film by retiring—an admission of defeat that sits with the viewer long after the film cuts to black.
4. Rosemary's Baby
Year: 1968
Director: Roman Polanski
Turns out there are a lot of movies where the bad guy who wins is the Devil, the baddest guy of all, and Rosemary's Baby is the best of them. Mia Farrow stars as Rosemary, a woman who moves into a new Manhattan apartment building with her husband Guy (John Cassavetes). While Guy experiences professional success, strange things begin happening to Rosemary, and the nosy neighbors only become more interested when she becomes pregnant. After giving birth, Rosemary discovers that the other tenants worship Satan, and she has given birth to the antichrist. Although horrified and angry at Guy's betrayal, Rosemary can't abandon her child—even if he is the devil's son.
3. Chinatown
Year: 1974
Director: Roman Polanski
"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Roman Polanski apparently loved a movie where the bad guys win, as in neither Rosemary's Baby nor Chinatown have uplifting ends. In the classic neo-noir, Jack Nicholson's private detective Jake Gittes uncovers a conspiracy theory involving water rights and the future of Los Angeles, and even though mogul Noah Cross (John Huston) had a man who threatened to expose the scheme killed, he doesn't experience any consequences. The ultra-rich rarely do.
2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Year: 1978
Director: Philip Kaufman
The 1956 original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers comes oh so close to letting the bad guys—in this case, alien pod people who replace humanity while they sleep—win, only for the day to be saved. No such luck in the Donald Sutherland-led remake, which ends with the iconic, horrific image of a now-duplicated Matthew Bennell (Sutherland) opening his mouth in a grotesque scream to alert his fellow pod people of the existence of an unturned human in their ranks.
1. The Wicker Man
Year: 1973
Director: Robin Hardy
Perhaps the greatest example of folk horror also has one of the finest twist endings in cinema, one that has the sunshine-loving inhabitants of Summerisle singing and dancing for joy as a man burns to death in front of them. Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) has been dispatched to the Scottish island to try to find a missing girl, but nobody, including the island's charismatic leader (Christopher Lee), is much help or seems too concerned. That's because the entire thing was a set-up; the people of Summerisle are pagans who believe sacrificing Howie will ensure that they have a good harvest next season. (The bad guys also win in the Nicholas Cage-led remake, but the less said about that movie, the better.)
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