10 More Moments That Literally Stopped Horror Movies
7. Charlie's Death - Hereditary
Ari Aster's masterful Hereditary slams to both a literal and figurative stop at the end of the first act, when Annie's (Toni Collette) 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is brutally killed in a traffic accident.
After going into anaphylactic shock at a party due to accidentally ingesting nuts, Charlie's weed-huffing brother Peter (Alex Wolff) frantically drives her to the hospital.
She desperately leans out of the car window while gasping for air, just as Peter swerves to avoid a dead deer in the road, causing her head to make contact with a nearby telephone pole, decapitating her.
It's one of horror cinema's all-time great "we have just lost cabin pressure" moments - a completely shocking, traumatising death scene that's all the more unexpected given that the trailers were edited to suggest that Charlie would appear in most if not all of the movie.
Instead she's dead meat by the 35-minute mark, in a rare horror movie moment so genuinely horrifying and upsetting that viewers might genuinely forget to breathe.