It’s easy to think of some of the most disturbing deaths you’ve seen in a horror movie. People can likely think of those that had the most immediate, visceral impact. But in this list, we won’t be looking at death scenes that were particularly disturbing, at least not in the gory sense. Instead, we’ll be checking out some of the most bizarre, weird, what-the-hell-were-they-thinking death scenes to have ever been committed to celluloid.
A Girl Gets Plunged to Death in Ghoulies Go to College
If you haven’t seen Ghoulies Go to College, you’re missing out on 80 minutes of mind-numbingly stupid entertainment. It’s the only R-rated movie in the Ghoulies series and it is ironically the most childish. In this scene, a soft-core homage to Animal House, the ghoulies watch a woman—who is clearly a pornstar as no college student could afford those implants—undress and then follow her into the shower. They go after her with a plunger, sticking it on her mouth and then comically stretching her skin out a good six feet. Presumably the actual death is due to suffocation, but like everything else in this feature it’s not made entirely clear.
Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond is many things from moment to moment. Overall, it’s an atmospheric, gory masterpiece. But it’s a combination of many different elements. It’s a zombie movie, it’s a ghost story, and for this one scene it’s a 1950’s bug flick. While much of the gore had come from the undead at this point in the story, Fulci wanted to try something different. So this one character is killed by being torn to pieces by spiders. The venomous tarantulas have a bite that would be enough to kill the poor guy, but he gets it worse than that, as they claw at him with their legs and tear at his flesh, something I did not even know spiders could do.
Dan’s Death in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Dan’s death scene stands out from every death in Dream Child. All of the deaths in the film are imaginative but none of them make much sense. Dan’s is the worst offender in that regard. It’s such a ridiculous, elaborate, over-the-top scene especially when considering the fact that all he really does is get hit by a truck. In the dream he is slowly merged with a motorcycle that he steals after Freddy gets into his truck. He is grafted into the metal and wiring and turned into some terminator-Giger-alien-hybrid. It’s a neat design, for sure, but it has absolutely no place in the story. It’s ultimately pointless because Dan wakes up from this incredibly long nightmare sequence absolutely fine…for two seconds before driving into an oncoming 18-wheeler.
A Girl is Turned into a Living Doll in Dolls
After his first two features, Re-Animator and From Beyond, Stuart Gordon’s Dolls seems incredibly tame and for the most part, it is. The movie doesn’t need a ton of gore and doesn’t showcase any nudity. In part this is due to its sense of childlike whimsy, and also because Gordon knew the concept of a mansion full of old, Victorian dolls stalking and killing the guests was frightening enough. There’s not a lot of really shocking or gory moments in the film, though, until this scene. Here we reveal that a girl who had gone missing in the house has been turned into a living doll. She’s not turned into a small porcelain figure—but that does happen to someone later in the feature. Instead, she is dressed up like a doll, her eyes gouged out and replaced with doll’s eyes after her death. In something that could have almost been made for kids, it’s a disturbing and unexpected sequence.
The Frozen Face Smash in Jason X
This is the most infamous scene from a movie that everyone was supposed to forget. A moment after Jason wakes up on board a spacecraft after being frozen for 500 years, he grabs the nearest girl and immediately walks her over to a cryo-freezing station, which is apparently used to preserve objects. Despite never having seen any of this tech and being generally lacking in intelligence, Jason immediately knows what it does and dunks her face in it. He then lifts her up and slams her frozen face down onto the counter, shattering it to pieces. It’s so satisfying for no real reason whatsoever and fits the feature so well that you almost have to wonder if the studio green-lit the whole production just for that scene.
