.

Carrie, Flanagan’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel, and its fumbled final episode have me once again thinking about endings, how critically important it is to get them right, and the properties that have crashed and burned because of that failure. I am going to examine some endings that did not work and explain why they failed to give me the conclusion that they required. There are undoubtedly people out there for whom some of the endings are perfect, and that is the beauty of artistic works; it is not science or mathematics with objective provable answers. It is, in the vernacular of the time, vibes.

Spoilers ahead for the following films:
An American Werewolf in London
Resident Evil (2026)
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Carrie (2026)

An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’ film that, along with The Howling, changed forever how audiences experienced the transformation from human to wolf in cinema, has one of the most fumbled endings in film history. The movie is noted for its heavy mix of humor and horror and its score that features a number of pop songs with the word “moon” in their lyrics or titles. Despite the frequent jokes and gags, the story ends in a very traditional manner for werewolf movies, with poor, doomed David being gunned down by London’s special forces. Even ignoring the poor blocking of the scene (just how did all those men with rifles shoot David so many times when his love, Alex, stood directly between them and their target?), the lack of any time for a denouement, a breather to let the tragedy of the tale sit in the audience’s mind, coupled with a hard edit to black and a doo-wop version of Blue Moon, emotionally scrambles the ending. What the hell am I supposed to be feeling at that moment? Triumphant because the murderous beast is dead? Sorrow at David’s fate that was no fault of his own? Mirth because that song, that version, at that time is so out of place? While there is much to admire about that movie, that ending strips away and ruins everything that came before it.

Resident Evil (2026): I have already reviewed this movie and commented that the ending did not work for me, and for much the same reason that An American Werewolf in London failed: a disconnect between the tone of the movie and its conclusion. While an audience might walk into a werewolf movie expecting a tragic end (that has been the genre’s tradition since 1941’s The Wolf Man), walking in to see a movie adapted from a video game is entirely different. One expects, or at least hopes, to win a game. Like John Landis’ take on the werewolf tale, Resident Evil is stacked with humor, much of which comes from Austin Abrams’ performance. The movie is, for all practical purposes, a one-man show centered on Abrams, and without a compelling setup to ready the audience for his failure to save himself and his transformation into one of the monsters he has spent the entire evening combating, his fall comes off as unjustified. Some might argue that is “realistic,” for whatever that word might mean in a fictional context, but stories are not about realism save the emotional variety. It would have been realistic for Luke Skywalker to continue to rely on his targeting computer and not the apparent hallucination in his ears, miss the shot, and doom the rebellion. While “realistic,” it would have been entirely contradictory to Star Wars’ tone and a terrible ending.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986): The feature film adaptation of the stage musical that was adapted from a 1960 low-budget horror of the same name has the distinction of having bungled its ending twice, in both its theatrical release and its director’s cut.

The theatrical cut, after negative responses in test screenings, forced a victorious ending with a wholly unestablished, sheer-luck method for defeating the murderous plant. The film found only middling success at the box office, which I would partly attribute to the forced feeling of the reworked conclusion.

In the stage play and the director’s original cut, both of the principal characters end up eaten by the plant, followed by an extensive sequence without any characters for the audience to identify with as the plant and its offspring conquer the world. When this was rejected by test audiences, director Frank Oz and producer David Geffen attributed the rejection to the “power of the close-up,” which they felt created a powerful bond between the protagonist and the audience. I think this reading is incorrect. In the director’s cut, a vital song, Meek Shall Inherit, is edited down, cutting out the very moment that earns the protagonist his doomed ending. In the excised section of the song, Seymour recognizes the evil of feeding people to the plant, even though he himself did not kill them, and commits himself to destroying the plant, but, fearful that a life of poverty would cost him the love of Audrey, then reverses his decision and commits himself instead to a life of evil, feeding the plant corpses. It is at this moment that he and the story earn their tragic and doomed ending. With this critical moment removed, the ending that brings about his death is no longer morally justified.

Resident Evil (2026), Little Shop of Horrors, and Carrie (2026) all fail to land their stories cleanly by ignoring the moral vector of their plots. Resident Evil employs an ending fit for a tragedy but without a character that presented a tragic flaw that earned such a sad state. Little Shop of Horrors short-circuited its tragic ending, expecting the audience’s forgiveness for the character’s misdeeds. And in Carrie, her reward of safety and compassion is wholly inappropriate for a character who willfully murdered scores of innocents and gleefully danced afterwards. An American Werewolf in London, while morally consistent with the rest of the film, rushes it ending spoiling what may have worked.

An ending, like an aircraft coming in for a landing, requires that everything be lined up and on the right glide slope at the right speed to avoid disaster.