25 Greatest Film Deaths This Century

Until this year, when we got a whole new 28 Days film from the creator, the franchise was presumed dead. This is thanks to 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to Danny Boyle’s original movie and, by all accounts, not half the film it could have been. Nevertheless, it does have its moments - and it should go without saying, it packs one hell of a death scene.

We join the movie long after the rage virus has taken the UK, at the dinner table of Don and Alice Harris (Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack), and four other survivors, who have built their refuge on a farm on London’s outskirts. When a young boy comes seeking sanctuary from hordes of the zombified infected, they let him in and all hell breaks loose. This sequence sees Don abandoning not just the boy and his friends, but his wife, who calls his name at the window while he runs for his life.

And that was bad enough.

But Alice is reintroduced later in the film: she is an asymptomatic survivor, mercifully unaffected by the virus. However, when they are sealed in a quarantined room together and Don kisses her, it turns out he isn’t. Thus follows a rapidly edited sequence of shaky cam and bloody violence as the infected Don batters his wife, bites chunks out of her flesh, and crushes her eyes with his thumbs.

Tragic, heartbreaking, and almost unbearably brutal - the standout death scene of the entire series.