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Not all filmmakers like their movies to have simple endings. Some leave their last scenes ambiguous to keep audiences thinking. But sometimes that plan backfires, resulting in endings that are just plain confusing. Fear not! We’ve got the answers you need in our video above, but beware of spoilers.

Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan’s film left audiences’ minds spinning as much as the top in the final shot. Just when it looks like the top is about to spin out and tumble, the screen cuts to black. The final shot shows Dom Cobb reuniting with his kids. But we never know if it’s really happening or if it’s a dream. Fans debated the scene endlessly for years after Inception came out…but according to Nolan, the non-ending is actually kind of the whole point.

In 2015, the director gave the commencement speech at Princeton University, and told the grads to "chase their reality." He used the ending of Inception as an example, saying:

"[Cobb] was off with his kids, he was in his own subjective reality. He didn’t really care anymore, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality are valid. The camera moves over the spinning top just before it appears to be wobbling, it was cut to black."

In short, the ending of the movie is up to us—and we’re right either way.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Meanwhile, the ending to Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy isn’t as vague as Inception. After flying a nuclear bomb out of Gotham City, Batman escapes the blast…off-screen. We know this, because later, while Alfred is in Florence, he sees his former Master Bruce sitting at a table, enjoying a meal with ex-Catwoman Selina Kyle. Some fans have theorized that this is all a dream—that Batman actually died in the explosion, and that Alfred simply imagined seeing his friend taking in the Italian sunshine.

But that’s bat-baloney. Before the movie’s end, we learn along with Lucius Fox that Bruce Wayne fixed the Bat-plane’s autopilot six months before the final showdown in Gotham. That’s all the exposition necessary for viewers to know that Batman jumped out while the plane flies the bomb toward the bay.

And sure, when Alfred sees Wayne in Florence, it’s exactly how Alfred describes it earlier in the film. But that’s not a dream—it’s just the best way for Wayne to show Alfred he’s alive. Moreover, Selina Kyle is there, wearing Wayne’s mother’s necklace, which she steals at the beginning of the movie. Alfred doesn’t know she and Wayne have become an item, and he’d quit before Batman and Catwoman teamed up to save Gotham City.

Finally, Bruce Wayne himself, Christian Bale, thinks that he’s alive by the end of the movie. He explained during an interview while promoting Exodus: Gods and Kings:

"[Alfred] was just content with me being alive. And he left. Because that was the life he’d always wanted for [Bruce]. I find it very interesting. I think with most films, I tend to say it’s always what the audience thinks it is. My personal opinion is that it was not a dream. That that was for real. And [Bruce] was delighted that he had finally freed himself from the privilege, but ultimately the burden of being Bruce Wayne."

None of this matters anyway. Batfleck is the wave of the future! But let’s shift our gaze toward the ghost of Batman’s past…

Birdman (2014)

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film about a washed-up actor trying to make a comeback on Broadway has the kind of weird ending that puts Inception to shame. Throughout the film, Riggan Thomson is shown as having superpowers, only to have them later be explained as being all in his head. In the final scene, Riggan’s daughter Sam enters his hospital room to find his bed empty and the window open. Sirens and talking can be heard coming from the street below. Initially, Sam looks down, but she slowly turns her head to the sky and she smiles. Some might think this means Riggan actually does have powers, and has flown away.

But…probably not. What really seems to have happened is that Riggan has successfully committed suicide, which he failed to do on the previous day. Sam, for her part, seems to start hallucinating just like her dad. The fact that she has bird tattoos on her arm and that her father played a superhero with bird-based powers suggests the strong connection between the two. Sam seems to leave the real world to enter a fantasy where her father lives, soaring above the clouds. The film is subtitled "The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance," after all. Here, Sam chooses to ignore reality.

One of Birdman‘s four screenwriters, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., hinted during an interview with HuffPost Live that the key to their understanding of the ending lies within Sam’s relationship with her father:

"I think when we found the relationship with the daughter, we started to understand what Riggan’s story was. Once she got down, Emma’s big monologue, in the basement, we started to understand the relationship and what it was. We’re not going to sit around and explain the ending. I guess my thing is, if you can silence the voice of mediocrity, then what is possible?"

