1. Duane Jones - Night Of The Living Dead
Though surviving in a zombie apocalypse is a tall order as it stands, Ben (Duane Jones) had seemed to stave off the invasion pretty damn well at the end of George A. Romero's stunning, seminal zombie masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead. In fact, it turns out that there's a force Ben needed to be more afraid of than the zombies - the trigger-happy, potentially racist local deputies, who mistake him for a zombie and shoot him dead without hesitation, before placing him on a pyre to burn along with the zombies. Much commentary has been made about the racial allegory of the film, and that the deputies may have assumed that Ben was a zombie because of his darkened skin colour, a shocking and thought-provoking way to involve a thrilling survival story with some timely political sentiment (especially given the film's year of release - 1968). Though Romero insists that Jones was cast merely because he was the best person for the job, it's hard to argue with the thinking that there was, consciously or not, something more sinister percolating beneath the surface. Which movie death has shocked you the most? Let us know in the comments below.