The Big Picture
- Alternate endings in movies provide a glimpse into different plot possibilities and highlight the importance of the right ending.
- Horror films often have darker alternate endings that challenge traditional happy endings and explore crueler options.
- You're Next's alternate ending, which would have seen the protagonist killed by police, was scrapped in favor of a more satisfying and comedic twist.
Watching an alternate ending to a movie is like taking a peek at a parallel dimension, looking at the different directions, whether vast or small, the plot of a movie could go. Most importantly, it shows the audience how important the right ending is to a movie. While fittingly absurdist and juvenile, a pie fight at the end of Dr. Strangelove doesn't quite hit the same as the bombs dropping. On the other hand, the alternate, more somber, and reflective ending to I Am Legend that adds humanity and empathy to the monsters was bafflingly discarded for a big action movie explosion. Alternate endings are usually the ones that veer in a darker direction, Dante being shot and killed by a random robber in Clerks, Simba falling to his death in The Lion King (no, seriously), or Scott Pilgrim turning out to be a serial killer the whole time in Scott Pilgrim vs The World.
Horror Has Some Dark Alternate Endings
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in horror cinema; the genre has oodles of endings that give our heroes a bleaker fate than what we're given in the cinematic release, or even just the United States cinematic release, such as in the case of The Descent. Ash wakes up to an apocalyptic future in Army of Darkness, Audrey II becomes a kaiju and destroys New York City in Little Shop of Horrors, and Ripley gets killed off in Alien. Within the horror genre, happily ever after doesn't always cut it, and these alternate endings let us ask what if they actually went with the crueler option?
This brings us to the 2011 film You're Next, a cult classic of early 2010s horror, a sleeper hit of the decade, and on the high tier of home invasion movies. What starts as a formal reunion for a rather dysfunctional family becomes a life-or-death situation as masked killers break in, riddle the house with traps and phone jammers, and start to kill off the household one by one. However, there is one spanner in the works, Erin (Sharni Vinson), who is less of a Final Girl and more of a crazy skilled survivalist who's prepared to do whatever it takes. This twist in the traditional slasher storyline is what makes this action-horror endlessly fun, inventive, and darkly comedic, making it a thrill ride until the credits roll.
How Does 'You're Next' End?
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You're Next ends with a bang, as it should. Erin manages to kill or subdue all the invaders single-handedly, badly injured but victorious, as the absent police finally arrive. However, as the officer crosses the threshold, Erin suddenly remembers the trap she'd set up earlier in the movie, an ax swings down on the officer, blood splatters, and roll credits. This ending is great, it combines all the things that the movie had done extremely well so far. It follows Chekhov's Gun with a perfect setup and payoff, it's a sudden and bizarre act of violence that's both brutal and kind of funny, Erin's skills as a killer being a bit too efficient. Despite the implied deep legal trouble our hero is going to be in soon after, it sends audiences home happy.
Like many great horror films, the alternate ending is much darker. A police officer still arrives, but instead of his sudden death by a trap we witnessed Erin set up earlier, he instead shoots Erin in the head and kills her. Brutal. Unlike many other alternate endings, you can't see this one as a deleted scene on the DVD, in fact, the only proof that it exists at all is a photo of Erin with a bullet through her head and a couple of archived tweets by the creators confirming its existence. It never made it into the edit, was never tested with audiences, and will never see the light of day.
'You're Next's Alternate Ending Was A Total Cop-Out
That's right, they were about to pull a Night of The Living Dead on us, wherein the ultra-competent protagonist who manages to survive to the very end of the movie gets killed off at the very last minute by the police who finally decide to show up. A cop-out if you will, or as TVTropes.com more elegantly puts it,"Cavalry Betrayal:" Apparent rescuers who turn on and attack the heroes. This isn't the only alternate ending of the 2010s that ends similarly, with the protagonist making it out of the gauntlet of horror before being arrested, or worse. A few years later we actually got to see the alternate, and all-too-real ending of Get Out, which was thankfully replaced with a bait-and-switch of the idea.
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That's not to say that the cavalry betrayal is a bad plot device, far from it, it makes perfect sense for the genre. It is horror movie law that the police are spectacularly bad at their jobs, an important thing to note when you don't want an easy out for your movie. This can be for many reasons, sheer incompetence, profiling, the horror being so outlandish that the police don't believe the heroes, they're totally outmatched by it, or most scintillating of all, the police were in on it the whole time. The idea that an institution we're all taught to trust and put our safety in the hands of turning out to be either ineffective or actively corrupt adds a new level of danger to the story. The police in horror films can even be effective when working within regular expectations, a great example of this is in Jennifer's Body, where the protagonist's arrest, incarceration, and escape at the end show her transition from a dorky BFF to a cold-blooded killer. The concept of the cavalry betrayal is one that's not to be looked down upon... But as an ending?
A Realistic Ending Doesn't Always Mean Better
There is a reason this ending almost never makes it into the final cut, as Night of the Living Dead knocked the wind out of our sails. It’s a solid downer ending that adds to the theme of man being the real monster, not to mention the unfortunately topical aspect of a Black protagonist doing everything right but being gunned down by the sheriff’s militia anyway. It’s heavy stuff. That is the exception, not the rule, because this ending almost never works, and ends up as nothing more than a deleted scene or a single screenshot.
Is it more realistic? Sure. If someone does a lot of murders in a slasher movie or is the last one standing among piles of dead bodies, there's bound to be some legal ramifications there.. In You're Next, we are rooting for Erin the whole time, we watch her incredible hunting tactics in awe and desperately want her to come out of the film in the end, keeping a police officer shooting her in the head would do nothing but nullify the whole experience, making the journey amount to pretty much nothing. Every story is a journey and more than being realistic, it's important to make that journey worth it.
