Staff Inquiry: Death Scenes That Make You SQUIRM

It’s October, so things are getting pretty spooky here at Film Inquiry HQ. Pretty sure I saw a ghost in the water cooler the other day. We don’t have a water cooler, but that’s neither here nor there (though it does lead me to suspect that the water cooler itself was the ghost). During this festive time of year, the internet is lousy with lists of favorite or underseen horror films, so we decided to go in a different direction.

Thus, it was put to our writers to think of death scenes; not merely their favorite death scenes, but ones that make them squirm in their seats. What follows is a collection of scenes depicting people turning into ghosts that our writers advise only be watched half turned away and from behind openings between your fingers.

Note: It should be needless to say, but just in case, spoilers abound.

Alex Lines – City of the Living Dead (1980)– Intestines Scene

Lucio Fulci stands as one of the kings of Italian horror, sitting beside Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Michele Soavi, with his hits including Zombi, Don’t Torture a Duckling and the Gates of Hell Trilogy. The Gates of Hell Trilogy include The Beyond, House by the Cemetery and City of the Living Dead. All three films are incoherent nightmares, films lacking any character or plot, but working on a dream-logic which creates some bizarre and grotesque death scenes.

City of the Living Dead starts off with a priest hanging himself, which opens a gateway into hell, unleashing various spirits who go around and kill people in gruesome ways. The most memorable scene in the film is seemingly referred to as “The Intestines Scene”, so you already know what you’re getting into as soon as you hear it.

An innocent couple is making out in a car, when the woman spots an image of the hanging priest, who spots the couple. As soon as she makes full eye contact with the priest, his deathly gaze fixates her, which leads her eyes to start bleeding, frothy white sludge to arise from her mouth and then there’s the worst part. Her entire guts (lamb organs were used) come out of her mouth, the overt bloody imagery mixed with the misery-inducing music, makes for a kill scene which is still effective today, in a world dominated by CGI setpieces and computer-generated blood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg8YBInpims

Alistair Ryder – Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil (2010) – Wood Chipper Scene

The sign that a great movie has emotionally impacted you is when you feel genuinely shocked or saddened at a character’s death. Whilst trying to choose a definitive best death scene for this piece I realised something- every single death scene I chose is either hilarious (mostly unintentionally), only witnessed by me out of context in Youtube clips as opposed to sitting through hours of awful low-budget horror.

After almost committing to choosing Nicolas Cage’s bee-based demise in the hilariously bad 2006 remake of The Wicker Man, I decided it was only fair that in the spirit of Film Inquiry, I chose a death scene that was intentionally hilarious. After all, horror comedy is the toughest genre to pull off correctly, with the most effective deaths having to balance laughs and shocks in equal measure. Although not a perfect film by any means, 2011’s Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is one of the best examples of how to pull off gruesome deaths hilariously and effectively.

The movie has a simple, ingenious premise to which it almost manages to live up – a group of college students (the typical horror movie victims) meet two sinister hillbillies in the woods, assuming they will try to murder them. Naturally, they are a couple of nice, normal guys, but a series of bizarre coincidences leads many of the students to die whilst Tucker and Dale are nearby, leaving the remaining students to think they are a couple of redneck psychopaths, with Tucker and Dale bemused as to why college students are acting out a suicide pact on their property.

In the best scene, one that dethrones Fargo as the definitive wood chipper movie sequence, a student tries to kill Dale whilst he’s chopping wood – Dale narrowly moves out of the way and the most laugh out loud bit of horror slapstick comedy since Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead heyday is committed to screen. It is incredibly dumb, incredibly lowbrow, yet brilliantly ingenious at the same time, fully committed to ringing as many laughs from the bloody violence as is physically possible.

