As horror films get gorier and more inventive with how the human body can be slashed, hacked and destroyed, we ask the question: what makes for a great horror movie kill?
Horror is having a bit of a moment. Smile 2 and Terrifier 3 are pulling audiences into cinemas and The Substance has a lot of people – this writer included – including Demi Moore in their awards predictions. Other excellent highlights from this year’s terrifying offerings are In A Violent Nature, Late Night With The Devil and Oddity.
Forgive us for stating the obvious here: violence is one of the big draws of the genre and always has been. The pure spectacle of seeing a weird, worm-like alien burst from John Hurt’s chest or Michael Myers hacking a teenager to pieces is weirdly attractive and a big reason why people seek these films out.
Arguably, the genre has only gotten more extreme as the years have gone by. There’s more guts and gore, more beheadings and filmmakers are constantly trying to find new ways to gross audiences out.
So what makes for a great horror movie kill? What makes a kill go from unspectacular to unforgettable? And more importantly, why do we want to see people die horribly in the first place?
Not everyone is a fan of outrageous amounts of gore and people will likely have very different answers to the above questions, but let’s have a look at some of the great horror kills and see if there are any common threads.
If we think about some of the most iconic, well-known horror movie kills of all time, you’re like to encounter the above-mentioned chestburster scene from Alien, Janet Leigh’s death in Psycho, Drew Barrymore’s demise in Scream and the opening of Jaws. All fantastic kills, largely because they come as a complete surprise.
Both Psycho and Scream introduce Leigh and Barrymore, both well-known movie stars, in their opening scenes and then kill them off almost unceremoniously. If you saw Barrymore’s face and name on a poster for Scream, you surely didn’t expect her to be Ghostface’s first victim.
But the surprise element isn’t everything when it comes to kills. Heck, the entire Saw franchise is built around the expectation that almost everyone in it dies. The question becomes, how do they die? What kind of a wringer will they be put through?
Finding new and increasingly disturbing ways to kill off victims has become almost a race between horror filmmakers. Arguably, Terrifier’s Damien Leone is winning this by a mile. Art The Clown has managed to hack, rip into and slice and dice into his victims with increasing imagination and gore.
This is also something Saw is particularly good at. John Kramer’s traps have gotten far more elaborate than the humble Reverse Bear Trap or Razorwire Trap. As the franchise has gone on, the traps have become more and more bloody. One of the more nightmarish traps is the Acid Room from Saw VI where the film’s “protagonist” William is injected with needles full of acid, resulting in him dissolving from the inside out. Nasty stuff, and more than enough to give you nightmares.
In fact, sometimes the deaths don’t even need to be that gory for them to be effective. Going back to the Saw franchise, in Saw 3D, a woman dies by being enclosed in a brazen bull, roasting to death. She was completely innocent and not a subject of Kramer’s tests – she was the girlfriend to the subject of the tests and used as a punishment for him as he failed his final test – but arguably she faced one of the cruellest ends seen in any Saw film.
Another fire-related death that you somehow feel in your bones is the tanning bed deaths from Final Destination 3. A group of high schoolers are targeted by Death itself after they defy fate and get off a doomed rollercoaster ride that ends in bloodshed. Two girls are getting their tan on, but a series of unfortunate events leads to them being trapped in their respective tanning beds with the heat cranked up to eleven. They burn to death, slowly and painfully.
However, the greatest horror film deaths tend to be those that incite an equal amount of disgust and elation. Take Lucio Fulci’s 1980 trilogy-opener City Of The Living Dead (also known as Gates Of Hell) which features perhaps the most stomach-turning death scene of all time.
Two teenagers find themselves possessed by something wicked. You see, the dead have been rising in their town after all hell breaks loose, rather literally after the suicide of a priest. Rosie (played by Daniel Dorin) suddenly gets a vacant look in her eyes and before you know it, the girl starts to regurgitate her own organs.
If the visual isn’t enough to make you want to run to the loo, it’s the sound effects that really drive home just how excruciating such a death would be. Sound design in general is crucial to making a memorable kill scene, whether it’s with the victim’s cries of help or pain, with an effective score or, like in City Of The Living Dead, non-stop chorus of gagging sounds while real veal intestines pour out of the mouth of the actress and the fake head they used in close-ups.
The organ regurgitation from City Of The Living Dead tests the limits of suspension of disbelief for sure, but do we want realism from our horror movies? Sure, it’s pretty haunting imagining roasting to death or having a drill slowly penetrate your skull (another fantastic City Of The Living Dead death), but there’s also a certain joy in watching something completely ludicrous.
Earlier in 2024, director Chris Nash asked audiences to adopt the viewpoint of a traditional horror movie killer in his ambient slasher In A Violent Nature. The film itself is as ambitious as it is gory, but one of its kills has already established itself as a classic of the genre.
Aurora is your typical expendable horror movie victim and our killer Johnny targets her as she’s doing yoga on a cliff. Johnny comes armed with a hook attached to a chain and he’s about to do some serious damage with it. Johnny punches a hole into Aurora’s stomach before attaching the hook to her head and pulling it – yes, the head – through the hole in her stomach. Nash doesn’t shy away from showing us all of Aurora’s bones breaking, either.
What makes the kill even more graphic is that it’s preceded by a much more lowkey death. Before Aurora’s tranquil yoga session gets ruined, Johnny attacks her friend in the lake. He simply pulls her under, barely allowing her to scream. The surface of the water just about flickers as a sign of some kind of struggle underneath that we’re not privy to before a body floats to the surface.
Another example of a ridiculously entertaining kill is the unimaginable Liquid Nitrogen death from Jason X. The tenth film in the Friday The 13th series isn’t exactly regarded well by fans of the franchise or the general audience, but the kill has gone on to appear on many horror movie kill listicles and for good reason.
Most of Jason X takes place on a spaceship after Earth has become too polluted. Unfortunately, someone thought it was a good idea to bring Jason Voorhees. One of the first people to die on the spaceship is poor scientist Adrienne, who has been left alone with the corpse of Jason. Except he’s not exactly a corpse, although we’re not entirely what to class him as. Jason has died more times than we can count and the bugger keeps coming back. In fact, his return is being planned right now.
Jason awakens on Adrienne’s lab table and attacks, brutally submerging Adrienne’s head in a sink full of liquid nitrogen, freezing her instantly. As a cherry on top, Jason then smashes her head on the counter, causing it to break into roughly a million pieces.
I’m no scientist, but I’m not sure how common it is to keep sinks full of liquid nitrogen, nor am I sure how quickly it would freeze an entire human head, but who cares when the results are this fun? The death isn’t particularly gory or even disturbing, but just bloody good entertainment. It’s great value for your hard earned money; if you can’t scare ‘em, gross them out or make them giggle.
Why do we find these extreme, graphic, ludicrous deaths so entertaining? There’s no real, singular answer. We’re all attracted to and fascinated by different things, but in part, horror has always been about challenging yourself. Franchises like Terrifier, Saw and Hostel thrive on asking audiences how much more can they take. What’s your limit? What will make you tap out?
There’s no one kill that could be crowned the best of all time. There are millions of great deaths across decades of cinema, horror or not. And we’re sure to see some more grim, nasty and enthralling deaths in our future as new voices emerge in the genre.
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