8 Horror Movies Where Only One Person Dies

To more casual moviegoers, the horror genre is often thought of as being all about excessive gore and piling up a hefty body count.

For some movies, clearly that is the aim, but falling back and relying on a large kill count to make your film a hit is a dangerous game, and can often lose sight of what makes horror so special in the first pace - especially here in 2020.

You could argue that for a spell in the '80s, the majority of audiences were about the more bodies the better, but that was why something like Wes Craven's Scream was so special in 1996. That Craven offering poked fun at the overplayed, stale tropes of the genre in a way that breathed new life into horror.

Despite those films which have chosen to go with the mantra of the bigger the list of dead bodies the better, so often there have been pictures where less has certainly been more. In fact, certain horror favourites have managed to be a success by featuring just one solitary kill.

Here then, are eight such movies where only person bites the bullet.

Even now, 34 years after its release, David Cronenberg's The Fly is a gloriously gruesome movie whose practical effects work stands out as something truly special.

As science fiction and body horror collide, the determined scientific drive of Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle results in a terrifying hybrid creature that eventually becomes more fly than man. The initial plans of Seth was to master teleportation. And while he had some success on that front, Brundle hadn't accounted for an unassuming fly to be in one of his telepods at the time he opted to test out teleportation for himself.

The end result of that, famously, is that Brundle and this fly fuse together, with the eccentric scientist slowly losing his human emotions and capability of thought - not to mention his physical appearance - as things hurtle from scientific discovery to grim and creepy transformation.

Loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story, Cronenberg's The Fly only features one casualty. That casualty being Goldblum's Seth Brundle - who, in a moment of clarity at what he's become, is killed off after begging Geena Davis' Ronnie Quaife to put a bullet in his human-fly hybrid head.