Top 10 Hollywood Creative Kills

Hollywood is constantly coming up with new and creative ideas to shock us with ways to die. Disturbing scenes of death are not common to Horror movies alone and found outside the genre all the time. It’s not uncommon to hear news someone died of fatal gunshot or stab wounds, so Hollywood has gotten creative throughout the decades. Here are some glimpses into Hollywood’s more creative and unconventional ways to die, in no particular order. Warning: Though the following gore is fake it’s not for queasy stomachs!

“I’d buy that for a dollar!” Ah, who could forget the 1987 gore-enthusiastic film, Robocop? With a record of 11 original ‘X’ ratings before the MPAA finally approved an ‘R’ rated version to be released to American theaters. The Sci-Fi film featured a murdered cop turned cyborg by O.C.P. to create the perfect crime-fighting machine. Robocop lived up to his name and took down villains, one by one, in a glorious spectrum of violence as never before seen in theaters. What disturbed audiences and the MPAA was that the gore was not so over-the-top laughably funny, but more realistic than cheesy for its time. Something later Robocop films failed to do. The above clip features the toxic waste scene in Robocop, in which one of Robocop’s murderers crashes into a vat of toxic waste which melts his body and causes excruciating pain, only to be put out of his misery by an oncoming vehicle. The scene can’t be embedded from youtube but you can watch it here.

It’s been referenced, parodied and even copied since its release, but the chest-bursting scene in Alien has remained infamous to this day. It’s no surprise Alien, released in 1979, received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. To achieve the needed sense of panic needed in one take, actors were not told about the spewing blood. As a result, actress Veronica Cartwright stumbled and fell to the floor screaming. Called the “chestburster,” it features the death of a spaceship crew member who unsuspectingly hosted a baby alien inside his chest.

Another creative kill scene that had people talking was David Cronenberg’s, Scanners. Released in 1981 and still one of the most gruesome death scenes today. Scanners, the name given to folks in the movie with telekinetic powers, featured duels between people with supernatural abilities. One such ability was the power to make heads explode, which was put to good use in the movie. Special effects artist Dick Smith created a prosthetic head filled with livers and shot from the back with a shotgun to create a cringe-worthy effect of exploding head, with brain content flying everywhere.

Play with the Lament Configuration and you’ll summon demons from Hell. Clive Barker’s, Hellraiser, gave us a peak at what tortured souls could look like. Cenobites, once-human-beings trapped in Hell and consumed by demonic forces, now do Hell’s bidding by retrieving souls in the mortal world for the under world. The Cenobites were not happy about Frank escaping Hell, so they decided to deal with him the best way they know how: torture. Here is Frank’s demise.

If you die in your dreams you won’t die in your sleep, right? Not if Freddy’s coming for you. This murderer comes from beyond the grave and invades the dreams of adolescents. Falling asleep meant encountering Freddy Krueger, a child serial killer turned loose from prison and killed by revengeful parents. Freddy haunted dreams and continued his thirst for blood from the other side. Only catch was if you fell asleep you were subjected to Freddy’s relentless disrespect for the laws of physics. Poor Johnny Depp never saw it coming. Neither did the ceiling.

“We all get them,” and they’re annoyingly harmless; chain letters. Don’t pass them on and your wishes won’t come true at midnight or nobody will love you. Or, in the case of the 2010 film Chain Letter, the consequence for not passing on a harmless chain letter is death. This harsh penalty makes for an interesting kill. The featured clip above shows Chain Letter’s serial killer, Chain Man, using his favorite choice of weapon to finish off his victims: chains. In one killing sequence, the Chain Man chains the separate legs of a high school girl, played by Nikki Reed, to two separate cars. The cars belong to the girl’s parents and as they take their separate cars to work one morning, they unknowingly drag their chained daughter from the garage. When the parents split in opposite directions to go to work, so does the body of their daughter. Riiiiiip! I haven’t winced this bad in years.

The ground was no longer safe with graboids on the loose in the 1990 film, Tremors. Graboids, fictitious worm-like creatures that lived and traveled underground, devoured anything that made noise above ground; including humans. Though Tremors was a box office failure which barely broke even, it was a runaway hit on home video, later becoming a cult classic. The unique creature concept of the graboids, blind entities that sensed prey by vibrations in the ground, made for entertaining chases of cat-and-mouse, with human consumption. Graboids devoured humans whole with their four-digit mouths and multiple, prehensile snake-like tongues. This video clip from Tremors 3 shows a graboid doing what it does best, eating people alive.

It’s fun to play games. It’s even more fun to win. In the 1997 movie, Cube, if you win – you keep your life. If you lose – you die. Cube, a low budget award-winning film, placed unsuspecting people inside a cube and left the players to solve the puzzle of the cube to survive. The beginning of this clip (which can’t be embedded) features the unique death of a player as he tests the fields of the cube and finds himself diced into cubes. Another notable and obvious mention would be the Saw film series and the many games Jigsaw played with his victims.

Resident Evil, a popular zombie movie released in 2002, was roughly based on a video game of the same title. In the movie, lead character Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, and gang try to get past an obstacle to discover what’s wrong with the Hive, a secret underground government facility testing biohazardous chemicals for warfare. The intruders trigger the Hive’s defense mechanism and ensues a battle of man vs. machine intelligence. The trapped people try to out-maneuver the program’s defense and find themselves victims of the laser.

One of the most haunting scenes in cinema history, and still terrifyingly realistic today, is the nuclear nightmare scene from 1991, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Nuclear footage was studied for hours by a special effects team to make the nuclear blast as realistic as possible. Large-scale miniature buildings were built and blown away using air mortars to mimic the destruction of Los Angeles. Computer imagery was later used to generate the nuclear blast rippling through the city. The scene here shows Sarah Conner falling asleep and dreaming about a future war she knows will happen. Her present self tries to warn her dream self playing with her son, John Conner, on a playground. The nuclear bomb that exploded was caused by a self-thinking computer program called SkyNet that seeks to annihilate mankind.

See the infamous chest-bursting alien from the movie Aliens with a, uhh… alternative motive.