The 5: Off Screen Film Deaths

This Week on the 5: Off Screen Deaths We Wanted to See

The off screen death is an odd thing. You follow a character throughout a film, you become connected to them and then they’re gone and you don’t get the satisfaction of seeing their last moments. It’s a cruel trick that a film maker will play on their audience that doesn’t get used as often as you may think. Below are 5 characters killed off screen.

* * *

• Tracy/Gwyneth Paltrow – Seven.  What’s in the box? It’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s sad freshly severed head. Like the rest of John Doe’s victims, we never go to see them actually die. Except this time we actually knew the person who getting offed. A tremendous, classic scene that blew everyone away watching it. No one saw it coming due to Gwyneth’s off screen death. They couldn’t of thrown us a bone by putting on a DVD extra?
• Llewelyn Moss/Josh Brolin – No Country for Old Men.  Following Josh Brolin’s character Llewelyn in No Country for Old Men gave you hope for the little guy. Llewelyn was one step ahead of everyone throughout the film. Which is why when Tommy Lee Jones rolls up to a hotel, post shoot out, and we see Brolin dead on the floor, viewers were pissed, angry and straight up sad that the films protagonist was assassinated by a Mexican cartel. Some thought he deserved better than that. Most anticipated some wild movie ending shoot out with Anton Chigurh. We got none that, a swerve that blew a lot people away was Llewelyn Moss’s off screen demise.
• Zed/Peter Greene – Pulp Fiction.  We all know Zed’s dead. We all know Zed raped Marcelllus Wallace over a saw horse. We know Marcellus shot Zed’s dick off with a shotgun. And we also know a couple of pipe hitting brothers were coming over to go medieval on his ass. Unfortunately the viewer never gets to see that last bit go down. You have to draw the line somewhere, and torturing a crooked cop to death with a blow torch and some pliers must be that line.
• Fenster/Benicio Del Toro- Usual Suspects.  Who didn’t love Fenster in the Usual Suspects? One of Benicio Del Toro’s earliest roles, the weirdly accented, fast talking Fenster was your favorite Suspect right out of the gate. The bad news is, he’s the first guy out of the crew to make a run for it. We don’t even get to see his body, just that they buried him on a beach, where they knew the body would get dredged up. They at least could of told us where the hell the guy was from.
• Doughboy/Ice Cube – Boyz N the Hood.  Doughboy knew his days were numbered, he killed three dudes by the end of Boyz N the Hood. That’s OK though, he did it for all the right reasons – vengeance for the death of his brother Ricky. Doughboy was easily the best character in the film, the one you wanted to follow, and to only give him a printed line on the screen saying he died two weeks later? That just seems disrespectful to the fictional man’s memory. Pour one out for Doughboy, he never got a true on screen send off.

* * *