Kill or be Killed: Comparing Death Sequences in Horror and Action Movies

This article or originally appeared in Kitchen Sink magazine.

In the first Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Tina falls asleep after making sweet teen love with trouble boy Rod. She later begins thrashing beneath the blankets and Rod tugs them off. Tina’s baby-blue striped pajama top opens to reveal what looks like the polyvinyl chest of a CPR dummy. Four slashes appear down the center and Tina begins gushing hunter-orange blood. Freddy is attacking her from the dream world but is invisible to Rod and the audience’s waking eyes. Rod looks repulsed as Tina fumbles at her sliced open torso and makes puking sounds. As she levitates gymnastically in the air; her head slams into Rod, sending him careening into a bedside lamp. Gravity is inverted for Tina and her body is dragged upwards leaving a smear of red Wet’n’Wild up the wall, until she is spasming half-naked on the ceiling, reaching out towards Rod with the peacock-encrusted wallpaper dividing them. When she at last succumbs to death, gravity resumes its normal pull and she falls to the mattress with a splash. That’s how much blood there is; the sound evokes a diver who has completed a complex maneuver and dropped to the pool below. Her corpse slides on her bloody sheets face first into a heap beside the bed. Hearing Rod’s screams, Tina’s friends Nancy and Glenn break down the door and the audience is forced to stare at their extensive collection of sad and shocked facial expressions.