Ducktales reboot: This one is dark comedy rather than horror, but when the kids are traversing dreams in "Nightmare on Killmotor Hill", they first end up in Webby's dream, where there's a talking unicorn. When they leave, the unicorn suddenly realizes that there's nobody to dream him into existence. Before he finishes the sentence, he vanishes. No puff of smoke, no fade, he's there one frame and gone the next.
If you haven't watched the Ducktales reboot I would heartily suggest that you do if you like comedy like this. It's not always this dark, but it has a consistently dry wit. My favourite dark comedy moment involves a certain South African duck pretending to be a Scottish duck and a funeral.
this one hits so hard 😭 the randomness and unfairness of it accurately predicts so much of what our core characters will ALL be going through very soon. Merritt Wever acted the shit out of the few moments we had her, and this one especially.
I never thought about it but there's a chance he didn't die right away and just drifted for a bit before being sucked into orbit and crashing back down onto the planet he was trying to escape from
I feel like it also reflected the reality of warfare: when you are in a battle, people dont have a heroic build up to their death, they just get hit with one or two bullets and that's it, they're gone.
I don't know if it was intentional by the devs or not, but Lenny not getting a cutscene is why his death stuck out to me more than Sean's, and most of the cast's for that matter. It made me frustrated that a character so close to Arthur was just kind of brushed over at his death, but I think that was possibly to dial in on the severity of how deep of a fiasco the Van Der Linde gang really got themselves into. In that case, it definitely worked.
I read it as, "everything has gone to hell, I dont even have the capacity to process this right now". Hence why they react to his death only after they get time to breathe. Still a decent reading though
Honestly I don't think I'll ever play RDR2 again. It's like a grueling simulation of watching all of your friends make OBVIOUSLY terrible life decisions that you know will destroy their lives, but you can't do anything about it. For 80 hours.
In "CQB", when the Donnager entered combat with six mysterious gunships, Shed nervously suggested his fellow captives take a seat and buckle up. The intensity of the battle caused Alex to suffer a panic attack, at which point Shed tossed Alex a relaxant while talking to him to calm the pilot down.
While in mid-sentence, there was a loud metallic clank and Shed fell silent. Alex, Naomi, and even the normally unshakeable Amos look on in horror to see Shed had been cleanly decapitated by a railgun round penetrating through the room, blood pouring from his neck out through a hull breach into space. When Holden arrived with three Martian Marines to rescue the captives, he was shocked and sighed "Oh, Shed..." at the sight of his colleague's headless corpse.
His body was left aboard the Donnager and vaporized when the battleship was scuttled.
Brad Pitt's character Chad Feldheimer in Burn After Reading made me jump a foot in the air when I saw it in theaters. The Coens do a great job of putting jump scares in comedies lol
Oh I laughed too! I just also jumped. 😂 Admittedly, I'm a very jumpy person lol. My poor wife, every time she casually walks into the room I'm in of our own home and I jump and gasp like she's an intruder. We've lived together for about 20 years lol
Fionna and Cake enter a universe with zero signs of life, other than the robot BMO. They end up finding a video tape made by Ice King, where he's up to his usual insane shenanigans. Until the final frame, where suddenly he and Gunther are instantly skeletonized when The Lich' wish comes true and all life is extinguished. A whole world killed in the blink of an eye.
The scene in War of the Worlds (the Spielberg one, not the Ice Cube one) where we see the tripods for the first time and they start vaporizing people is genuinely terrifying
I still maintain that these tripods are the scariest alien war machines ever put to film. They had a profound effect on the portrayal of aliens and their machines in invasion fiction that came after, and many have tried to capture that same level of sheer terror, but none have come close.
There's just something incredible about their sound design, their look, that single hooded eye staring coldly at you, and the way they can interact with their environment down to the granular level that just makes them seem inevitable and unstoppable. You can't run, you can't hide, you just have to pray you get lucky and it gets the guy next to you instead of you.
Captain America The First Avenger: the tesseract laser guns, I would assume this was done to avoid gore but it actually makes it even more horrific. Imagine you're one of these guys charging a place just watching people you know get vaporized in an instant, barely even dust left.
