10 WTF Off-Screen Horror Movie Deaths
1. Nurse Keating - The Exorcist III
Though wildly polarising upon release, The Exorcist III certainly gets a good deal more love these days, and nobody who's seen it can forget that scene where Nurse Keating (Tracy Thorne) gets decapitated with a pair of garden shears.
The entire setup for this gnarly payoff is masterful, lingering on a seemingly unremarkable shot of a hospital hallway, where Nurse Keating enters a room, does her checks, and then re-emerges to lock the room up. But as she turns around, the door suddenly pulls open, and a nun carrying shears quickly pursues her, accompanied by one of the horror genre's all-time most pant-filling jump-scare sound effects.
Before the fatal snip can be made, though, we cut to a decapitated statue of Jesus Christ, making it abundantly clear the fate that's befallen the nurse without actually having to show her head being parted from her body on camera.