10 Behind-the-Scenes Facts about Iconic Deaths in Horror Movies

Horror movies are littered with brutal deaths, from slashers stabbing victims to zombies chowing down on the living. A fair number of these kills have reached iconic status, and the stories about the making of these famous scenes are often just as interesting as the onscreen deaths themselves. Here are 10 such stories—which, of course, often feature spoilers.

Related: Top 10 Horror Films That Disturbed the Crew

10 The Sleeping Bag Kill in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

There have been many iconic kills in the Friday the 13th franchise, but one of the top fan favorites occurs in Part VII: The New Blood (1988). A woman is camping with her boyfriend near Crystal Lake when Jason Voorhees drags her from the tent while she’s still in her sleeping bag and gives her one hard bash against a tree, killing her instantly.

The sleeping bag kill was initially supposed to involve multiple hits, but the scene had to be cut down for the film to achieve an R rating. Although not as gory as originally intended, Jason managing to kill the woman in just one whack feels brutal. Kane Hodder, who has played Jason many times, says that it’s one of his favorite kills “because you’re killing someone with something that is not a weapon. Anybody can kill with a weapon.”

The kill left such an impact that it even inspired a kill in Jason X (2001). The slasher is plunged into a holographic camp and comes across two girls who offer him alcohol, drugs, and sex. The film then cuts to the two girls in sleeping bags, with Jason using one to hit the other—and this time around, he takes multiple swings.^[1]

9 The Decapitation Scene in Hereditary

The horror in Hereditary (2018) kicks off when 13-year-old Charlie (Milly Shapiro) goes into anaphylactic shock. While driving her to the hospital, her older brother Peter (Alex Wolff) swerves to avoid roadkill, but at that moment, Charlie has her head out of the window to get some air, and she’s decapitated by a telephone pole.

Although the scene is a punch in the gut, Shapiro had a great time while filming it. She was safely tethered to the car and said that “randomly they would swerve and not tell me so I would be startled.” She described the experience as “kind of like a rollercoaster.” Shapiro was even thrilled about seeing the model of her decapitated head and wanted to take it home “to display it and scare people with it.”^[2]

8/span> The Plastic Bag Kill in Black Christmas

Clare (Lynne Griffin) is the first sorority girl to be picked off by Billy, the largely unseen slasher in Black Christmas (1974). After suffocating her with a plastic bag, he puts her body on a rocking chair in the attic. Not only is her corpse creepily shown multiple times throughout the film, but her plastic-wrapped head also appears on the film’s poster.

Although Griffin doesn’t have much screen time as Clare while alive, she had to film numerous shots while dead. Many actors would struggle to play dead with a plastic bag over their head, but it didn’t faze Griffin because, in her own words, she’s “a fairly good swimmer so I could hold my breath for a long time. And I could also keep my eyes open for a long time without blinking.” She said the only real issue was that “when I was breathing, it was making the bag fog up, so they decided to stick it to my face and poke holes up my nose.”^[3]

7 The Dive Out of the Window in The Exorcist

The Exorcist (1973) ends with Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) sacrificing himself by inviting the demon into his body and then jumping out of the window onto the many steps below the MacNeil’s house. In the film, the house is right next to the top of the steps, but it is further back in real life, so an extension had to be built.

Before stuntman Chuck Waters made the iconic leap, a layer of rubber was put on all of the stone steps to make it slightly less painful. Then it was time for Waters to jump—twice—a feat that was watched from the surrounding buildings by people willing to pay $5 to the Georgetown residents looking to profit from the filming. When Miller asked Waters how he pulled off such a dangerous stunt, he replied, “Complete and total non-resistance, my body becomes totally relaxed.”^[4]

6 The Ending of Night of the Living Dead

When penning Night of the Living Dead (1968), writers George A. Romero and John Russo figured the main character, Ben, would be played by a white actor. That changed when Duane Jones auditioned for the role, but Romero and Russo purposefully didn’t rewrite the script to reference his race. Despite that, Jones being Black changed how the ending of the film—which sees Ben killed by the men who are getting rid of the zombies—was perceived.

“The fact that these redneck posse guys shot him, that became racial, instead of just a mistaken identity, which is really what we intended,” Romero said. He had to fight to keep the dark ending, with Columbia Pictures wanting Ben to survive. Romero said, “None of us wanted to do that. We couldn’t imagine a happy ending.” Jones was in agreement, telling Romero that “the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way.”^[5]

5 The Opening Scene in Scream

Scream (1996) opens with Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) getting a phone call from a killer while she’s home alone. After terrorizing her with questions about horror movies and killing her boyfriend, Ghostface stabs Casey and strings her up from a tree. This scene was inspired by a real—although less bloody—event in screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s life.

