Whether they were innocent or deserved punishment for doing something horrible, movie characters have suffered a fate worse than death many times. Death often brings a sweet release from torment, and there are plenty of movie characters who shouldn't be denied reliving the guilt of their transgressions. Others have suffered enough already, but are trapped in circumstances where they can't escape a painful situation, whether through their own doing or someone else's, and they must watch in existential horror as they relive a loop of pain and discomfort over and over again.
A fate worse than death can range from surviving a traumatic situation after so many other friends have died to being physically maimed for eternity. It's often intended to impart an important lesson either to the sufferer or to the audience and can be found in genres that often present moral quandaries like psychological horror films, film noirs, and even romances. The trope plays on fans' awareness that in some cases, whether due to physical pain or simple unpleasantness, death would be more agreeable than whatever comes next.
10 Wallace - Tusk
In Kevin Smith's body horror film Tusk, ambitious and overly curious Wallace (Justin Long) decides to interview the most interesting man he can find for his podcast, even if it means trekking alone into the Canadian wilderness to do it. As a guest at the man's substantial lodge, he listens to his host's fascinating tales, including one story about a walrus that precedes him being drugged. After he awakens, he becomes part of an agonizing experiment, where his host's intense curiosity about man's dominion over the animal kingdom has compelled him to mutilate Wallace into a walrus-man, to live alone in a subterranean habitat forever.
9 Theodore "Victor" Allen "The Sloth" - Se7en
In the deeply disturbing psychological thriller Se7en, two detectives (Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt) are hot on the trail of a serial killer who presents each victim in a tableau devoted to one of the Seven Deadly Sins. When they encounter Theodore "Victor" Allen, aka "The Sloth" and a known child molester and drug dealer, they realize that the skeletal man they find has been tied to his bed for a year while continuously pumped with narcotics and fed just enough to keep him alive. Victor is tortured in every way imaginable for making easy money off of other people's suffering.
8 David Drayton- The Mist
An adaptation of Stephen King's novel, The Mist follows a close-knit community rallying together in a grocery store during a supernatural event, including David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his children. After they're attacked by creatures from the outside, Drayton takes a small group and finds a vehicle so that they can meet up with a military detachment, but eventually loses hope and decides to shoot everyone in the car before they get eaten. He runs out of bullets once he gets to his turn, just as the US Army arrives, and must live with the fact that had he just waited a few more minutes, everyone would have survived.
7 Caroline Ellis - The Skeleton Key
Caroline (Kate Hudson) answers an advertisement to assist an elderly man (John Hurt) at a palatial home in New Orleans, but soon realizes the house has strong roots in Hoodoo. She comes to believe that the man's wife Violet might be using the mystical practice to siphon the remaining years of his life to lengthen her own when in fact, the person possessing Violet uses Caroline's newfound belief to swap bodies and trap Caroline in Violet's forever. Now in Violet, as paralyzed and sickly as Violet's husband, Caroline realizes that the elderly man contains the trapped essence of a much younger man once as curious as Caroline.
6 Andre Hayworth - Get Out
When Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes to visit his girlfriend's parents for the weekend in Jordan Peele's Get Out, he encounters Andre Hayworth (LaKeith Stanfield) at a cookout, someone he used to know who now behaves very differently. Andre went missing from Brooklyn six months prior when he was purchased by an elderly white man named Logan King for a risky brain transplant. With King's brain in Andre's body, he gets to enjoy an immortality of sorts puppeteering the young man's body, while the real Andre resides in "The Sunken Place" until his body dies or something happens to King's brain function.
5 Cleopatra - Freaks
In Freaks, Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) is a trapeze artist who develops a scheme with the strong man Hercules (Henry Victor) to seduce one of the sideshow "freaks' named Hans (Henry Earkes) and then take all of his inheritance. Hans and his friends accept Cleopatra despite her being viewed as "normal" and without knowledge of her machinations, but when she reveals her true colors after a night of drinking, they turn on her. After ridiculing Hans and his friends, Cleopatra gets her comeuppance by being amputated, tarred, and feathered, now dependent on the very "freaks" she once mocked as the Human Chicken.
4 Frank - Hellraiser
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When Frank (Sean Chapman) procures a mysterious puzzle box and opens a portal to another dimension in Hellraiser, he thinks he'll experience pleasure beyond his wildest fantasies, but instead he's flayed alive and trapped there. When his brother's family moves into his old house, they inadvertently respawn Frank, who uses his brother's wife to lure male victims to the house so that he can use their essence to regenerate completely. Unfortunately for Frank, his niece solves the puzzle box a second time, releasing the beings who trapped him in the first place, and the Cenobites ensure that Frank's avarice be "rewarded" by tearing him apart for eternity.
3 Wade - House of Wax
In House of Wax, a group of high school friends get a flat tire on their way to a football game and the only place to seek refuge is the eerie local wax museum. Wade (Jared Padalecki), his girlfriend, and their friends soon find the museum less welcoming than it seemed, and the owners are desirous to add to their collection of wax statues. Wade winds up encased in hot wax toward the end of the film, and when his friends try to free him they only succeed in removing his skin, and he eventually dies of shock from a direct hit to the face.
2 Lindsay - The Human Centipede
When two young women tour Europe, their car breaks down in Germany, forcing them to seek refuge in a local villa owned by the diabolical Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser). After resting for the night, they wake up stitched into his latest experiment, a "human centipede" created by sewing Lindsay's (Ashley C. Williams) mouth to the anus of a Japanese tourist, with hers connected to her companion's at the end. The Human Centipede ends when the police raid the villa, the Japanese tourist slashes his throat on a piece of glass, and Lindsay's friend dies of sepsis, leaving her alone, gravely ill, and in between two corpses.
1 Quynh - The Old Guard
In The Old Guard, a group of powerful immortals has either been captured and imprisoned or forced to conceal themselves for fear of discovery over thousands of years. One such immortal warrior named Quynh (Ngô Thanh Vân), who is capable of healing herself from any wound, is held captive in the worst way of all of them. She's placed in an iron maiden at the bottom of the ocean to drown, and every time her body heals itself from the injuries and shock, she immediately drowns again, a process that repeats for hundreds of years until she escapes.