10 Recent Horror Movie Deaths Nobody Saw Coming
6. Elaine - Beau Is Afraid
Because having a character suddenly kill themselves by drinking a can of paint apparently isn't unpredictable enough, Ari Aster went one further near the end of his madcap psychological horror film Beau Is Afraid.
In a masterful feat of misdirection, it's established early on that Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is terrified that he will die of a hereditary heart murmur if he has sex. And so, when Beau hooks up with childhood friend Elaine (Parker Posey), it's a sequence filled with weirdly gut-wrenching tension.
Then the big twist, er, comes (sorry). Beau survives climaxing just fine, but Elaine is the one who dies instead, her body immediately turning stiff mid-orgasm.
It happens totally out of nowhere and Aster makes no attempt at all to clearly explain why Elaine was the one to die, ensuring that audiences were left a bewildering mixture of horrified, confused, and perhaps even grimly amused. Never change, Ari.