So I was watching “The Dark Power” on Rifftrax, and there’s a character who gets killed when his hand is ripped off his arm and then his face is pulled off, while he’s still screaming and obviously still alive for a while. It’s pretty shocking considering the movie doesn’t have any other death scene that’s nearly as brutal as that one. Here’s a Youtube link to the scene I’m talking about (the hand ripping starts around 58:12):
How about some other movies where one unfortunate character meets a terrible end because the FX budget and script stars all magically aligned?
Off the top of my head, I think Cybil’s death in “Silent Hill” was much worse than anyone else, except maybe the lady who had her skin ripped off by Pyramid Head.
It will not be on YouTube, but there is a movie with one of the most viscerally disturbing (for a woman) death scenes I’ve ever seen.
Galaxy of Terror. Don’t ask me what the movie’s about; I’ve seen it several times and I still have no clue (think a more disturbing version of The Day Time Ended and you’ve basically got the idea; the plot, if there is one, is virtually non-existent and I have no idea what the purpose of the film was, if any), but this one scene did get to me. The one thing I did get out of the film is that the various characters face their worst fears during it, and one of them, a waif-like blonde, is terrified of bugs. So naturally she gets attacked by a giant maggot. But it gets worse. Because this is a Roger Corman film (ironically the film that got James Cameron noticed for his work on the film), there has to be some T&A involved. The maggot produces slime which dissolves the poor girls clothing and then the implication is that the maggot basically rapes her to death. You don’t actually see anything happening at the nether regions, but at one point her screams of terror literally turn into orgasmic moans right before she dies, covered in slime and bug juice. It’s gross.
As a woman that is a HIGHLY disturbing implication to think about, so it stuck in my head.
Aside from that, I can think of quite a few exceptionally gruesome deaths in film, some famous, some not so famous. The scene in The Thing where the man’s chest turns into a mouth and bites off the doctor’s arms was absolutely amazing special effects work (the rest of the film ain’t so bad either). The final death scene for Brundlefly in Cronenberg’s version of The Fly was extremely gross and disturbing. And there’s a film called Society that’s got some amazing body horror in it; the film’s basically about how rich people “feed” off the poor, but in this case they do it literally; all the rich people in the film at the end strip down to their undergarments and basically deform into this one gelatinous mass of stuff that absorbs this poor schlub into itself before they all reform into their “human” guise (there’s also a scene where one of the rich people literally gets turned inside out by the “hero”).
Truthfully most body horror films would probably suit your question perfectly; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a body horror film that didn’t have SOME sort of absolutely gruesome death scene folded in. And a lot of those have some absolutely amazing special effects artists on the film.
Indiana Jones. First, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. There’s the guy who gets chopped up by the plane propeller and I thought that was bad enough even without actually seeing it happen. My mind supplied the details. But then, at the end when they open the ark and the guy melts. When I was a kid, and my family was watching it at home, my mom made me close my eyes for that last scene…not that it helped overly since there was all the screaming and such. But I watched it when I was older and… I’m wimpy about this stuff, but man, that was gross.
Second, in Temple of Doom, the guy who gets pulled into the rock crusher. Again, you don’t see it, but my mind helped me out. Yech.
Gory deaths is one of the things I really hate about horror movies.
That one character in Hot Fuzz. Yes, there are murders throughout, but there’s one death in particular that makes you reflexively jump and yell “HOLY CRAP”
I think the most interesting examples are movies outside the horror genre, where gruesome deaths are expected.
I’d cite the death of secondary villain Milton Krest via decompression chamber in License to Kill. While the Bond movies have a lot of violence, it’s usually not particularly bloody or graphic. Come to think of it, the death of Benicio Del Toro’s character and the maiming of Felix Leiter are also more gruesome than the norm for Bond movies.
I think that’s the only thing people remember about that movie. Not the cast, which was kind of impressive (Erin Moran, Edward Albert, Grace Zabriskie, Ray Walston, Zalman King, a young Robert Englund), not the effects per se, certainly not the story (what is it, again? X-rated Forbidden Planet?), sometimes people know that this and Battle Beyond The Stars were among Cameron’s earliest films but who remembers Dave DeCoteau was a P.A. and Bill Paxton was a set dresser?
The planned scene was an ordinary girl-gets-et scene but Corman needed Taaffe O’Connell to get nekkid. The original scene got an “X” from the MPAA so…yeah.
People’s heads explode all the time.
Honestly, the only one that really comes to mind is church steeple through the jaw, but that wasn’t fatal.
But then, at the end when they open the ark and the guy melts. When I was a kid, and my family was watching it at home, my mom made me close my eyes for that last scene…not that it helped overly since there was all the screaming and such. But I watched it when I was older and… I’m wimpy about this stuff, but man, that was gross.