Barton Fink (1991)

At the end of this Coen Brothers flick, Barton Fink wanders onto a beach, where he meets a woman resembling the picture decorating his sparse, depressing hotel room. Shortly after they meet, the movie ends, potentially leaving some viewers scratching their heads. What’s it mean?

The picture represents the idea of Hollywood. It’s a place of fantasy, beaches, and beautiful women. Meanwhile, throughout the entire film, Fink is subjected to the reality of Hollywood. He’s had his script torn apart by an executive; found out his hero, writer W. P. Mayhew is a washed-up alcoholic, and that Mayhew’s wife writes his novels for him; and has fled from both a burning hotel and a shotgun-wielding maniac.

You’d think that finally finding the woman on the beach would mean that Fink is at the end of his trials, having reached his reward and a place where he feels safe. But in fact, he’s learned the truth about the dangerous world in which he now exists.

Joel Coen explained in a 1991 interview:

"Some people have suggested that the whole second part of the film is nothing but a nightmare. But it was never our intention to, in any literal sense, depict some bad dream, and yet it is true that we were aiming for a logic of the irrational. We wanted the film’s atmosphere to reflect the psychological state of the protagonist."

No Country For Old Men (2007)

At the end of the Coen Brothers’ blood-soaked, neo-Western, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tells his wife about two dreams he has about his father. In the first dream, he loses some money his father gave him. In the second dream, Bell sees his father holding a torch, riding ahead into the darkness of a snowy mountain pass.

Shortly before Bell tells the stories of the dreams, he tells his wife that his father died young, and in a sense, his father will always be a younger man. More importantly, throughout the movie, Bell ponders the violence in the area where he is sheriff and, since he’s close to retirement, wonders whether he’s too old for the world in which he lives. The title of the movie is No Country For Old Men, and Bell is one of those old men. It’s become too violent too quickly for someone of his age, and he can no longer cope. The world needs someone younger, like his father, to light the way in the ever-growing darkness around it—exactly like the second dream Bell describes.

As for the first dream? Maybe Bell just needs a new wallet.

Donnie Darko (2001)

There’s "hard to understand" and then there’s Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly’s cult classic mindbender about a suburban boy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who’s visited by Frank, a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume and warned that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Frank’s visit is followed by a jet engine crashing into Donnie’s room, so it’s understandable that Donnie starts acting erratically in the weeks that follow—but the ending, which finds him back at the start of the movie’s timeline, laughing in his bedroom and waiting for the engine to drop in and kill him, is much more difficult to parse.

Reams have been written about Darko‘s meaning, but the nugget-sized version is essentially this: Donnie was a sort of locus point for a tear in the space-time continuum, and although he spends much of the film unaware of it, his actions throughout the bulk of the film take place in an alternate universe where he’s needed in order to set the universe straight—basically by arranging it so the jet engine ends up in his bedroom. There’s a lot more on the subject here, and whether or not you truly understand it all, Donnie Darko remains a singularly trippy experience—but there’s definitely a method to Kelly’s madness.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

David Lynch fans don’t watch his work for straightforward narratives, but even in the context of his endearingly weird filmography, 2001’s Mulholland Drive is tough to figure out. Lynch himself has steadfastly refused to help untangle the movie, which moves in jittery circles around an actress (Naomi Watts), a mysterious woman (Laura Elena Harding), and a film director (Justin Theroux)…all of whom are mixed up in a dreamlike and frequently nonsensical series of events.

Ultimately, the movie’s ending is every bit as open to interpretation as the rest of the film—and although viewers are welcome to delve into any or all of the many theories attempting to explain what Lynch might have meant by the whole thing, the best explanation was arguably posed by the late film critic Roger Ebert. "The movie is hypnotic; we’re drawn along as if one thing leads to another but nothing leads anywhere, and that’s even before the characters start to fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope," he mused. "There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery."

Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Our hero in The Matrix franchise, Neo (Keanu Reeves), was the only one with enough power to break the Matrix and save humanity. He spent the first two films on an apparent collision course with the near-invincible AI program known as Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). But when their cataclysmic fight in the third installment finally arrived, Neo…gave up?

