I don't normally have to reduce myself to being a cheat for these posts -- I usually know what I want to do, as the death scenes I pick are almost always ones that have burned themselves into my brain -- but I cheated today and had to look the above scene up, for three reasons. Three reasons that came together to force my cheating, cheater's hands. The first reason is there is a new movie in the ConjureVerse out this weekend --
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, the third in the main series starring Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as "
spiritual warriors" Ed and Lorraine Warren, hits theaters (and also I believe HBO Max) tomorrow.
The second reason I cheated today with this week's "Ways Not To Die" post is not only is a new ConjureVerse movie out but today is also actress
Bonnie Aarons' birthday -- if her name isn't familiar to you it should be because she's given shape to a ton of your cinematic nightmares; most infamously she played the "Bum" behind the Winkies dumpster in David Lynch's
Mulholland Drive.
I wrote an entire ode to that scare once at The Film Experience,
read that here. It's one of the greats of all-time -- if I ever made a list of the Best Scares Ever it would be Top Five no question, and that might even be under-selling it. Best ever? It's possible! And more recently Aarons also played "The Master" in Travis Stevens' terrific vampire flick
Jakob's Wife with Barbara Crampton (
reviewed here). But to get back to my point Bonnie Aarons of course also played the "Demon Nun" in
The Nun, seen getting her ultimate comeuppance up top -- the character was first introduced in the second
Conjuring movie in one of that flick's best scares...
And then she got her own damn spin-off, thank you very much. That does bring me to my third reason for cheating with today's post, which is kind of a downer ending to end this otherwise celebratory post on, but besides Bonnie Aarons just cutting an instantly iconic figure in
The Nun that movie is kind of awful, and I didn't remember anything about it. So because of the first two reasons I had to google a helpful video that showed me all of the movie's death scenes (
seen here) in order to finalize this post's subject. What that video told me? A ton of people die in
The Nun. I tend to think of the
Conjuring movies as actually being fairly bloodless without high body counts? But forty people die in
The Nun! Dead Nuns start scattering around like volcanic detritus at one point! Who knew?
Or better yet who remembered? Once that many people start dying, and in fairly unmemorable ways, well it's no wonder I had to do homework for this post -- I'd rather have one iconic death scene than forty scattered nuns, yo. (Wisdom, y'all. Free wisdom here!) The Nun's death scene seen up top (and I think it's safe to assume they'd bring that character back in a second if they felt like it so "death" should be in quotes) came the closest -- there are a couple of beautiful shots mixed in there, with the red of the blood and with Bonnie Aaron's spectacular face twitching about. Horror movies need to remember to rely on those things more and CG nonsense less.
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