Year: 1995

Director: David Fincher

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: A kidnapped man from a sex club

As John Doe (Kevin Spacey) doesn't personally partake in any of the murders of his victims in the movie Seven, he orchestrated something special when it came to Lust, his fourth victim. He kidnaps a married man from a sex club and forces him at gunpoint to assault a sex worker with a custom-made, bladed strap-on. Forced between either death or murder, the man does what he is told.

By the time he is found by Det. David Mills (Brad Pitt) and Det. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), he is barely able to recount the story without stuttering and breaking down, as the trauma of the ordeal has caused him to have a mental breakdown. It is doubtful he will ever recover.

Even the detectives have a difficult time listening to the story, as one of the parting shots of the moment depicts Mills and Somerset in a moment of contemplation over the horror of the event and the man’s tale of terror.

Year: 1999

Director: Takashi Miike

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: A record producer who “disappeared”

In the film Audition, film producer Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) holds a series of fake auditions in an effort to find love, he didn't think he would find someone as demure as Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), a former dancer who enchants the widower upon their first meeting. But as he falls deeper under her spell, both the audience and Aoyama's acquaintances find there is something amiss with the young woman. Perhaps it is that none of her references check out. Or her habit of disappearing without a trace for stretches of time…

Or perhaps it's the man-sized burlap bag she keeps in her living room that keeps attempting to escape.

After she drugs Aoyama, he gets to peek inside the bag, where he discovers not only what happened to one of Asami's references, but offers a glimpse into her tragic past and his possible future.

Horrifically abused by her father, Asami now takes revenge on all men by sadistically torturing them. Inside the bag was once a record producer, but now is a shell of a man, who after the removal of his feet, eyes, tongue, fingers, and ear, along with months, if not years, of ritual abuse, has become a pet to Asami.

In truth, he is more than a keepsake of Asami's "hobbies." He is Aoyama's fate, for while he might have been auditioning for a new wife, Asami was auditioning for a new bag man.

Year: 1993

Director: Brian Yuzna

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: Sarah

In the segment "Whispers" of the forgotten anthology Necronomicon: Book of Dead (based on "The Whisper in Darkness" by HP Lovecraft), Sarah (Signy Coleman) is a pregnant police officer, who while investigating a killer known as "The Butcher," is kidnapped by unseen assailants along with her boyfriend/partner Paul (Obba Babatundé).

A couple known as the Benedicts trap the officers in a cavern filled with bat-like critters who feed on the brains of the living, turning them into the living dead that do their bidding. As the bat-creatures have already fed on Paul, only Sarah is left to fend them off. But just as things look bleak for the young police officer and the beasts have her cornered, she awakens in a hospital, surrounded by her parents (who suspiciously look like the Benedicts).

For a brief moment, all seems well. But alas, Lovecraft is not known for his happy endings.

Asking to see Paul, she discovers that her lover is still in the same undead shape as before, while her baby was placed inside Mrs. Benedict/her mother/the matriarch bat creatures. As the bedding is pulled back, it is revealed that Sarah's limbs have been removed. The hospital setting becomes the cavern and the grim reality sets in: This is Sarah's life now, as she is doomed to become a brainless body whose only purpose is to birth monstrosities.

Year: 1997

Director: Paul W. S. Anderson

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: Captain S. J. Miller

When Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and his crew of the Lewis and Clark are dispatched to respond to a distress signal from the Event Horizon – a ship that disappeared seven years earlier – they thought it was a mere rescue mission. But almost from the beginning, the mission seemed amiss. Once on the Event Horizon, it was clear there was a massacre of some sort, but who was killed and what caused it wasn't quite clear. And soon, the crew begins to feel the effects for themselves, especially Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill), the Event Horizon's designer who was there to salvage the ship.

As it turns out, it wasn’t a distress call as much as it was a warning. The jumbled Latin of the message didn't say "Save us," but "Save yourself...from hell." The Event Horizon was now a portal to a hell dimension, and it had Dr. Weir in its grasp as he is now determined to sacrifice the crew of the Lewis and Clark to his new master. To save his crew, Captain Miller opted to sacrifice himself by destroying the Event Horizon and all that was onboard.

From glimpses of the hell dimension and the images left behind by the former crew who were driven to insanity, the audience knows what is in store for Miller: unspeakable pain, torture, and horror for possibly all eternity. But for his crew, he trades perpetuity in a hell dimension to make sure they can return home.

Year: 1995

Director: David Fincher

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: Theodore “Victor“ Allen

There is a reason why Seven appears twice on this list. It is because John Doe's (Kevin Spacey) punishments for those he saw as sinful were beyond the horrors of a sane human mind. But few were as tortuous, twisted, or just plain sickening as what he inflicted upon Theodore “Victor“ Allen, AKA “Sloth” (Michael Reid MacKay).

A drug dealer and pederast, Allen was discovered to be Doe's next victim when his fingerprints were found at the crime scene in “Greed” victim Eli Gould's office. Behind a painting, the words "Help Me" were scrawled using only his fingerprints.

Detectives would later discover that Doe removed his hand to write his little note.

At Allen's apartment, a tableau of unspeakable torture unfolded. For a year, John Doe methodically tormented and mutilated Allen for his sins by tying him to a bed and feeding him assorted drugs. Keeping him lucid and alive, he recorded his "progress" with Sloth as he slowly rotted in the bed, doing the bare minimum to keep the man alive while hiding his deterioration from nosy neighbors with hundreds of car air fresheners. After a year of drugs, little food and water, and nothing else, Allen became a living corpse, as his flesh rotted off his body and his brain putrefied in his skull, he lost all sense of self and became a breathing carcass with no ability to think or feel.

