THAT'S THAT

It is estimated that, by the age of 75, most people with access to media will have seen approximately 120,000 onscreen deaths. In this new series, you can further bump up your total. 

001: A totally real guy gets his head split down the middle by a killer Mummy with a meat cleaver.

BOOM TIME

 

The underwater atomic test at the Bikini Atoll in July 1946 was captured for research purposes by five hundred cameras stationed on unmanned planes, high-altitude aircraft, boats, and from more distant points on land around the Atoll, the island group forming an almost complete ellipse, a natural stage for this most terrible show of man's destructive power. The mushroom cloud is perhaps the single most iconic symbol of the 20th century: both synthetic and organic, horrifying and enthralling, a seething mass of ever-changing death.

We still have these bombs like this, of course, more than ever, in fact, but we now think about them in the same way we think about sharks, or fire, or falling off a cliff: a primal but somehow distant fear. Besides, being instantly vaporised is the least of our worries these days, we all know it won't be anything like as easy as that.

HEALTH AND SAFETY GONE MAD

From Think About This (some time in the early 1990s).

NIKE DECADE

In 1996, over the course of three days, 39 members of the UFO and doomsday cult Heaven’s Gate swallowed poison, put plastic bags over their heads and laid down on their bunks to die. Dressed entirely in black, with patches stating that they were members of ‘The Away Team’ (a Star Trek reference) their corpses were recovered a couple of days later. The cult believed that the millennium would bring the end of the world and decided to join the afterlife on their terms, perhaps in order to direct the Rapture from heaven. 

The cult all wore Nike Decade trainers, budget range black and white shoes that they bought in bulk from the local K-Mart. These trainers feature heavily in the crime scene photographs, sticking out from the purple cloths and tarpaulins pulled over their bodies, an unwelcome advertisement for the sports brand that had dominated the decade. Pissed off, Nike immediately withdrew the Decade from sale, in hindsight a missed opportunity. 

Just Do It clearly does not mean mass suicide, it’s much less meaningful than that.

All of which prompted me to think about what trainers I'd wear to kill myself. I eventually decided on a pair of Adidas All Blacks, a rather sleek shoe I wore a lot in the late eighties. They were discontinued some time ago, so I'm unlikely to commit suicide just yet. Which, actually, is fine by me.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING

HIT BY A TRUCK

Truck Turner, d. Jonathan Kaplan (1974)

It looks like murder, but it's actually (sort of) self defence. Isaac Hayes plays bounty hunter and Magnum toting bad ass Truck Turner in the meandering, wish fulfillment fantasy film of the same name. I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, but couldn't that pimp have found a better outfit to wear when trying to kill a man? I can't help but think if he'd have selected his clothes with more care the outcome might have been different.

PULSATING / WARBLING

Firestarter, d. Mark L. Lester (1984)

Inspired by the great Stranger Things, I’ve been delving into the world of the 80s, a period that I have previously had little affection for, despite spending my formative years there. Firestarter is a film that I have never seen before, and was amazed how good it was. Fast moving, well-acted, choc a bloc with psychokinesis and death, and a mad, eclectic cast (Drew Barrymore, Martin Sheen, George C. Scott, Freddie Jones) it’s a film where literally hundreds of people are burned alive by a nine year old girl and, for the most part, they absolutely deserve it. 

Aside from the relentless, pitiless violence, two things stand out for me: the portrayal of ‘The Shop’, the harmless sounding government department that specialises in making monsters; and George C. Scott’s performance as John Rainbird, a Native American assassin who nurtures a relationship with the little girl hoping that, one day, she will kill him.

YOU NEED HANDS

The Crawling Hand, d. Herbert L. Strock (1963) 

Here with a super low budget film which uses the space race to colour a fairly traditional horror story. A moon shoot ends in disaster when, on the return journey, the rocket goes haywire. Despite having run out of oxygen some twenty minutes previously, the Astronaut's frightened (and frightening) face appears on the mission control monitors, alternately hissing ‘kill!’ and ‘press the red’, i.e. the button that will destroy him and his ship. As the ship is about to crash into a populated area, mission control press the button and the ship explodes, showering debris all over the coastline including, on a secluded beach, the Astronaut’s arm, sheared off at the elbow, but still wearing its glove and spacesuit sleeve (I was reminded of J.G Ballard at this stage, although it’s too early for his work to have been an influence. Perhaps Ballard saw this film?)   

A brilliant but brooding young science student (‘I’m going to the top – and I’m making it on my own!’) discovers the severed arm, wraps it in a shower curtain and takes it back to his digs where it promptly strangles his landlady and then takes him over, forcing him to do bad things until he gets flu and his high temperature weakens the arm to the extent that he can break the link and stab the severed limb repeatedly with a broken bottle. Hungry junkyard cats finish the job. Or do they? No, not really. The uncanny is not so easily disposed of.      

There is probably a monograph to be written about crawling hands in the movies, from The Beast With Five Fingers through to The Evil Dead and beyond. They're mainly horror films, of course, severed hands don't normally creep around in anything else.

DEATH FROM ABOVE

From The Craven Sluck, d. Mike Kuchar (1967)

THE WORST NEWS IN THE WORLD

The release of David Bowie’s latest album brought out the experts, the people who haven’t been making the world a better place for 45 years, but have strong opinions on someone who most definitely has. Bowie should retire, they said, or should have left the music business after 1980, or, indeed, not even recorded any music at all. Some hailed the album as a masterpiece, as if their approval made all the difference, as if them liking it was the reason he made it. Typically, Bowie has outmaneuvered them all, and died – without consultation, without approval, without warning, on his own terms, in his own way. It’s so typically Bowie it's almost funny, but instead it feels like the sun has gone out. There hasn’t been a day in my life that hasn’t had some David Bowie in it, and my life has been enriched because of it and because of him. I love you, David. Thank you.

UNEASEFUL DEATH

Soylent Green, d. Richard Fleischer (1973)

In the horrendously polluted and dangerously over-populated world of Soylent Green, the greatest thing a citizen can do for the state is to die. Those who volunteer for death are shown consideration, even kindness, often for the first time in their miserable lives, and, as they absorb a fatal cocktail of drugs, they are shown archive footage of a green, fertile Earth to the stirring accompaniment of 'Morning' from Grieg's 'Peer Gynt'.

The older Sol (one of my heroes, Edward G. Robinson) takes no comfort from the footage, which simply reminds him all that has been lost since his youth, and why death is preferable to life in 2022 AD, regardless of what he knows will happen to his body as soon as his last breath leaves it.