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But when done properly, the Not Dead Yet!
scare can be a glorious thing.
scares in movie history.
And needless to say, you cant kill Death.
(Be sure to check out the ending ofFinal Destination 5, which is especially nuts.)
as he keeps not dying.
24.A Nightmare on Elm Street
Ah, yes, the diversionary tactic.
And at the close of the film, it looks like thats just what happened.
But no, wait hes got one last attack left in him.
But its also intense, and genuinely horrific.
I got em all, he declares exhausted and terrified but also somehow elated.
This time, its Susan George who must blow away the last remaining bad guy.
This certainly extends to the Not Dead Yet!
ending, but even there,Screamdelightfully overdoes things to an absurd degree.
Billy stabs Stu too deep, so that Stu starts to feel faint and bleeds out, dying.
Just then, Billy opens his eyes and rises again, and Sidney blows him away.Got all that?
20.A Nightmare on Elm Street 2
I cant believe its all over.
Freddy has burned, melted, exploded, and been ripped apart from inside and turned into ash.
He seems to be pretty much done for.
Bonus points for referencing those all-pervasive and gruesome school-bus safety films of the 1970s and 80s.
As revenge, they must claim six new people.
By the end, Blake and his men have seemingly been vanquished, and the fog has receded.
Except that they havent, and it hasnt.
But then he comes back and stabs her, and watchesherdie.
Brian De Palma would copy the idea a few years later for the shocking ending toCarrie.
14.Event Horizon
Sometimes Sam Neill is the good guy, sometimes hes the bad.
Luckily, hes blown out into space when he shoots a hole in the spaceship.
He dies yet again when Laurence Fishburne blows the whole place to smithereens.
But later, the missions survivors have one last vision of him right before the film ends.
Any hopes of a sequel, however, were dashed when the movie flopped.
And its final Not Dead Yet!
jolt is one of its more effective moments.
She struggles in the depths, nearly drowning, and finally makes it out.
Plus, his hair practically screams evil.
So its appropriate that hes the one who comes back at the very end.
And then, in true Not Dead Yet!
Helen has become the new Candyman.
9.Friday the 13th
Is the originalFriday the 13theven a good movie?
Then she wakes up.
Think of this one as a cross betweenDeliverances final watery rising hand andCarries closing dream vision.
Alas, its not over yet!
(Youre terminated, fucker!)
Close herself was reportedly not happy about this ending, which flattened Alex into a basic horror cliche.
Sure enough, it was ahugehit.
Jamie Lee Curtis has stabbed Michael Myers (a.k.a.
She sits there exhausted and terrified.
And then, ever so casually, he rises, without any sharp jolts or shrieks or clever cuts.
He rises and then he sits there for a couple of beats.
Of course, the film contains one more Not Dead Yet!
But thats why God invented sequels.
(Or was it Satan?)
5.Alien
Its still a hell of a shock, this one.
Thats when she finally blows it out of the goddamn air lock.
The regretful villain first slashes his own throat but that is soon revealed to have been a ruse.
This sets up one of the all-time greatest Look out, hes right behind you!
3.Wait Until Dark
This might be the Not Dead Yet!
scare in its purest form, as well as being one of the earliest examples of it.
Anyway, Ripley has to blow another alien out of the goddamned air lock,again.
