The late J. G. Ballard, whose later novels were unflinching in their exploration of dystopias and the devolved human mind, continuously wrote off the horror genre as people working off their fear of death. He found it despairing too.

And this is from the guy who wrote Crash. That’s Crash that Cronenberg adapted, about cars, and not the recent Oscar winning waste of celluloid about race relations.

In cases like the first Friday 13th movie, the coda ending is just a trick to create a larger shock for the audience. But the ending of your movie gives the final word to the meaning of the narrative.

Once it became a regular convention there was definitely a tangible idea in slasher horror that evil wins.

Back to the fear of death angle. Simon Pegg cites that as the reason that 1)Zombie movies are the most effective horror movies metaphorically and 2) Zombies should never run or be fast. The idea is that it’s slow, creeping and completely inevitable/unstoppable.

My take on Dead Snow was that it was, very simply, part homage and part lampoon to the very films they explicitly mention in the script. Classic 80s and 90s horror that kind of kicked off the genre. Part Evil Dead and part Friday the 13th. At no point did I feel that Dead Snow was trying to take itself even a little bit seriously nor did I feel I was meant to take it seriously or be genuinely scared.

I realize mine is just a different point of view or maybe I missed the point of what you were trying to say but I thought it might be worthwhile to get that different view out there for discussion.