The 10 worst non-death movie scenes ever
Death is one of the very few inevitabilities in life, but sometimes a movie character can experience something that turns out to be worse than simply being shuffled off their mortal coil.
Whether it’s being accosted by a supernatural being, an actor suffering life-threatening injuries in the pursuit of cinematic excellence, or a scene that’s so grisly, it creates a lurching sense of dread in the pit of any viewer’s stomach, in a lot of cases it would have been a lot easier to simply put them out of their misery.
Being able to survive bullets, broken bones, and brutal attacks is expected of many protagonists, but not all of the unfortunate victims listed below were the stars of action spectaculars. Paranormal investigators, superfans, regular joes, law enforcement officers, and secret agents all feature, showcasing the breadth of fates worse than death to have made their way to screens.
Spirituality to one side, death is the last thing that happens to anybody, but in some instances it quite clearly isn’t the worst.
The 10 worst non-death scenes:
10. The Conjuring 2 (James Wan, 2016)
Rather remarkably, considering its status as a horror movie, not a single person dies during the 134 minutes of The Conjuring 2. Not that director James Wan needs to drop bodies to create terror, though, with the haunting encounter between Vera Farmiga’s Lorraine Warren and Bonnie Aarons’ demonic nun Valak weaponizing the very concept of fear itself.
First spotting the ominous figure at the end of a hallway, the tension cranks up as Lorraine enters an office where a painting of Valak takes pride of place. Of course, with this being a horror film, the entity explodes out of the darkness, infiltrating her mind and forcing her to watch Patrick Wilson’s Ed be impaled through the chest.
While none of it actually happened in the real world, it stands out as the single most frightening sequence in a franchise that’s nine entries deep, an impressive accomplishment that’s entirely deserved as Valak embarks on full-blown psychological warfare.
9. Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985)
Within the context of Police Story, Jackie Chan’s Chan Ka-Kui taking on a mall full of attackers is an act of unbridled heroism, which comfortably ranks as one of the most jaw-dropping extended fight sequences in the history of action cinema. However, it’s the actor suffering for his art that constituted a real-life maiming.
No stranger to being injured, having racked up an extensive list of maladies throughout his storied career, Police Story‘s signature set piece could have very easily killed Chan if even so much a single thing had gone wrong. Sliding down an entire row of lights scared even the daredevil star, who admitted that he performed it with a Buddhist prayer stuffed into his trousers.
With no wires, no safety nets, and the lights having reached high temperatures having been turned on for so long, Chan ended up scraping all the way down to the bottom while suffering excruciating cuts and bruises to go along with second-degree burns, electric shock, and broken vertebrae. Knowing what happened to him only serves to make the scene more impressive and hard to watch at the same time.
8. The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
Sometimes, the implication of a character’s fate can be exponentially more effective than sending them off to a grisly demise. It has rarely been proven truer than in the final moments of The Blair Witch Project.
The found footage sensation was a trailblazer, pioneer, and game-changer all at once, with the sight of Mike standing silently facing the wall in a dilapidated house generating intense debate and countless theories while also causing many a viewer to peer as hard as they could into the penetrating darkness to see if there really was something hovering in the shadows.
The art of suggestion remains a powerful cinematic tool, and even though the moment has been parodied beyond belief in the years since, the initial gut-punch of The Blair Witch Project was a hundred times more powerful than any bucket of blood and guts could ever hope to be.
7. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005)
The grandstanding conclusion to George Lucas‘ second trilogy charted Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the Dark Side, and it was made abundantly clear why Darth Vader was required to be completely encased in a hulking armoured costume that gave him his signature heavy breathing.
Not only is the lightsaber duel between Hayden Christensen’s Anakin and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi one of the most impressive and rousing action beats in the entirety of the Star Wars saga, but the former’s fate was nothing short of brutal.
Laughing in the face of his master having the high ground, it would be an understatement to say Anakin regretted his decision after having both of his legs sliced clean off, leaving him to be helplessly charred into a smouldering husk by the onrushing lava. Ouch.
6. Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)
The damage may have been mercifully inflicted off-camera, but a significant percentage of the audience were nonetheless left squirming in their seats when Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre went to extreme lengths to interrogate Daniel Craig’s 007 in Casino Royale.