There are a lot of theories that attempt to explain the hows and whys of The Matrix Revolutions‘ head-scratcher of an ending, in which Neo lies on the brink of defeat until he realizes he doesn’t need to beat Smith, but assimilate into the system—after which Smith is wiped out and the Matrix reboots under the dawn of a brand new day. The best of them is presented by the Matrix 101 fan site, which offers a detailed (and eventually rather moving) analysis that’s far too long to break down here, but boils down to this: Neo brokered a detente of sorts with the machines, allowing the continued existence of the Matrix "free zone" known as Zion while healing the corruption in the program personified by Smith. "This is a world where eradication of the enemy is seen for what it is: a symptom of the problem, not a solution," concludes the essay. "This is a world where the creator and its creation have the potential to live fruitfully in peace and cooperation."

Tree of Life (2011)

For film buffs of a certain stripe, Terrence Malick movies are always an event. The Tree of Life, which united a showy cast that included Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain to tell a sort of memory play recounting the life of a Texas family, certainly fit the bill. Although the bulk of the story takes place in small-town 20th century America, it also makes room for the Big Bang and the creation of the Earth (including a couple dinosaurs) and ends on a ponderous note that finds its protagonist (Penn) standing on a beach that may or may not signify the afterlife.

One of Hollywood’s foremost auteurs, Malick has never been in any real rush to explain his movies, and Tree of Life is no different. In fact, part of the fun of the film is trying to piece it together for yourself. If there’s a "real" meaning, he hasn’t seen fit to share it—and the panel of religious experts convened by the Los Angeles Times was unable to come up with any kind of consensus. Rather than telling a straightforward story, suggested film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, "I just think [Malick is] opening up the top of his head and letting the memories and fantasies and personal anecdotes pour out, and arranging the pieces in such a way as to prompt you to remember your own life and reflect on it, and think about your own place in the cosmos, however small or large you may imagine it to be."

The Fountain (2006)

Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain features a trio of interlocking stories, each hundreds of years apart, all about a couple (played by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in each installment) coming to terms with being separated by death—and culminates in a wild whatsit of an ending. In the movie’s present-day timeline, a doctor named Tom labors feverishly to find a cure for his wife Izzi’s brain tumor. She’s written most of a book in which a Spanish conquistador searches for the Tree of Life at the behest of his queen; meanwhile, in the future, a cosmonaut heads for a distant nebula in a biosphere containing the Tree, interacting with Izzi’s spirit along the way. It all ends in the cosmonaut’s fiery death, the Tree’s rebirth, and an ending in which Izzi’s spirit hands Tom fruit from the Tree…which he plants in her grave.

It’s all deeply symbolic, obviously, and anyone hoping for a literal explanation out of The Fountain will be somewhat frustrated. But it’s acquired a growing cult following over the years among viewers willing to puzzle with what Aronofsky’s admitted is a "Rubik’s cube" of a story that’s ultimately really about coming to grips with our own mortality. He told AICN:

"It’s a film that’s a journey and it’s a trip and it’s an experience through the meditation of a lot of these questions. There are ideas in there that I believe, but I think I wanted to leave it open, so that anyone can bring their own beliefs to the table, and that it could awaken them, and people can have a conversation. Just like when we all used to sit around in college, or wherever, with friends just bull****ting about, you know, ‘What is the world and why are we here?’ That’s what this film is."

Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar is a lot of things—action thriller, thoughtful treatise on the love between a parent and a child, and an effects-driven spectacle—but easy to understand isn’t necessarily one of them, particularly in the film’s final act. Astronaut Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), on a desperate mission to find a new home for humanity, plummets into a black hole and drifts beyond the event horizon, finding himself inside a tesseract where he’s able to see inside his daughter’s bedroom at any point in her life. He communicates with her through gravity, thus guiding her to unlock the equation that helps humanity escape Earth.

Nolan’s movies give viewers a lot to think about and discuss, but Interstellar is just plain trippy—and it grows more so after Cooper is discovered floating through space by later members of the human race he’s saved, brought to meet his dying daughter (who’s aged at normal speed while he’s been on his intergalactic travels and is thus much "older" than he is). There’s plenty to unpack—more than we have the space to dive into here—and much of it is left unexplained. So what was Nolan trying to tell us?

The gist of the whole film rests on the notion that time is a circle—and the possibility of a "bootstrap paradox," a theory explained by Slate with a comparison movie fans should appreciate:

"In the first [Terminator movie], Kyle Reese is sent back in time by John Connor to protect Sarah Connor, John Connor’s mother. The paradox is that Reese turns out to be the father of John Connor—by sending Reese back in time, John Connor created himself."

