Horror movies are littered with brutal deaths, from slashers stabbing victims to zombies chowing down on the living. A fair number of these kills have reached iconic status, and the stories about the making of these famous scenes are often just as interesting as the onscreen deaths themselves. Here are 10 such stories—which, of course, often feature spoilers.

Related: Top 10 Horror Films That Disturbed the Crew

10 The Sleeping Bag Kill in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

There have been many iconic kills in the Friday the 13th franchise, but one of the top fan favorites occurs in Part VII: The New Blood (1988). A woman is camping with her boyfriend near Crystal Lake when Jason Voorhees drags her from the tent while she’s still in her sleeping bag and gives her one hard bash against a tree, killing her instantly.

The sleeping bag kill was initially supposed to involve multiple hits, but the scene had to be cut down for the film to achieve an R rating. Although not as gory as originally intended, Jason managing to kill the woman in just one whack feels brutal. Kane Hodder, who has played Jason many times, says that it’s one of his favorite kills “because you’re killing someone with something that is not a weapon. Anybody can kill with a weapon.”

The kill left such an impact that it even inspired a kill in Jason X (2001). The slasher is plunged into a holographic camp and comes across two girls who offer him alcohol, drugs, and sex. The film then cuts to the two girls in sleeping bags, with Jason using one to hit the other—and this time around, he takes multiple swings.^[1]

9 The Decapitation Scene in Hereditary

The horror in Hereditary (2018) kicks off when 13-year-old Charlie (Milly Shapiro) goes into anaphylactic shock. While driving her to the hospital, her older brother Peter (Alex Wolff) swerves to avoid roadkill, but at that moment, Charlie has her head out of the window to get some air, and she’s decapitated by a telephone pole.

Although the scene is a punch in the gut, Shapiro had a great time while filming it. She was safely tethered to the car and said that “randomly they would swerve and not tell me so I would be startled.” She described the experience as “kind of like a rollercoaster.” Shapiro was even thrilled about seeing the model of her decapitated head and wanted to take it home “to display it and scare people with it.”^[2]

8/span> The Plastic Bag Kill in Black Christmas

Clare (Lynne Griffin) is the first sorority girl to be picked off by Billy, the largely unseen slasher in Black Christmas (1974). After suffocating her with a plastic bag, he puts her body on a rocking chair in the attic. Not only is her corpse creepily shown multiple times throughout the film, but her plastic-wrapped head also appears on the film’s poster.

Although Griffin doesn’t have much screen time as Clare while alive, she had to film numerous shots while dead. Many actors would struggle to play dead with a plastic bag over their head, but it didn’t faze Griffin because, in her own words, she’s “a fairly good swimmer so I could hold my breath for a long time. And I could also keep my eyes open for a long time without blinking.” She said the only real issue was that “when I was breathing, it was making the bag fog up, so they decided to stick it to my face and poke holes up my nose.”^[3]

7 The Dive Out of the Window in The Exorcist

The Exorcist (1973) ends with Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) sacrificing himself by inviting the demon into his body and then jumping out of the window onto the many steps below the MacNeil’s house. In the film, the house is right next to the top of the steps, but it is further back in real life, so an extension had to be built.

Before stuntman Chuck Waters made the iconic leap, a layer of rubber was put on all of the stone steps to make it slightly less painful. Then it was time for Waters to jump—twice—a feat that was watched from the surrounding buildings by people willing to pay $5 to the Georgetown residents looking to profit from the filming. When Miller asked Waters how he pulled off such a dangerous stunt, he replied, “Complete and total non-resistance, my body becomes totally relaxed.”^[4]

6 The Ending of Night of the Living Dead

When penning Night of the Living Dead (1968), writers George A. Romero and John Russo figured the main character, Ben, would be played by a white actor. That changed when Duane Jones auditioned for the role, but Romero and Russo purposefully didn’t rewrite the script to reference his race. Despite that, Jones being Black changed how the ending of the film—which sees Ben killed by the men who are getting rid of the zombies—was perceived.

“The fact that these redneck posse guys shot him, that became racial, instead of just a mistaken identity, which is really what we intended,” Romero said. He had to fight to keep the dark ending, with Columbia Pictures wanting Ben to survive. Romero said, “None of us wanted to do that. We couldn’t imagine a happy ending.” Jones was in agreement, telling Romero that “the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way.”^[5]

5 The Opening Scene in Scream

Scream (1996) opens with Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) getting a phone call from a killer while she’s home alone. After terrorizing her with questions about horror movies and killing her boyfriend, Ghostface stabs Casey and strings her up from a tree. This scene was inspired by a real—although less bloody—event in screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s life.

“I was house-sitting for a friend of mine, and I walk into the family room, and I see that the window’s open,” Williamson explains. “So I go and I get a butcher knife and I start walking around the house and I call up my friend on the phone and I’m like, ‘okay, I think someone’s in the house.’” Williamson’s friend started doing the “ch ch ch, ah ah ah” sound effect from Friday the 13th, which led to the pair discussing horror movies. But unlike in the movie, thankfully, a killer wasn’t waiting to pounce.

Scream was originally supposed to star Barrymore as the main character, Sidney Prescott, but she requested the role of Casey because “my biggest pet peeve was that I always knew the main character was going to be slugging through at the end, but was going to creak by and make it.” To defy expectations, she took the role of Casey—making the audience initially think that she was the main character—”so we would establish this rule does not apply.”^[6]

4 The Highway Pile-Up in Final Destination 2

Final Destination 2 (2003) starts with a pile-up on a highway caused by the chains on a logging truck snapping, sending tree trunks crashing into the vehicles on the road behind it. As much of the crash as possible was done by a stunt team, with the whole scene taking 11 days to film. But one thing that wasn’t possible to do practically was the logs—and not because it would have been too dangerous!

Jason Crosby, who worked on the film’s CGI, says that the crew “discovered that real logs only bounced about an inch off the road when dropped from a logging truck.” So, to get the right amount of height from the bounce, the logs had to be added with CGI. Thankfully, that means that the chances of a log barreling straight through your windshield are incredibly low.^[7]

3 The First Kill in Jaws

Jaws (1975) starts with Chrissie (Susan Backlinie) being attacked by an unseen shark while swimming in the sea at night. To simulate the attack, stuntwoman-turned-actress Backlinie was tied to ropes, and then, as director Steven Spielberg explains, she was “tugged left and right by ten men on one rope and ten men on the other back to shore.” For the final pull underwater, Spielberg himself tugged on the rope because “he wanted it just a certain way.”

Backlinie had to go through another ordeal to complete the scene, though. Spielberg wanted her screams to sound like she was really drowning so, according to Richard Dreyfuss, who played oceanographer Matt Hooper. “He had her tilt her head back, and he poured water down her throat while she screamed, which is now known as waterboarding, so Steven is actually guilty of a war crime.”^[8]

2 The Shower Scene in Psycho

The scene in Psycho (1960) where Marion (Janet Leigh) is murdered in the shower is an absolute classic. When director Alfred Hitchcock was asked why he wanted to adapt Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, he said, “I think the murder in the bathtub, coming out of the blue, that was about all.” The murder is actually more brutal in the novel, with Mary (as she’s called in the book) being decapitated.

The short scene took a week to film, which was an enormous one-third of the shooting schedule. Hitchcock wanted perfection and made Leigh film the shot of the camera zooming out from her eye 26 times. However, while editing, they noticed that Leigh took a breath in the only shot deemed usable, which is why there’s a brief cut to the showerhead.

Food also played a crucial part in the scene. A knife slicing through casaba melon and steak was used for the sound of the knife cutting Marion. Thanks to being filmed in black and white, the fake blood didn’t have to be red, so Hershey’s chocolate syrup was used. The shot where it looks like we see the knife pierce Marion was done by putting chocolate syrup on the tip of the knife, placing it against her stomach, and pulling away, with the shot then being reversed.^[9]

1 The Chestburster Scene in Alien

Director Ridley Scott knew that the element of surprise would be crucial for getting the actor’s best reactions to the chestburster in Alien (1979). “If an actor is just acting terrified, you can’t get the genuine look of raw, animal fear,” he said.

The cast knew that an alien creature would burst out of Kane’s (John Hurt) chest, but they didn’t know how it was going to look. Everyone but Hurt left the room, and he got into position under the table with his head sticking through a hole. His prosthetic chest was filled with cuts of meat, along with the alien on a hydraulic ram.

After a false start, Scott got the alien to punch through and the blood to spray just the way he wanted it. The actors were suitably shocked, with screenwriter Ronald Shusett recalling that “Veronica Cartwright—when the blood hit her, she passed out. I heard from Yaphet Kotto’s wife that after that scene, he went to his room and wouldn’t talk to anybody.”^[10]

Death is always a tragedy to those who have lost someone close to them. Sometimes, though, it’s hard for the rest of us to keep a straight face, particularly when people die in a ridiculous way. And there’s no shortage of ridiculous deaths through history.

The Victorians, who took death so seriously, must have struggled even harder. Their sense of propriety and strict decorum combined with their morbid obsession with death must have made attending any funeral difficult. On that note, attending any of the following people’s funerals must have been extremely challenging.

10 The Man Who Swallowed A Mouse

Factories in Victorian England were not hygienic places. Mills especially attracted a large number of vermin. So it should not really have come as too much of a surprise when a mouse ran across the work table of one young factory girl in 1875.

Perhaps, however, the girl was taken by surprise, for she let out a piercing scream, and one of her colleagues dashed across to help her. He managed to catch the mouse, but it soon wriggled out of his hand and disappeared up his sleeve. The gallant young man gasped in surprise as the mouse suddenly reappeared from under his collar, and the mouse, seeking a dark hole in which to hide, promptly jumped into his open mouth and down his throat.

The Manchester Evening News reported that “a mouse can exist for a considerable time without much air [ . . . ] the mouse began to tear and bite inside the man’s throat and chest, and the result was that the unfortunate fellow died after a little time in horrible agony.”^[1]

9 The Man Killed By His Alarm Clock

Sam Wardell was a lamplighter in Flatbush (part of Brooklyn in New York City) in the mid-1880s. Lamplighters would take ladders around to light the gas-powered street lamps at dusk and return at dawn to extinguish them. They also sometimes served the additional role of waking the local inhabitants to tell them it was time to get up.

Perhaps Sam Wardell was one of those people who had trouble waking up in the mornings. To ensure that he wouldn’t sleep through his alarm, he took his alarm clock and added some, shall we say, modifications. He fixed a wire to the clock and attached the other end to a shelf. Then he placed a 4.5-kilogram (10 lb) stone on top of the shelf. Then he rigged the shelf so that every time the alarm went off, the shelf collapsed and the stone would crash to the floor and wake him up. Presumably, he had solid floors and no neighbors.

The system worked perfectly until Christmas Eve 1885, when he invited some friends to his one-room apartment for a party. In order to make room for them to dance, Wardell pushed his furniture to the walls.

It must have been a good party, because Wardell climbed into bed afterward without replacing the furniture.

The following morning, his alarm went off. His shelf fell. And the stone dropped straight onto his head, killing him, well, stone dead.^[2]

8 The Man Killed By A Coffin

Pallbearing is not known for being a particularly dangerous occupation. However, for Henry Taylor of London, it was the death of him.

In 1872, he was performing his duties at the graveside on a wet day. The ground was slippery, so to avoid embarrassing accidents, mourners were requested to access the grave on foot to lighten the load on the funeral carriage. The coffin was removed from the hearse and was being carried gingerly by six pallbearers in solemn fashion. As they approached the grave, the pallbearers were ordered to turn so that the coffin would be facing the right way when it was lowered into the ground.

