Death is Not What We See in the Movies

We go to the movies to escape real life. Films make us feel a wide range of emotions, from joy to fear to sentimentality to awe to a satisfying sense of justice. While death and destruction often give us a cathartic thrill on screen, moviegoers don't want to see it the way it happens in real life. Movies give us spectacular, quick, and clean scenes of death, when the reality is much more difficult. For one thing, it is often very hard to murder someone, unless you just shoot them, and that's, sadly, not visually dramatic enough for all films. The good news is that you are not likely to be present at the number of murders or disasters you see on film, or even medical deaths.

But that's how the general public gets a mistaken view of how death works. In real life, death is prolonged and rather gross, two things that filmmakers tend to avoid. Read about five mistaken ideas we've gotten used to by watching movie deaths at Cracked.     


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It's always bothered me how 'clean' death is in movies, tv, videos, etc. People rarely just up and die when shot in real life. There's blood and 'debris' everywhere, the person might be screaming, moaning, whatever. Death can be hard not easy. Some faces are not looking like they are sleeping like in those shows. But I think these producers don't want a real life sort of death in their shows or maybe the actors just want to look pretty even in death? Whatever. But it's a big con to keep this lie going, IMO. If they make death look more realistic then maybe people will think 2x before doing some violence. Oh, who am I kidding besides myself?
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There's a "fight to the death" scene at the end of episode 1of FX's recently released The Old Man that is more real than pretty much anything I've seen before. Nothing clean about it from start to finish.
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When I was interning as a hospital chaplain, I watched a woman die. I found it notable that, unlike in the movies, the heart monitor doesn't flatline. Rather, the heart rate slowly fades away as the electrical impulses in the heart dissipate.
Also: the body visibly shrinks and turns grey very quickly.
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