The Most Utterly Depressing Horror Movies Of All Time

The 2007 film adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist presents a dystopian world where monsters and giant insects attack a small town in Maine as it's slowly enveloped by a strange mist. The characters find out that a government experiment gone wrong allowed these interdimensional beings to escape, and there seems to be no end in sight.

When the main characters believe all is lost, protagonist David Drayton mercy kills his own son and three other survivors with the four remaining bullets in his gun. Ready to face the mist, David sees it suddenly receding. The government has contained the mist, meaning that David took the lives of his son and friends for nothing. David's chilling screams mark the end of this hopelessly depressing film.

Threads starts out with British couple Ruth Beckett and Jimmy Kemp planning their wedding when the apocalypse suddenly occurs. As worldwide tensions escalate, a massive explosion off the coast of the United Kingdom immediately wipes out 12 to 30 million people.

The town of Sheffield, where Ruth and Jimmy live, doesn't see sunlight for a year due to fallout from the blast. Ruth eventually escapes to the countryside and gives birth to a daughter named Jane, but she dies when the girl is only 10. Life in the UK is almost medieval, with food used as the primary currency. The film ends with a 13-year-old Jane screaming in terror as she gives birth to a deformed, stillborn baby.

Some hostage movies end with a silver lining and the protagonists prevailing. Funny Games is not one of those movies. Ann and George Farber, along with their son, Georgie, are held hostage by Peter and Paul, two sadistic criminals who bet the Farbers that they won't be alive by 9:00 the following morning.

The film devolves into a cycle of the Farbers almost escaping only to be captured and punished for not following the games' rules. The film becomes particularly dark as young Georgie is murdered and George is killed soon after. Just when it seems like Ann might escape, Peter and Paul drown her just before 9 am. They then go on to the next house, where the viewer can assume they will continue their sickening games.

Consisting of 14 scenes shown in reverse chronological order, Irréversible is distressing because of its intense violence, juxtaposed with what could have been a happy story. The viewer is witness to a multitude of violent scenes, including the murder of Mick with a fire extinguisher and Mick's attempted assault of Marcus. There is also Le Tenia's graphic assault of Alex, which goes on for several agonizing, uncut minutes.

In the end, the viewer learns that Alex and Marcus were a happy couple excited for Alex's pregnancy, but a series of unexpected events turned their world upside down. The flipped timeline definitely makes the story more depressing because the viewer knows what horrible things will happen to the unsuspecting characters.

Post-apocalyptic films seem to have really cornered the market on depressing horror. The main characters of The Road, known simply as Man, Woman, and Boy, are among the few survivors of an unnamed tragedy that seems to have wiped out most of the world.

The woman begins to lose hope that things will ever improve and walks into the forest naked, where it's assumed she freezes to death. The man and the boy have a number of misadventures, including coming upon a group of cannibals who hold other humans captive as their food source. The man eventually dies, leaving the young boy completely on his own. There's a small glimmer of hope as the boy is rescued by another wandering family, but it's a far cry from what one might call a happy ending.

Stories about orphans tend to be tragic, but tragedy turns into horror in the 2007 film The Orphanage. Protagonist Laura purchases the orphanage she grew up in so she can turn it into a home for disabled children, but there's something distinctly "off" about the building. Strange things begin happening as her young son, Simón, says he's made friends with a boy named Tomás who wears a sack mask over his head. The situation devolves further as a former employee named Benigna refuses to leave the family alone and is later suspected of abducting Simón.

Laura eventually discovers that Tomás was Benigna's son, who died after some of the children in the orphanage removed his sack mask to reveal a facial deformity. Benigna then poisoned the children and hid their bodies on the property. As if this news isn't horrible enough for Laura, she finds Simón's body in a secret room and realizes she is inadvertently responsible for his death.