As the six men shuffled around in a circle carrying the coffin, a rather heavy one by all accounts, Taylor slipped on the muddy ground, upsetting the other pallbearers in the process. To prevent themselves from falling, the others let go of their burden, and the coffin fell full-force on top of Henry Taylor, killing him.^[3]

7 The Woman Who Killed herself With Color

People have always been willing to suffer to be fashionable, but for the Victorians, there were few lengths to which people would not go in order to look their best. After Empress Eugenie wore a stunning green dress to the Paris Opera in 1864, green was in. Everyone who was anyone wanted to be seen in the same emerald green shade as the princess.

It was unfortunate that that particular shade of green was created by mixing copper with arsenic. The color became so popular that it was used in fabrics everywhere. Deaths soon followed.

In 1861, Matilda Scheurer, a maker of artificial flowers, died of accidental poisoning after dusting the flower petals with “green powder.” Though her death and its cause were described in grisly detail in newspaper articles, the fashion for Paris green continued.

As its lethal properties were public knowledge, it is not, perhaps, surprising that when Louisa Cruikshank decided to kill herself, she thought of the colorful substance. In 1882, at just 18 years old, Miss Cruikshank purchased the poison without any difficulty from an art supplies shop and died swiftly but painfully soon afterward.^[4]

6 The Man Who Swallowed A Billiard Ball

The Victorians, alas, did not have the monopoly on stupid people. And stupid drunk people are apt to behave in the same way today as they did then. But, in an age when people had to make their own amusements, some found greater scope for doing ridiculous things. Take Londoner Walter Cowle, for instance.

In 1893, while enjoying a night out, he bet his friends that he could put a billiard ball in his mouth and close his lips around it. At the subsequent inquest, the landlord of the Carlisle Arms Tavern maintained that when he provided Cowle with a billiard ball, it was on the understanding that he would not actually put the ball in his mouth but only appear to do so, while using sleight of hand to palm the ball in his pocket.

For some reason, however, perhaps in some way connected to the large number of drinks that the landlord at the tavern had served, Cowle did indeed put the ball in his mouth, whereupon he immediately began to choke. Both his drinking companion and the landlord tried to remove the billiard ball, even holding Cowle upside down and slapping him on the back, but nothing worked.^[5]

Though, at the inquest, his friends maintained that they had seen Cowle perform this trick several times, the landlord of the tavern had nothing else to say on the matter. And neither, of course, did Cowle.

5 The Lady Who Danced In Her Shroud

When Mrs. Marion Hillitz died in 1878 after a long, entirely normal illness, her friends and relatives gathered to pay their respects ahead of the funeral. Her body was laid out in her coffin, and mourners sat around the corpse praying or talking in subdued voices.

So it must have come as something of a shock when Mrs. Hillitz suddenly sat up in her coffin and addressed the company. She surveyed her family and friends, soberly attired in black, and announced, “I am not dead yet, but I will die soon.”

According to newspaper reports, Mrs. Hillitz then climbed out of her coffin and “danced around the room, sang, and shouted in a loud, ringing voice” as the mourners presumably stared in disbelief—and probably a fair amount of terror.

However, the miracle was not long-lasting. Her nurses, once they had gotten over the shock, put the old lady to bed, where she died, for real, later that night.^[6]

4 The Man Stabbed As Part Of The Act

In 1896, while performing in a new play at the Novelty Theatre in London, Temple Edgecumbe Crozier (his real name, apparently) was killed when a fellow actor stabbed him during his debut performance of The Sins of the Night.^[7]

For some reason, the prop dagger had been replaced with a real one. As a result, when his fellow actor uttered the words, “Die villain, die,” and stabbed him enthusiastically during the final scene, the blade pierced Crozier’s heart and killed him.

For obvious reasons, The Sins of The Night was not a success, and its run was an extremely short one.

3 The Servant Who Died Reenacting A Death

In October 1881, a man asked his servant to collect a gun that he intended to give someone as a gift. The servant, a dim-witted chap called Hague, went to collect the revolver and, while there, decided to examine it closely. For reasons best known to himself, Hague lifted the gun up to his face to examine the trigger mechanism and somehow managed to shoot himself in the mouth. The wound was instantly fatal.

Another servant, witnessing the accident, called the police. After their arrival, she picked up the gun to demonstrate to the officers just how the incident had occurred.

As Hague had done, she lifted the gun to her face to examine it, and, just like Hague, she managed to pull the trigger. The bullet went through her mouth, and she, too, died, which must have made things a lot clearer for the police.^[8]

2 The First Motor Vehicle Fatality

Today, traffic accidents are, unfortunately, a daily occurrence. In 1869, there had never been a death by motor vehicle, until August 31, when Mary Ward became the first-ever casualty of the automobile. At that time, automobiles were called “road locomotives” and were little more than steam trains with rubber tires attached, weighing approximately 1.5 metric tons.

Mary Ward was a remarkable woman who had done pioneering work in the fields of science and astronomy. She must have had a curious mind, because she jumped at the chance to ride in her husband’s new car.

Though the car was only traveling at 6.4 kilometers per hour (4 mph), Mary fell from the passenger seat as the vehicle took a sharp bend, and the enormous back wheel ran straight over her. Newspaper reports that said she died of “dislocation of the neck” were no doubt being discreet.^[9]

1 The People Who Died Of A Sweet Tooth

Sugar has long been known to be an addictive substance. And, as with all addictive substances, demand sometimes outstrips supply. In Victorian Britain, the price of “white gold” was very high, and so, enterprising grocers often cut their products with cheaper substances. How times have changed.

The cheap powder used to cut sugar was known as “daft” or “daff” and usually consisted of substances such as plaster of Paris or powdered limestone.

In 1858, one sweet seller, known to all as “Humbug Billy,” operated a sweet stall in Bradford in the north of England. His suppliers, when purchasing the daft with which to cut their product, had accidentally bought 5.4 kilograms (12 lb) of arsenic and not the plaster of Paris that they thought they were getting.^[10]

Unaware of the mistake, Humbug Billy sold the sweets from his stall. He sampled the sweets and was ill himself, but rather than destroying the stock, he negotiated a discount and carried on with the sale. Enough sweets were sold to have killed 2,000 people, but, thanks to the quick work of the town crier, who alerted the locals as soon as the source of the illness was known, only 21 people died, though another 200 had to be treated for arsenic poisoning.

Ward Hazell is a writer who travels, and an occasional travel writer.

Death comes to us all. No matter how rich, powerful, or well-loved you might be, no one lives forever. When it’s a celebrity that’s died, the news tends to travel fast—so fast in fact that it precedes the actual death. Sometimes news outlets jump the gun, sometimes rumours are spread online as clickbait, and sometimes people just remember something that never happened. Whatever the explanation, here are the most notable cases of people who were (literally) gone before their time.

Top 10 Horrifying Premature Burials

10 Tom Kenny

You may not recognise the name or even the face of Tom Kenny, but after five minutes you’d definitely recognise his voice. The voice actor is best known as the voice of Spongebob Squarepants, but has also done work for other children’s shows on Cartoon Network, including The Batman (The Penguin), Adventure Time (Ice King), and PowerPuff Girls (the Narrator).

It’s perhaps because of his far-reaching impact on many a millenial’s childhood that his death had such an impact when it was announced as part of a clickbait hoax in 2012. Rest assured, Kenny is alive and well, currently doing voice work for background characters in Rick and Morty, most notably Squanchy.^[1]

9 Eddie Murphy

Eddie Murphy has been killed off not once, but twice—once in a snowboarding accident in 2013, and then in a car crash in 2017—although some estimates have claimed that Murphy has been falsely declared dead as many as eight times.

Some believe that Murphy was conflated with his brother, Charlie, who passed away from leukaemia in April 2017. The 2013 rumours may have come from desperate fans hoping that Paul Walker’s accident—which happened around the same time—was also a hoax. One thing’s for sure—when Eddie Murphy does leave us, no one will believe a word of it.^[2]

8 Pope John Paul II

The undisputed king of falsely being declared dead, however, is Pope John Paul II, who was prematurely axed off not once, not twice, but three times before his actual death in 2005. The most recent example happened two days beforehand—FOX got their wires crossed and believed the terminally ill Pope was already dead.

The first time was the result of poor wording and even poorer timing. After a botched assassination attempt in 1981, a report from CNN for some reasons kept referring to the Pope in the past tense, leading some to believe the assassination had been a success. You’d think that CNN would have learned their lesson after that, but in 2002 a great number of their obituaries were prematurely leaked to their website, including one of His Holiness, claiming he had died in 2001. The Queen may have two birthdays, but only the Pope can die four times. Speaking of which…^[3]

7 Queen Elizabeth II

Just after Christmas 2016, rumours of a media blackout in the United Kingdom snowballed on Twitter, somehow getting twisted into reports that the Queen herself had died. A fake BBC News account tweeted a picture ‘confirming’ the rumour, which only added fuel to the fire.

To be fair, the Queen had been ill over the Christmas period, and this was back in 2016 when celebrities were dropping like flies, so it is possible that people believed the Grim Reaper was going for the final boss. While the Queen remains in good health, celebrating her 93rd birthday and her 72nd wedding anniversary this year, reports that George Michael and Carrie Fisher had passed away earlier that same week sadly turned out to be true.^[4]

6 Bill Bailey

Sometimes, a fake death is just a classic case of mistaken identity. Appearing on the Graham Norton show in 2018, British comedian Bill Bailey claims to have woken up one morning to discover that BBC had pronounced him dead overnight, even going so far at to claim that “tributes were pouring in” to celebrate his life and work.

It turns out that someone called Bill Bailey, a DJ from Kentucky, really had died the night before, but someone at the BBC obviously didn’t feel like doing a whole of research.

Top 10 Bizarre Celebrity Conspiracy Theories

5 Marilyn Manson

Another case of mistaken identity, albeit one Manson brought upon himself. In 2017, cult leader and mass murderer Charles Manson, from whom Manson (real name Brian Warner) takes his stage name, died in prison. Since Manson was imprisoned for life in 1971, its very possible that he has a little bit less name recognition than Warner, whose fans were too busy mourning him online to notice that we weren’t all talking about the same person. Or that Warner was still alive.^[5]

4 Mark Twain

Of course, faulty reports of celebrity deaths long predate the internet. Mark Twain, who is one such example, was widely reported to be on his deathbed just under thirteen years before he actually was. In reality, it was Twain’s cousin that was seriously ill, which newspapers then spun into a scoop that claimed Twain was dying.

Twain telegrammed a friend to let him know he was alright, signing off with one of his most famous (and often misquoted) quips: “The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration.” This story even has a happy ending. According to Twain, his cousin made a full recovery.^[6]

3 Barbara Bush

When there’s an announcement that someone is dying however, sometimes they really are dying. That said, there is still such a thing as jumping the gun. When the Bush family released a press statement announcing that former first lady Barbara Bush was on her deathbed, CNN (of course) drafted an obituary titled “DO NOT PUBLISH” in very big letters. Naturally, someone published it, and Barbara Bush was reported dead a whole two days too early. Fortunately, the obituary had chosen to remember her as a “witty, gregarious matriarch… that propelled two [relatives] to the White House.” Not everyone’s obituary ends up being quite so warm…^[7]

2 Marcus Garvey

While Barbara Bush may have had the chance to read her own obituary, at least it wasn’t what killed her in the first place. In 1940, noted political activist Marcus Garvey suffered from a stroke which left him paralysed, causing some newspapers to report that he had died.

His obituary was not quite as flattering as Bush’s, claiming that he had died “alone and unpopular”, causing Garvey to have another stroke that finished him off for real.^[8]

1 Nelson Mandela

By far the strangest and most famous of deaths that never actually happened was that of Nelson Mandela. When the news broke that he had actually died in 2013, many were baffled, convinced he had already died in prison years prior, with some even going so far as to cite seeing his funeral on TV.

