Editorials
Which On-Screen Death Is Difficult For You to Watch?
A few weeks ago, I asked all of you what your favorite deaths in horror movies were. Now I’m curious to know which death(s) are the most difficult for you to watch. I touched upon Lizzy Caplan’s death in Cloverfield in that post, noting how it was so disturbing to me that it made it difficult for me to watch the movie again. Last weekend I got to catch Marjane Satrapi’s new film The Voices, starring Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick. I loved it, but there is a death in the movie that made me very uncomfortable and disturbed me in a way other deaths in horror films haven’t. If you’ve already seen the film, you probably know what I am talking about. Let’s discuss below!
***WARNING – MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE VOICES WILL BE DISCUSSED***
The Voices tells the story of Jerry Hickfang (Ryan Reynolds), a psychotic man who talks to his cat, Mr. Whiskers and his dog, Bosco, and they talk back. Of course, they aren’t really talking to Jerry. He has stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication and his subconscious thoughts are being reflected through his pets. Mr. Whiskers tells Jerry to kill people and has very funny, foul-mouthed one-liners. Bosco reflects Jerry’s good side. After he accidentally kills Fiona (Gemma Arterton), a girl he has a crush on in his office, things start getting out of control.
***Again, DEATH SPOILERS Below***
Marketed as a horror comedy (which is very difficult to do), The Voices becomes much darker than I was initially expecting about 2/3 of the way into its run time, when Jerry accidentally murders Lisa (Anna Kendrick), another girl in his office whom he went on a date (and had sex) with the night before. The entire scene is very uncomfortable and disturbing to watch. Lisa, still incredibly happy after a successful first date with Jerry, decides to go to his house and surprise him with mini-cakes. Eventually she makes it inside his “apartment” (it’s actually a dilapidated building that Jerry imagines as a beautiful apartment) and sees Fiona’s decaying head sitting on the coffee table. She (understandably) freaks out and hides out in Jerry’s bedroom. After trying to run out, Jerry grabs her and throws her on his bed, causing her to break her neck on his bed frame. The kicker is that she doesn’t die instantly. She lies on the the bed with tears streaming down the side of her face and keeps repeating “Jerry, I just want to go home” as he crawls in the bed and cuddles next to her. Her eyes slowly fill with blood as she stops breathing and dies.
I can handle a lot of carnage in horror films, but it’s not the carnage that makes it difficult for me to watch a character’s death (unless it involves pus). When a character is so sympathetic and so likable, it makes their death incredibly difficult for me to see (which makes the movie more horrifying, so I guess the movie did its job). The fact that Lisa was played by Anna Kendrick, an actress whom I admire a lot, certainly didn’t help matters. I was honestly kind of hoping that Kendrick’s character would turn out to be equally as insane as Reynolds’ so they could run off into the sunset together, but alas, she was doomed to become another head in his refrigerator.
So all of this being said, I just found Kendrick’s death to be incredibly emotional and difficult to watch. What made it so striking is that her death made me sad, which isn’t something I usually feel in horror films. There are a few other on-screen deaths that I find nearly as effective (the aforementioned Lizzy Caplan death in Cloverfield, Heather Matarazzo’s death in Hostel: Part II and Nora Arnezeder’s death in the Maniac remake immediately come to mind) if only because I felt such an intense emotional connection with Kendrick’s character.Do you agree with me? Or are there other deaths that are equally difficult for you to watch? It could be deaths that are too gory for you but I’m really interested in the deaths that connected with you on an emotional level. Let me know in the comments below!
The Voices is currently in limited theatrical release and available on select Video On Demand services.
The Evil Dead universe expands this weekend with the arrival of Evil Dead Burn in theaters, unleashing a demonic siege upon a grieving family. Director Sébastien Vaniček doles out a gauntlet of pain from beginning to end, and that includes the credits.
While Evil Dead Rise skipped out on credit scenes, Evil Dead Burn follows 2013’s Evil Dead with the inclusion of a mid-credit scene and a post-credit scene, extending the Deadite mayhem to the very end.
Vaniček uses the mid-credit scene for levity, injecting one last punchline of gallows humor regarding the Price family. It also raises questions on where that carnage leads. But it’s the post-credit scene that holds larger franchise implications, sure to get fans talking.
It also doesn’t make much sense.
Warning: Major spoilers ahead!
Evil Dead Burn directly ties to Evil Dead Rise, with a possessed Jessica (portrayed in the new movie by Greta Van Den Brink) brutally dispatches a pair of fishermen before leaving the lake in search of those in possession of the Kandarian dagger: the Price family. Deadite Jessica kicks off a new wave of terror when she targets eldest son Will (George Pullar), using him as a Trojan horse into his family.
The Evil Dead Rise connections come full circle in Burn’s post-credit scene, bringing back a fan-favorite Deadite.
In this scene, the daughter of the cremator hired to handle Will’s remains gets curious about a shelf of unclaimed ashes. Among them are the ashes of Ellie Bixler. The girl, left alone while her mom is tending to a client, hears a voice she mistakes for her mother. It’s not.
The voice guides her to a mirror, where she sees not her reflection but that of Deadite Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Ellie wastes no time dispatching the child, claiming with a grin, “Mommy’s back.“
Sutherland’s Deadite performance remains a standout in this franchise, but Ellie’s appearance here doesn’t make much sense beyond fan service. Evil Dead Rise final girl Beth (Lily Sullivan) reduces Ellie, who’d assimilated into the Marauder, to a bloody pulp via tree shredder in the film’s climax. There’s not a lot of flesh or sinew left to cremate, to start. To really get into semantics, the Marauder was an amalgam of multiple Deadites in one, so separating her remains from, say, Danny’s (Morgan Davies) or the neighbors seems like an impossible task.
The Marauder in Evil Dead Rise
It’s also jarring in that Deadites tend to prefer to make their torment personal. Ellie has zero connection to this random child. To further nitpick, there are likely much closer crematoriums to Ellie’s home, even if the lake and Price household are in the general region.
Most of all, Vaniček plays so fast and loose with the Deadite possession rules that this scene breaks from the established norms in a confusing way. There’s no dagger here or incantation to summon a demon, so it’s not clear how just being in the presence of her ashes summons her here.
Does any of this really matter? Not at all. The haplessness of this scene’s inclusion doesn’t seem to suggest anything other than a fun momentary reprise of a fan favorite character. It does, however, seem to leave the door wide open for Ellie’s full return.
It’ll be a while before we find out if that is indeed the intention behind this scene; the next is Evil Dead Wrath from director Francis Galluppi (The Last Stop in Yuma County) set for theatrical release on April 7, 2028. It’ll predate all Evil Dead films with its 1972 setting.
Evil Dead Rise
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