Nothing stirs the emotions like the death of a major character in a feature film or television series. Whether they’re killed off midway through a Quentin Tarantino movie or during a pivotal episode of a TV series, these moments get people talking and debating, sometimes for years if not decades.
Emotions run so strong when it comes to whether or not a major character is going to die or not, it became a hook for numerous cable series, especially ones with established life and death stakes. Many people tuned into shows like The Sopranos, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad to see which characters would survive and make it to the next season.
Although a feature film has a more finite structure than a TV series, the death of a major character in a movie— especially if it happens sooner than expected — can also be a defining and much-talked-about scene (in some cases, the most talked about scene).
There are many reasons for this and they pertain to any screenwriter writing a spec script with mortal stakes. Below I discuss some of the benefits to killing off a major character in your script and how to best execute it.
And since we’re talking about the deaths of major characters, be warned:
Major Spoilers Ahead!!!
Being familiar with “the Hero’s Journey” structure prevalent in many films, people are prepared for a major character to be killed during the climax or during “the low point.”
The character who meets their end is usually someone close to the protagonist — usually a mentor figure — and their death forces the protagonist to come into their own as a hero. The Star Wars films have done this in every first film of the Skywalker Saga, in which a mentor is killed via a lightsaber and in view of their protégé: Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope; Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace; Han Solo in The Force Awakens.
Only in the case of Han Solo was this shocking to some people, because he was such a beloved and well-established character in the Original Trilogy. However, to anyone paying attention to the story beats of these films, it was fairly obvious Han Solo wasn’t going to survive The Force Awakens.
Generally, what’s more shocking to people is when a major character is killed earlier than expected, and it offsets the prior trajectory of the film. At the time of its release, Sonny Corleone’s violent death midway through The Godfather had this effect on audiences, and it stirred a lot of emotions.
Inspiring an emotional response is one of the major goals of any piece of art, and it should likewise be a goal for a screenwriter. If the reader feels what your characters are feeling (like audiences empathizing with the Corleone family’s grief), it leads to a deeper connection and makes a greater impression.
In a horror/thriller, if you kill off a major character in your script earlier than expected, it heightens the suspense because suddenly the threat is intensified and no character is safe. This is a device used by screenwriters and filmmakers in the past and it definitely led to greater suspense and higher stakes.
In Dan O’Bannon’s script for Alien, the crew of the Nostromo were more or less given equal focus, and Ripley was treated as an emerging protagonist. Director Ridley Scott followed suit and casted a then-unknown Sigourney Weaver as the character.
At the time, actor Tom Skerritt was a little more familiar to the public, and his character, Dallas, was the Captain of the Nostromo, so naturally 1979 audiences were shocked when he was dispatched by the alien and so early in the film. Suddenly every character was at risk and it made the film scarier and more tense than the sequels in which Ripley — or a Ripley-esque substitute — is clearly designated as “the Final Girl.”
The filmmakers of Deep Blue Sea likewise increased the tension and suspense when the character Russell Franklin was eaten to death by a shark early in the film. In addition to being played by the biggest star in the cast (Samuel Jackson), the character is even positioned as the heroic figure that’s going to survive the ordeal via an intentionally misdirecting backstory. Franklin’s death ended up being one of the most memorable and talked-about scenes in the film and it led to greater audience engagement.
But what if it’s not just any major character you kill off, but your protagonist?
Perhaps the most iconic shocking death in film history is Marion Crane in Psycho. Unlike Alien, which didn’t have a decisive protagonist until Ripley emerged as one, Marion is without question the protagonist for the first half of the film: she’s the point-of-view character and it’s primarily her story. However, after she was killed in the famous shower scene — at the halfway mark of the film — not only were 1960 audiences severely shocked, they were suddenly left without a protagonist. What kept people watching the movie?
Director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano successfully swapped Marion with Norman Bates (and also to a lesser degree with Marion’s sister Lila). In a pivotal scene before Marion’s fateful shower, she has an in depth conversation with Norman in the motel’s parlor. It’s during this conversation that audiences sympathized with Norman and his emotional strife over his mentally-ill mother.
Immediately after Marion is murdered, Norman becomes our new point-of-view character, and it now becomes his story as he attempts to cover up the murder to protect his mother. The fact that he turns out to be the killer is one of the greatest twists in film history, and what’s so ingenious about it is how Norman retrospectively served as both a protagonist and an antagonist (a dynamic still in play in the 1980s sequels).
Though not nearly as ironic and complex, Deep Blue Sea also never left audiences without protagonists. In addition to Russell Franklin, there’s the character Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), who’s signposted early on as the film’s true protagonist. Plus, after Franklin becomes shark meat, the underdog character Preacher (LL Cool J) emerges as a secondary protagonist. Blake and Preacher are both likable characters, so it wasn’t difficult for audiences to get behind them and hope they survived their mutated shark ordeal.
Vincent Vega’s death midway through Pulp Fiction is another moment that shocked audiences, but that film likewise was never without a protagonist, and in fact had revolving ones for each story. Furthermore, Vincent wasn’t the protagonist of the story in which he was shot dead; Butch Coolidge was.
Also the film being nonlinear, Vincent returns as a secondary protagonist in the final story. This goes to show that even when a narrative is as unconventional as Pulp Fiction, writer-director Quentin Tarantino still abided by the following rule: always have a point-of-view character your audience connects with.
So when killing off a major character — protagonist or otherwise — always make sure there’s another character there for your reader to latch onto and to care about. And the stronger your characters are overall in your script, the easier it’ll be to pull this off.
Readers will be sad to see one character go, but they’ll still have someone to follow and to root for.