The "Shoot The Shaggy Dog" Trope In Horror, Explained
Audiences expect a happy ending in some genres of fiction, but the horror genre offers no such assurances. Tons of horror stories let the villain win the day, or see the heroes fall prey to venomous fate. The saddest tales aren't even happy to stop there, they'll come up with an ending so bleak that it renders the first 99% of the story pointless.
Horror movie protagonists are usually up against seemingly impossible odds, routinely pitted against an evil they can't even conceive of, let alone defeat. Even in those routinely lose-lose situations, most of the genre's dubious heroes or ill-fated innocents manage to survive. Most, but not all.
Horror Movie Protagonists That Suffered The Most
The Shoot the Shaggy Dog trope is invoked when a work of fiction ends in a way that doesn't just leave its heroes dead and its villains victorious, it also renders all efforts to the contrary retroactively pointless. It's an ending that means to suggest that there is no good in the world of the story, often with a fairly direct mean-spirited sentiment directed towards the audience. The term «shaggy dog story» refers to an extremely long and winding tale that terminates in anti-climax. It's a type of joke that relies entirely on the comedic value of wasting the audience's time. Norm Macdonald was famous for shaggy dog stories. Shoot the Shaggy Dog stories take the same concept, a story that ultimately amounts to nothing, and replace the intentionally dull ending with an overwhelmingly bitter and sad one.
Horror fiction is a natural home for the Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, as it would feel out of place almost anywhere else. An archetypal example would be the iconic Final Destination franchise. Over five films in eleven years, the story of
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