10 Sci-Fi Movie Deaths That No One Saw Coming

There’s nothing quite like a shocking death to truly up the ante of a sci-fi film.

Whether it’s a relatively family friendly blockbuster that has eschewed explicit gore until this pivotal moment or a gory sci-fi horror hybrid which intends to set up its stakes in the most brutally clear manner imaginable, a sci-fi movie can seriously up its tension by pulling off an unexpected death scene.

Few viewers going to see Ridley Scott’s classic Alien in 1979 expected that the film’s biggest star John Hurt would be dead meat within the first hour of the film, nor how gruesome his unexpected demise would be. Meanwhile, anyone watching 2017’s Life probably didn’t expect to see…

Well, that one is a little more recent, so let’s avoid adding any extra spoilers to an article that is already listing shocking deaths.

From the otherwise demure genre films which threw in one shockingly explicit demise to the grittiest entries that sci-fi has to offer, here’s our rundown of the most unexpected and brutal deaths that sci-fi genre has ever pulled off. You didn't see these coming!

Released in 2000, the first Final Destination film really took its time exploiting the franchise’s admittedly ingenious premise.

Essentially a film-length Rube Goldberg machine with a gory punchline, the first film followed a nervy and surprisingly solid Devon Sawa as a teen who accidentally saves a handful of classmates from gruesome death when he has a vision of their plane crashing.

Soon, the grim reaper comes to off them one by one, resulting in a string of the elaborately staged death scenes these films soon became infamous for.

After the earlier shocking bus-based death, no one expected another brutal out-of-nowhere demise in this film’s short runtime.

The gag had been done and couldn’t work again. Besides, anyone still left onscreen was a famous face. Audiences certainly didn’t see a sudden death coming for one of the most famous faces in the cast, Seann William Scott.

The Stiffmeister played Billy Hitchcock, the group’s resident geek, and he seemed likely to make it to the film’s close due to both his comic relief and the actor’s relative high profile.

Then a piece of railway debris split his head in two as he talked about avoiding death with his fellow survivors. Damn, Final Destination, didn’t know you had it in you.