This has given rise to the so-called Mandela Effect, a testament to the frailty of human memory, where people remember things that have never happened. Or at least, not the way they think. Its perfectly possible that they are remembering the deaths of other black activists like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, or possibly conflated Mandela’s death with his release in 1990. But, as we all know, the only rational explanation is that we all died in 2012 and traveled to a parallel world where the Monopoly guy doesn’t have a monocle.^[9]

Top 10 Mandela Effects (Movie And TV Edition!)

Social media is incredibly divisive. Most people agree that it’s marvelous at connecting us, but there is a strong movement toward reducing the time we spend online. (The coronavirus quarantines and social distancing guidelines are an exception, of course.)

The Internet can definitely have an unfavorable impact on some aspects of our lives, making us unhappy occasionally. However, the negative repercussions of social media can also be grave enough to be linked to fatalities.

These stories are cautionary tales of 10 deaths directly linked to social medial and the Internet.

10 Creepy Things Social Media Does To Control Your Mind

10 Influencer’s Birthday Pool Party Drownings

Earlier this year, the death of three Russians at a birthday pool party was announced on Instagram, creating a frenzy on the Internet. The beginning of the story does not sound that unusual—until you realize that about 25 kilograms (55 lb) of dry ice were dumped into the pool.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Yekaterina Didenko, the birthday girl and influencer, tearfully recounted the devastating event to her over one million followers. Russian news media and some bloggers criticized her for trying to capitalize on it.

At the party, several people were choking and passing out after jumping into the pool containing dry ice. Despite its name, dry ice is actually solid carbon dioxide (the gas we exhale when we breathe out) that is frozen at a temperature of -78 degrees Celsius (-109 °F).

As dry ice doesn’t melt—it goes from solid to gaseous at room temperature—people use it for party tricks and cool effects. This process, called “sublimation,” gives CO₂ its “smoky” qualities.

When dry ice melts in confined spaces, it turns into carbon dioxide gas, a potentially harmful substance. Carbon dioxide can cause breathing difficulties and asphyxiation, which was the reason for the party guests’ deaths.^[1]

9 Choking Challenge
The Internet’s Most Dangerous Craze

The “choking game” (aka “fainting game”) is the act of intentionally cutting off oxygen to the brain, causing the person to pass out. Children and teenagers take the challenge mostly due to curiosity (allegedly, it induces euphoria) and peer pressure.

This incredibly dangerous and irresponsible activity has been around since long before the Internet existed. (In fact, the first death was reported in 1995.) Even though the Internet cannot be blamed for the creation of the choking game, it can be credited for its resurgence.

Social media viral challenges are a huge deal for young people. Usually, when a teenager sees someone his age doing something thrilling on the Internet, he´ll try to replicate it. That’s the purpose of these challenges, which range from the ridiculous to the horrifying.

The choking game has made several comebacks over the years due to social media challenges. In 2006, a year after YouTube was created, 35 deaths were caused by the choking game. In 2019, teenager Mason Bogard died while attempting the challenge.^[2]

8 Deadliest Selfies Part I
Model Falls Off A Cliff

People will do anything for a selfie. If you don’t believe that, just do a quick search on “selfie-related deaths.” Madalyn Davis was not the first and won’t be the last casualty caused by the search for a great picture.

Davis, a makeup artist and social media influencer, was an expert in eyelash styling and had thousands of followers across different platforms. She was vacationing in Australia when the tragedy occurred.

Davis fell off a cliff in Diamond Bay Reserve in Sydney while trying to take a risky photo. Police and paramedics launched an air and water search with the assistance of the Marine Area Command. Unfortunately, the body of the British model was found in the water about four hours later. She had died on impact from head injuries.^[3]

7 Facebook Unfriending Culminates In A Double Homicide

Have you ever been “unfriended” on Facebook?

It’s not a nice feeling. But normal people get over it in a couple of hours. Thirty-one-year-old Jenelle Potter did not have a typical reaction. Instead, she decided that murder was the sensible response.

This story deserves a list of its own as it involves jealousy, the CIA, and a double homicide. Here’s the short version: After allegedly being cyberbullied by a couple of her former friends, Jenelle convinced her parents to shoot them.

The crime happened in 2012. Janelle’s father claimed that he acted according to his own impulses. However, the prosecutor of the case believed that Jenelle had manipulated her parents with a catfishing scheme.

Allegedly, Jenelle used social media to deceive her parents into killing her former friends. She created a fake profile of a CIA agent. The “agent” sent messages saying that Jenelle’s life was in danger.^[4]

6 Woman Lynched By A Mob In Brazil Over An Internet Rumor

Spreading rumors is a nasty thing to do. Although the practice was not invented online, it has certainly been exacerbated by the Internet. In the old days, the impact of a rumor was limited to small groups of people. Usually, the worst-case scenario was getting a raunchy reputation in your school. However, rumors gain a whole new dimension with the Internet’s reach and propensity to distort reality.

In 2014, Fabiane Maria de Jesus, a mother of two, was identified by a local Facebook page as a criminal accused of kidnapping children and sacrificing them in satanic rituals. The origin of the misunderstanding was supposedly a police sketch that vaguely resembled a picture of her.

The Brazilian woman was dragged through the streets by a mob of people and beaten to death. When six of the miscreants were arrested, a protest broke out at the police station. People screamed, “Do you want to arrest everybody? It’s everybody’s fault! It’s nobody’s fault! It’s the Internet’s fault!”^[5]

9 Sinister Facts About The Dark Side Of Instagram

5 Teenager Is Cyberbullied Until He Commits Suicide

The earliest deaths attributed to the Internet are related to cyberbullying-induced suicide, which is made much worse by social media. As a society, we now take bullying more seriously due to the long-lasting effects on the victims.

It can be difficult to put an end to bullying in schools, but it is even harder to stop it on the Internet. One of the most notorious cases is the suicide of 13-year-old Ryan Halligan. He was relentlessly cyberbullied by other kids on Myspace due to a rumor that he was gay.

At one point, a girl pretended to like him, only to later publicly humiliate the boy for believing in her affection. Ryan told her: “It is girls like you that make me want to kill myself.”

Ryan hanged himself in 2003. His lifeless body was found by his sister.^[6]

4 Deadliest Selfies Part II
Mauled By A Bear

In another selfie-related incident, a man was killed by a bear in India while trying to take a picture with the animal. After attending a wedding, Prabhu Bhatara was driving back to his house when he decided to stop to urinate in the woods. While doing so, he spotted an injured bear, which prompted him to attempt to take the selfie of the year.

As Prabhu approached the animal, the bear attacked and a struggle ensued. A stray dog at the site intervened but failed to deter the bear. The whole ordeal was filmed by a bystander, and clips of the horrific incident can be found on the Internet.^[7]

India’s wildlife often clashes with people in the suburban areas of the country. To no one’s surprise, that was the third fatality linked to selfies with wild animals in that region in a year.

3 YouTuber Dies In A Paragliding Accident While Filming A YouTube Video

Having a YouTube channel drives you to do crazy things to get views.

On “The King of Random” channel, Grant Thompson used to showcase DIY projects and experiments, but outdoor activities were also featured. Unfortunately, the influencer passed away in 2019. He was found dead near Sand Hollow State Park, Utah.

Along with his body, paragliding equipment and a recording device were recovered. This suggested that he died while attempting to film a video for his popular YouTube channel.^[8]

2 Woman Strangled By Her Tinder Date In A Rough Sex Session

Tinder is probably the first name that pops into your mind when you think of online dating. The platform is so successful that even nonusers understand what the terms “swipe left” and “swipe right” mean.

Dating in the social media era can make you feel safer. You don’t meet people face-to-face right away, and you can get a friend to track your position through GPS. However, this extra sense of security can lead you to ignore basic instincts and bypass self-preservation precautions.

Women are especially vulnerable to predatory behavior. The death of 22-year-old Grace Millane serves as an example of how we can never be too safe while meeting people we don’t know.

While the British woman was backpacking in New Zealand, she agreed to go on a date with a man she met on Tinder. The date went from promising to tragic when she was strangled during a rough sex session.

The man, not identified for legal reasons, hid her remains in a suitcase. Then he went on another date with another woman.^[9]

1 Lips To Die For:
The Kylie Jenner Challenge

Kylie Jenner is a media personality who stars in the reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Her estimated net worth is US$1 billion, making her the youngest billionaire at 21. She is known for her ravishing beauty, of which the most coveted aspect is definitely her plump lips.

The desire to have Kylie’s pouty lips inspired the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge. Teenagers inserted their lips into shot glasses and sucked out the air to create a vacuum. The aim was to swell the lips. The problem is that the act itself is dangerous due to the injuries sustained to the face.

In 2015, a story circulated online that Natalie Cardenas, 19, was found dead on her bedroom floor with “huge lips” and a shot glass in her hands. According to the fictional account, the tragedy prompted the authorities to declare the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge illegal in the United States. Although no credible source confirms that story, it’s a good idea to skip the challenge as it can cause real and possibly lasting injuries.^[10]

10 Ways Organizations Manipulated Social Media For Political Agendas

About The Author: Arnaldo is a Brazilian with a PhD in quantum chemistry who is living in the UK. He is a fanatic about science, beer, and the Internet.

[WARNING: This list contains disturbing fictional footage.] Movie fans have long contended that there are certain movie deaths that are just not plausible. These include ‘drowning’ in quicksand, being strangled to death in under a minute and decapitation by merely swiping a knife across someone’s neck.

With horror movies, it gets even worse, especially left to the creative minds of sick Hollywood types. Characters are cut into little pieces when pushed into a barbed wire fence or have their eyeballs pop out during laser surgery. Not to mention getting squashed by a flying car engine or having their heads popped open by falling weightlifting equipment. And this is all from just one movie franchise.

On this list are 10 more over-the-top horror movie deaths that (hopefully) wouldn’t happen in real life.

10 Shocking Horror Stories That Happened In Real Life

10 A stomp will do it

In Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Myers, who appears dead, is being transported in an ambulance. Unfortunately for one of the paramedics, Myers suddenly pulls an Undertaker move and sits up. He then proceeds to push his thumb into the poor man’s skull, thereby killing him. Now while this might look ‘awesome’ on screen, it would be literally impossible to do in real life.

This doesn’t stop Myers from continuing the implausible kills, however. In Halloween (2018) he not only yanks a man’s teeth from his mouth after ripping open his jaw, he also stomps on his psychiatrist’s head, squishing it to pieces in one very gruesome scene.

9Watch out for the wire

The opening sequence of Ghost Ship may be one of the most memorable in horror movie history, but it’s also one of the most unrealistic death scenes. A wire slices through passengers attending a party on the deck of a ship, cutting them in half.

While this scene is rather terrifying, and could be rather hard for squeamish viewers to watch, it is also highly improbable considering the amount of people one wire has to cut through, not to mention ribs and spines getting in the way.

MythBusters even tested the theory of a cable cutting a person in half and could not find any concrete evidence to support the possibility.

8 Glass pane that makes bones disappear

As mentioned in the intro, there is a certain movie franchise that has made it its business to come up with evermore over-the-top, unrealistic, yet highly entertaining death scenes. Each movie tries to outdo its predecessor and include weirdly contorted gymnasts, death by brick, bathtub incidents, wrenched bodies and more.

One death in particular had fans hit the pause and replay button, however. Simply because it was even more ridiculous than the others. In Final Destination 2, Tim Carpenter almost chokes to death during a dentist appointment and later also almost gets electrocuted. But Death had a much “simpler” plan for Carpenter.

In his last moments, Carpenter heads out of the building, rudely shoos away a bunch of pigeons and then gets rewarded by a massive falling glass plane that basically turns him into Jell-O. One might be tempted to ask what had happened to all the bones in this body, but that would just ruin the hilarity of the moment.

