10 WTF Off-Screen Horror Movie Deaths
These off-screen deaths went HARD regardless.
Of the many reasons people love horror movies, right at the top of the list is getting to see some creatively nasty kills, because what card-carrying horror fan doesn't love a gory death scene or two? But as cinema has proven time and time again, what we're not shown can end up having a far more bruising, lasting impact, as is most certainly the case with the following 10 horror movie deaths.
In each of these scenes, the pivotal moment of death was obscured from view or cut away from. Perhaps it was for budgetary reasons, but it nevertheless left audiences to imagine precisely what happened and what the poor victim was going through in their final moments. While it can be disappointing for audiences to be "robbed" of the desired money shot, in each of these scenes the implication probably ended up being so, so much worse, effectively weaponising our own imaginations against us.
The haunting ambiguity of what really happened to these characters has allowed these death scenes to live on far longer than they probably would have were they merely obliterated in more conventional genre fashion on-screen...
10. Marlena - Cloverfield
Nobody suffers a more agonising death in Cloverfield than Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), who midway through the film is bitten by one of the smaller parasitic creatures which falls off the main monster attacking New York City.
This leaves Marlena increasingly weak until she starts bleeding from the eyes, causing the military personnel in the vicinity to start panicking and drag her to a quarantine area.
Though we don't directly witness what happens to Marlena, we do get to see a silhouette of her grisly end, as her body rapidly expands and violently bursts open, splattering blood all over the nearby tarp and killing her instantly.
Even though we understand the basic beats of what happened, not explicitly seeing it only ends up making her death that much more unsettling, even if it was most likely concealed due to budgetary constraints given the technical complexity of showing such an elaborate death in clear view.