UPDATE: Final Frame Images added January 2024.
Happy last Wednesday of the year! I hope you all felt seen this holiday season.
I am very lucky; my husband gifted me a wall-mountable hand and a vintage candelabra to recreate the hallway decorations from Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.
I’m at 48 subscribers, just 2 shy of my 2023 goal, so if you’re thinking about subscribing or sharing this with someone, please do!
And hello new folks! This is a bit lighter than usual. The end of December is a time for reflection & rot, not research.
Coming Up: Vampires Part I: Origins, The Internet
This Week: Favorite Final Shots
There are quite a few ‘Mandela effects’ surrounding the final frames of famous movies; it’s rare that the final frame is the moneyshot, the twist. It usually comes a bit sooner, and then tapers off before the credits.
I misremembered Psycho’s final shot as Norman Bates’ creepy smile; the iconic moment is actually followed by Marion’s car being pulled up from the mud.
What stays with us is not usually the very very last thing we saw, but sometimes we’ll convince ourselves it was. It was so good, it had to be.
To honor the end of the year, here are some of my favorite end shots. No particular order, spoilers all the way down.
May (2002)
May is both the creator and misfit in this modern rework of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the patron saint of loneliness. After a lifetime of being ‘too much’ even for the self-proclaimed horndogs and freaks, May finds connection in a Frankenlover of her own. She snuggles up to her corpse creation, who tenderly reaches back. Or does she? No one can love May like May can love.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
After a night of torture by the Sawyer family, lone survivor Sally escapes. Leatherface follows her to the road — the road! she’s supposed to be safe! — where in a nail-biting sequence, Sally just barely gets away with nothing but the clothes on her back, soaked with blood. Our final shot is not of her giddy with mania, but of Leatherface, now that his new girl/sister/mother/toy/treasure is gone, twirling his chainsaw to the rise of the sun, only the rev of the machine to keep him company now.
Pearl (2022)
Played by 2020s Horror Queen Mia Goth, outcast and aspiring star Pearl delivers a ???-minute forced smile to her husband in the face of the bloody and heinous crimes she’s committed. She cannot force anyone to like her or cast her in a bigtime show, but she can force us, the audience, to bear witness to her pain and sacrifice as the credits play across her strained face.
Cure (1997)
Is there a dream you’re longing to revisit? That’s this Japanese horror movie, inspired by Fincher’s Se7en. Fall under its spell, just as deep into obsession as our protagonist, until the final reveal wakes you up.
The VVitch (2015) & Midsommar (2019)
Same ending! SAME ENDING! Our beautiful young blonde female protagonist has been dealt a bad hand in life. An outside force with its own evils reaches into her heart, offering her what she cannot get anywhere else; not just the taste of good food or revenge, but a community, something her closest ones could never give her. In her final moment with us, the audience, she is lost and she is found.
Honorable Mentions:
The Blair Witch Project (1999), Barton Fink (1991), Funny Games (1997, 2007), Sleepaway Camp (1983), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Thirst (2009)
The best endings hold two conflicting truths, don’t they? You could’ve prevented this / This was destined to happen. You got everything you ever wanted / You got nothing you wanted. You are good / You are evil incarnate.
The best endings are beginnings of new stories. The best endings stop the story dead in its tracks. The best endings wrap everything up. The best endings leave room for mystery. We watch movies for the journey, but is that really true if the ending is a big fat dud? What a waste if it was.
Movies are their final shots.
As always, thank you for reading, and happy one month to Chocolate Syrup! My baby has teeth. Sharp teeth, and too many of them, growing impossibly fast.
Next time, we are starting the first of MANY vampire newsletters, with Vampire Origins. I am VERY excited.
Happy New Year!
xo,
the buzz of the fly that sounds like ‘allie lembo’