(This article was originally published in October 2009)

This ain’t the end, fool!

That’s what many films seem to scream at us just when we think we’re finished. One of the best ways to really deliver that final sucker punch to the audience is for a movie to lead us to believe the story is done, only to knock us around with a final bit of storytelling meant to shock, appall, or just plain freak us out.

(The fool’s ending, it should be explained, is slightly different than the twist ending, although they can be the same thing. A twist ending takes what we thought we knew and turns it on its head, while a fool’s ending fools us into thinking the story is done, only to reel us in for one last bit of story.)

Is it cheap and manipulative? Sometimes. But when done right, it can turn an already great movie into one for the ages.

For example…

…and be forewarned, SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW…

…who can forget the last few seconds of the seminal horror film, Carrie, when the lone survivor of the prom massacre comes to visit Carrie’s grave to set down flowers. Suddenly, a hand bursts up from the ground, grabbing onto her wrist, and causing quite a few moviegoers to soil their pants.

Recently, a film adaptation was made of Stephen King’s story The Mist, about a group of people forced to take refuge in a supermarket when they are surrounded by an ominous mist, filled with monstrous creatures. It’s an over-the-top study of how close mankind is to complete anarchy and societal breakdown, and gets a little bogged down in its obvious message, but the movie really grabs you in its last few minutes when a tiny handful of survivors are driving through the mist, believing monsters could be nearby at any moment.

The protagonist, David, realizes that suicide is a much better option than the torturous death delivered by the mist’s monsters. They have a gun with four bullets. The problem? There are five of them in the car. So David does the noble thing and mercy-kills all of them, including his own son, as the sound of monsters gets nearer. The bitch of it is it wasn’t monsters at all, but a tank, part of the army contingent that destroyed the monsters. Ouch.

In Friday the 13th, one of the earliest slasher films, a woman named Mrs. Voorhies is killing camp counselors for letting her son Jason drown in the lake. Mrs. Voorhies is vanquished at the end by a plucky young female counselor, who then, exhausted, floats in the lake. We believe it’s the end. All is good until Jason jumps out of the lake and grabs her, thus scarring an entire generation of film-goers for life.

In the classic sci-fi film Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston has a hell of a time dealing with a planet dominated by damn, dirty apes, and just wants to get back home. This is a piece of cinema history, and the ending has been spoiled for anyone who’s ever read a book, seen the Simpsons, or watched Spaceballs as a child, but here you go anyway…

In X-men: The Last Stand, battles have been fought and many characters have died, including Professor X, Cyclops, and Jean Grey. Early in the film, in what we believe is a throwaway scene, Professor X is asking a class a philosophical question about a man who’s in a coma and is completely brain-dead: is it ethical or unethical to transfer the mind of a dying father into the body of the comatose man?

The payoff occurs after the credits roll, when we see that comatose man being tended to by Dr. Moira McTaggert. Suddenly, he creaks out the word “Moira?” in what is unmistakably Professor X’s voice.

In George Romero’s original zombie flick Night of the Living Dead, a young man named Ben has tried in vain to keep a small group of survivors alive in a zombie apocalypse, but eventually only he is left alive. He hides out in the cellar and waits out the zombie horde, which is eventually killed off by a posse of living humans.

Thank God, right? Nope. Ben climbs the stairs and peeks out at the posse, only to be mistaken for one of the zombies and is shot in cold blood.

But the mother of all fool’s endings is also, as it happens, the mother of all twist endings. It should come as no surprise that I’m referring to The Sixth Sense.

In the movie that made its director, M. Night Shyamalan, a star, The Sixth Sense tells the story of a young boy who sees dead people, all the time, sleepwalking through our world, unaware of their mortal status. Bruce Willis plays a man who helps the boy make peace with these dead folks, and guide them to the realization that they themselves are dead. This also helps the boy bond with his distant mother. The story wraps up nicely.

But it’s not the end! Willis’ character, who was dealing with a distant woman of his own, namely his wife, realizes the cause of her ignoring him in the last few minutes of the film — he’s been dead the whole time!!

The fool’s ending is a great device because it allows the storyteller one last moment to knock the audience on the side of the head, and often a fool’s ending is what makes a story memorable. The challenge for storytellers these days is an audience who’s “seen it all” — we’ve been there for The Sixth Sense and all the rest, which means writers will have to stay on top of their game to truly get the drop on us. I, for one, look forward to what they come up with.

