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Post by sean on Jun 4, 2008 9:49:50 GMT
(breezily ignoring the scope for spoilers in this thread...)
What are your favorite death scenes from horror novels or short stories?
I'll start with the death of Lewis in Straub's 'Ghost Story' who leaves this world through an illusionary door in the woods.
Oh, and the bit in Ellis's 'American Psycho' where the bloke gets an axe in his head just after saying that Iggy Pop was better in the 80's.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 4, 2008 10:28:56 GMT
Great idea for a thread, Sean! I wouldn't say they were 'favourite's exactly, but death scenes i've never been able to forget include the appalling murder of Raut at the end of H. G. Wells' The Cone, the terrifying (to me) conclusion of Bernard Taylor's The Moorstone Sickness and the little girl's fatal encounter with a steamroller in Charles Birkin's Marjorie's On Starlight. Then there's the knife fight in Ewers' Tomatoe Sauce and, of course, his unflinching account of The Execution Of Damiens. And how about the final moments of De Sade's Justine? That has to be one of the funniest!
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Post by nightreader on Jun 4, 2008 20:08:39 GMT
Could just be the mood I'm in (my telly has been kaput for 10days now ) but for me I'm thinking gruesome, and one of the best at that is Graham Masterton. In 'The Djinn' one of the early deaths is by suicide - in order to prevent a trapped demon from gaining a human visage Max Greaves destroys every picture and photograph in his home then cuts his own face off. Masterton always seems to be able to find the most bizarre and extreme ways of offing people. In 'The Manitou' the spirit of Indian medicine man Misquamacus kills a male nurse by turning him inside out! Great stuff...
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Post by dem bones on Jun 4, 2008 20:55:34 GMT
Yeah, Masterton gives good grisly death and no fooling. How about the protracted slaughter of an entire family at the beginning of Black Angel? There's very little horror fiction makes me feel uncomfortable, but that chapter was as unbearable as the worst Alan Temperley can throw at us.
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Post by sean on Jun 5, 2008 8:26:30 GMT
I think that one of the most thorough deaths can be found at the end of the 1979 'Quatermass' series, and Kneale's novelisation of the same. Professor Q has a heart attack, is zapped by an alien beam and blown up with a huge bomb all at roughly the same time.
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Truegho
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 135
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Post by Truegho on Jun 29, 2008 16:42:11 GMT
The death of the schoolteacher in James Herbert's epic masterpiece THE FOG - castrated with a pair of garden shears! - takes some beating for sheer, gut-churning horror. Truegho www.horrorwriters.net
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Post by valdemar on Apr 24, 2012 13:39:12 GMT
Another Quatermass death: that of MP. Vincent Broadhead in the Hammer version of 'Quatermass II' I first saw this as a still photo in one of Denis Gifford's large format film books when I was quite young. It fascinated and horrified me simultaneously. I didn't like it, but had to keep looking at it, until it got so that the book would fall open at that page [shades of HPL's 'The Picture In The House']. It worried me as I had no idea of special effects techniques, and the man covered in smoking black sludge really bothered me. When I saw the movie, years later, the shock had not diminished. The anguished cry from somewhere above, in reply to Quatermass' call, and the stagger down the stairway from a tank containing 'food' by a man rendered somewhat less than human, more a blind, shambling mass of slime, has to be one of the most terrible deaths ever committed to celluloid. Broadhead's dying cries of ''Don't touch me!'' give it an extra horrid edge. A close second to this, in the same film is the idea of humans being pulped up to block the flow of oxygen through a pipe that is killing the alien interlopers. Just glad it wasn't actually shown. ;D
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Post by Shrink Proof on Apr 24, 2012 18:21:29 GMT
(breezily ignoring the scope for spoilers in this thread...) What are your favorite death scenes from horror novels or short stories? Oh, and the bit in Ellis's 'American Psycho' where the bloke gets an axe in his head just after saying that Iggy Pop was better in the 80's. Terrible. Iggy Pop was better in the 80s - who back then would have imagined him descending to the level of selling car insurance?