“I was house-sitting for a friend of mine, and I walk into the family room, and I see that the window’s open,” Williamson explains. “So I go and I get a butcher knife and I start walking around the house and I call up my friend on the phone and I’m like, ‘okay, I think someone’s in the house.’” Williamson’s friend started doing the “ch ch ch, ah ah ah” sound effect from Friday the 13th, which led to the pair discussing horror movies. But unlike in the movie, thankfully, a killer wasn’t waiting to pounce.

Scream was originally supposed to star Barrymore as the main character, Sidney Prescott, but she requested the role of Casey because “my biggest pet peeve was that I always knew the main character was going to be slugging through at the end, but was going to creak by and make it.” To defy expectations, she took the role of Casey—making the audience initially think that she was the main character—”so we would establish this rule does not apply.”^[6]

4 The Highway Pile-Up in Final Destination 2

Final Destination 2 (2003) starts with a pile-up on a highway caused by the chains on a logging truck snapping, sending tree trunks crashing into the vehicles on the road behind it. As much of the crash as possible was done by a stunt team, with the whole scene taking 11 days to film. But one thing that wasn’t possible to do practically was the logs—and not because it would have been too dangerous!

Jason Crosby, who worked on the film’s CGI, says that the crew “discovered that real logs only bounced about an inch off the road when dropped from a logging truck.” So, to get the right amount of height from the bounce, the logs had to be added with CGI. Thankfully, that means that the chances of a log barreling straight through your windshield are incredibly low.^[7]

3 The First Kill in Jaws

Jaws (1975) starts with Chrissie (Susan Backlinie) being attacked by an unseen shark while swimming in the sea at night. To simulate the attack, stuntwoman-turned-actress Backlinie was tied to ropes, and then, as director Steven Spielberg explains, she was “tugged left and right by ten men on one rope and ten men on the other back to shore.” For the final pull underwater, Spielberg himself tugged on the rope because “he wanted it just a certain way.”

Backlinie had to go through another ordeal to complete the scene, though. Spielberg wanted her screams to sound like she was really drowning so, according to Richard Dreyfuss, who played oceanographer Matt Hooper. “He had her tilt her head back, and he poured water down her throat while she screamed, which is now known as waterboarding, so Steven is actually guilty of a war crime.”^[8]

2 The Shower Scene in Psycho

The scene in Psycho (1960) where Marion (Janet Leigh) is murdered in the shower is an absolute classic. When director Alfred Hitchcock was asked why he wanted to adapt Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, he said, “I think the murder in the bathtub, coming out of the blue, that was about all.” The murder is actually more brutal in the novel, with Mary (as she’s called in the book) being decapitated.

The short scene took a week to film, which was an enormous one-third of the shooting schedule. Hitchcock wanted perfection and made Leigh film the shot of the camera zooming out from her eye 26 times. However, while editing, they noticed that Leigh took a breath in the only shot deemed usable, which is why there’s a brief cut to the showerhead.

Food also played a crucial part in the scene. A knife slicing through casaba melon and steak was used for the sound of the knife cutting Marion. Thanks to being filmed in black and white, the fake blood didn’t have to be red, so Hershey’s chocolate syrup was used. The shot where it looks like we see the knife pierce Marion was done by putting chocolate syrup on the tip of the knife, placing it against her stomach, and pulling away, with the shot then being reversed.^[9]

1 The Chestburster Scene in Alien

Director Ridley Scott knew that the element of surprise would be crucial for getting the actor’s best reactions to the chestburster in Alien (1979). “If an actor is just acting terrified, you can’t get the genuine look of raw, animal fear,” he said.

The cast knew that an alien creature would burst out of Kane’s (John Hurt) chest, but they didn’t know how it was going to look. Everyone but Hurt left the room, and he got into position under the table with his head sticking through a hole. His prosthetic chest was filled with cuts of meat, along with the alien on a hydraulic ram.

After a false start, Scott got the alien to punch through and the blood to spray just the way he wanted it. The actors were suitably shocked, with screenwriter Ronald Shusett recalling that “Veronica Cartwright—when the blood hit her, she passed out. I heard from Yaphet Kotto’s wife that after that scene, he went to his room and wouldn’t talk to anybody.”^[10]