I got the idea for this post whilst in the Cardiac Care Ward of Manchester’s Royal University Hospital after suffering from a heart attack earlier in the day!
With that happening to me it got me thinking about death and the dead in films and the way it is portrayed. From high farce such as Death Becomes Her or Wristcutters a Love Story – to a more classical version of the likes of Dracula and other films about the dead.
So here is 5 films about the dead. The list isn’t numbered as I don’t give out rankings more that what is in the list.
Death Becomes Her.
One of, if not, the blackest comedies of films about death and being dead. From the first moment you see Bruce Willis as a hen-pecked drunken plastic surgeon right to the final scene with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in the church – I won’t tell you more if you’re one of the very few people left on this planet who hasn’t seen the film.
I had the idea of what the most famous scene in the film was and then remembered that there are probably two. The first being the death of Madeline and the subsequent shotgun injuries of her friend, Helen and the ruining of her top. Both are below so you can decide on which is better / more famous…
Nosferatu.
The grand-daddy of all Dracula films. Even after all of the decades after it first hit the silver screen it still makes its appearance occasionally back where it should be seen.
Not only have we seen from this film the way that every subsequent portrayal of Dracula but a lot of the actual filming of certain elements that go into making a Dracula film.
Shadow Of The Vampire.
A strange one to make the list but this is a film about the making of Nosferatu. It makes us wonder if the actor who plays the titular character is an amazing method actor or something a lot more sinister
Wristcutters a love story
A black comedy about suicide and living in purgatory. Not a film that normally gets onto a list like this but with what I have been through and somebody cutting into my wrist. That cutting was to help save my life and not for the purpose that put the characters into their afterlife.
The purgatory of the film is just like the normal world but slightly less happy. They work as pizza delivery buisness, “Kamikaze Pizza”
No list about films with the dead in them is incomplete without mentioning at least one of the George Romero dead series. For me the best is the second, the one set in the shopping mall. Dawn Of The Dead.
I have to put in the original version. It gave cinema goers a new version of the dead, or more specifically, the undead. With their shambolic walking to their inability to do anything useful…
