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.
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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 each entry was more or less identical. A group of unlikeable young adults finds themselves in some normal situation when, all at once, everything goes horribly wrong. The central characters and everyone who happens to be nearby are slaughtered in some nightmarish accident. The scene of horror is then revealed to be a premonition in the mind of a single victim. That foreknowledge allows the main characters to escape their fate, but death comes for each of them in turn. Inevitably, the reaper claims every victim in the order they were meant to die, regardless of what they do to survive. Every film starts with its protagonists avoiding death through pure dumb luck, then they end with that luck running out. The films weren’t appreciated for their stories, but that kind of “everyone dies, the end” storytelling is Shoot the Shaggy Dog in a nutshell.
Another classic horror franchise to use this technique is the criminally underrated 90s and 2000s sci-fi torture horror series Cube. Like Final Destination, the films follow a fairly formulaic structure, but this trilogy increases in scale. The film depicts a group of strangers trapped in an unexplained superstructure, the eponymous cube. Some rooms are rigged to instantly kill their occupants, while others are safe havens. Finding the path through without being murdered is almost impossible, as almost every element is governed by Byzantine advanced mathematical puzzles. Most people don’t find their way through, left destroyed and undiscovered after their grisly fate. Those who do don’t fare much better. The gradual reveal of the cube’s purpose, or lack thereof, results in those who do make it out meeting their death on only slightly different terms. Not only does everyone involved almost always die, but there’s also little rhyme or reason to the usage of the cube or the people trapped within it. The entire franchise is an exercise in cruelty and futility, but the real stories are the ultimately meaningless struggles that take place within that wacky box.
There’s no shortage of literary signifiers of this trope either. Many of the great works of science fiction and classic horror wind up describing a nightmarish dystopia that is more or less identical at the end of the book. 1984 and Brave New World, the two most influential and poorly interpreted works of fiction in modern history both end no better than they started. Nearly every work of Franz Kafka’s career featured an ending that left its characters looking like idiots for ever having tried. Harlan Ellison’s magnum opus I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream ends with the title line, but it slightly subverts the trope by having the character death be the only happy element of its ending. There’s a long history of stories, especially scary stories, ending without the slightest shred of levity or purpose.
The Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending is controversial at the best of times. The worst examples make a story feel pointless, almost leaving its audience angry after having experienced it. However, if the artist seeks to create a story about the worst things that life has to offer, there’s no better way to do it than to end with rocks falling and everyone dying.
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