Which Quentin Tarantino movie has the highest kill count?
Ever since Michael Madsen sliced a policeman’s ear off while dancing to Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck In the Middle With You’ during the 1992 movie Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino has firmly established himself as one of cinema’s most bloodthirsty directors.
His films are well-known for their graphic violence, and there’s even an argument to be made that Tarantino brought gory film violence into the mainstream. That is no doubt something that makes him feel very proud.
Of course, Tarantino is not all about violence. Some of his works, such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Vol. 2, have little in the way of graphic violence, and for the most part, the outbreaks of violence in his films are relatively brief in comparison. The more heavy inclusions often seem to function to punctuate his famously lengthy dialogue scenes.
Nevertheless, his penchant for featuring graphic violence is perhaps what he’s best known for. That said, his most violent movies, both Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Django Unchained, linger long in the memory. The first instalment of Kill Bill is perhaps the closest thing to a straight-up action film Tarantino has made, and it’s filled with incredible, gore-soaked fight scenes. In particular, the film’s climax – in which Uma Thurman‘s Bride character sees off countless opponents within a lengthy sword fight – is absolutely legendary.
Django Unchained is also extremely bloody. During the famous Candyland shootout, the film itself seems to turn red due to how much gore there is, and, given that this particular film was showcasing the horrors of slavery, much of the violence in that film has a darker, more distressing edge than it does in most of Tarantino’s work.
Still, if one goes by body count, neither film is Tarantino’s most violent. The one with the highest number of characters killed is actually 2009’s Inglorious Bastards. This film has a staggering body count of 397, which more than quadruples the number for the second-highest – Kill Bill Vol. 1, which has 91 deaths. This high number of deaths is mainly thanks to the film’s climax, in which hundreds die in a massive explosion.
Inglorious Bastards memorably indulges in historical revisionism at the end. The film’s climax sees the titular band of Jewish American soldiers killing most of the major Nazis at a film premiere, meaning that the film’s body count includes Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Tellingly, Tarantino chose to linger on a shot of Hitler’s face being shredded by machine gun fire.
In truth, Tarantino’s movies don’t usually feature massive body counts, given that they are often more contained chamber pieces in a sense. Nonetheless, when it came to Inglorious Bastards, Tarantino really went all out.
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