Kill Your Hero?

Q. Is it a bad idea to kill your protagonist? This morning I had one of those moments that come to you when you're writing…things are humming along and then you write something and realize that you can go somewhere else entirely.

Anyways, my moment involved possibly killing my protaganist right near the end of the story. There's a twist following the climax, and just when everything seems resolved the protaganist is fed to the wolves by a character he thought was on his side. This character gets away…the credits roll…basically I'm afraid the audience has too much at stake with the protaganist and will be pissed off if he dies. But at the same time I think the twist could be good enough to satisfy them.

This is really a gut check question. Are you in the right genre? Does it make it a more satisfying story? Does it deliver the goods on the concept? Have you set this up throughout the movie so that it is a surprising but inevitable ending? Then go for it.

I think the key thing with a surprise downer ending is it has to be, somehow, not a true surprise. It can't come out of nowhere. It has to be set up emotionally. The hero has a death wish. The hero is getting away with something that we know, deep down, he can't really get away with. Or shouldn't. There have been intimations of death all along. The resolution of the movie is really about what the hero accomplished, not whether he survives. The hero is a bad bad man and we really want him dead.

The posters for a certain Mel Gibson movie say, "Every man dies; not every man really lives." So you know going in that the odds aren't good for Mr. William Wallace.

In a horror movie I saw a few years ago, the heroine loses her child in the opening. She never really gets over that. In one version of the ending (the European one, of course), she doesn't make it out alive because dying (and being reunited with her dead daughter) is a better result for her than going on living.

In a long-running HBO series, the main character (arguably) winds up dead in the finale. But he's talked about it and he lives in a world where it's normal.

You shouldn't end on a twist for the sake of a twist. But if you can surprise us, yet leave us with a feeling afterwards that this was the natural conclusion of the story -- then go for it.

(Incidentally, if you are pitching your movie out loud before you write it, then this question will answer itself. When you tell your listener that the hero's dead, do they go, "Cool!" or "WTF???")

NOTE: The comments are rife with SPOILERS, since it's impossible to talk about surprise endings otherwise!