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Apr 24, 2012 21:10:16 GMT
(breezily ignoring the scope for spoilers in this thread...) What are your favorite death scenes from horror novels or short stories? Oh, and the bit in Ellis's 'American Psycho' where the bloke gets an axe in his head just after saying that Iggy Pop was better in the 80's. Terrible. I regularly bang out Passenger in my set when I get punk nostalgic. great set of chords.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 25, 2012 13:46:22 GMT
Iggy Pop was better in the 80s - who back then would have imagined him descending to the level of selling car insurance? Or Johnny Rotten doing TV commercials for butter!
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Post by Shrink Proof on Apr 25, 2012 18:41:01 GMT
Or Johnny Rotten doing TV commercials for butter! He claimed that he accepted the advert offer to raise money to reform Public Image Limited and then take the band on tour without the need for a record deal. Sorry, didn't mean to derail the thread...
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Post by pulphack on Apr 26, 2012 6:16:06 GMT
Did Mr Lydon not lose a lot of money he had in property when there was an earthquake in california? I know he was pleading near poverty at one point because of some financial disaster, which to me adequately explains having to do ads. What else is available, really?
Maybe our generation (assuming we're comparable ages) really have a problem with this whereas thse before and after don't because we lived in that era when we really thought a counter culture mattered? It IS all just art & entertainment in the end, when divorced from context. And everyone needs to earn: if you've got cash then it's dubious, but if you're just getting by... I have this issue with Bill Hicks fans (as much as the man himself, who I loved) who praise him for never doing TV, ads, or sucking corporate dick. Except that he kept going back on things like Letterman KNOWING that he would be outrageous, banned for a while, then asked back to boost ratings, all the while increasing his live audience. He did 300 shows a year. Other actors, comics, musicians didn't have that cushion and indeed that luxury.
My point, and I have one in there somewhere, is that a 'sell-out' in that sense is relative.
Anyway, isn't the company Iggy advertises the one that won't insure musicians?
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Post by dem bones on Apr 26, 2012 9:01:39 GMT
Anyway, isn't the company Iggy advertises the one that won't insure musicians? yeah, bloody brilliant! re Rotten/ Lydon/ PIL, i'm guessing the impending reissue of God Save The Queen is similarly motivated. fair play to him, though i'd have preferred if the splenetic Problems was finally given a crack at the charts. John Peel adopted a similar strategy to fund causes close to his heart. Wasn't it was the cash raised from a Peel voice-over paid for The Undertones' studio time when they recorded the Teenage Kicks ep? Later, JP waved his fee for a Tube appearance on condition The Fall were allowed to perform ( Bombast/ Cruisers Creek). Afterwards he struggled some with the ethics of the gesture. 50,000 Fall fans asked "can you do it every week?" and, as we know 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Apr 26, 2012 11:27:39 GMT
Speaking of Iggy Pop and death scenes, he has a good one in the animated television series The Venture Bros. By way of explanation, in the show Iggy is a turncoat henchman of David Bowie (a.k.a. the Sovereign), who is the shapeshifting leader of a league of supervillains known as the Guild of Calamitous intent (no, it doesn't make much more sense in context). Here he is about to plunge to his death in the Grand Canyon: www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=a0kd51olw6o
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Post by valdemar on Apr 26, 2012 14:28:35 GMT
John Lydon has gone on record as recently as last Thursday that he is distancing himself from the impending re-release of 'God Save The Queen' He said that that was in the past, and indeed, I still cringe at people who call him 'Johnny Rotten'. He hasn't gone by that name since January 1978. BTW: Iggy Pop has never been as good as he was in the late 1970's, and his albums made with Bowie, 'Lust For life' and 'The Idiot'. He was nearly as good again in 1986 with 'Blah Blah Blah'. And then he started parodying himself with those poxy ads with that shit puppet. Sad. Oh, and Lydon's butter ads? Cash from cows. . ;D
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