The Most Uncomfortable Death Scenes In Movies

Even if you live and breathe movies, watch them every day, and think you've seen every possible scenario a filmmaker can throw at you, some things are just going to make you squirm. A great death scene, whether it's because of the emotional context or because of some truly disturbing gore, can do this in a heartbeat. One minute you're comfortably watching a movie, completely aware that you're seeing something that's make believe, and then death hits you. It might be the performance, it might be the camerawork, it might be the makeup. It might even be that it reminds you of something in your own life. Whatever the case, that death scene is going to stick in your head when you turn out the lights that night — and possibly for the rest of your life. Incredibly uncomfortable death scenes are legion in cinema history if you know where to look, but here are ten of the most unforgettable.

WARNING: Spoilers (and violence) ahead!

Nothing about American History X is comfortable, and that's exactly the way it's meant to be. Tony Kaye's searing portrait of a family's attachment to — and ultimate struggle against — their racist hate is never easy to watch, but so compelling that it's also impossible to look away. If anyone is going to hide their face during this powerful film, though, odds are there's one particular moment they're waiting for: When Derek (Edward Norton) forces a young black man to put his mouth around a curb and then stomps his head in. The curb stomp is brief and one of numerous brutal moments in the film, and the moment of impact is shot from far enough away that most of the gore is only implied. Your brain puts it together, though, and if you force yourself to confront the moment, it's almost guaranteed to linger viscerally in your memory for weeks after you see the film.

Director Lucio "The Godfather of Gore" Fulci is among the most inventive death scene orchestrators in the history of horror cinema, to the point that many of his fans watch his films not be repulsed by the gruesome moments, but to see the dark art at work in their assembly. Fulci films are often so over the top, and so devoted to getting creative with their bloodiest moments, that you forget you're watching a human death scene, and instead it becomes a kind of dark ballet of good old-fashioned practical effects, camerawork, and acting. In other words, a Fulci scene that makes you really feel that it's real is especially effective, and Zombi 2 has one of the most infamous. 

If you're watching a zombie film you expect a good many of the deaths to come from human vs. human conflict or from flesh-devouring hordes (more on that later), but to kill off Paola (Olga Karlatos), Fulci has a zombie improvise a little bit and impale her face on a shattered wooden door. The shot of her eye getting closer and closer to that splinter is incredibly effective, in part because so much of horror cinema teaches you to believe that you won't actually see the moment of impact. Surely it will only be implied. Surely the camera will cut away. When you do see it, it's unforgettable.

Pet Sematary, both in book and film form, has the benefit of centering an inherently horrifying concept from the beginning: The loss of a child. The fear of it hangs over the Creed family until they finally lose Gage (Miko Hughes), and then when Louis (Dale Midkiff) tries to remedy things and resurrect his lost boy, it only gets worse when it becomes clear that what came back is definitely not Gage. As an audience, we've seen this building for a while, but witnessing Gage's violent post-resurrection slaughter of Jud (Fred Gwynne) isn't softened by that knowledge. Seeing the once-angelic little boy crawl out from under the bed and slash his kindly neighbor's face is bad enough, but then Gage bends down and buries his teeth in the old man's throat, cementing this scene's place as one that keeps playing in your head even when you close your eyes. Any single element — killer child, undead child, or transformed child — would have been horrific on its own. Pet Sematary brought us all three.

Darren Aronofsky's films, from Pi to Black Swan to mother!, are often designed to produce maximum discomfort. There's a thread of tension running through each of them, spurred on by often Oscar-worthy performances, that tightens and releases at an often frantic pace, but it's often about more than just ratcheting up an audience's heart rate. The tension is accompanied by the sense that the entire status quo of the film could be upended at any moment. This feeling is maximized in mother!, as we follow the title character (Jennifer Lawrence) through a home that she rapidly and inexplicably loses control of. The entire film is engineered to overwhelm both Lawrence and the viewer to the point that it feels more like a disturbing dream than a story, and this reaches its peak when the Mother's newborn baby is ripped apart. In the moment when Mother and the audience realize what's happened, all sense of the film's metaphorical explorations and stylistic concerns leaves you for a moment, and you're just left to squirm in the shock of what just happened.

Movie moments that make an impact on you in childhood stick in your brain with a permanence that the cinematic experiences you have as an adult often can't approach. The first time a movie scared you, made you laugh until you couldn't breathe, or even made you cry just stays in your head. Even if you go back to those same films as an adult and find them lacking something, that emotional devastation is often still there, and that's particularly true of death scenes. There are a number of unnerving death sequences in films for children (Bambi's mother, the Wicked Witch of the West, Mufasa, etc.), but Artax's drowning in the Swamp of Sadness in The NeverEnding Story is a particularly hard one to watch. It's not animated. It's not a CGI character, and it doesn't ever seem like a puppet. As an adult watching it, you can sort of see how it was pulled off, but as a kid — even though the film fades to black for the final moments of the horse's life — you feel like what you're watching is very, very real.