7 Sliced in half by… more glass

There is more glass in this entry, this time in the form of a door. Thirteen Ghosts was released in 2001 and introduced fans to a host of creepy characters including The Torso, The Great Child, The Angry Princess and The Jackal who all lurked in a spooky house.

Along with these horrifying beings came a multitude of character deaths, including a man cut in half by a car, another man thrown into spinning rings that cut him to pieces and a woman squashed between two glass walls.

The most talked about death scene, however, comes when a cocky lawyer walks past several of the ghostly inhabitants to get to a case filled with money, stashed away in the basement. He takes the case and then tries to make his way out only to be stalked by the Angry Princess and then absurdly split in half by a glass door. The lawyer’s front half then slides down the glass while the back half stays put against the other side of the door for a second or two. The surprised look on his face is truly priceless.

6 My eyes!

Rounding out a glass-trio, the glass in this entry comes from ordinary eyeglasses.

Carrie was released in 1976 and a sequel appeared many years later when The Rage: Carrie 2 was released in 1999. The movie is based on the real-life rapes and sexual assaults by a group of high school boys from California who called themselves the Spur Posse. These boys ‘kept score’ of their horrific acts by using a points system.

The star of the movie, Rachel, is enraged when her friend commits suicide after being humiliated by a football player she had slept with. She passes the information on to the local sheriff who attempts to charge the player, Eric, with statutory rape. This angers Eric’s friends who then target Rachel, not knowing she has telekinetic powers.

Inevitably, Rachel exacts her own revenge. Towards the end of the film, Eric and his friend Mark, together with Mark’s girlfriend, Monica, try to take on Rachel with harpoon guns. Rachel uses her powers to shatter Monica’s eyeglasses, effectively blinding her. In shock, Monica shoots Eric with her harpoon gun and they both bleed out and die. It is truly a scene that must be watched to be fully appreciated.

Top 10 Classic Horror Movie Misconceptions

5 You can microwave anything, apparently

The Last House on the Left also thrives on vengeance. A gang brutally assaults two young girls, killing one and raping the other. Mari, who was raped, manages to get away and jump into a lake but is then shot in the back by the man who attacked her.

The gang ends up seeking shelter from a raging storm at a nearby house. Unbeknownst to them, it is the house Mari had lived in with her parents. It is soon revealed that Mari is still alive, and her parents come to realize what has happened and who the people in their home really are. The couple plan revenge on the gang and end their unexpected reign of terror by injuring the rapist, Krug, to such an extent that he is paralyzed from the neck down. Mari’s father, John, then places Krug’s head in a microwave and turns it on. As the film ends, Krug’s head explodes in gruesome fashion.

This is a truly over-the-top gross out scene that technically shouldn’t have happened as a microwave doesn’t work with the door open. But since Krug deserved everything he got, we’ll just let this one slide. You can watch the clip here.

4 No vegetables, no dessert!

Sleepwalkers is a strange film but, to be fair, so are most of Stephen King’s creations. The movie features two incestuous Sleepwalkers (a mother and her son) who feed on female virgins and are deathly afraid of cats, as the felines can see through these creatures’ human disguise. Unsurprisingly, the movie received many unfavourable reviews after its release in 1992, but it does have somewhat of a cult following.

There are a lot of ridiculous scenes in the movie, including the Sleepwalker son breaking off a guy’s hand and then… handing it to him (pun intended). Not to mention the exceptionally cheesy dialogue that accompanies these scenes. At one point during the film the Sleepwalker mother, Mary Brady, walks up behind a police officer talking on his phone and she stabs him in the back. Her weapon of choice? A corncob. The best part about this hilarious scene is Mary’s line at the end: “No vegetables, no dessert. That’s the rule.”

3 Pancakes of death

Lumberjack Man is a comedy horror released in 2015, and as such the kills are supposed to be hilarious and outrageous. However, when it comes to food as murder weapon, this movie takes it one step further.

The killer, Lumber Jack, stalks teens and staff on a retreat during their annual camp. Lumber Jack is armed with a saw, axes and a rolling griddle that sports giant pancakes. He kills the teenagers and uses their blood in lieu of syrup to pour over the flapjacks. There are a lot of murders that include people being hacked to death with axes, heads impaled by spikes, a truly weird scene where a girl’s breast implants are torn out through her back and a police officer who gets his heart ripped out and plopped into his mouth.

The winner, however, has to be poor Courtney who gets beaten to death with a giant … yup, you guessed it … pancake.

2 Superman … erm… Jason punch!

Jason Voorhees is one of the creepier killers in horror movies. He is not on the Michael Myers level, but his hockey mask has been known to strike fear into the hearts of movie goers worldwide. Jason has been featured in a host of Friday the 13th movies and went head to head against Freddy Krueger in Freddy vs Jason.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was released in 1989 and was deemed one of the weaker instalments in the series. The movie centres around Jason stalking high school students, first on a ship and then in NYC.

As expected, there are a multitude of murders throughout, with a hot rock from a sauna being used as a weapon, a woman being stabbed with a spear gun, throat slitting, stabbing and toxic waste drownings.

The most graphic (and unintentionally funny) scene comes when one of the victims tries to fight back only to have his efforts rewarded with a single powerful punch by Jason that sees his head fly clean off and land in a nearby dumpster.

1 Blended

You’re Next, released in 2011, focuses on estranged siblings reuniting at a dinner held in honor of their parent’s wedding anniversary at their childhood home. As the dinner progresses, the family suddenly finds itself under attack by unknown assailants who are determined to finish them all off.

What the attackers don’t know, however, is that one of the siblings, Crispian, has a girlfriend who is not afraid to fight back. Erin uses her survival skills with precision and brings her own revenge on the attackers by stabbing and bludgeoning them with a meat pounder.

It is eventually revealed that one of the siblings, Felix, and his partner Zee, hired the assassins to murder the family in the name of money (inheritance). They try to kill Erin, but she turns the tables on them and kills Felix with a blender. She first smashes it into Felix’s face, plunges the smashed carafe onto this head and ensures the blade pierces the skull before she turns the blender on. The blade effectively mushes Felix’s brains into a disgusting smoothie after which Erin jams a knife into the top of Zee’s head.

10 Horror Houses That Really Existed

Electrocution is a horrible way to die. Cell phones, science experiments, tasers, faulty wires, and even ordinary outlets can be delivery systems for shocking deaths. Accidental electrocution fatalities are common, and homicides involving electrical torture occur with terrifying frequency. Sometimes, electricity is even used as the murder weapon.

See Also: 10 Shocking Myths About Electricity

10 Cocaine And Tasers

In February 2015, Florida police tased Calvon Reid to death. Wynmoor retirement community residents called authorities, and indicated that Reid, 39, had been injured and needed medical attention. After Reid refused the officers’ help, they tased him multiple times in the chest. Witnesses recall hearing Reid cry “I can’t breathe” and “they are going to kill me”.

Reid’s death was ruled a homicide and led to the abrupt retirement of the Coconut Creek police chief. Initially, investigators kept information regarding Reid’s death a secret. Three of the four officers involved had let their taser certifications lapse. The autopsy revealed that “recent cocaine use” exacerbated Reid’s condition. However, “complications of an electro-muscular disruption device” was the cause of death. Cocaine has been linked to taser fatalities in the past. In most cases, cocaine is listed as the cause of death in an attempt to demonize the victims of overzealous police.^[1]

9 A Spy’s Death In Cairo

In early 2016, the body of Giulio Regeni, 28, was found in a ditch in the outskirts of Cairo. The Cambridge PhD student had been missing for two weeks. The autopsy revealed a brain hemorrhage, seven broken ribs, and electrocution to his penis. He had also been sliced with a razor, bludgeoned, and repeatedly kicked and punched. The tops of both ears had been lobbed off, and multiple finger and toenails had been ripped off.

Regeni was most likely killed as a suspected spy. The Italian grad student had been studying Egyptian trade unions. He wrote several articles critical of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s administration. Three Egyptian security officials revealed Regeni had been taken into custody. All three confirmed that he had triggered red flags due to his research project and contact with the leftists April 6th movement and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood – both considered enemies of the state.^[2]

8 Iphone Horror

In 2014, the charred body of Wu Wenyuan was discovered bed next to a broken iPhone 4S. The phone’s screen was smashed, and the 18-year-old Xinjian resident was not breathing. The coroner’s report revealed electrocution marks on her neck, hands, and left foot. The cause of death was electrocution from the cell phone’s “electrical leakage”. Investigators determined the phone had been plugged into a knock-off charger, which might have caused the electrocution.

This is not the only time an iPhone has electrocuted someone to death. In 2015, Evegina Sviridenko was killed when she dropped her cell phone into the bath. The 24-year-old Moscow resident had been looking at her social media page when the plugged-in phone hit the water. Sviridenko’s roommate discovered her pale and floating. Her skin was still quaking from the electrical shock. Investigators believe that an off-brand charger was likely responsible for Sviridenko’s cell phone electrocution death.^[3]

7 Electro Pedophile

The body of Sonia Payi was discovered in the undergrowth near a Strunaway industrial park. The autopsy revealed the seven-year-old South African girl had been raped before she was electrocuted to death. Sonia was abducted while sneaking out with a friend to buy snacks from a local shop. A joint force of police and locals began the search. Specialized K9 search and rescue units combed the cemeteries and alleys.

A mob of 200 New Brighton residents, mostly women, chased the man who allegedly abducted, raped, and electrocuted Sonia Payi. They pelted him with stones and beat him. Police had to intervene. According to the vigilantes, the man had been pretending to be deaf and was spotted playing with children near where Sonia was abducted. Residents were immediately suspicious, as the man was not a local. When questioned he doubled-down on his deaf act and escaped, leaving his false teeth behind.^[4]

6 Don’t Try This At Home

A 15-year-old Ohio boy was electrocuted to death recreating a YouTube video. Morgan Wojciechowski was attempting the “Jacob’s Ladder” experiment, which involves a high-voltage arc of electricity traveling between two points – frequently wires. The high school freshman’s parents were alerted to the trouble when they heard “a lot of noise” coming from the garage. Emergency crews were dispatched but it was too late. Morgan was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital.

Investigators discovered a microwave battery pack attached to an electrical outlet via multiple extension cords. Jumper cables from the battery pack connected with wire hangers, believed to be the points where electricity would travel. The Wojciechowski family was aware of Morgan’s experiments. However, they are unaware which video prompted him to recreate the fatal experiment. Jacob’s Ladder displays can be found at museums and science centers. They are dangerous and should not be trifled with at home.^[5]

5 Sex Tape Murder Suicide

In January, Virginia police discovered the naked body of Kim Yeon on the basement floor of an Annandale home. She was handcuffed to a clothed 73-year-old man. When authorities approached, the man wrapped an electrical cord around his wrist and began to convulse. The cord was connected to an awls jammed into a circuit breaker – an improvised electrocution device. Yeon, 56, was pronounced dead at the scene. The unidentified man was taken into custody and hospitalized.

Police traced Yeon’s cell phone to the Annandale residence. Knocks went unanswered, but they discovered the grisly scene by peeking through the basement window. Investigators discovered a note, which indicated that the man wanted to kill Yeon and take his own life. There was also a DVD sex tape of the couple. There was no indication that Yeon was abducted. However, her death is being investigated as a homicide. The motive remains a mystery.^[6]

4 Sexual Jealousy Slaughter

Last summer, Indian police discovered the naked remains of Alka Kumari in her family home in Amishar. The coroner’s report revealed that the 25-year-old was a victim of homicide. First, she was strangled. Then her breasts and genitals were electrocuted. She was violated with a two-foot sword, before electrical current was sent through it, burning her internal organs.

