Want to see a supercut of the greatest movie deaths of all time, with a note from director Robert Morgan? Welcome...
ABCs of Death 2 director Robert Morgan told us about his experience with his favorite movie death ever...in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
As a kid, I loved Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I knew this movie was by the same guys who did those films. So I was expecting Han Solo in the jungle, but when I saw Alfred Molina’s face get impaled by spikes near the start of the film, I suspected this was going to be a bit more deathy than those films…
Of course, I’d seen nothing yet, because at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, we get one of the most awesome death scenes ever filmed when Nazi Major Arnold Toht (Ronald Lacey) and friends get on the wrong side of the Ark of the Covenant and have their faces melted off. The scene has a great set-up – Indy telling Marion not to look, the weird lightshow of all the angelic ghost things and the eerie John Williams music. But when the mood turns nasty, it’s genuinely chilling. When that angel looks up towards the camera and its face turns into that deathly grimace, you just know something nasty is about to happen…
So the Nazis scream, and they melt. Oh, and Belloq’s head explodes. The weirdness of sped-up melted wax fx gives it a nightmarish, stop-motion-esque quality that no amount of CGI could match (and CGI is certainly how they’d approach such an effect today, if at all). The whole thing is topped off by one of the all time great movie screams, courtesy of Ronald Lacey, just at the moment he realizes his head is about to melt. If I realized my head was about to melt, I think I’d do that exact same scream.
Watch all these great movie deaths in this crazy supercut!
Greatest Movie Deaths of All Time from Drafthouse Films on Vimeo.
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