The notion of the zombie existed long before George Romero’s seminal 1968 horror flick, The Night of the Living Dead, spooked a generation of film-goers.

Zombies actually have their grisly origin as a component of the magical religion, Vodun (more commonly called ‘Voodoo’). They were corpses that had been reanimated by a witch doctor called a bokor, who uses the bodies to do his bidding.

Often these zombies, as the stories go, were mistaken for being living human beings. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, western scientists went on expeditions to Haiti to get to the bottom of the zombie legends, and while no hard conclusions were reached, some of the scientists speculated that zombies were, in fact, real, and that they were victims of a bokor who used the poison found in pufferfish to essentially cause them brain damage, making them susceptible to the bidding of their masters. They weren’t dead, but they were basically automatons with no will of their own.

Fun stuff, huh?

Zombies took quite a different turn when adapted by Romero in the first of his undead features. In his black-and-white classic, the dead return to life and begin killing the living and eating their flesh. (For those keeping score, the cannibalism aspect was not a part of the Vodun zombie lore. That was all Romero.) A small group of people take refuge in a farmhouse and do their best to fend off the oncoming horde, only for each person to die a horrible death.

What was (and still is) clever about Romero’s work is that he was not simply telling a story to make you afraid of the dark. He would carefully weave biting social commentary into all of his zombie movies, subverting our expectations to the point where humanity can seem more evil than the zombies.

After Romero produced Day of the Dead in 1985, he took a 20-year hiatus from zombies, and the genre faded into the background.

But then in 2002, Danny Boyle (now of Slumdog Millionaire fame) directed a chilling little horror movie called 28 Days Later. Praised as a reinvention of zombie fiction, the film’s version of ghouls were actually normal people (who were, blasphemously, alive) who had been infected with what is essentially a concentrated form of simple, human rage.

Perhaps most terrifying is that while the Romero zombies lurched along at a snail’s pace, Boyle’s zombies booked at their victims like a freight train, intent on obliterating their prey, stopping at nothing. If you haven’t seen this film before, do it. You’ll thank me.

Zack Snyder, who would go on to direct genre pics 300 and Watchmen, took notice of just how freaky-deaky these new running zombies were, and incorporated them into his 2004 remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

After that, the floodgates were opened. George Romero, the man himself, even returned to the genre with 2005’s Land of the Dead, and is still churning them out. Hollywood even went big-budget-zombie with the 2007 Will Smith movie I Am Legend.

And it wasn’t just Hollywood that was playing the zombie game. Media of all kind were cashing in. Image Comics produced a still-running title called The Walking Dead, in which humans attempt to survive in a world that has been devastated by a zombie apocalypse. As if Marvel Comics’ continuity wasn’t indecipherable enough, they began a “metaseries” called Marvel Zombies, which features many well-known heroes, like Spider-man and the Fantastic Four, as the brains-consuming undead.

Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, wrote two books which describe in tongue-in-cheek fashion the oncoming zombie apocalypse, The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z.

Even sweet little J.K. Rowling included zombies in her sixth Harry Potter novel, referred to within the story as Inferi.

In short, zombies have arrived.

And in addition to the ones pounding at the door, there are still more zombies waiting in the outskirts for the opportunity to feast on some flesh. All signs point to the fact that the zombie craze is still going strong.

Romero’s newest addition to his ourve, rumored to be called Island of the Dead but listed on IMDB simply as ... of the Dead, is allegedly due out later this year.

Meanwhile, both The Walking Dead and Marvel Zombies are going strong. A new flick called Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson, is coming soon. Based on this image alone, I’ll be there on opening night:

Comic series Deadworld will be getting the feature film treatment in the near future. And to my eternal delight, a new book is out that revisits Jane Austins riveting masterpiece, entitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is a retelling of the original novel…with zombies.

(If there is any justice in this world, Keira Knightly will reprise her role as Elizabeth Bennet in the film version, and in her delicate, refined, British way, kick some zombie ass.)

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, young indy filmmakers continue to cut their early chops on super low-budget zombie flicks. And while it makes me cringe now, I was certainly not above the call of zombies when I made a little comedic film in college that served as an intro to a concert for my a capella group, The Earth Tones. And never being too proud to embarass myself for my fellow fantasy fans, here’s a short clip from the film below.

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