Amanda Garrett – Leave Her to Heaven (1945) – The Lake Scene

Film noir offers plenty of memorable death scenes, from James Cagney checking out in a blaze of glory in White Heat to a harrowing death by tractor in Border Incident. Even by these grisly standards, there’s one noir death scene that is more squirm-inducing than all the rest. The “lake scene” in Leave Her to Heaven shows a drawn-out death by drowning that is one of the most riveting moments in classic movies.

Leave Her to Heaven, directed by John M. Stahl, tells the story of a writer, Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde), who falls madly in love with a beautiful young woman, Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney), who he meets on a train. Richard is so captivated by Ellen’s stunning good looks that he ignores several warning signs that Ellen is dangerously unstable and rushes into a whirlwind marriage. Once the couple are wed, Ellen becomes obsessively jealous of anyone and anything in Richard’s life. She constantly needles him about a high school girlfriend he hasn’t seen in years, and she even wants him to give up writing so he can focus all of his attention on her. However, the supreme object of Ellen’s hate is Richard’s younger brother, Danny (Darryl Hickman). The boy is disabled by polio and Richard is his primary caregiver. Ellen makes several unsuccessful attempts to send Danny away, but she finally finds a permanent solution to her problem while Danny and the couple are vacationing in Maine.

Danny regularly swims for therapy and one day he and Ellen are out in the boat when the boy decides to take a dip. He quickly becomes tired and wants to return to dry land, but Ellen, suddenly realizing that she can rid herself of Danny forever, sits frozen in the rowboat while Danny screams and flails until he sinks beneath the waves. This harrowing scene is brilliantly staged by Stahl to ratchet up the suspense to an almost unbearable level.  The cross cuts between Danny’s slow demise and Ellen’s pitiless face (significantly, her eyes are covered by designer sunglasses) is simultaneously riveting and stomach churning. I’ll admit that each time I watch the scene, it’s hard for me not to turn my head away.

Arlin Golden – Dancer In The Dark (2000) – Bill Houston

Lars Von Trier is known for putting everyone through the ringer, characters and audience alike. But no one gets it worse than his female protagonists, so much so that if something unfortunate happens to a woman in the real world, one would be justified in calling it “Von Trier-esque”, if that didn’t sound so bad. But the death scene I chose is not one that befalls one of Von Trier‘s leads, but one that she commits, in turn damning herself to the gallows.

In Dancer In The Dark, Björk plays Selma Ježková, an immigrant factory worker in small-town Washington who is slowly losing her sight due to a genetic condition. Determined to save her only son from the same fate, she has been secretly stashing away money from her paychecks to pay for an optical operation. Her financially strapped and pathetic landlord Bill, played by David Morse, sneakily discovers her hiding place, and one day Selma returns home from having lost her job to discover the money gone.

When Selma confronts Bill, he refuses to return what he has taken and furthermore creates a scene and lies to his wife, Linda (Cara Seymour), leading her to believe that Selma is attempting to steal their money. Bill threatens Selma with his service gun, and as a result ends up shooting himself in the leg. Bill pleads with Selma to finish him off, to save him from his wretched existence.

Selma, both blind and utterly distraught, obliges him, firing a hail of bullets from behind a torrent of sobs. However, due to her condition, she just further maims him. Without any bullets left, she is forced to use the very safe deposit box that Bill intended to fill with her savings to bludgeon him to death, with the aid of some horrific sound design. The whole time you just want to shout at the screen ‘Björk! Stop! It doesn’t have to be this way! Oh jeez. Stoooooooppppp!” but she never listens.

There is no excessive gore or any shocking gross-out elements (ahem, Anti-Christ); it’s her inefficiency and conflicted emotions that make this scene so brutal. Somewhat of a reprieve is offered by a spinning record, whose hisses and pops provide the basis for the film’s next musical number. But the damage has been done, and everyone, viewer included, is worse off for it having happened.