Police believe the slaying was motivated by “sexual jealousy”. They discovered a note reading, “I miss you”. Cold beverages were sitting in the room where her body found. The police also discovered a mobile phone missing a SIM card. Cash, gold, and silver ornaments were taken. However, investigators believe this was to give the perception of a robbery, and throw them off the real killer’s trail. The brutality of the murder suggests a person with a personal connection to Alka. Five years before her murder, Alka was married. It lasted only days.^[7]

3 Copper Theft Gone Wrong

In 2015, the Jefferson county sheriff’s office received a report of a dead body near Highway 221. The deceased was Charles “Chip” Ridenour. The coroner’s report revealed the 39-year-old died from electrocution. Warrants were issued for David Wade, 43, and Robert Brown, 52. Georgia authorities believe the two, along with Ridenour, were trying to steal copper wire from the tops of power poles. The pair has been charged with felony murder, concealing a death, and theft by taking. At the time of his death, Ridenour was on probation for stealing an air-conditioning unit.

Copper theft is an epidemic. Estimates report that the business of illegal copper is worth $1 billion a year. It remains valuable as scrap because of its uses in fiber optics, plumbing, and nearly all electrical gadgets. As a tangible asset, it is extremely hard to trace. Thieves will go nearly anywhere to find the precious metal.^[8]

2 Cuckold Killer

In 2014, the body of Choa Chu Kang was discovered in Malaysia’s Sungei Gedong Camp. Maggots seethed through the badly decomposed corpse. His hands were bound and his t-shirt was pulled up to his neck. His scalp was damaged and his eyes, missing. The autopsy revealed that he died from blunt force trauma to the head and face.

Chia Kee Chen, 55, was charged with the murder. Prosecutors believe the feud developed over an affair between Kang and Chen’s wife. The relationship was broken off. However, a New Year’s text message triggered a rampage. Chen and two accomplices assaulted Kang in a parking lot and forced him into the back of a van. They tied him up and electrocuted him. They then beat Kang to death before dumping his body. Chen’s longtime friend Chua Leong Aik, 66, and business partner Febri Irwansyah Djatmiko have also been charged with the murder.^[9]

1 Cell Phone Honor Killing

17-year-old Amine Demirtas was electrocuted to death by her brother for using a cell phone without his approval. According to Kasim Demirtas, 29, he developed suspicions his sister was using a mobile to meet new people. He asked for the phone repeatedly and demanded the passcode so that he could read her messages. When she refused. Kasim tortured and electrocuted her to death. Their father was arrested along with Kasim for encouraging the brutality.

Nearly 300 women are killed from domestic violence each year in Turkey. Honor killings are common, and activists believe that many go unreported as suicides. The murder took place in a Batman, Turkey. Between 1995 and 2006, at least 71 women committed suicide in the conservative city. Murders in which a woman’s family kills her following a “shameful” act are illegal in Turkey. However, officials often look the other way and judges hand out light sentences.^[10]

About The Author: Abraham Rinquist is the executive director of the Winooski, Vermont, branch of the Helen Hartness Flanders Folklore Society. He is the coauthor of Codex Exotica and Song-Catcher: The Adventures of Blackwater Jukebox.

Horror films should be, well, horrific right? I mean it is right there in the name. But sometimes the division between what is frightening and what is funny is not always obvious. Movie makers go out of their way to make their audiences take notice so they strive to make the deaths in their horror films stand out from the usual stabbings, bludgeonings, and ghostly goings-on familiar to the genre. Some films take such glee in their stupendous deaths that they become horror-comedies. Or comedy-horrors.

Either way, here are ten horror movie demises so ridiculous they’re funny. And here’s the first list if you’re interested.

Top 10 Ridiculous Movie Monsters

10 Killer Condom

When people book into the Hotel Quickie they have only one thing on their mind. Yet despite their desire for quick sex they also show an admirable to make it safe sex. Unfortunately in this German horror film putting on a condom is one of the worst things you can do for your health.

After a living condom is created that has a very painful looking set of sharp teeth it soon begins attacking the horny tenants of the hotel. Officer Luigi Mackeroni leads the hunt for the killer condom but, when he falls for a gigolo called Billy, he loses more than his heart. While the pair begin to make love the killer condom manages to bite off Mackeroni’s right testicle.

Mackeroni survives the attack but others are less fortunate when their penises are bitten off. The condoms do not only attack men however, one woman commits suicide by leaping into a pool of water teeming with toothy prophylactics.

9 Thrown CDs

The Hellraiser films follow people who are foolish enough to release the Cenobites from Hell. Cenobites are people who have been transformed by their perverted pleasures into demons that subject others to fiendish tortures.

In Hellraiser 3 Pinhead, leader of the Cenobites, pays a nightclub a visit, causing all the creepy décor of the club to come to life. He massacres the patrons of the club. Some get off easy by dying in falls but others face a more brutal offing. One woman has her drink turn to ice and impale her through the mouth. The DJ gets the most ridiculously apt, and 1990s, death of the film.

CDs from his stack begin to levitate around his head menacingly before slicing into his skull, brain, and mouth. Unfortunately this is not the end for the DJ. Pinhead uses his hellish powers to transform the DJ into a new cenobite – named CD [LINK 2].

CD joins the diabolical rampage unleashed on the city using his new powers. These powers consist of having a CD in his belly that ejects discs. It is these that he throws to kill a poor cab driver and a police officer.

8 Giant Rabbits

Rabbits are not the most threatening of creatures. Perhaps that is why the studio that produced this film changed its title from Rabbits to Night of the Lepus before its release. They also studiously left rabbits off of the promotional materials for the movie. But there is no avoiding the fact that the villains of this film are rabbits.

The movie begins with a rabbit being given a cocktail of hormones in an attempt to control the rabbit population on a ranch. Instead the rabbits begin to mutate into huge and unusually carnivorous monsters. The ranchers attempt to destroy the giant rabbits with dynamite but that just annoys them. The rabbits attack the farm.

In one of the greatest scenes in movie history dozens of normal sized rabbits are shown stampeding through a model of a farm before a rabbit’s paw crashes through a window and slashes a woman’s throat.

7 Psychic Tyre

The 2010 movie Rubber has been described as the greatest film about a killer tire ever made. It focuses on the actions of Robert – the titular tyre. When Robert comes to life in the middle of the desert he begins by killing and crushing various items and creatures. Unable to crush a glass bottle he turns to his psychic powers to blow them up.

When Robert is run over by a truck he turns his powers on the driver and makes the man’s head explode. This is just the beginning of Robert’s rampage. Soon heads are popping all over the place and the police are called in to track down their man, or tyre.

Rubber offers a meta-commentary on horror films by having an audience on screen watching events as they unfold. But unlike audiences in a cinema these viewers are not safe from the machinations of the nefarious tyre.

6 Vending Machine

Stephen King is the master of modern horror. His novels succeed in turning even the most mundane things into creepy threats. Films based on his books often top the box office charts. Surely then a film not only written by King, but directed by him, should be one of the best ever made? Maximum Overdrive, however, is not.

When the Earth passes through the tail of a comet all machines on the planet become sentient and malevolent. Bridges toss cars into rivers and arcade machines shock people to death. The most memorable murder of the movie however is reserved for the coach of a little league game. While buying his players soda from a vending machine it begins to launch cans at him. One hits him in the nuts while another crushes his skull.

Stephen King has disowned this film and vowed never to direct another one again.

10 Ridiculous Movie Plots That Just Don’t Add Up

5 Eaten by lions – The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan was once the golden child of Hollywood who reinvigorated the movie industry with his clever plot twists. Then he was declared a hack with only one trick up his sleeve and became the butt of everyone’s jokes. When you watch The Happening it becomes clear that something is dreadfully wrong – and not just in the plot of the movie.

When people begin to mysteriously commit suicide for seemingly no reason panic spreads across the globe. Some jump from roof tops, some drive their cars off the road, and some take the most convoluted routes to the afterlife they can contrive. In on scene a man is shown walking into a lion enclosure at a zoo. Apparently wanting to die he reaches out his hand towards the lions. But instead of antagonising them he just sort of stands there. Not the quickest way to die.

When the lions do attack the man he shows a superb lack of interest as they tear off his arms. The gory attack could be frightening if it was not so strangely filmed with bad CGI.

4 Choke on ‘em!

George Romero’s zombie films are masterpieces of horror that often come with a strong side of social commentary. Day of the Dead tells the story of one of the last outposts of humanity after a zombie apocalypse has destroyed the world. Whether there is any humanity left in the surviving humans is one of the central questions of the film.

The leader of the military outpost where the film is based, Captain Rhodes, becomes increasingly frustrated with the scientists he is supposed to be protecting. Eventually the zombies penetrate the underground bunker and Rhodes is chased through the tunnels by a zombie who has regained some of his motor functions and managed to grab a gun. When Rhodes opens a door and is faced with a horde of zombies he manages to spit defiance with his last breath.

Even while zombie fingers are tearing him in half and with his internal organs slipping out Rhodes manages to taunt his murderers. “Choke on ‘em!” he says, apparently forgetting zombies do not breathe.

3 Basket Ball

When Wes Craven stepped out of the horror genre with the film Deadly Friend he hoped to make a sci-fi film full of complex character studies. Unfortunately the audiences first shown the movie wanted the bloody gore of Craven’s earlier works and the studio forced reshoots to bring more blood to the screen.

Deadly Friend tells the story of a young genius who creates a robot with real intelligence, and an overprotective nature. When the genius’ love interest is left brain dead he does the obvious thing of implanting his robot’s mind into her body. The new cyborg then goes on a killing spree.

An elderly neighbour who had taken the genius’ basketball earlier in the film comes face to face with the cyborg who gets her own back. The cyborg takes the basketball and obliterates the old lady’s head by throwing the ball at her. This leaves the old woman’s body stumbling about her living room until it collapses shaking on the ground.

2 Exploding Shark

Jaws was the film that made everyone afraid of the sea. It also proved that an exploding shark can be an extreme moment of triumph. Yet its sequel, Jaws 4 (Jaws: The Revenge), has one of the most absurd shark explosions ever captured on film.

When a great white shark begins following a family around the world and attacking its members it is left to matriarch Ellen Brody to stop it. She takes a boat out and plans to shock the shark to death with electricity. But when the shocks make the shark jump out of the water she drives the boat into it. Being impaled would probably have killed the fish anyway but for some reason that is never explained the shark explodes violently. The scene is also not helped by it looking as if it was filmed using tiny models in someone’s bathtub.

Michael Caine who stars in the film took the panning of this movie in good spirits. He has said “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

1 Oh My Gooooooodddd!

Troll 2 has gained the reputation of being one of the very worst films ever made. Its production was troubled by an inexperienced cast, a crew that spoke very little English, and a bizarre special effects. The plot of the film revolves around vegetarians goblins who want to eat people – so they do the logical thing by transforming them into plants.

When the Goblin queen captures a girl and boy she gives them broth to drink. While the girl dissolves into green goo the boy, Arnold, is left staring helplessly as the goblins eat her remains. Arnold’s delivery of “Oh my God!” has since become a meme. Arnold’s fate is more drawn out when he is turned into a tree.

When a friend comes to rescue Arnold he pulls the bark covering his face off and Arnold pleads to be rescued. Unable to free Arnold from the dirt he is planted in Arnold commands him to “Grab the pot and drag me out quick!” Alas he is too slow and the goblin queen returns and turns a chainsaw on the unfortunate tree-boy, but she promises he won’t feel a thing. “Just a little tickle.” This seems to be true as when she begins to slice him up he just starts giggling.

10 Ridiculous Myths We Believe Because Of Movies

Few buildings are more recognizable than the White House. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has epitomized US democracy since 1800, when President John Adams moved in. From the days of unceasingly trying wars to global turmoil, the walls of the White House have undoubtedly witnessed unprecedented moments in history.

