10 Horror Movie Characters Who Were SECONDS Away From Dying
8. Shigeharu - Audition (1999)
Known as one of Quentin Tarantino's favourite films and the most unsettling horror movie Rob Zombie has ever seen, Takashi Miike's Audition really doesn't mess around when it comes to charting the stone-cold brutality of the damaged human spirit.
In the film, Eihi Shiina plays baby-doll psycho killer Asami Yamazaki, whose abusive past haunts her, manifesting as a possessive-repulsive dichotomous relationship with the men she seduces, which drives her to torture, maim and murder. One such victim comes in the form of the film's protagonist, unlucky-in-love widower Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who stages the titular audition in the hopes of finding a new Mrs Right.
While things fly along merrily enough during their initial entanglement, Asami becomes jealous over Shigeharu's dead wife, and drugs him so that he is paralysed yet still able to feel pain. Asami tortures Shigeharu to the edge of death, and, with the blood swiftly draining from him and one foot severed, Asami is about to make inroads on the other when Shigeharu's son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) walks in on them.
In the ensuing fight, Shigehiko himself comes within seconds of death, but ultimately triumphs over Asami, booting her down the stairs and breaking her neck. Whether Asami really dies, we may never know, but she just about did the lot of them.