9. Memorable Deaths in Movies

Author’s note: I’m stuck! I had an idea to write about the afterlife as a short story and now I’m stuck in a “how do I end this before it turns into a novel” 4-way stop sign. Turns out that I’m a little out of practice on writing that kind of piece (the last short story I wrote was probably in 2006) and have had all kinds of starts, stops, edits, cuts, etc. that have really slowed me down and made me a little frustrated. Writing is hard. Even when it’s easy, it’s hard. And sometimes, if you get stuck in the worst kind of way, writing can almost make you feel like a piece of shit in a “this is dumb” or “this is a worthless endeavor” kind of way. I always break through that kind of thing and end up releasing something eventually (I am ultimately writing for myself, after all), but it doesn’t make the stuck’ness of it all any less difficult. NO MATTER… I’m going to keep plucking away at that piece and I hope it’ll get released at some point soon. While I’m stuck on that piece, I figured I’d work on something a little easier and fun to write, so LET’S TALK DEATHS IN MOVIES! *air horn sound*

Best PIXAR Death Scene: Whether it’s the villainous Charles Muntz getting caught in some of Carl’s balloons and plummeting 15,000 feet to his death in Up, the utter heartachingly beautiful deaths of both Mama Coco from Coco or Ellie Fredericksen in the aforementioned Up, or Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong sacrificing himself to save Joy in Inside Out, Pixar has some of the best, most impactful death scenes of any genre of any format. My runner-up pick for “Best PIXAR Death Scene” is Buddy getting his cape in caught in the engine turbine at the end of The Incredibles. It’s such a great villain death, foretold so deliciously by Edna Mode’s “NO CAPES!” admonishment earlier in the film.

But my top pick goes to Hopper’s demise at the end of A Bug’s Life, easily their most underrated film. I’ve always loved the idea of Hopper thinking the bird is another one of Flik’s tricks (they used a fake bird earlier to scare him and his gang). But the real monster movie level deliciousness comes with how adorable that bird and its chicks are and how grotesque Hopper’s (off-screen) death would wind up being; getting disembowled by a bunch of adorable baby birds. It’s freaking awesome!

Bad Last Line by a Character Before Dying: I was originally going to do a “great last line by a character before dying” but erased it almost immediately after writing it. Although I love a great final line, there’s nothing I could write about something like Roy Batty’s last line from Blade Runner that would be all that interesting to read. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like… tears in rain. Time to die.” Yeah, that’s pretty perfect. Or the subtle last line of “Brooks was here,” as it’s etched into the woodwork of the spot where Brooks hung himself in The Shawshank Redemption. Or the nobility of “Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight” as the ship sinks in Titanic. They’re all perfect and don’t need me to tell you so. Enough said.

But a “Bad Last Line by a Character Before Dying” post? That I can work with. There are so many bad ones:

• The Godfather Part 3 gets way too much negative heat, in my humble opinion. No, that movie’s not as good as the first two movies (perfect movies by my estimation), but that third movie more or less works, especially the final hour or so. But what doesn’t work so much is Mary Corleone’s (as delivered by Sofia Coppola) “Dad?” after she’s shot on the opera house steps. The whole last scene of that movie should have been Shakespearean level tragedy, but is instead so tragically clumsy that it’s hard not to laugh.
• I’m going to talk about this movie later in a different section, but I’ve always hated Captain Miller’s “Earn this” at the end of Saving Private Ryan. I am a Steven Spielberg fanboy through and through, but if the Beard has one major weakness, it’s occasionally beating viewers over the head with the messages of his movies. “Earn this” has always felt like such a dickish thing to say to Private Ryan. Earn what exactly? Who is Captain Miller to say such a thing? Private Ryan was right there with you the whole time. Most of his platoon died, too. HE LOST THREE BROTHERS FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!! He’s already earned whatever life he chooses to live for the rest of his years. I guess you could say Captain Miller is talking to us in all of our 1998 Backstreet Boys glory and asking us to earn the freedoms we enjoy, but then why not do that via some other means as a post-script to the movie itself? Drives me nuts!
• If we’re talking about movies that beat you over the head with the message as delivered by the movie’s main character, I have to throw William Wallace’s “FREEEDOMMMM” from the end of Braveheart into the mix, as well. You either love that movie or you don’t. I don’t. …at all. I remember all my Marine friends going apeshit over that movie, but I think it’s pretty heavy handed in all the most annoying (to me) ways. That last line is emblematic of everything I dislike about the movie.
• Talia al Ghul’s final line in The Dark Knight Rises isn’t all that bad, to be honest. “My… father’s… work… is… done.” Solid. A good capper on a pretty amazing trilogy. But check out how clumsy her actual death is. How did Christopher Nolan let this pass? It’s truly horrendous. (the YouTube should be cued up appropriately)