Strapped to a chair and drenched in sweat for obvious and highly understandable reasons, the untested agent tries to put on a brave face and engage in some psychological banter, but he’s betrayed by the terror in his eyes. That’s completely fair, though, considering what happens directly underneath his seat.
As well as establishing beyond all doubt this was a gritty, grounded, and grizzled reinvention of Bond for a brand new generation, Craig showcases his acting chops to great effect by running the emotional gamut as his adversary threatens to turn his nether regions into pulpy nothingness.
5. The Revenant (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2015)
It would be fair to say the showstopping bear attack from The Revenant wasn’t quite as terrifying on set, and it may have even scanned as bizarrely hilarious considering there was a stuntman dressed in a bright blue bear costume – complete with a head – who had to embody a ferocious predator while stunt performers on either side of Leonardo DiCaprio pulled him back-and-forth on cables.
That’s the magic of cinema in a nutshell, to be fair, because watching it unfold on-screen was hardly a barrel of laughs. Uncompromising, brutal, and very bloody, the actor’s Hugh Glass may have survived the encounter, but only just.
Left as a ravaged shell of a man carrying deep wounds, his journey to safety started off with him on the lowest possible ebb, and the scene itself remains one of the most visceral and hard to stomach in an epic that’s packing more than its fair share of them.
4. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
The signature hallway fight in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy is a masterclass in staging and execution, with 17 takes required over the course of three days to capture Choi Min-sik’s Oh Dae-su pulverising a gaggle of dispensable henchmen as he embarks on a quest for freedom.
Despite bludgeoning them repeatedly with a hammer and sending blood spurting onto the screen from all directions, he doesn’t kill any of them. While you could theorise that the bodies dropping out of the lift in the subsequent shot might well be dead, the frame directly preceding it shows every single one of the assailants writhing around in some form of severe pain.
It’s regarded as one of the best action scenes of all time for several very good reasons, but the fact Oh Dae-su doesn’t end a single life from beginning to end of the one-take masterpiece in hand-to-hand carnage often goes overlooked.
3. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
Peter Weller’s Alex Murphy may have been as good as dead after being annihilated by Clarence Boddicker and his thugs, but seeing as he was alive enough to become the successful test subject of the RoboCop project, the ruthless thugs would live to rue the day they didn’t finish him off.
He’s beaten with weapons, has his hand blown clean off by a shotgun in gruesome fashion, and to put the final exclamation point on his would-be assassination, the rest of the arm goes next before no less than four of Boddicker’s goons fire an ungodly hail of shells into his body, with the big bad finishing things off with a succinct bullet to the brain.
Part man, part machine, and all cop he may have been, but there wasn’t exactly a whole lot of Murphy left to work with after he was filled full of lead.
2. Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Takashi Miike has spent almost his entire career pushing the boundaries of acceptability and good taste on-screen, but the closing stretch of Audition might just be the most notorious sequence of his entire filmography, which he’d likely interpret as a massive compliment.
Part of what makes it so disconcerting is how it’s completely ill-at-ease with the first two acts of the film, which opt for a more light-hearted and even comedic tone. However, all bets are well and truly off once Eihi Shiina’s Asami reveals her true nature, and it’s not for the faint of heart.
Injecting Ryo Ishibashi’s Shigeharu with a paralysing agent, her desire to be loved exclusively and unequivocally naturally manifests with his body being subjected to torture by needle and the removal of his feet. Miike then cruelly makes the viewer question whether this is really happening when Shigeharu falls into a dream sequence of sorts, but it’s all too real.
He may survive the ordeal in the end – with Asami the one who meets her end thanks to a fortuitous intervention by his son Shigehiko – but the reasonable assumption is that he’s probably going to remove himself from the dating pool for at least a little while.
1. Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)
A famous author being rescued by their biggest fan is the sort of thing that can only ever end up going one of two ways, with Kathy Bates’ Academy Award-winning performance as Annie Wilkes opting for the worst possible outcome on the part of James Caan’s Paul Sheldon.
Even now, the sickening sound design is enough to make anybody wince, with Annie deciding the only viable option to ensure her hero doesn’t abandon her is to shatter his legs with a sledgehammer. Misery was already intense before that, but the unforgettable scene took things to another level.
Parasocial relationships have only continued to rise through the internet and social media eras, but all Annie needed to display her undying devotion and unhappiness with her favourite literary series was a typewriter, a sledgehammer, and a deep-seated obsession.
