MEDIA STUDIES: HORROR FILMS

What’s the most inventive death in horror movies?

Death by bed in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Photograph: PR @alexito Bill Pullman being buried alive in a coffin full of blood in The Serpent and the Rainbow. With a tarantula on his face. It’s the little details that count.
@Sokket The bed eating a victim in the original Nightmare on Elm Street
@mcragg Scream. Death by catflap.
@theythinkitsallover Meaning of Life – exploding fat man.
@gembird My favourite is the one in The Happening where a man starts his lawnmower and then lies down in front of it so it chews him up.
@Sipech I think drowning in sand in The Omen. It made me aware of a phobia I never realised I had. Surely, the worst possible way to die.
@ATG66 I’ll never forget the scene in Dr Phibes Rises Again where the man is trapped by a huge scorpion statue that pins his arms with huge nails between its claws. The only way out is to get to the key that is in a vase. The man breaks the vase open to unleash hundres of scorpions, which then proceed to sting him to death as he’s trapped, unable to move … awesome!!
@Fumblebuck Arthur Lowe’s daintily surgical decapitation (under anaesthetic, while asleep in bed next to his drugged wife) by Vincent Price and Diana Rigg in Theatre of Blood, culminating with the maid finding Lowe’s head the next morning stuck on top of a milk bottle on the doorstep!
@CaptainDeadly The mouth in the stomach biting the doctor’s arms off in John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.
@neil886 Theatre of Blood! Of course! Robert Morley being fed his “babies”, and Eric Sykes’s walkie-talkie commentary on his own impending death.
@startchoppin Not sure if RoboCop counts as horror but Emil’s death, where he literally liquifies on impact, has always gone down well in these parts.
@misma Being eaten alive from the inside by slugs in Slither.
@grahamw How about the scene in which Sam Neill murders his wife’s former lover using only a feather and an old shoe he finds in a bin in Possession? Utterly revolting …
@AbelWhittle The death of Pat and her friend 12 minutes into Suspiria (1977). A celebration of style over substance. Argento shows his true misogynist self in these few minutes of depravity as he rips the heart from one woman and leaves the other hanging, sliced by sheets of glass, high above the beautifully decorated floor of an art deco building. Wonderful.
@PatriciaSB Ray Liotta being fed his own brain in Hannibal.
@MrArchitect Death by being filmed (and impaled by the camera) in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.
@YummieMummie I do have a soft spot for the decapitation scene in The Omen.
@EnthusiasticKnights Deaths by cats in The Uncanny.
@DrGiggles Body turned inside out by head being pulled inwards via hand through rectum (Society).
@leoniebahri In Happy Birthday to Me a character gets killed by having a shish kebab shoved down his throat.
@maid2 The Company of Wolves. The mono-browed huntsman/werewolf aims a karate chop at Angela Lansbury and her head sails off, shattering against the wall like a porcelain doll. Surreal, symbolic, weirdly beautiful and almost upsettingly abrupt all at the same time.
@Bartel Dracula: Prince of Darkness – the count is killed by running water (a rare use of this arcane piece of vampire mythology).
@jadders2010 My personal favourite would be from The Fountain in which Tomas drinks the sap of the tree of life before bursting into flowering shrubs, eventually being consumed by the ground.