Top 10 Great Movie Deaths

There isn’t a frame of film showing a knife blade break Janet Leigh’s flesh. Nor do you see any real T ‘n’ A. Yet, viewers think they see it all.

The 45-second shower murder in Psycho is one of those film moments when editing, music, performance, and cinematography merge in perfect unison to accomplish what film was invented to do: To get into your head and make you believe in things that don’t exist. Was Norman Bates real? No. Were the chances likely that you’d meet a knife in the shower? Definitely, not. Yet, several audience members in the ’60s feared taking showers after witnessing the butchery of Leigh. I can’t imagine a higher compliment for a filmmaker.

Personally, I prefer everything in Peter Jackson’s King Kong over the original film, including the Empire State Building swan dive (yes, I’m sure that makes me all sorts of horrible things to film snobs). Yet, it’d be plain-ass wrong to place Jackson’s remake on this list instead of the original. After all, directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and stop-motion animator Willis O’Brien created one of cinema’s most iconic images: An overgrown monkey swatting planes on the top of a skyscraper before tumbling to the streets. However, Willis deserves extra credit. With clay, rubber, metal, and fur he managed to evoke a sense of wonder and tragedy from an inanimate doll.

The Wicked Witch of the West’s fatal comeuppance is simply the most famous, quoted, referenced, parodied death scene in pop-culture history. The scene is so omnipresent it invisibly permeates everyday life, such as mundane conversation (“Can’t go out in the rain today, don’t want to melt”). But why? Part of its brilliance lies in its unexpected simplicity: H2O kills… evil (that was also the witch-slaying tool in L. Frank Baum’s book). But, movies are full of elegant ways to die. Yet few do it with such bravado as The Wizard of Oz. The film delivers a fantastic demise for one of the all-time great villains — clever, original, colorful, grotesque, well-acted, and 100% satisfying in that you feel the bitch got what she deserved. You can’t ask for anything more when it comes to death on the big screen.


So you think you know of some more memorable deaths. After all, where is Spock’s nuclear meltdown? Or Hans Gruber’s death by watch removal? Sound off below.

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