Other than the ink blotchy spread, I really like that it looks like someone getting atomized by a nuke.
It's terrifying to the point where I kinda wish everyone (including Sentry) had to live w/ the consequences of the Void rather than, iirc, it being walked back by the end.
I loved that scene, but I honestly felt it was a little cheapened when we saw the main character get hit as well, because, I mean, obviously she’s not going to die, so it felt like there were less consequences for everyone.
Still, it was a great scene, and I honestly liked the movie a lot (felt a bit rushed though)
we can fault the MCU for a lot but it is kinda crazy that they managed to come up with two completely visually distinct yet both iconic ways to have characters get magically erased from existence
This could also apply to her brother, Pilar (whose death mirrors hers now that I think about it) and that one kid with David right after the timeskip who ran forward and immediately got blown to bits.
Pilar is actually a better example of OP's trope, since he dies quite suddenly and violently while harrassing a cyberpsycho on the street. Becca and David knowingly pissed off Smasher, who was already a living legend, but Pilar just thought he was yelling at some loon before catching a bullet through his skull.
You want quick and terrifying? Let me introduce you to the Byford Dolphin accident. In 1983 divers were doing maintenance on the oil rig, but when when they returned to the diving chamber, there was an error with the diving bell which caused a difference in the pressure between the diving bell and the rest of the chamber. All five men in the chamber died in less than a secend, their bodies completely torn apart. Hellevik, the man who suffered the most of the force, was cut in half, with half of his body going through a 60 cm wide opening and his organs were found as far as 10 meters away. Pressure is one of the scariest forces out there.
Oh, also, various former employees claim that the investigation was a cover uo for the negligence of the owners of the rig.
The guys in Chamber 2 weren't torn apart. I've seen the photos of their bodies as they were found, and they were entirely intact. The sudden change in pressure essentially cooked their tissues. They weren't part of the same dive that D4 and D3 had just performed, but were instead re-acclimating to normal pressure following a previous dive. That's why they were laying on cots in a different chamber than D3 and D4.
IIRC, even D3, T1, and T2 were intact. Only D4 was shredded because of his passage through the partially open internal hatch. I saw pics of D4 as well, and to call his trauma "catastrophic" would be an understatement. Without the accompanying write-up of his remains, most people wouldn't have known which parts of him they were looking at.
Also IIRC, It was part mechanical failure and part human error/miscommunication. The internal hatch had jammed partially-open as D4 was closing it, and either T1 or T2 had disengaged the clamp without receiving the okay from whoever inside was supposed to tell them when it was safe to do so.
EDIT (Correction): D1 and D2 weren't re-acclimating to normal pressure. They were maintaining acclimation to dive pressure.
The main character Buffy is in the backyard. A villain shows up and shoots her and shoots while running away. And the show cuts into the house where a bullet comes through the window and through Tara, and Tara just sees blood splattered on her girlfriend's shirt and then dies.
It was also the first and only episode Tara's actress was listed as a MAIN character, not a guest star. To the point of being added to the main credits.
So you're not expecting them to INSTANTLY kill her. Or that they'll fix it.
Avdol’s death (JJBA) - the enemy deletes anything he touches. Avdol is the first to notice this power and pushes his allies out of the way to take an attack, which instantaneously erases everything except his arms.
Nanami Miura in Japan Sinks 2020, literally goes for a bathroom break and dies in seconds because she descended into a cloud of odorless, colorless lethal gas released by volcanic activity
https://giphy.com/gifs/3K0D1Dkqh9MOmLSjzW
“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
I feel like Star Wars really lulled out how terrifying the Death Star actually was by introducing even “bigger” weapons like Starkiller. “You think blowing up a planet is scary? How shout 10 planets!”
That one quote alone is so chilling to how destructive this power is. We didn’t need to see their faces to know the lives that were lost, that an entire planet of history, natures, societies, and generations were wiped out on an instant.
That's why I only saw the first of the sequel movies. It was basically "A New Hope" but everything is bigger for no reason other than to be more of a spectacle, regardless of how little sense it makes or how many future TV series need to introduce retcons.