Something you may not have thought about is the fact that a number of people have died inside the White House (although perhaps you’ve heard the claims that it’s haunted). The following ten entries delve into the little-known facts of those whose lives ended inside the presidential mansion as well as the aftermath and the loved ones they left behind.

10 Rebecca Van Buren

Eighteen years before Martin Van Buren became the eighth president of the United States, he lost his 35-year-old wife, Hannah, in 1819 to tuberculosis. Never to remarry, Van Buren’s daughter-in-law, Angelica, began performing the duties of first lady following her marriage to his son, Abraham. Almost immediately, the wealthy Southern belle was adored by Washington’s elite, who admired her charm, her graciousness, and her marriage, which became a romantic inspiration to America’s youth.

Much to the president’s delight, by 1839, Angelica and Abraham were living in the White House. Unlike Van Buren’s youngest son John, a notorious playboy whose extravagant and luxurious lifestyle consistently provoked the press, Abraham and his wife were the epitome of Van Buren’s envisioned picturesque first family. The jubilation within the mansion came full circle with the birth of Abraham’s first child, Rebecca, in March 1840. Sadly, Rebecca fell ill immediately after birth and never recovered, passing away six months later and becoming the first to die inside the White House.

Overcome with grief, President Van Buren immersed himself in his work. He became noticeably more stringent, and those around him claimed that the death of his granddaughter had morphed a once blissful and optimistic president into a tyrant.^[1]

9 Madge Wallace

Madge Wallace was your stereotypical mother-in-law, and her demeaning and bitter ways undoubtedly contributed to President Harry S. Truman’s personal discontent. Despite becoming the 33rd president of the United States, Truman was seen as nothing more than a simple dirt farmer and failed haberdasher in the eyes of Wallace, who considered him unworthy to be wed to her daughter, Bess. Her unwavering sullenness perhaps originated in 1903, when her husband, David Wallace, shot himself in the head, leaving the family deeply scarred with an abiding sense of shame. Nonetheless, Mrs. Wallace’s belittling of her son-in-law was unfounded, even more so after he successfully guided a nation through a time of world peril.

According to historian Alan L. Berger, Wallace, “a confirmed anti-Semite,” consistently badgered Truman about his positive stance on Israel in addition to questioning his qualifications as president. Addressing him only as “Mr. Truman,” Wallace wasn’t shy about supporting Truman’s opponents, such as Governor Thomas Dewey of New York.^[2] In light of the vile treatment at the hands of his wife’s mother, Truman ironically spoke well of Mrs. Wallace upon her passing in her White House bedroom on December 5, 1952, stating, “She was a grand lady. When I hear these mother-in-law jokes I don’t laugh.”

8 Letitia Tyler

Letitia Tyler was a socially engaged member of Washington’s elite society. Sadly, in 1839, the mother of seven would suffer a stroke, leaving her partially paralyzed. As luck would have it, her husband, John, would soon be chosen as the vice presidential candidate for William Henry Harrison. Nonetheless, his days of attending to Letitia’s needs at their home in Williamsburg would soon come to an end in April 1841, when he succeeded to the presidency upon the sudden death of President Harrison. Given her physical limitations, Mrs. Tyler was not present at her husband’s swearing-in. Nevertheless, she went on to manage all of the family and public social affairs from the confines of her bedroom. Spending the majority of her days in her room beside her Bible and prayer books, she directed many charitable contributions from her own personal wealth to the poor of Washington.

After political turmoil plagued the Tyler administration, First Lady Letitia suffered a second stroke. For days, she wrote her children, pleading for their return to Washington, DC. It is said that on the night of her death, Letitia, holding a rose in her hand, turned toward the door, searching for her son who would never arrive. On the evening of September 10, 1842, Letitia Tyler became the first of three first ladies to die during their incumbency. As the city bells tolled in her honor, her casket lay in state in the East Room while crowds gathered outside “sobbing, wringing their hands, and every now and then crying out, ‘Oh, the poor have lost a friend.’ “^[3]

7 Ellen Wilson

During the first three months of her husband’s administration, First Lady Ellen Wilson hosted over 40 White House receptions, musicals, and recitals. Her love for the arts proved comedic to the press, who often criticized her fashion sense—or lack thereof. Ironically, it would be her artistic eye that left an enduring contribution to the presidential mansion, including the creation of the Rose Garden.

Ellen suffered in private, sparing her loved ones the knowledge that she was dying from a kidney ailment known as Bright’s disease. On July 23, 1914, Dr. Cary Grayson moved into the White House, only to pack up 13 days later following the death of Mrs. Wilson. President Wilson was given the unexpected news of his wife’s grave condition merely 48 hours before her passing. He later stated that on her deathbed, Ellen uttered that she could “go away more cheerfully” if she knew that the alley clearance bill would pass. Word of this was sent to Capitol Hill, and her request was immediately granted.

On August 6, 1914, Ellen became the third presidential wife to die in the White House. Her remains were rested on her bed in the mansion before a private funeral four days later in the East Room. Her grave would go unmarked (albeit with a headstone) for a full year, drawing attention to the fact that the widower president had already publicly moved on with Edith Bolling Galt, whom he’d marry in December 1915.^[4]

6 Charles G. Ross

Charles G. Ross, press secretary under President Harry Truman, was often publicly flagged by the members of the press corps, who claimed that he lacked much-needed administrative experience. It became increasingly evident that Ross was not always aware of everything that was going on in the presidency, nor did the man, who was a poor public speaker, coordinate news releases with government departments and agencies in a timely fashion.

Nevertheless, Ross’s position in the White House was secure, given his close friendship with the president. The two men had known one another since their childhood in Independence, Missouri, where they both graduated, along with Truman’s wife Bess, from Independence High School in 1901. When Ross was called upon by Truman to be his press secretary in 1945, it would be a position he would hold until his unexpected death five years later.^[5]

After giving a press conference on the morning of December 5, 1950, Ross returned to his office in the White House to prepare for his upcoming televised news statements scheduled for that afternoon. Moments later, White House staff received a summons that Ross had collapsed at his desk, dying of a heart attack. President Truman said of his friend, “We all knew that he was working far beyond his strength. But he would have it so. He fell at his post, a casualty of his fidelity to duty and his determination that our people should know the truth, and all the truth, in these critical times.”

5 Frederick Dent

Before becoming the 18th president of the United States on March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia faced grave financial hardships for well over a decade. Struggling to produce an income from the 60-acre farmland he inherited from Julia’s father, Frederick Dent, the bleak future Grant foresaw for him and his family was becoming an incessant and debilitating mental strain. Grant’s hardships were only made worse by the unremitting belittling of his father-in-law, who openly chastised him as a failure, sending him falling into deeper despondency.

Frederick Dent’s relentless disparaging of his son-in-law continued even into Grant’s presidency. On the cold winter evening of December 15, 1873, Grant found a respite from the struggles of office and his insufferable in-law by dining out with his wife and son, Fred. The three returned to the White House close to midnight only to discover that a physician had been summoned to Dent’s bedside. Dent was found to be in a “quiet slumber.”

At 11:45 PM, Dent passed away, relieving Grant of the heavy burden he had fruitlessly carried for all those years trying to please an impossibly difficult man. Following his funeral in the Blue Room of the mansion, Dent’s remains were shipped back to St. Louis for burial. Grant, along with his son, accompanied the casket, while his distraught wife remained in Washington, DC.^[6]

4 Caroline Harrison

Caroline Harrison, wife of the 23rd president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, was instrumental in extensively remodeling the White House, including the installation of electricity. In addition, the first lady used her exceptional painting skills to design new formal presidential china, which, to date, remains one of the main public attractions of the mansion.

Her social obligations and enthusiastic involvement in the expansion and renovation of the White House would come to a sudden halt in the winter of 1891, after she suffered numerous bouts of debilitating bronchial infections. When her condition deteriorated in the summer of 1892, Caroline was officially diagnosed with tuberculosis, with little hope of recovery. Despite frequent attempts at a cure, including various operations to drain fluids from the pleural cavities of her lungs, Caroline died after a painful struggle at 1:40 AM on October 25, 1892, with President Harrison by her side.

Her private funeral in the East Room of the mansion two days later required an invitation to attend. Her Spanish red cedar casket, adorned with wreaths from dignitaries around the world, was then accompanied by her family to Indianapolis for burial.^[7] Just one month after her death, Caroline’s father, Reverend John Witherspoon Scott, passed away in the White House at the age of 92.

3 William Henry Harrison

On March 4, 1841, William Henry Harrison was sworn in as America’s first Whig president. The day was bitterly cold, and a stubborn 68-year-old Harrison declined to wear a jacket, hat, or gloves in what would become the longest Inaugural Address in US history. Just 31 days later, the ninth president of the United States would take his last breath inside the White House.^[8]

In the weeks leading to his death, a bedridden Harrison was thought to be suffering from pneumonia, as originally diagnosed by his physician, Dr. Thomas Miller. In recent years, however, the untimely death of America’s shortest-serving president is best explained by enteric fever contracted by pathogens in the White House water supply. A mere seven blocks from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was the city’s depository for “night soil,” a field of stagnated human excrement that became a breeding ground for deadly bacteria, including Salmonella typhi and S. paratyphi. This would explain Harrison’s sinking pulse and cold, blue extremities prior to his death, classic manifestations of septic shock.

The standard treatment that Dr. Miller administered only exacerbated the president’s condition. The opium Harrison was given facilitated pathogenic bacteria into the bloodstream by retarding the intestines’ motility, and repeated enemas potentially resulted in ulcer perforation, causing sepsis.

2 Zachary Taylor

For four long, agonizing days, President Zachary Taylor was bedridden inside the White House, suffering from severe cramps, diarrhea, nausea, and dehydration. Taylor ultimately succumbed to his acute illness on July 9, 1850, just 16 months into his term. The exact cause of death has always been disputed by historians, many of whom have claimed that the 12th president contracted cholera, while others hinted at possible foul play due to arsenic poisoning.

This theory led to the exhumation of Taylor’s remains at the National Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, on June 17, 1991. Given that 141 years had passed since his death, a team of medical examiners found no organs or skin on Taylor and, thus, had to rely on bone, eyebrows, and pubic hair in order to test for traces of arsenic. They found only small amounts of the chemical consistent with any human being on planet Earth. In addition, no traces of mercury, lead, or other toxic metals were found, indicating that the president was not poisoned. In fact, the only thing that stood out to the medical examiners was Taylor’s “unusually good set of teeth,” especially for a 65-year-old man living in pre-fluoride days. As for the cause of his unexpected and sudden demise, historians continue to cite gastroenteritis as the fatal culprit.^[9]

1 Willie Lincoln

On the cold winter day of February 20, 1862, 11-year-old Willie Lincoln took his last breath, casting a pall over the White House that would linger for the remainder of his father’s presidency. The child, who is believed to have contracted typhoid fever from the mansion’s contaminated water supply, was clothed in usual everyday attire and placed in a plain metallic coffin in the East Room of the White House.

The weeks prior to his death were an agonizing stretch for the president and first lady, who, on the inside, died along with their son, plunging the couple into insurmountable sorrow. According to Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who had become Mrs. Lincoln’s seamstress and confidante, President Lincoln’s grief “unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.” Mrs. Lincoln was inconsolable to the point that the president led her to a window and pointed toward St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, an insane asylum, stating, “Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

Following a long procession through unpaved streets, Willie’s remains were placed in a marble vault in Oak Hill Cemetery as a temporary resting place until the Lincoln family returned to Illinois. Even as he tried to hold the country together, the president consistently visited his son’s tomb until his assassination on April 15, 1865. In the end, the caskets of father and son were placed beside one another aboard the presidential funeral train for their journey home.^[10]

Adam is just a hubcap trying to hold on in the fast lane.

In television, killing off a character must be done just right. Too minor a player and no one cares; too major a character and everyone cares too much – unless it’s done with flare.

