Editorials
The 10 Best Kills in the 8-Film ‘Leprechaun’ Franchise!
Horror’s resident St. Patrick’s Day icon built a reputation on schlock. Rhyming puns, a hokey sense of humor that includes an obsession with shoes and gold, and a serious case of wanderlust – the pint-sized killer has traveled from Hollywood, Vegas, space, and the hood, after all.
Surprisingly, though, the Leprechaun ranks pretty high on the list in terms of horror icons with the most kills. He’s managed to surpass fellow figures Chucky and Freddy Krueger as he has now murdered his way through eight films. Freddy and pals have the edge when it comes to creative deaths; a lot of little Lep’s slaying happens off-screen or via quick cutaways.
That’s not to say there aren’t some gory gems throughout the franchise, though.
In keeping with the spirit of revelry for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re celebrating the best kills of the Leprechaun series.
Leprechaun – “He Played Pogo on His Lung!”
The first film of the series established the most important rule when dealing with the Leprechaun: never steal his gold. He sold his soul for it, after all. Poor pawnshop owner Joe acquires one of the shillings when Ozzie and Alex bring it to him to gauge its authenticity and worth. Meaning, Joe didn’t intentionally steal. Lep cares not, and gleefully sings while he hops along Joe’s chest with a pogo stick.
Leprechaun 2 – Cast Iron Stomach
One of the more memorable deaths in this sequel involves a man unwittingly shoving his face into spinning lawnmower blades, mistaking them for a woman’s breasts. It cuts away just before contact, though, leaving us with a little blood splatter and Lep’s amused reaction. Instead, this more graphic kill that establishes one of Lep’s signatures wins the prize. Here, Morty learns the real horrors of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” After capturing the Leprechaun, he demands his three wishes. Morty asks for the pot of gold, and Leprechaun obliges by having it manifest in Morty’s stomach. When Morty asks for its removal, Lep grants that wish, too… by tearing it open.
Leprechaun 3 – All Dolled Up
Las Vegas gal Loretta (Caroline Williams) harbors resentment over her lost youth, so she leaps at the chance to reclaim it when she observes the magic of Lep’s gold in action. She wastes no time wishing for the buxom body of a twenty-year-old once she’s stolen the shilling, and it works like a charm. The moment the gold passes to a new owner, who makes a wish of his own, Loretta’s wish blows up. Literally. All of her brand-new body parts plump up like plastic surgery gone wrong, and Loretta’s head ultimately explodes.
Leprechaun 4: In Space – Urinary Tract Infection
In one of the more outlandish sequels, it only makes sense for the kills to match. For space marine Kowalski, he opts to celebrate the death of the Leprechaun by urinating on his corpse. You can’t keep the Lep down, though, and his essence travels through the stream into Kowalski’s penis. It causes a gnarly infection, and the Lep later bursts forth from Kowalski’s penis during a moment of peak arousal. It looks as bizarre as it does painful.
Leprechaun in the Hood – Air Gun
The Leprechaun is after his golden flute in the fifth outing of the series, offering the highest body count of the franchise yet. His favored slaying method in this entry seems to be a sort of air gun, using magic to blow massive holes through the torsos of his victim. He uses it the first time on one of Mack Daddy’s (Ice-T) henchmen, and again on Mack Daddy himself in the film’s climax. Both equally gory, so take your pick.
Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood – Still Standing
Boasting the biggest kill count of the entire series, this sequel opts for quantity over quality. Meaning there aren’t a lot of unique deaths outside of stabbings or off-screen kills. That makes the outlandish death of Officer Whitaker the winner. After a brief fight, Lep rips his leg off, leaving him to profusely bleed out. The kill is dragged out for comedic effect when the cop takes a minute to realize what happened, then hops on one leg to reclaim his stolen limb. He doesn’t make it far.
Leprechaun: Origins – Accidental Ax
The first film to not star Warwick Davis as the eponymous creature was meant to work as a reboot. A group of friends opt to vacation in Ireland and instead find themselves sacrificed to the monstrous Leprechaun by locals. This gruesome death, a gory highlight, marks the first not done at the hands of the creature at all. Well, not directly. The surviving friends set a trap for the Leprechaun, but he tricks them into killing one of their own instead. Poor Jeni takes a brutal ax to the face.
Leprechaun: Origins – Fatality
The Leprechaun takes a more hands-on approach to this gory kill, perhaps borrowing directly from Scorpion’s iconic fatality in Mortal Kombat. After catching Ben, one of the least empathetic Americans, the Leprechaun reaches through his back and rips out his spine. Fatality!
Leprechaun Returns – Solar Panel Bifurcation
Ignoring all franchise entries outside of the 1993 original, Leprechaun Returns is a direct sequel that picks up 25-years later. It also offers the goriest and most creative kills of the entire series. Sometimes going green can be deadly, especially in this franchise, as evidenced by the grisly bifurcation of Andy. The Leprechaun takes full advantage of anything and everything when it comes to weaponry, and he lets loose a rooftop solar panel so that it slips off and cuts its victim clean in half.
Leprechaun Returns – Poor Ozzie
Of all the deaths in the franchise, this one hurts the most. After outlasting and putting a stop to the pint-sized monster 25-years ago, Ozzie suffers from the affliction that plagues most returning horror survivors: Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome. In the first onscreen death of the film, Ozzie returns to the original well and gets doused in a green liquid from its depths, ingesting some in the process. It creates severe nausea and bloat, and he regurgitates a four-leaf clover that then allows the Leprechaun to respawn from within Ozzie’s body. Cue the rebirth, which involves bursting forth from Ozzie’s entrails. It’s a painful, gory way for one of the franchise’s sweetest original heroes to go out.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on March 17, 2020.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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