Back to Interstellar: the tesseract Cooper entered was created by future humans who’d been saved by the work done by his daughter…so they gave him an opening through time and space so he could give her the knowledge she needed to finish her work. Hey, look, sometimes the explanations are just as confusing as the endings, okay?

The Babadook (2014)

Unlike a few of the movies on this list, figuring out The Babadook isn’t that difficult—provided you keep up with the sudden change in perspective in the final act. For much of its running time, this indie horror hit looks and feels like a particularly satisfying supernatural home invasion picture, with the titular nasty creature tormenting a single mother (Essie Davis) and her six-year-old son (Noah Wiseman) after he’s inadvertently summoned through the reading of a disturbing children’s book. But there’s more going on beneath the surface. In the film’s closing scenes, after the Babadook has possessed Davis’ character and she tries to strangle her son, he draws it out of her with a tender expression of love—at which point the Babadook flees into the basement, where she’s stored all mementos of her husband since his death.

That’s when we realize the creature wasn’t supernatural at all—it was her years of repressed grief, which had grown so powerful it threatened to destroy the lives of everything it touched. In a perfect blend of heartwarming and gross, The Babadook‘s closing moments show mother and son gathering a bowl of worms, which Davis takes into the basement to feed the vanquished beast—tacitly acknowledging that she’ll always carry it with her, and honor its place in her heart.

It Follows (2014)

Being chased is pretty scary, but being pursued can be worse. Few things are more terrifying than the knowledge that no matter how far you go or how fast you travel, your pursuer will keep gaining on you and eventually you’ll be caught. That’s the feeling that suffuses It Follows, David Robert Mitchell’s suburban horror movie about a girl named Jay (Maika Monroe) who has a seemingly ordinary hookup only to realize she’s been infected with a sexually transmitted ghost.

If that sounds ridiculous, well, it kinda is on its face. But Mitchell uses it as the setup for a pretty devilish little film. Jay’s told the only way she can escape the evil spirit (which haunts her in some truly terrifying ways) is by sleeping with someone else to pass it on. One thing leads to another, and ultimately, she and her friends try killing it, with generally unpleasant (not to mention ambiguous) results. After the climactic conflict, Jay and her friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist) have sex…and later, Paul’s seen driving past a group of prostitutes. In the film’s final shot, the duo walk down a street while someone (or something?) follows behind.

Like plenty of thought-provoking cinema, much of It Follows is open to interpretation. Mitchell has only hinted at his personal point of view on the scene depicting the spirit’s possible "death," but he’s made it clear that he never set out to make a movie with a literal meaning, or one whose antagonist’s motives were ever explained. As he’s said in multiple interviews, he was originally inspired by a nightmare in which he knew he was being followed, knew he couldn’t get away, and knew the people with him in the nightmare weren’t able to help him. As for the ambiguity of that last shot? Totally intentional. As he told Vulture, "It allows people to make up their own mind of what it means."

Vanilla Sky (2001)

Vanilla Sky was definitely not the movie Cameron Crowe fans were expecting to see when they filed into theaters in December of 2001—especially not with Crowe’s Jerry Maguire leading man Tom Cruise looming large on the poster. Instead of a feelgood romance or a fun coming-of-age story, they got a moody, elliptical remake of a hit Spanish film. A feckless playboy (Cruise) suffers near-death and disfigurement after his relationship with his new girlfriend (Penélope Cruz) plunges his ex-lover (Cameron Diaz) into homicidal obsession. He plunges into depression, has his face surgically restored, and then his life really starts to go haywire.

Ultimately, viewers are told that much of what they’ve seen is a lucid dream in Cruise’s brain, which has been held in cryonic stasis for more than 100 years, and that the more troubling elements of the narrative are the result of a glitch. He’s given the choice to either reboot the dream or exit it once and for all by jumping off a building and being brought back to life. He jumps—and the last shot is of Cruise’s character opening his eyes, starting his life over again.

There are lots of interpretations for all this, some of which were supplied by Crowe himself in the commentary track for the DVD—but the correct one might just be accepting what you see onscreen as the actual events of the story. Crowe seemed to lean that direction while talking with Film School Rejects about Vanilla Sky‘s unused alternate ending:

"You want people to understand what you’re going for, so the question is, looking at both endings: Did the pendulum swing too much in the direction of us explaining stuff? I think it did. The original ending was more open-ended, a little less explained."