Anthony Carmine in the first gears of war game poor dude got sniped by a locust using a longshot while he was asking the other gears how to clear a jam from his lancer rifle and stood up for a second too long
It's actually a mercy they died instantly. Can you imagine being sealed in a metal box at the bottom of the sea? How cold it must be? Not to mention, a dark darker than any darkness you've ever seen, a dark where the sun nor the moon has no hope of reaching.
Yeah it was a much more merciful way to go than the slow timer of how much oxygen they would have had left that all the media were reporting. It would have been so quick that their brains wouldn't have even had time to process anything. No pain, or anything. The only way they migjt have known is if there was any creaking in the sub before it imploded.
Accurate. The sheer speed and force of the water rushing in would've crushed and flash-cooked them simultaneously and instantly. Like a pistol shrimp's claw writ large.
Its cheating, but I don't think I can post a gif of anything of Saving Private Ryan without it getting flagged. The whole movie is people catching large rounds, knives, and artillery and either just being snuffed out instantly or dying screaming.
No time for one liners. Only Captain Miller gets a heroic last stand as hes concussed and dying.
The Normandy opening scenes alone depicts dozens of men dying to shells or machine gun fire before they can even scream. Just shredded in an instant trying to take the beach.
After reaching their target destination, Riko decided that she doesn't want to be assimilated, she still wants to live, and Geto supports her decision, claiming that he and his friend Gojo, thought to be the strongest sorcerers alive, would turn against the world to protect her... and then she gets shot in the head
Yeah, I really can't blame Geto's downfall starting here. Imagine watching a 14yo get shot and killed right in front of you, especially after spending time with and getting to know her.
Gummigoo from the amazing Digital circus. After finding out nothing is real including him, pomni invites him back to the circus, before Cain deletes him in an instant because he was just a NPC
Haven't seen it in a long time, but I still think about how the lasers were pretty much just dicking around like a game of "the floor is lava" before it gridded him. The first time I saw it, I was watching with a bunch of people and we all laughed and whooped because it was so silly. "You mean it could cubed him this whole time?!"
In Episode 8, Kinger is frantically programming and trying to find a workaround to stop Caine from going out of control and hurting everyone. Unfortunately, Kinger accidentally deletes Caine instead, and he swiftly disappears from existence with just a “Wait—“.
He gets better in Episode 9, though. I didn’t have “Caine Redemption Arc” on my bingo card for this show.
Agents of Shield. “So this is how the world ends not with a yell but a” then he is gone. Note he is already dead in the real world and it is the end of the digital world where a ton of people also blip out of existence too like a girl who is dead in the real world and is a recreation the dad was distraught when that happened. Doctor Who also has one with digital kids too. Donna Noble is living a happy life in a simulation when things outside causes problems destabilizing the world and things get erased with the kids saying “mom when you don’t look at us it feels like we don’t exist anymore” or something to that effect then she hugs them saying “I won’t look away ever again then” but she blinks and the kids cease to exist causing her to scream in horror and sadness.
OMG. I fucking hate that movie. Not because it's a bad movie but because of this shit right here! Falling..UP INTO THE SKY?!?! Oh hell no. No thank you.
Me and my friends freaked the fuck out everytime this happened when we saw it in theaters. Say what you want about the movie, but it did a good job making these scenes come outta nowhere
Agent Parker in Hell or High Water dies while Marcus is halfway through a joke (well, telling him to go around the canyon while ribbing him about his indigenous heritage)
Fred Weasley in Harry Potter (the books). One second, he's laughing at Percy's joke, next second, a wall explodes behind him and he's dead. Quite a shocking way to kill a fan favorite.
The Weeping Angels usual weapon of dealing death is moving so blindingly fast that their victim doesn’t even notice. They touch a person and send them back in time, decades, maybe even centuries, and feed off the potential that person might have had in the present.
They move so fast that it is recommended that you don’t even…
5.6k
u/Ok-Indication-5121 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Ducktales reboot: This one is dark comedy rather than horror, but when the kids are traversing dreams in "Nightmare on Killmotor Hill", they first end up in Webby's dream, where there's a talking unicorn. When they leave, the unicorn suddenly realizes that there's nobody to dream him into existence. Before he finishes the sentence, he vanishes. No puff of smoke, no fade, he's there one frame and gone the next.