As Bruce Springsteen bluntly states in the chorus of his 1982 song, "Atlantic City": "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact." Indeed, it's a fact of life, and as such, it's reflected throughout movies of every genre, from dramas to action movies, especially in horror movies and even comedies. Deaths can drive a story or the characters themselves, and so can the fear of it.
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But some movies take the idea of killing fictional people to a whole other level. They're rare, but occasionally, you'll get a movie where everyone does indeed die by the end (or at least all the main characters perish). In celebration of these morbid, often very pessimistic movies, there are some very stand-out films where just about everyone dies. It might go without saying, but:
There are massive spoilers ahead for all the films discussed.
'The Departed' (2006)
Martin Scorsese's no stranger to violence and death befalling the characters in his movies. Through telling stories about gangsters, low-level criminals, and otherwise dangerous or intense individuals, there's no denying his filmography has a decent body count. But The Departed takes it to a whole other level, as in its story about a gang that sends one of its own to infiltrate the police force. In contrast, a police officer goes undercover to infiltrate the same gang, and very few people are left standing by the end.
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To be specific, Mark Wahlberg's character survives, and so does Vera Farmiga's. But if you look at the posters for the film, the three actors featured across them all (Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio) all play characters that bite the dust throughout, and often quite suddenly too. The film's similarly brutal about dispatching its supporting characters, so by the end, the cast has been hacked down to almost nothing... definitely to the point where there's no chance Scorsese fans will ever in a million years see The Departed 2.
'The Cabin in the Woods' (2011)
The Cabin in the Woods is a brilliantly unpredictable takedown of generic horror movies and stands as one of the best horror comedies in recent memory. It starts as a derivative slasher movie before morphing into something else entirely. What seems like another "teens getting stranded in an isolated location then picked off one by one" type of film soon reveals a much larger, far more entertaining conspiracy plotline behind the scenes.
To cut a long (well, 95-minute) story very short, once the surviving pair of teens realize they need to die to prevent an apocalypse, they rebel, which causes the end of the world. So: much of the original cast dies in the cabin. Then chaos breaks out behind the scenes, and the people orchestrating the cabin situation die violently. Then the apocalypse doesn't get prevented, and everyone in the world dies. You can't really one up that level of carnage.
'Reservoir Dogs' (1992)
Quentin Tarantino's debut film remains one of his most relentlessly violent and uncompromising. In telling the story of an unsuccessful heist's chaotic fallout and the violent, sadistic criminals trying to find out what went wrong and how very few characters get out unscathed.
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Seven of the eight men involved in planning the heist are shown to die, with the one possible survivor being Steve Buscemi's Mr. Pink. But in the movie's final shot, as the camera zooms in on Harvey Keitel's face, it's possible to hear some background noises that include what might be gunshots. Whether they were warning shots from the police to get Mr. Pink to stop or fatal gunshots that ensured his death, it's not confirmed. Yet, given what happened to everyone else, it can be assumed that Mr. Pink perished, too.
'Night of the Living Dead' (1968)
George A. Romero's 1968 classic wasn't the first movie associated with the word "zombie," but it laid down the structure of what became the zombie film. As a result, it's arguably the first true zombie movie and remains one of the bleakest to this very day.
Like in many zombie films that would follow in its wake, Night of the Living Dead kills off most of its human characters before the movie's end. But it goes one step further when the one survivor, Ben (Duane Jones), looks like he's going to get rescued... only for a group of armed men to see him from a distance and mistake him for a zombie. He's shot, dies instantly, and then the movie ends on an absolute downer note. Every main character dies, even the lone survivor, and a zombie didn't even kill him.
'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' (2016)
Rogue One is one of the darkest Star Wars movies ever made, with the violent ending to all its main characters being something of a foregone conclusion. Viewers find out in the original Star Wars that many sacrificed their lives to obtain the plans of the original Death Star, and in Rogue One, we see those sacrifices being made firsthand.
Director Gareth Edwards stated he always wanted every main character to die and was glad that they did. It does make for a memorably bleak Star Wars film, with a hint of hope at the end for the rebel force's success in that original Star Wars movie. In hindsight, that makes things bittersweet, even if it's tough to get introduced to so many new characters only to see them all get killed by the end.
'Don't Look Up' (2021)
Don't Look Up is an angry, chaotic, and sometimes funny film about an approaching meteor that's about to destroy the world and how the world becomes divided over how seriously to take the threat. Everyone screams and disagrees at one another for 130-something minutes until they all realize it's too late. And then everyone on Earth is killed by the meteor.
It goes a little further in a mid-credits scene, though. A few people manage to escape Earth via a rocket ship before it's destroyed, and sometime in the future, they arrive at a strange new planet. Unfortunately, the existing wildlife there doesn't react well to the newcomers, and they violently eat the last President of the United States. It's easy to assume the other survivors will face the same fate, which makes Don't Look Up the rare film where literally everyone dies.
'Hamlet' (1996)
Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Hamlet in 1996 is one of the best Shakespeare adaptations of all time. It's notable for adapting the entire play into a mammoth four-hour runtime and, as such, completely depicts the bloodbath that is Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's most explosive tragedies.
Just about the only prominent character to make it out alive is Horatio (Nicholas Farrell), as very few are spared from the consequences of Hamlet's (Branagh) unquenchable thirst for revenge. Thankfully, the epic length of the film and massive, impressive production design ensure those deaths aren't in vain, as all the characters get to go out quite spectacularly.
'The Hateful Eight' (2015)
The Hateful Eight lives up to its title, with a plot involving eight suspicious, mostly unlikable characters forced to spend time together in a single cabin while a blizzard rages outside. Tensions mount, and personal conflicts brew until the shooting commences, the blood begins flowing, and the bodies start piling up.
Quentin Tarantino even throws a couple of extra characters into the mix beyond the eight specified in the title (near the film's end) before violently killing them off, too. And while two characters are shown alive in the final scene, they're both heavily injured and are unlikely to have the strength to leave the cabin to seek help once the snowstorm finally dies down. It's a long, sometimes funny, very brutal bloodbath — as one might come to expect from Tarantino.
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