[Perry] How the Ending Can Ruin the Tone of the Story

The following post contains spoilers for the movie, 1408. If you have yet to watch this movie and are into creepy (not gory) stories, I highly recommend that you watch it first and then come back. 

Don’t worry. I’ll wait. 

So I recently had the opportunity to re-watch the movie 1408. What had happened was, I recommended the movie to a friend of mine who was hoping for a scary movie to watch but was dissatisfied with the recent trend of horror movies just turning into these giant, gore-fests and devolving into torture-porn. He wanted something a little different.

Why did I push for 1408?

It was based on a Stephen King short story and say what you will about the man, he knows how to write creepy. The other reason was that I felt the movie did a surprisingly good job of it. There’s only a little bit of blood in the movie and it primarily relies on a sense of ‘wrongness’ to the environment to scare the pants off you.

That and it was a haunted hotel room story.

You can never go wrong with a good haunted hotel room story.

Suffice to say, I loved the movie. I thought it had a good (if simple) story and built up the atmosphere nicely as well as dropping along a few scares here and there at a nice and even pace.

The crowning jewel of the movie though? Definitely the ending. As good as the movie was, this was one of those cases where the ending really just shed a light on everything that had happened before, during the course of the movie, and essentially almost redefines what happened.

And I lent the DVD copy I had of the movie to a friend.

Now I’d bought the movie because I wanted it around but I hadn’t actually watched my copy of it yet, you know? I’d just bought the damned thing to add to my collection for later watching.

What I didn’t notice was that I had bought the DVD with the director’s cut ending.

I only found out about it when my friend brought back my movie, telling me that it was pretty good, but that the ending ruined it.

I couldn’t believe it. I defended the ending, wholeheartedly I defended it! I told him how amazing it was, and what a poignant feel it left the story on. I told him how that thrilling moment of revelation sent chills down my spine when you hear the girl’s voice coming through right at the end when the wife is there…

This is when he interrupted me.

“What the hell movie are you talking about?”

And so I stopped mid-rant.

“What the hell movie are YOU talking about?”

It turns out there were two endings.

The theatrical ending and the director’s cut alternate ending.

If you haven’t seen this movie, I VERY highly recommend that you take a watch of the theatrical version first.

So here’s the thing. They have this wonderful story, tightly paced with a classic setup and a good buildup of atmosphere…and then to top it all off, you throw in this powerful, poignant ending that affirms that John Cusack’s character went through everything he did. And it pushes that revelation in a wonderfully subtle way–through the daughter’s voice coming out of the burnt tape recorder. Throw in the wife’s reaction to it when she clearly believed her estranged husband was out of his mind and that blank, neutral expression on Cusack’s face as he looks at her reaction? Not gloating, not happy and not sad. Just blank. It was totally this “believe me now?” kind of face but without any snarky or any ‘I told you so’ feel to it.

It was fantastic. The perfect way to end the film.

Then you have the director’s cut ending. His “original” vision of the ending, if you would.

In this one, Cusack dies in the fire. The estranged wife attends his funeral, to be accosted by a HAMMY Samual L Jackson who goes on and on about how Cusack dying was a good thing because he averted a great evil or some such nonsense.

Understandably, she completely blows him off. In this ending, Jackson is the one listening to the burnt recorder, alone in his car and then there’s this completely inappropriate jump scare with Cusack’s burnt face in the rearview mirror and Jackson doing this exaggerated jumpy motion before the image disappears and he drives off. Then you see the burnt out ruins of room 1408 and a ghostly image of Cusack and his kid as they fade away into the sunlight.

WHY?

That makes no sense whatsoever. How can you take a movie with all of this build-up and then completely reduce it to this last cheesy scare tactic?

What’s worse is that the ending nullifies the build-up of the movie. The wife gets no sense of closure whatsoever, Cusack’s character never really changes as he doesn’t have to live with the knowledge of what happened. For all intents and purposes, in the director’s cut, Cusack’s character died crazy and that’s just…a damned waste.

Endings are important. Endings are damned important. A good ending  can reinforce an average story. Because it’s the last thing you see before you’re done with the movie, a good ending is usually the thing audiences take away with them when they’re done.

And a bad ending? Just the opposite. A bad ending can RUIN all of the build-up, atmosphere and character building you’ve done. An ending that doesn’t quite fit the tone of what the rest of the story is about can completely skew what your audience takes away from your story as they walk away from your story.

So the ending? Super important. It’s an area you want to step lightly with and one of the few places where it might really help to get that trusted second opinion.

In a big portion of the story writing process, I’d recommend going with your gut feelings over anyone else’s opinions. Nobody knows your story and where you want it to go quite like you do.

When it comes to the ending though? There’s a strong chance that your vision might be biased and that second opinion can really help to avoid the trap of writing a mediocre ending and having your story fade from the mind as soon as it’s done.

 

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[Perry] The Power of a Good Threat
[Perry] Using An Unreliable Narrator
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