You’ve made it to Day 6 of the 2025 OkGoreberfest 30-Day Horror Challenge, and today’s topic to tackle is “Best Horror Movie Death.”
This is a great topic, the Hallmark of many a horror lies in it’s creativity with regard to the unexpected end of life. This is because most of us spend our entire lives knowing that by the end we will all die, there is absolutely no escaping this, and a whooooole lot of fear and anxiety is hardwired into this. Horror movies take this most basic human fear and make a playground out of it.
Best death scene in a horror movie? Let’s start with some runners-up. For starters, there’s no denying the shower scene in Psycho its place in any list. It’s one of the most famous murders in horror. It’s sudden and unexpected, stark with the blood running darkly through an otherwise white and sterile landscape, in a place where people feel most vulnerable.
There’s the opening scene in Jaws, a drunken skinny dip in the dark and quiet calm of a beach at night, when suddenly she is attacked and eaten by a wild animal she can neither see nor run away from. That terrified rapid breathing after she gets bitten the second time? It still makes the hairs on my arms stand up!
That one death in Bone Tomahawk… you know the one. Really hard to watch, it’s primal and brutal and just keeps getting worse the longer you watch!
The Terrifier franchise is 10% about the actor’s miming and 90% about its signature gore. Trying to out-gore every gore that proceeded it. Terrifier 2 has a kill in a bedroom that would be difficult to out-gore in any movie.
The leap and the hammer in Midsommar. The head explosions in Scanners. The sleeping bag murder in Friday the 13th #7. Jack Torrance frozen in the snow. That scene with the spring-loaded shears in Exorcist III. The swimming pool in Let The Right One In. The fire extinguisher in Irreversible.
I think I have to go with the ballroom scene in 2002’s “Ghost Ship.” It’s a fairly forgettable movie – except for that one scene. Old-timey cruise ship has an everybody-dances scene on the deck of the ship. A young girl even has a dance with the captain himself. Then all of a sudden there’s a snap as a tight cable breaks loose and zings across the dance floor. Everybody more than 5 feet tall is suddenly motionless, their eyes a mask of surprise and horror. Still alive… until everyone’s upper part suddenly tumbles to the ground, followed by their lower parts – everyone sliced neatly in two. What a scene! The rest of the movie is, I dunno, a bunch of ghosts trying to kill anyone who comes on the ship? I honestly don’t remember the first thing about the movie, other than its notorious death scene.