A look at 8 vital horror and fantasy films about angry and eerie severed heads
A few days ago, we mused on a series of key horror and fantasy films that featured hands removed from appendages and then opted to take on lives of their own, exacting revenge, causing harm and generally raising all manner of murderous Hell. Tonight, we move up the torso to the source of all our sentient human power, the head. The noggin. The cranium. That bone shell that houses our spongy brain and that controls all our function and perception. The brain IS us. And when the head leaves the body… if it’s not a happy death and if the head in question doesn’t belong to a decent sort. Well… look out!
RELATED: 7 scary severed hands in cinema!
Here then are our picks for the 8 greatest evil and/or annoyed or just plain freaky severed head horror and fantasy movies ever. Like all of these listy-thingies, our picks are subjective and we’re more than open to suggestions from you, dear readers, as to other key creepy craniums in arcane cinema we may have missed.
So wrap your head around this list, have a read below and discuss in the comments section!
Severed Heads
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The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)
No list about malevolent and sentient severed heads would be complete without this gem, which oddly gets lumped into the dreaded "so bad it's good category" and yet is actually, y'know, really good. The original title is The Head That Wouldn't Die, which makes more sense but doesn't sound as epic. Virginia Leith hisses her dialogue, threatens her mad scientist beau and controls a monster in the closet. "Let Me Die" she shrieks, over and over. Delightful stuff.
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Tales of Terror (1962)
Roger Corman's brilliant Poe anthology (penned by the great Dick Matheson) sports a trio of tales starring Vincent Price, the best of which is The Black Cat, In it, Peter Lorre is the lout who kills his wife and her lover and has a wicked weird dream in which the pair play catch with his outraged severed head. Brilliant and bizarre stuff.
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Macbeth (1971)
Roman Polanski's masterpiece is the de-facto cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's horrific morality play and the end, where the evil Macbeth (Frenzy's Jon Finch) gets his head hacked off, is brilliant. For a second we see the world through the quickly dying eyes of the slain Macbeth and it's a harrowing moment in horror.
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Alien (1979)
Ian Holm's sinister, spastic synthetic Ash's milky meltdown in Ridley Scott's landmark haunted house sci-fi classic climaxes with some legendary weird severed head antics. The grinning, blinking, gurgling android unleashes some grim exposition while separated from his busted body. Gross, weird, oddly sexy...
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Clash of the Titans (1981)
The Ray Harryhausen original is the best, a rousing stop-motion epic with charming stop-motion monsters, the best of which is the Gorgon Medusa, who Perseus (Harry Hamlin) kills, decapitates and holds her cursed living/dead head to the beastly Kraken, this turning him to stone. Love that head!
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The Thing (1982)
"You've gotta be f**king kidding me!" Rob Bottin brings the freak to John Carpenter's now-lauded remake of the sci-fi classic that is ample intense and stylish and is saturated with Bottin's mesmerizing FX creations, the weirdest of which is the alien-possessed severed head that melts off a corpses body and sprouts spider legs and scuttles away. A classic scene from an immortal horror movie.
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Re-Animator (1985)
Another essential severed head, removed from the body of the diabolical Dr. Hill (David Gale) in Stuart Gordon's brilliant Lovecraft horror comedy Re-Animator. Herbert West's re-agent brings the prick back to life and the shrieking, horny head tries to go down on a naked Barbara Crampton while controlling a horde of zombies. The greatest ever!
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Shrunken Heads (1994)
Musician and filmmaker Richard Elfman's daft horror comedy, a Full Moon favorite that also features music by both Richard Band and Elfman's famous brother Danny. In it, voodoo revives the severed, shrunken heads of a trio of slain kids whose floating noggins are out for revenge. One of the weirdest flicks on this list.
