10 Sci-Fi Movie Deaths That Came Out Of Nowhere

John Carpenter's The Thing is a film which thrives on its intense unpredictability: neither the audience nor the movie's characters are ever sure of who can be trusted, or who may be hosting the titular extraterrestrial entity.

This pays off in spectacularly horrifying fashion, then, when Norris (Charles Hallahan) suffers a heart attack and Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) attempts to resuscitate him with a defibrillator.

As he applies the shock paddles to Norris' chest, however, his chest caves in and transforms into a giant toothed mouth, immediately biting off Copper's hands and leaving him to die from either blood loss or shock.

While it wasn't terribly surprising that Norris died at some point in the movie, the sheer grotesque weirdness of his demise is something nobody saw coming, and it's all the more nauseatingly effective as a result.