The element of surprise is key. For example, despite it being arguably the greatest series ever, Breaking Bad didn’t shock audiences when Walter White died. The guy had terminal cancer and even more terminal enemies, for God’s sake.

This list, rather, deals with surprise demise. Following are ten TV deaths that few viewers saw coming.

10 Notable People Who Foresaw Their Own Deaths

10 Roseanne Conner (Roseanne)

Arguably the most anticipated reboot of all time was the return of the beloved sitcom, Roseanne, after 21 years. Unfortunately for the Conner family matriarch, it was also one of the shortest-lived.

On March 27, 2018, the domestic goddess returned, shattering ratings expectations and quickly becoming the top-rated primetime show. Unlike some reboots, it’s nostalgia was both endearing and believable: The Conners’ working class roots made it likely they’d not only have the same house after 20 years, but much of the same furniture.

But the show was also as edgy as ever, leaning into the USA’s deep cultural and political divide. A rare Trump supporter on TV, Roseanne pilloried political correctness while allowing anti-Trump family members to land some blows as well. The result was simultaneously humorous and cathartic. We liked the Conners, and watching their low-grade culture war took the edge off our ever-escalating one.

And then Roseanne – the actress, not the character – called a Black woman an ape on Twitter. After just nine episodes, her show was promptly cancelled.

However, the reboot was so successful that the program soon returned as The Conners. Obviously, the family had some explaining to do regarding their former title character’s absence. A plotline that started before Roseanne’s cancelation – a budding problem with opioid pills – provided the perfect out. In the opening moments of The Conners, we learn Roseanne overdosed on prescription painkillers.

9 Christopher Moltisanti (The Sopranos)

A wise guy with New Jersey’s mob, typically one that crossed boss Tony Soprano, got whacked seemingly every episode on The Sopranos. But with the exception of Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero – whose downfall was anticipated due to his season-long role as an FBI informant – Tony’s immediate crew remained intact through nearly six seasons.

That changed with the death of Tony’s nephew and longtime protégé, Christopher. Of course, as war with a powerful New York family loomed and the show barrelled toward its controversial conclusion (“Did Tony die?” might be the most asked TV-related question ever), main characters were sure to get popped.

But it was the WAY Christopher died that shocked viewers. We find Christopher driving with Tony – the sort of innocuous scene frequently used for explanatory dialogue or, in The Sopranos’ case, a post-violence calm-down. Unfortunately, Christopher had recently relapsed on heroin and, his reflexes dulled, drifts into the opposite lane. He swerves to avoid an oncoming vehicle, and his truck careens down an embankment.

Tony was hurt but ambulatory. Christopher was alive but badly injured, bleeding and wheezing. “I’ll never pass a drug test,” he tells Tony. “Call me a taxi.”

Tony flips open his phone, starts dialling… then closes it. He pinches Christopher’s nostrils until the wheezing stops. At once stunning and fitting, the scene shows Tony grappling with his affection, disappointment and fury at his drug-addled mentee.

8 Zoe Barnes (House of Cards)

In the first season of House of Cards, it became quite clear how underhanded Frank Underwood was. Snubbed for a cabinet position by the incoming president, Frank starts his long-game revenge by convincing a congressman to run for Pennsylvania governor. With the help of hookers and booze, Frank ensures the candidacy will crash and burn. He then persuades the sitting Vice President to step down and run in the lapsed candidate’s stead and, to cover his tracks, murders the congressman by making it look like a suicide.

Meanwhile, he cozies up to the president, and when the VP slot becomes available… voila: Vice President Frank Underwood. So yes, we knew Frank was unscrupulous. But throw a girl in front of a TRAIN unscrupulous? Jesus.

Throughout, Frank is helping his cause by first confiding in and then sleeping with a young reporter named Zoe Barnes. The “friends with mutual benefits” relationship eventually turns sour as Zoe begins suspecting Frank of play far fouler than mere political wrangling.

As Season 2 begins we find Zoe digging into the congressman’s supposed suicide. Frank suggests a covert meeting in a shadowy Washington DC subway station. Zoe voices her belief that the congressman was murdered, suspecting Frank knows something but not that he’s the actual culprit.

Frank responds by pushing her in front of an oncoming train.

7 Jimmy Darmody & Nucky Thompson (Boardwalk Empire)

This same-show double-entry features two character deaths surprising for different IRL reasons. HBO’s ambitious period piece about the golden years of Atlantic City and the NYC area’s mafia turf wars was a tribute to the violent, roaring 1920s centered around a real-life gangster: Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, who lorded over the beachfront vacation town’s legendary boardwalk for decades.

Like any crooked official, Nucky has henchmen, the most prominent being a young World War 1 veteran named Jimmy Darmody. Season 1 sees their relationship strengthen but, in Season 2, Jimmy makes the seemingly inevitable behind-the-scenes power play. Even though they iron out their differences, Nucky shoots him anyway.

For a show that ranks among the greatest dramas ever, Jimmy’s death didn’t quite fit. It seemed somewhat shoehorned, lacking sufficient setup. Then an explanation emerged: Michael Pitts, the actor who portrayed Jimmy, was so impossible to work with they killed him off. His Hollywood rep is so poor that he hasn’t landed a major role since.

Jimmy’s revenge came posthumously: in the series finale, his son, Tommy, shoots and kills Nucky on the very boardwalk he rules. Why was this surprising? Because the show’s main plots paralleled with historical events, and the real Nucky Thompson died peacefully at the ripe old age of 85.

6 Jackie Peyton (Nurse Jackie)

Eight years after her screen husband, Tony Soprano, starred in the most controversial finale in TV history, Edie Falco tried to pull off her own enigmatic exit. The only thing that didn’t work was the attempted ambiguity. While a solid argument can be made both for and against Tony getting whacked, it’s commonly believed that Falco’s title character, Nurse Jackie Peyton, dies from a heroin overdose as the show – and Jackie – fades to black.

But despite the attempt at a permanent cliffhanger – the show’s creator admits he wanted the audience to wonder whether his heroine died from… well, heroin – the scene gives the clear impression that Jackie perishes, with the final camera shot ascending from Jackie’s eyes-affixed, flat-on-her-back body. At a time before NARCAN made heroin overdoses largely reversible (the show ended just months before the wonderdrug’s introduction), Jackie was a goner.

It’s a credit to the Emmy-winning show that Jackie’s death, unintentional or not, was surprising. After all, its entire premise is an emergency room nurse with an opioid addiction and access to a hospital’s well-stocked pharmacy. Through seven seasons, Jackie’s lives the rollercoaster existence of an addict whose clean time is interrupted by discouraging, consequence-laden relapse.

Those with addiction know it is rarely realistically portrayed on television. Nurse Jackie did it better than any in TV history and, when Jackie paid the ultimate price, the result was gut-wrenching and eyebrow-raising.

5 Maude Flanders (The Simpsons)

The Simpsons broke a lot of ground for animated series, including becoming the first to permanently kill off a recurring character. And as with many conventional “IRL” sitcoms, The Simpsons called upon the Grim Reaper when many were calling the show a bit stale. (Well, that and the voiceover actress asked for a huge raise.)

In the 11th season’s 14th episode, the forebodingly (albeit confusingly) titled “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily,” Homer, Marge and the family attend a racecar event, where a vendor is shooting free T-shirts into the crowd from an air cannon. Excited, Homer jumps up, removes his shirt and makes a bullseye on his tummy with a ketchup squirter. The T-Shirts come flying at high velocity…

… and Homer ducks, distracted by a shiny object. The shirts hit the wife of Homer’s God-fearing neighbor, Ned Flanders, and she falls off the top of the bleachers. RIP, Maude Flanders.

The odd thing about Maude’s fatal plunge was how unfamiliar audiences were with a cartoon death being final. Viewers trained to see Wile. E. Coyote back on the Roadrunner’s tail after falling off a jagged cliff were instead shown a funeral.

Years later, Family Guy permanently killed off two recurring characters – Muriel Goldman and newscaster Diane Simmons – in a special whodunnit episode. Initially, most thought the plot wouldn’t carry over to Quahog proper, but it did. Neither character was ever seen again.

4 Susan Ross (Seinfeld)

Something major was about to happen in a self-proclaimed “show about nothing.” Jerry and George, both longtime bachelors, were on the verge of marriage.

The uber-particular, narcissistic Jerry falls in love with… well, someone just like him. In what at first appears just another of his whirlwind, short-term romances, Jerry meets his mirror image in Janine Garofalo, who does a hilarious episode-long Jerry impression complete with hokey observational humor (“What’s the deal with decaf?” she muses) and conspicuous cereal consumption.

On the other hand, George has been engaged for quite a while and, in true George fashion, is regretting it. But as his fiancé, Susan, prepares to send out the wedding invitations, George gets “lucky” in the most twisted way possible. Susan, licking and sealing envelope after envelope, suddenly faints. She is rushed to the hospital, seemingly no big deal.

Then she dies, the victim of paste poisoning. The cheapness of the envelope material – courtesy of the ever-frugal George – was directly attributable to Susan’s demise. “We found traces of a certain toxic adhesive,” the doctor explains, “commonly found in very low-priced envelopes.”

A microcosm of the show’s anti-hero appeal, first George and then the other three main characters – Jerry, Elaine and Kramer – feign disappointment. Jerry then realizes that he doesn’t want to get married, either, and the gang dismissively decides to go grab some coffee. Back to normal – that is, back to nothing.

3 Maria LaGuerta (Dexter)

How can a murder in a show about a serial killer be surprising? When it’s the serial killer’s police officer sister doing the murdering.

The latter seasons of Dexter, chronicling the secret serial killer life of a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Police Department, lost some steam. Many believed the show jumped the shark when the title character’s sister, police officer Deb Morgan, discovered Dexter’s dark side by witnessing him ritualistically dispatch with a mass murderer she’d been hunting.

The subsequent season dealt with the newfound stressors between Dexter and Deb, who now knows her brother is the notorious Bay Harbor Butcher – a vigilante that only kills bad guys, per Dexter’s “taking out the trash” code. Deb grapples with the bad deeds Dexter does for the common good – but doesn’t turn him in.

However, Metro Homicide Captain Maria LaGuerta, a major character from the show’s inception, begins to figure things out. She sets Dexter up by paroling a man who killed his mother. But Dexter turns the tables: offing his mother’s murderer then drugging LaGuerta, he prepares to stage her death as a mutually fatal confrontation with the ex-con.

Then Deb shows up. Gun in hand, she realizes Dexter’s plan and works up the courage to do what must be done: shoot her bother to save LaGuerta’s life. The gun fires…

… and LaGuerta’s chest explodes. Immediately remorseful, Deb cradles LaGuerta’s limp body, sobbing hysterically. Dexter survived to slice for another season, with a much-anticipated reboot scheduled for later this year.

2 Bill Hendrikson (Big Love)

He did it! Our polygamist protagonist survived five seasons of threats from the plural marriage compound he escaped, and protected his three-wife life from the modern-day, strictly one-spouse Mormon Church.

Big Love was a subculture phenomenon whose main character, Bill Hendrikson, was a prominent businessman in Utah who, unbeknownst to society, had multiple wives. Bill had fled a fundamentalist polygamist compound – isolated, self-contained communities that practiced plural marriage despite the Mormon Church’s (and the law’s) strict forbiddance. The result was television gold: The Hendriksons were a DOUBLE fish out of water whose lifestyle was too liberal for their backwards roots and too backwards for Salt Lake City society.

By the final season, Big Love’s big family overcomes all of this, but Bill finds himself facing a new issue: polygamist women’s lib. His first wife wants to gain priesthood – strictly a male role – and his third wife wants to work.

Still, these are domestic problems, albeit ones multiplied by three. Bill is largely in the clear from the law and violent fundamentalist extremists. And then a deranged neighbor shoots and kills him for resodding his lawn without permission (LINK 10). How unneighborly.

