9 Creators Who Regretted Killing Off Movie Characters
3. John Carpenter Called Killing A Young Girl "Stupid" - Assault On Precinct 13
Assault on Precinct 13 is one of John Carpenter's greatest movies yet also one of his most controversial, largely due to a brutal early sequence where a young girl, Kathy (Kim Richards), is shot dead by a gangster while buying an ice cream.
It's a brutal yet darkly hilarious scene if only because it's so utterly unexpected, even in a Carpenter movie of all things.
Carpenter had to effectively sneak the scene into the film's theatrical release, as the MPAA threatened to give it an X rating if the scene was included.
As such, he gave a cut copy of the movie to the MPAA but distributed an entirely different version with the scene in tact - a trick you'd surely never get away with today.
Despite Carpenter's reputation for being a no-apologies maverick, he did later state that he regretted the sequence and particularly how graphically he depicted Kathy's demise:
"We had a scene where a little girl gets killed with a gun, and it was pretty horrible at the time - explicit. I don't think I'd do it again but I was young and stupid... I don't really think it was very clever, it was pretty ham-fisted."