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

There’s an entire website (complete with four-part video) dedicated to explaining the ins and outs of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic, and we couldn’t possibly get into even a fraction of the analysis that’s been devoted to the movie in the decades since its release. What we can do is offer Kubrick’s own assessment of the ending, in which astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) comes into contact with an extraterrestrial monolith and goes through a bizarre succession of experiences—vast space travel, seeing himself at different ages, and finally being transformed into a floating space fetus. Even for the late ’60s, it’s pretty nutty stuff.

"In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny," Kubrick explained, as revealed in the book Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. "That is what happens on the film’s simplest level."

In the next breath, however, he pointed out that 2001 concerns itself with "elements of philosophy and metaphysics" that "have nothing to do with the bare plotline," so whatever Kubrick’s summary tells you about Bowman’s fate, you can trust there’s more to it—and that any extra meaning is entirely up to you. "The film becomes anything the viewer sees in it," he continued. "If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded."

Enemy (2013)

Of all the movies on this list, this is the one with the ending that feels truly inexplicable. Enemy follows Jake Gylennhaal as Adam, a history professor who discovers the existence of his exact double. The story feels like a particularly menacing dream, and at no point is this more evident than when the movie ends with Gyllenhaal walking into his bedroom…to find his wife has turned into a giant spider. It’s incredibly disorienting—there’s a reason audience reviews of the film are so divided. But don’t confuse it for randomness, as everything about the film from its opening epigraph ("Chaos is order yet undeciphered") implies there’s deeper meaning at work here.

"It’s a movie that is set to a game," said director Denis Villenueve. "It’s not something that gives answers. It creates a lot of questions in your mind, but it’s set like a puzzle." To solve this puzzle, focus on two keys: Adam’s opening lecture on dictatorships, and the meaning of the spider.

Villenueve has hinted that the real enemy in Enemy is "the dictator inside ourselves," and the opening monologue is entirely about how dictators distract subjects from their problems with the entertainment of "bread and circuses." Couple this with Villenueve’s suggestion that both protagonists are "maybe two sides of the same persona," and you realize the mystery of the double just may be an invention of the dictator in Adam’s mind. And what problems is the hero distracting himself from? The women in his life, represented in his mind by spiders.

In the opening scene, a performer at a private sex show Adam attends prepares to crush a spider on a silver platter; after a strained visit with Adam’s mother, a giant spider is seen looming over the city. When Adam’s double is killed, he contemplates a return to the show, at which point she appears to him as a spider, coiled in the corner in fear. His bread and circus is the puzzle. Once solved, he’s a victim again to the dictatorship of his mind. And just as Adam says in his opening lecture, history repeats. He receives the key at the end. In the beginning, he uses the key. The movie is cyclical; Adam is a man chronically disloyal to his wife trapped in a web of his own creation.

American Psycho (2000)

Based on the second novel from Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho is a satirical horror story about the inner life of Patrick Bateman, a high-paid investment banker in 1980s New York. He’s also, if you believe his inner monologue, an unhinged serial killer and sadist. His job as an executive is no coincidence. A major theme of the story is to ridicule the self-centered "greed is good" mindset of the decade, and make fun of the high-powered players of the finance world who embody that ethos the most.

Everyone around Bateman is as horrible as he is, save for the murderous tendencies—and Bateman may not even be a real murderer. His body count is called into question as the story progresses and Bateman frequently experiences things that aren’t real. (The ATM that says FEED ME A STRAY CAT and the shootout with police that follows, for example.) An air of "did that really happen?" hangs over the entire story, until the only thing that’s truly clear is that Bateman is utterly insane.

Following a night of murder, a police manhunt, and a confession to his lawyer, Bateman attends a social occasion to find that nothing’s changed. His apartment full of corpses has been cleaned up. Either he’s done nothing, or his crimes have been of so little interest to his peers that they haven’t caused a single ripple. By the end, the question of whether Bateman’s murders really happened is irrelevant—no one would have noticed either way. There are no consequences to his actions, "even after admitting this." The movie ends as Bateman says: "there is no catharsis."