Dying, Bill asks his first wife for a blessing – an implicit consent to her wishes, as this is something only a priest can provide. Bill’s random, post-climactic end becomes both liberating and unifying for the sister wives, suddenly empowered despite tragedy.

1 Ned Stark (Game of Thrones)

Oddly, television’s most surprising death ever occurred in a show that became infamous for killing off main characters with reckless regularity. But before Game of Thrones was known as the place protagonists go to die, the show did something truly unprecedented: killed off its undisputed main character in the first season.

That was Eddard “Ned” Stark, Lord of Winterfell, who is tapped to become the right-hand man for his old friend King Robert Baratheon. Throughout the season, the show goes to great lengths to portray Stark as a classic protagonist. He gets the plurality of screen time, and is developed as an imperfect yet moral man willing to sacrifice and do his duty. So even when things started looking rough for Ned, no one really thought he’d get the ax.

Long story short: the king gets killed, and Ned learns that the widow, Cersei, had been sleeping – and procreating – with her brother. Yuck. But before Ned can arrange to have Robert’s brother assume the Throne, Cersei has him arrested.

Still, the stage is set for Ned to survive. As he stands shackled before the new king – Cersei’s young son, Joffrey – he makes a convincing yet false public confession. King Joffrey declares both his mother and Ned’s daughter Sansa, who Joffrey has eyes for, have called for mercy.

Instead, Joffrey has him beheaded and sticks his head on a pike. Ned was dead, and the series’ “no one is safe” bravado born.

10 Shocking Electrocution Deaths

Musicians often lead crazy lives, full of excesses and unique experiences, so it’s only normal that their deaths should be just as memorable. Here are ten examples that prove the point.

10. Keith Relf

Nowadays, the ’60s London rock band The Yardbirds is primarily remembered for launching the careers of not one, not two, but three of the greatest guitarists in music history: Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck. And yet, it is none of them that interest us today. Instead, we’re focusing on the original lead singer of the Yardbirds, Keith Relf, who accidentally electrocuted himself while playing his electric guitar.

This happened in 1976, years after Relf had left the band. The 33-year-old rocker was in the basement of his own home when he accidentally electrocuted himself with an ungrounded guitar. Relf was in poor health, which could further explain why the electric shock killed him, but the truth is that we simply don’t know any details about how his death actually occurred. His family remained fiercely private regarding Relf’s demise, which only led to the rise of rumors and legends, particularly the idea that he died while playing his guitar in the bathtub.

9. Bobby Fuller

In 1966, the Bobby Fuller Four found its greatest success when it scored a Top 10 hit with its cover of “I Fought the Law.” Unfortunately, the group did not get the chance to capitalize on its newfound fame. Just a few months later, the leader of the band, Bobby Fuller, was sitting dead in his car outside of his apartment, under some pretty fishy circumstances.

Ostensibly, Fuller’s death was ruled a suicide, although with some heavy question marks. Some claim that his body was found covered in gasoline. Others that it had several stab wounds. Either way, not something one would inflict on themselves before taking their own life. And some have also accused the police of quickly closing the case without a proper investigation, not even bothering to search for fingerprints or interview possible witnesses. And last, but not least, there have also been reports that Fuller’s body was in an advanced state of rigor mortis, suggesting that he had been dead for hours even though his car had only been parked for 30 minutes.

We don’t know how many of these claims are true, but they do seem to indicate that something more sinister happened to Bobby Fuller. As far as who could have done it is concerned, ideas are all over the place – a pissed-off nightclub owner, the mob, and even Charles Manson got a mention. But there isn’t any solid enough evidence to point the finger at any of them.

8. Steve Peregrin Took

The rock band T. Rex could not survive the death of its frontman Marc Bolan, disbanding soon after his untimely death in a car crash in 1977. But just a few years later, another one of the band’s founding members, Steve Peregrin Took, passed away in a much more bizarre and unique way – by choking on a cocktail cherry.

By the time of his death, Took had long been away from T. Rex. He had been fired from the band in 1969 due to his extensive drug use and party antics which were, apparently, too much even by ’60s rockers standards. Anyway, after his departure from T. Rex, Took embarked on various solo and group musical projects, the most notable of which was probably the band Shagrat which included original Motörhead member Larry Wallis.

The 31-year-old Took died on October 27, 1980, at his home in London, as we said, after choking on a cherry. Some versions of the story reported that it was a cocktail onion, and drugs were also involved, which is why his official cause of death was listed as “death by drug misadventure.”

7. Al Jackson Jr.

During the 1960s, Booker T & the M.G.’s was one of the funkiest instrumental bands around, made up of a bunch of experienced session musicians signed to Stax Records who decided to start their own band after playing on hundreds of records for other artists. The original lineup included Al Jackson Jr. on the drums, known as the “Human Timekeeper” for his intuitive ability to keep the beat. 

Unfortunately, Jackson’s time with the band was cut tragically short in 1975 when he was murdered in his own home in Memphis. It was September 30 and Jackson was supposed to fly to Detroit that night for a recording session. However, that was the night of the iconic “Thrilla in Manila” boxing match between Ali and Frazier. Jackson didn’t want to miss it so he postponed his travel and went to the Mid-South Coliseum to watch the fight televised. When he got back home, he found an intruder in his house. He forced Jackson onto his knees and shot him in the back five times. Later, his wife Barbara ran into the streets screaming for help, shouting that a burglar killed her husband.

Because Jackson’s murder remains unsolved, it has given rise to suggestions that all may not be what it seems. After all, the robber had complete control of the situation, and yet he still shot Jackson five times. Even the police noted that the intruder really wanted to make sure Jackson was dead. And the wife testified that she heard the killer refer to Jackson by his first name, indicating that they knew each other. Rumors say that Jackson’s record label may have had a hand in this, or even his wife since the two were in the middle of a divorce and she had already shot him once a few months earlier. 

6. Licorice McKechnie

Many artists perish by giving in to their demons, which is usually a nicer way of saying that they die from drugs. Another sizable chunk gets taken out by plane and car crashes, while a few of them are killed and their murders go unsolved, like the aforementioned Al Jackson Jr. And every now and then, some of them simply disappear, never to be heard from again.

That last one was the fate of Christina “Licorice” McKechnie, a Scottish singer with The Incredible String Band. They reached their peak when they performed at Woodstock in 1969, but a bad breakup with one of the other members forced McKechnie to leave the group in 1972. 

After that, her movements become much more obscure. She moved to California at one point. She married and later divorced another musician named Brian Lambert. She did return to her native Edinburgh once to see her family, but around 1990 McKechnie seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. All reports claim that she was last seen hiking across the Arizona Desert.

5. Alessandro Stradella

Unusual musician deaths are not solely contained in modern times. We travel back almost 350 years to 17th-century Genoa to explore the strange demise of Baroque composer Alessandro Stradella.

Stradella was, undoubtedly, a talented and prolific artist who produced hundreds of works, but he was also quite a shady character. “He led a dissolute life” is the polite way of saying it and he saw his fair share of scandals that resulted in not one, but two assassination attempts.

Stradella’s first brush with death occurred in Venice. He was freelancing as a music teacher, but he tried to seduce and abduct a pupil named Agnese van Uffele. Unfortunately for him, she also happened to be the doge’s niece, and he did not take kindly to Stradella’s actions. In fact, the doge sent his goons after the music teacher, and they beat him up, stabbed him, and left him for dead.

Stradella survived this first encounter and, wisely, decided that it was time for a change of scenery. He fled to Genoa but, clearly, made no attempt to mend his ways. It wasn’t long before he made some new enemies and these were more successful in their assault on the composer. Stradella was attacked and stabbed in the street again, and he died at the age of 42.

4. Gram Parsons

The death of country rock pioneer Gram Parsons is not particularly notable. The artist died of a drug overdose, which is not exactly unheard of in the world of music. But what happened afterward makes this a unique entry.

Parsons was a big fan of the Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California. After visiting it several times, he expressed his wishes to his closest friends that, when he died, he would like his ashes to be scattered there. His road manager, Phil Kaufman, wanted to fulfill Gram’s last wish, but there was one problem – Parsons’ family wanted to give him a standard burial in a cemetery and, legally, they had the final say. So Kaufman did what any true friend would do in that situation – he stole the body.

Kaufman and another friend, Michael Martin, arrived at LAX as they were getting ready to ship Parsons’ remains to New Orleans. The duo had rented a Cadillac hearse and pretended to work for the funeral parlor, saying there was a change of plans and that the body would be flown from Van Nuys Airport. The LAX employees were a bit dubious but, ultimately, they released the body. The pair then raced to Joshua Tree National Park where they set the casket on fire. 

Unfortunately, they didn’t get the job done. Some campers spotted them and alerted the authorities. Kaufman and Martin were arrested before the body had been fully cremated and what was left of it was eventually returned to Parsons’ family and was buried. For their role in this little escapade, Kaufman and Martin were each fined $300.

3. Terry Kath

“What do you think I’m going to do? Blow my brains out?”

Reportedly, those were the last words of Terry Kath, guitarist and founding member of the rock band Chicago. And you can probably guess what happened next. That’s right, Kath had a heart attack. No, not really, he shot himself.

Kath was a big gun enthusiast, which is fine in itself, but he was also a big drug enthusiast, and he often liked to combine his two favorite pastimes. Many of his friends felt it was only a matter of time until this ended in tragedy, and they were right. It was January 23, 1978, just a week shy of Kath’s 32nd birthday, and the guitarist was hanging out with one of the band’s roadies, Don Johnson, at his home in Los Angeles. 

As per usual, Kath had a few guns with him and was playing with them, spinning them around, pointing them at his own head and even pulling the trigger. Understandably, this was making Johnson a little nervous so, in a bid to reassure him, Kath wanted to show him that all of his guns were empty. He picked up a 9mm, showed the roadie the empty clip, inserted it into the weapon, put it to his own temple, and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately, he forgot a bullet in the chamber and Kath just shot himself in the head.

2. Glenn Miller

There was a time during the early 1940s when conductor Glenn Miller had the best-selling music act in America. And yet, when World War II rolled around, Miller decided to forego the safety of his country in order to entertain the troops, and he paid for this with his life.

On December 15, 1944, Miller boarded a small airplane to cross the English Channel from London to Paris. He was never seen again and the wreckage of the aircraft has never been recovered.

As to what exactly happened, the most obvious answer is that Miller died in a plane crash alongside two other officers who were aboard the aircraft. The reason for the crash is up for debate. Some believe it was due to bad weather which forced the pilot to fly low and caused the fuel intakes to freeze. Others think that he could have been killed by friendly fire, specifically by Allied bombers jettisoning bombs after returning from a failed raid over Germany.

And that is, of course, assuming that Miller was actually killed in the crash. More outlandish ideas suggest that the big band leader faked his death and moved to South America, or that he actually died in a Paris bordello and the army concocted the story to protect his image. Or even that he was assassinated while on a secret mission from the US Government to negotiate with Nazi Germany. 

1. Mike Edwards

As far as bizarre musicians’ deaths are concerned, it will be hard to top the “freak” accident that took the life of Mike Edwards in 2010, when he was crushed by a giant hay bale.

Edwards was most famous as the cellist of the 1970s rock band Electric Light Orchestra, playing with them in their early years before leaving the group in 1975. Fast forward to September 3, 2010, and the 62-year-old Edwards was driving through the countryside of Devon when a hay bale tumbled down a hill and struck the front of his van. Weighing over 600 kilograms, the hay bale killed Edwards instantly.

Two men were investigated by the police for possible criminal negligence for allowing the hay bale to tumble out of control, but an inquest jury cleared them of any wrongdoing, labeling Edwards’s death as “a farming accident, but one that was easily preventable.”