Death that most screwed you up as a child

If we’re talking about movie deaths that most screwed you up as a child, the list seems endless and there are several to choose from. There’s everything from the Mufasa’s death in The Lion King, to the bee attack/funeral scene in My Girl, to Bambi’s mom getting unceremoniously gunned down by hunters in Bambi. You could talk about Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web, Obi Wan Kenobi getting struck down and “becoming more powerful than you could possibly imagine,” or even the death of “the gun who doesn’t want to be a gun” in The Iron Giant.

But if I had to really narrow it down, I’m going with these 3 movies.

• Old Yeller in Old Yeller. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over Old Yeller’s death. I loved that movie so much as a child that it almost felt like Old Yeller was my dog. I even read the book it was based on and Savage Sam, its follow-up. When I’ve watched clips of that movie now as an adult, I’ve come to the realization that Old Yeller is more about old school rugged masculinity than about a kid and his dog, so I’m not sure how well it’s aged. But the movie worked well for me as a 6 year old kid with a dog of his own.
• Artax in The Neverending Story. This scene was (and remains) 100% devastating. Having a kid and his horse enter something called “The Swamp of Sadness” where the sadder you get the harder it is to survive said swamp is some straight up gangster ass German Fairy Tale shit. We’re not pussyfooting around here with poisoned apples, magical shoes, or magical long hair. No, we’re confronting existentialism and depression via drowned horses here. How did any of us who grew up in the 80s make it out okay? …did we make it out okay?
• Look… All of the aforementioned deaths are sad, but Mufasa is killed off screen. You only see Bambi’s mom after she’s shot. You only really see and hear the gunshot that takes out Old Yeller, but then you don’t see the dog again. But that red and white shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? You see the Judge literally end its life as it looks up to both the judge and to us with those adorable puppy dog eyes as it’s melted into eternity. And then as if to rub it in all of our faces, the Judge’s effing hand is dripping red ink in a “is that blood or red ink” fake out. Jesus Christ… WHAT THE FUCK?

Most unintentionally hilarious death scene: I know which one I’m going to pick so let’s give a shout out to the runner up:

• Propeller guy from Titanic. You can almost imagine James Cameron pitching this scene. “And then, when the ship is capsized with the aft of the ship at its highest point, I want a guy to fall off the top of the ship head over heel, hit the propeller with his foot, and then have that hit speed up the speed of his spin as he hurls towards the water.” And you can almost see the SFX person at ILM whisper “Jesus…” under their breath.
• But this pick goes to Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black, a movie perhaps only remembered because of both the below death scene scene and it being the movie that had the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer (undoubtedly the most eagerly anticipated movie trailer in history) attached to it. The movie itself is pretty dreadful (overwrought, plodding, thought it was smarter than it was), but Pitt’s death scene is an all time unintentionally hilarious WTF moment. After kind of a standard “meet cute” in a coffee shop, the clip below is cued up to the correct moment:

Favorite slasher movie murder: I grew up on horror movies, so this could probably be its own post with 50 different selections to choose from. But in the spirit of providing just a few, here are some favorites:

• Freddy Krueger literally turning someone into a marionette puppet by ripping their veins and arteries out of their body in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.
• The “stick a guy to a wall like a pin cushion” stabbing in the first Halloween. The killing itself is relatively mundane, but I’ve always loved how Michael Myers tilts his head to the side after the deed is done. There’s not a lot of great character work in most of Michael Myers actions, but that’s a nice subtle moment.
• Casey Becker’s (Drew Barrymore) death scene from the first scene of the first Scream. Having the biggest star of your movie die literally in the first 5 minutes is a pretty incredible heat check and left us all on high alert for the rest of the movie. In most other movies, she’d be a “final girl,” but here she is being dispatched rather unceremoniously in one of the more brutal death scenes I’ve seen in one of these movies. But the entire scene itself is also top notch, what with the boyfriend on the patio, the ticking clock of the parents coming home (and knowing they’re too remote for the police to get there in time), and with the great subversion of her failing the quiz by saying Jason Voorhees is the killer in Friday the 13th, when it was actually Jason’s mom who was the killer in that first movie. Brilliant
• Speaking of Jason Voorhees… look, Jason X is total garbage and almost 100% unwatchable. It’s set in space, y’all. Jason doesn’t belong in space. But it does have one of the all-time great slasher movie kill scenes. In it, Jason finds one of the scientists, shoves her face into a vat of liquid nitrogen, freezes it, then smashes it on a counter like a big chunk of ice. YouTube won’t let me link to it due to its graphic nature, but holy effing crap, y’all… one of those “so brutal it’s actually kind of hilarious” death scenes.

Most Impactful Death Scene: I don’t even know what to call this section. “Most impactful death?” “Death scenes that knock you on your ass?” “Death scenes that stick with you?” Even though I took a shot at Saving Private Ryan (a movie I really like but don’t fully love) earlier in this post, that movie has two such scenes. It almost feels a little disrespectful to talk too much about either, but the first one is the medic Wade calling out for his mom as he lies dying on the battlfield near the end of the film. Giovanni Ribisi’s acting is just superb in that scene.

But perhaps the most impactful death scene I’ve ever seen in any movie is the knife fight later on in that movie. For starters, that scene is a perfect distillation of what war actually is; person against person, relying on skill, a little luck, and unadulterated brutality by the combatants. But what really makes that scene brilliant is the incorporation of the language barrier between the two soldiers. As that German soldier begins winning the battle of strength and slowly descends the knife towards Private Mellish’s (Adam Goldberg) chest, with the Nazi Youth knife the Jewish soldier had won on the battlefield earlier in the movie, no less, he starts speaking to him in German. Private Mellish obviously doesn’t understand what he’s saying and implores him to “stop” and asks “what’s that mean,” but the knife just methodically keeps getting closer and closer to his chest, no matter how much he begs him to “stop… stop…” God that scene just hits so. freaking. hard. That’s a human impulse and a piece of brilliant screenwriting. I haven’t even mentioned that all of this could have been stopped by Corporal Upham, who’s (relatably) cowering in the stairs as all of this happens within earshot. If you’re curious what the German soldier is saying, here’s the translation: “Give up, you don’t stand a chance! Let’s end this here. It will be easier for you, much easier. You’ll see it will be over quickly.” Just… weirdly poetic and hauntingly beautiful, but devastating in a way that you can feel in the deepest part of your gut.

I could probably go on and on and on and on with this post but going to stop here to save some more for down the road. Ideas for a follow up down the road: best hero death scene, death scene were someone sacrifices themself for others, best Tarantino death scene (so many to choose from with that category), or most impactful death of an inanimate object. I’ve always loved how death is portrayed in movies and find it pretty fascinating that movie deaths can be as emotionally all over the map as any death we see in real life. Good stuff.