Black Swan (2010)

Deciphering the ending of Black Swan starts with comparing it to the ending of director Darren Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler. Both films are natural companion pieces that Aronofsky says were originally conceived as the same movie. The Wrestler ends on a tragic note, cutting to black as its hero leaps into the ring, choosing to die doing what he loves—either right then, or one day soon. Black Swan‘s fade to white as Nina lies bloodied on the mattress backstage is a little more ambiguous, but still tragic, as Nina chooses her art over herself. While we don’t know if she literally dies after her performance, she’s given herself entirely to the role. It’s a kind of ego death, or death of innocence, that she’ll probably never come back from. To become the vessel for a perfect black swan, she loses her sanity, and loses herself. But oh, what a beautiful performance. "Perfect," she says at the end, her goal achieved. "I was perfect."

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

Jacob’s Ladder follows the last days of a war veteran and postal worker named Jacob Singer as his reality becomes completely undone at the seams, invaded by demons and hellish visions. Midway through, he meets a scientist who once worked with the military to experiment on soldiers with psychedelic drugs meant to put them into killing frenzies. He takes this as the explanation for his visions, but the ending of the movie reveals the truth goes even deeper.

Similar to the 1890 short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Jacob’s Ladder is about the last dream of a dying man, killed by fellow soldiers in an unexplained attack. Perhaps the reality of the film is his mind attempting to figure out why he was gunned down, to sort out a meaning for his senseless death. The opening of the movie wasn’t his past days in Vietnam—it was the last day of his life. As the movie ends, he expires on the battlefield, his tormented journey through Vietnam, and his mind, fractured by war, over at last.

So why the hellish visions, and why at the end do they turn more peaceful, with Jacob ascending into heaven with his son? Jacob’s chiropractor, Louis, who serves as his guardian figure in the movie, explains to him that if you resist death, and try to hold on, "you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. It’s just a matter of how you look at it."

The Witch (2015)

One of the wisest scripting moves made by this fantastic movie is making it clear at the very beginning that yes, there really is a witch in them there woods. Unlike many films that court a certain air of ambiguity, The Witch makes its supernatural content explicit—instead of having to wonder if it’s really happening, you can just sit back and wonder what it means.

In the end, Thomasina’s family has been devastated by infighting and madness stoked by provocations of the evil in the woods, resulting in the death of her father, and leading her to kill her own mother in self-defense. Lost and terrified, she becomes susceptible to the manipulations of Black Phillip, a demonic character who seems to be a high power of dark evil. He convinces Thomasina to follow him into a world unrestrained by the Puritanical values that her domineering father preached, offering an alternative to holy penitence and self-denial—"wouldst thou like to live deliciously?" Impressionable and lost, Thomasina swears allegiance to Black Phillip, and joins his coven of witches in the woods. She becomes powerful, she becomes, in her mind, free—the only cost is her mortal soul. Who knows if she’ll one day live to regret it—as the movie ends, she embraces the hedonistic freedom of Black Phillip’s cult.

Silent Hill (2006)

The Silent Hill series of movies and games presents the idea of an "otherworld" beneath our own, where physical spaces remain mostly the same, except they’re covered in rust, blood, and populated by demons. But separating the real world and that otherworld is a misty in-between, where humans and the monsters can cross paths. Initially, this foggy reality is only confined to the town of Silent Hill, but as the movie ends, Rose and her adopted daughter Sharon remain in the mist even as they leave town and return home. Christopher, Rose’s husband, seems to sense their presence, but they occupy different planes of reality—recall the sequence when Christopher and Rose couldn’t see each other as he searched for her in Silent Hill, despite occupying the same hallway in different dimensions.

The implication is that a part of whatever evil has infected the town has followed Rose and Sharon home, keeping them in this cloudy purgatory, likely through Sharon. Sharon is, essentially, another part of Alessa, Silent Hill’s girl-gone-bad who was burned as a witch and sought supernatural vengeance on the town that killed her. Though Alessa appears defeated at the end of the film, her essence lives on in Sharon, in a world beneath reality that has now followed her beyond the borders of the town. Director Christophe Gans explained his take on the series’ mythology in 2006, saying, "Here we are dealing with a character who has the capacity to split, and when you realize that Alessa is no longer one character, but many, it explains the story of the town. It’s interesting because the town itself mirrors this fractured psychology—different dimensions, different doubles of the same person."