50 Movie Death Scenes That Left You TRAUMATISED
12. The Girl In The Red Coat - Schindler's List
With films based around war, there are bound to be multiple, sometimes countless, murders of people completely unknown to the audience. Piles of bodies with no names to attach to them.
In Schindler's List, shortly after Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) arrived in Nazi-occupied Krakow, he ordered the deaths of 2,000 Polish Jews. Naturally, a mass killing of this magnitude severely affected Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), but thanks to Steven Spielberg's genius use of a tiny splash of colour, the entire massacre became personified through one little girl.
The film was almost completely black and white, but among the violence and the killing in the streets, there was one small child who wore a red coat. The sole spark of colour against the monochrome background. This represented a number of things, from innocence and helplessness to the red itself signifying the bloodshed of such an act.
After first noticing her in the streets, Schindler then saw the same little girl in the same red coat among the countless dead. Has such a small amount of colour ever been used in film to greater or more powerful effect than this?