I'm not gonna lie, it's a little hard these days being a horror fan while also being tired of dwindling party tropes, kill 'em all/bad guy wins endings and found footage films where nobody makes it out.

Like don't get me wrong, if the horror story is damned good, I don't mind any of the above things, but the fact that every writer these days feels like the ending *has* to be dark and bleak and grim and terrible for everybody is just so damned tiring.

I've always been very outspoken about how I love horror protagonists that get shit-kicked for a while before turning the tables and fighting the fuck back and, sometimes, WINNING over the supernatural, stalking horror and it feels like there's no horror media like that now.

The Walking Dead isn't necessarily the progenitor of this kind of writing, but it is the example I most cite as to why grimdark stories are exhausting.

The UR-example for me is an entire episode that follows a character who is outside the recurring cast...

...we spend an entire episode following this character that nobody has met before this episode and none of the normal cast meets DURING the episode as they search for their missing parents. Surprise, surprise, not only are they dead, they're zombies...

...but of course the episode builds up to the zombie part. First they focus on the corpses for a long time before they awaken, eat the character to death, episode over and the events are never referred to again.

What was the point of it? To reinforce what we already know about the universe? That bad ends happen to good people, something that has been so firmly well established since season 1 that it's one of the main things the show is known for.

I'm pretty sure this episode is post-Negan, by the way, after the shocking (and totally not at all foreshadowed) execution of Glenn. People suddenly dying horribly is a firmly established trope in the Walking Dead, it doesn't need to be reinforced with a whole bottle episode.

Between The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones airing roughly concurrently, grimdarkness is The Popular Thing and has been for near on a decade. I've rambled all over the place with this thread, but the point is: I'm tired of it.

A good example of the kind of horror movie I like that ALSO pulls no punches is 2006's remake of The Hills Have Eyes. The main family gets fucked up in that one, bad shit happens, not everybody makes it. It's glorious and dark...

...but in the last third, the survivors of the main family Step the Fuck Up and suddenly the mutants aren't the scariest thing in that desert anymore. It's desperate, it's gritty, but the main characters do, ultimately, triumph. I wish more horror movies did it like that.

I am also open to suggestions about movies in a similar vein: Something terrorizing the main characters, until the main characters learn the score and turn it around in their favor.

Hush is another good recent example.
2018's Halloween is a great example as well, although it's a little on the fence for me.