Jay Ledbetter – Seven (1995) – Lust

Do you know how to make sure something is truly twisted? If its mere description makes your skin crawl. The “lust” scene in Seven shows no violence. Not one drop of blood. Detectives Mills and Somerset make their way through a sex club with dance music blaring. It is an oft-used trick for David Fincher, disorienting the viewer by making the characters almost inaudible against the music. Once on the scene, the detectives walk through a door with “LUST” carved into it, revealing a man screaming to have something taken off of him.

That thing is one of the most twisted and perverse murder weapons ever imagined. The film quickly cuts to the police precinct where the man has finally calmed down and explains how he came to kill a prostitute in the club. Seven’s villain, John Doe—masterfully portrayed by Kevin Spacey – forced the man to have sex with the woman with a custom sex toy featuring what I can only describe as a foot-long sword attachment. We are shown only a picture of the device, but it is enough to leave you shaking. Seven is as dark as mainstream film gets, and this is a moment that comes and goes quickly, so it is easy for viewers to forget. It is all exposition and it is the most devastating movie moment I can remember experiencing.

Julia Smith – American History X (1998) – Curb Stomp

For the most part I’m okay with violence on film. Unless it’s prolonged and unnecessary (I get bored) or the filmmakers have used it for shock value, especially in the case of sexual assault. But when it comes to violent deaths that specifically include bone crushing noises, well, that really makes me squirm in my seat. The knife plunging, rib-cracking death of Private Mellish in Saving Private Ryan and the death by oar of Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley are pretty high on my list of memorable scenes, but nothing grits my teeth more than the ‘curb stomp’ murder of a nameless victim in American History X.

American History X probably didn’t get the reception it deserved when it came out. There was a lot of back and forth between the director Tony Kaye and New Line Cinema, who eventually had Edward Norton make the final cut with a new editor. People are also always weary of a film which is about a (albeit reformed) violent Nazi skinhead, and you can understand why. But while the film does have a lot of violence in it, it’s in the context of a man who has changed, and Edward Norton performs this part very well. So it is perhaps that much more shocking when the reason for Derek Vinyard’s (Norton) past incarceration, and indeed the reason for the narrative, is revealed to us in a flashback.

Derek Vinyard has been imprisoned for killing two men. One he kills with his gun, the other, however, has a much more grotesque end. I’ve since discovered that it’s referred to as a ‘curb stomp’, it involves the victim being forced to bite the edge of the curb before their attacker stomps on their head. Even now it sends shivers up my spine. Maybe it’s the excellent performance of Edward Norton, who builds the tension admirably as Derek threatens his victim. Maybe it’s the simplicity and callousness of the death. Or maybe it’s just that the very idea of bone and tooth crushing against stone is more than I can take. What a miserable way to go.

Manon de Reeper – Ichi The Killer (Koroshiya Ichi, 2001) – Torture Scene

In all honesty, almost every scene from Ichi the Killer could be included here. I ended up cheating a little, because in the scene I picked, the guy doesn’t die… But the entire movie provides so many cringeworthy, squirm-inducing deaths that I thought, so what if the guy doesn’t technically die in this scene – it did nearly kill me, it’s so awful.

Ichi The Killer is notorious and has raised great controversy – it has even been banned outright in Malaysia, Norway and Germany due to its graphic depictions of extreme violence and cruelty. In this 2001 Takashi Miike film that tells the story of feuding yakuza gangs, one of the main characters is the Glasgow smile, pink coat-wearing, metal skewer-wielding and sadistic gang enforcer Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano).

In this almost five-minute-long scene, Kakihara has taken a member of the rival Funaki clan, who, according to rumour, kidnapped Anjo, their gang’s boss. To retrieve the information of their boss’s location, Kakihara suspends Suzuki (Susumu Terajima) on meat hooks, pierces him with his skewer weapons, pours cooking oil over him, and also does something to the man’s genitals… and Kakihara clearly seems to enjoy torturing the man. It soon turns out, however, that Suzuki is innocent. From beginning to end, the scene makes you squirm, and if you can watch it without covering your eyes at some point, I applaud you, and also fear for your sanity. In the next scene, Kakihara slices off his own tongue as penance for torturing Suzuki, and this is visualised in the way of an unflinching front shot. Lovely.

