10 Great Movies Where The Villain Kills The Hero

9. The Hateful Eight

Calling anyone a "hero" in Quentin Tarantino's grim snow-bleached Western is slightly wrong, given the director's delight at writing morally murky characters who all seem to have blood on their hands and very creative opinions of what constitutes right and wrong. But Kurt Russell's John Ruth is about as close as you're likely to get in that cut-throat world to a good man.

At the very least, he's a man determined to carry out his duty to bringing in outlaws, which he does pretty successfully right up to the point when he mistakenly drinks some poisoned coffee at Minnie's Haberdashery and turns into a fountain of vomited blood.

Eventually, it's revealed that Michael Madsen's Joe Gage slipped the poison in when Ruth wasn't looking, unravelling a tense whodunnit spectacularly as basically everyone dies. It's a Tarantino flick, so deaths shouldn't be shocking, but seeing Ruth threaten to turn inside out is still provocative all the same.