Year: 1992

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Characters Whose Fates Are Worse Than Death: Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp

Frenemies actress Madeline Ashton and writer Helen Sharp (Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn) were in a bit of a pickle after they murdered each other. Once they both realize that they drank Lisle Von Rhuman's (Isabella Rossellini) elixir of life, they discover they won’t really die as much as deteriorate over time. To keep from looking ghoulish, Mad and Hel turned to former partner and surgeon-turned-mortuary cosmetologist Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis) for help in their “upkeep.” However, after he escapes their manicured clutches, the duo realize they will have to spend the rest of their immortal lives together helping each other paint and spackle their undead bodies until the end of time.

Jump forward 30 years to Ernest's funeral and things are not going well for the pair. The lack of any artistry, as well as patience, result in shoddy repair for the two former beauties, who now resemble cheap wax mannequins during an Arizona heat wave. But when they both take a tumble down a staircase, things go from bad to worse as they shatter every plastic part in their shallow, narcissistic little bodies.

Frustrated, angry, and sitting in hundreds of little pieces at the foot of the stairs on a public street, the two can do nothing but sneer at each other in contempt as they wait to be swept up.

Year: 1995

Director: David Fincher

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: Ripley clone

In Alien: Resurrection, when a clone of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), known as Ripley 8, is stalking the USM Auriga in search of Xenomorphs with the crew of the Betty, she finds a bit more than she bargained for as she discovers the science crews every failed attempt to clone her.

As she walks into the laboratory, Ripley 8 takes in the ill-fated clones one through seven in all their mutilated and misshapen horror, each more terrible than the last. One has too many mouths while another has the skeleton of a Xenomorph inside a human's fleshy shell. Each of the doomed doppelgängers is on display in glass jars for further study…except for one.

Ripley 7 is very much alive. Barely covered by a sheet and exhibiting grotesque, mutated features of the Xenomorph's skeletal structure, the creature with Riplay's face begs for euthanasia. There is no telling how long it has been there, praying for death. In addition to its mutations, there are slices cut into its body from experiments done without anesthetic and wires that hang haphazardly from its torso. Clearly, its entire life has been spent in pain. Its only words are, "Kill. Me."

Thankfully, Ripley 8 obliges as she sets fire to the entire lab.

Year: 1994

Director: John Carpenter

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: The teen on the bike

As insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) and book editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) drive to New Hampshire in an attempt to find author Sutter Kane and the town of Hobb's End, a fictional setting for many of Kane's works, they begin to witness strange occurrences. While driving at night, Linda passes a young man in a denim jacket riding a bike. A few minutes later, she passes an older man, wearing an identical outfit (director John Carpenter in a cameo) on a similar bike, but going the opposite direction. Later, as she glances at a map, Linda accidentally hits an impossibly old and decrepit man with white, blinded eyes in the same outfit and bike.

Linda gets out of the car and runs to the man's side, and in the voice of the younger man, he cries, "I can't get out. They won't let me out." He then gets up and walks away, casting a sinister parting glance at Linda before leaving on his bike, back into the void.

It is clear that the old man was the young boy, cycling through an endless loop. As the audience isn't privy to how time works in Hobb's End, he could have been cycling for minutes, or years, or centuries. Or longer.

Year: 1999

Director: Mark Pellington

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: Michael Faraday

Imagine being accused of one of the most horrific crimes ever perpetrated by man only to be innocent. The entire world believes you to be an evil madman and your children will forever believe you to be a villain.

Welcome to Michael Faraday's (Jeff Bridges) legacy.

In the beginning of Arlington Road, history professor and widow Michael Faraday is still mourning the death of his wife Leah, a former FBI agent who died in the line of duty. A single father now, he befriends the Langs (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), a seemingly nice couple who soon become ingrained in Michael's life in dangerous and disturbing ways.

After the suspicious death of his girlfriend Brooke, the discovery of the Langs' shady past regarding the law, and a few threats towards his son Oliver, Michael becomes convinced that the Langs are terrorists. Attempting to do right, Michael chases the couples' van to the FBI headquarters garage, only to discover that the van he is pursuing isn't the threat, he is. The Langs made Michael their patsy, filling his trunk with explosives and twisting the narrative so it appears he destroyed a government building, when in actuality, he was attempting to save it.

Now dead, Michael's name lives on in infamy as his son is now an orphan, forced to grow up in the shadow of a traitorous father, never to know that Michael was actually a hero all along.

Year: 1997

Director: Luis Llosa

Character Whose Fate Is Worse Than Death: Paul Serone

Snake hunter Paul Serone (Jon Voight) is a man so driven by his passion to catch the mighty anaconda that he doesn’t allow a little thing like morals, or ethics, or humanity, get in the way of nabbing a huge friggin’ snake. Though he occasionally proves himself as handy, performing the odd emergency cricothyrotomy when needed, he mostly lashes out against the innocent documentary film crew and allows the snake to eat poor Gary (Owen Wilson).

By the time Serone goes head to head with the legendary anaconda, he miscalculates his attack strategy and is eaten whole. But as audiences find out, being swallowed by a 40-foot snake doesn’t necessarily mean one is dead. Later, the snake regurgitates a partially digested Serone, and he blinks, having spent hours slowly being devoured in the tummy of his sworn enemy.