More gruesome deaths in this movie include a head riddled with skewers (like a freestyle Pinhead) displayed in a broken TV, throats sliced with blood spurting out of them at great velocity, bodies literally chopped in half (lengthwise), yet all this is trumped by a giant massacre. The result is a scene as gory as you’ve ever seen it: intestines are splayed everywhere, blood covers every surface of the room, it even has a face sticking to a wall, and then slowly sliding down. If you want to see the most brutal moments and have a strong stomach, the kindly users of Youtube have put together a video of the most brutal moments of Ichi the Killer. For your enjoyment, click here. There’s gratuitous violence in film, and then there’s embracing gratuitous violence and pushing it as far as it can go – the latter is definitely the case here.

Enjoy squirming in your seat:

Mason Manuel – The Thing (1982) – Norris

The one movie death that continuously gets me, no matter how many times I watch it, is Norris’s death by defibrillation from The Thing. The film is creepy enough especially for its time due to its stunning use of practical effects, but Jesus give me a gallon of blood running through the streets before I have to watch a guy explode into an alien monster again.

While a team based in the arctic is forced to deal with an alien being, team member Norris mysteriously goes limp. As another team mate presses down on his chest with defib paddles, his hands go straight into the man’s chest which turns out to be a giant alien mouth. Kurt Russel and his band of misfits eventually are able to kill the abomination with a flamethrower, but just as you think the grossness is over, director John Carpenter throws another disgusting curve-ball our way.

Though Norris’s body was burned, his head escaped most of the damage and so escapes by (how else) literally detaching itself from its own body and scooting around the floor using its disgustingly large tongue. It wiggles and squiggles all around the floor trying to escape from being burned. And as if THAT wasn’t enough, the damn thing decides that the best way to escape is to grow creepy spider legs and make its grand escape. Luckily, before I can cringe any more, Kurt Russel’s character is able to find and burn the creepy head. Excuse me, I am going to go cuddle with my blanky now.

Samuel Spencer- Hot Fuzz (2007) – Simon Skinner

Most death scenes leave me cold. Colder than Alan Cumming’s death scene where he gets frozen by liquid nitrogen at the end of Goldeneye. As a child I was fascinated by the history of fake blood (no denying it, I was a weird kid), and as a result I’ve never been able to see even the goriest deaths as anything more than some chocolate syrup or a c*cktail of slightly poisonous photo developing chemicals (as used on The Godfather). Also, I worked in a sexual health clinic for most of my teens, so my squirm thresholds are particularly high.

However, there is one that gets me every time. No slasher film can do it, no Oscar-bait slow cancer death film can, but Simon Skinner’s (Timothy Dalton) death in Hot Fuzz definitely does. Despite being a comedy, Dalton’s death is brutal, with him and his creepy moustache finding themselves impaled on the spire of a church in a miniature village. I mean, I know some people think Dalton was a crappy Bond, but he doesn’t deserve that undignified death, a tiny church with a Licence to Kill taking The Living Daylights out of his character (I’ll stop now, if only because I’ve run out of Dalton Bond films to make puns from).

Actually, that’s exactly what is so icky about it. Not only is it a pretty nasty way to go in general, but it’s completely undignified when you think that this guy is not only Bond (my favourite Bond as a child – again, really weird kid), but he also played a goddamn Time Lord God on Doctor Who. Dalton getting skewered on a spire is the only link two favourite franchises getting skewered, like a franchise kebab of childhood dreams. Even eight years after the release of the film, I still sometimes think of it when I’m shaving under my chin and shudder. All this grossness, and not a single drop of the red stuff in sight.

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What is the death scene that makes you squirm in your seat? Is it on this list? Tell us all about your favorite horrific film deaths!

(top image: Seven (1995) – source: New Line Cinema)