Two things in life are certain: death and our collective delight with gruesome fictional depictions of death. Horror movies comfort us even as they play to our most irrational fears. They give us a safe space where we can practice reacting to appalling circumstances, and where we can appreciate the slapstick humor of mortality without having to experience actual loss.
Indeed, part of the fun in watching fake people perish is the false feeling of omnipotence. The viewer knows the killer is lurking in the basement, but the babysitter doesn’t! But no matter how loudly we yell at the screen, we are ultimately powerless to influence a character’s scripted fate. As we watch them step toward their doom, we pretend like we’d make different choices. We’d lock the scary door, outsmart the alien intelligence, or simply not touch the glowing cursed object. But we’re kidding ourselves. You’re always going to go check on that strange noise in the cellar, especially if you’re a Gemini.
There are myriad reasons for death in a horror movie: hubris, horniness, inattention, curiosity, and even random bad luck. We gather here today to qualify relative risk of improbable demise based on astrological sign. As a Virgo, you’d probably sensibly refuse to watch the killer VHS tape, but if you’re an Aquarius? The ghost girl’s crawling out of the TV already. If the Lament Configuration puzzle box existed, Scorpios would probably line up to fight for a chance to be ravished eternally by the Cenobites, but Taurus doesn’t even have to leave their comfy sleeping bag to get thwacked.
In the great horror movie of life, we’re all eventually gonna die. Based on your sign, how will the fantastical hand of fate come for you?
Click here to jump to a sign: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces.
Aries will die like Curt (Chris Hemsworth) in Cabin in the Woods, reduced to a simplistic archetype of courage and competence. Ultimately, your altruistic drive to heroism will be weaponized to engineer your demise.
A shining representative of Aries excellence, Curt is stated to be a sociology major on a full academic scholarship to university. But it’s his prowess on the football field that leads to his unwitting selection for the role of “the Athlete” in “the Ritual,” a sacrifice/simulation through which a shadowy organization prevents the destruction of humanity at the hands of bloodthirsty prehistoric titans.
Curt is a leader and an optimist, typically considered positive qualities in life, but in this context they drive him toward the eponymous cabin where he and his friends will be systematically murdered. Nevertheless, he’s great at rolling with the punches once the hillbilly zombies arrive and the rusty farm implements start swinging!
By the time Curt finally meets his end in the meta horror-verse in which he unfortunately exists, he has faced and defied death several times. Apart from the influence of some thought-altering pheromone gas, he’s pretty phenomenal in crisis, quick to pivot and plan for survival even amid the shock of physical and emotional trauma. He bundles his surviving friends into a van and almost manages to ferry them to escape, thwarted only at the last instant by factors outside his control, specifically a big chasm cutting off the road back to civilization. It’s then that he comes up with the most direct, Aries-style solution imaginable: he’s going to jump a goddamn motorcycle over the gorge to the other side.
“You’ve gotta give it everything,” his buddy advises as Curt revs the engine.
“You know it,” Curt replies, determined.
“Don’t hold back!” his friend insists.
“Never do,” Curt declares, issuing some famous last words.
He guns the engine, picks up speed, roars over the edge, and sails gracefully over the gap! Perfect form, holy shit he’s going to make it!!! But then just as the viewer’s heart soars, he slams into an invisible force field marking the border of the Ritual area. Stunned — perhaps killed outright? — by the high voltage collision, he falls. As his friends look on screaming, Curt’s insensate body bounces and scrapes against the newly revealed web of confinement, sparking a fitful illumination of his long plunge to the depths below. Yeah, that’s exactly how Aries is going to go.
It’s the late ’80s and Jason Voorhees is killing teenagers like it’s his job. Judy, who does not appear to realize she is a character in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood or comprehend the danger associated with having sex anywhere near Crystal Lake, is camping with her boyfriend. Initially rebuffing his romantic overtures, she sends the BF on an errand to fetch firewood in order to give herself time to get comfortable enough for shenanigans in a shared sleeping bag. Once her hair is properly tousled and her camisole artfully disarranged, she cozily snuggles down in her bedding and hears footsteps outside. Assuming the expected return of her partner, she calls out invitingly: “Okay you big hunk of a man, come and get me!”
As Jason has already murdered the boyfriend in the woods by this time, he obligingly steps in to fulfill her request himself. Surprised by the sight of the machete Jason uses to slice and enter the tent, Judy somehow manages to outdo even her instantly iconic previous line to produce one of the most legendary acts of horror victim behavior: she pulls the sleeping bag over her head. She literally thinks she can hide under the covers from Jason!!! Amazing.
Seemingly out of respect for the move, Jason refrains from simply stabbing her with his enormous blade. Instead, he drags the whole sleeping bag from the tent, shushing Judy gently as she struggles, and with a suddenness borne out out supernatural serial killer strength, he whacks the bag against a tree. THWUMP! That’s it, one hit. It’s instant. Judy’s dead. Long live Judy! Judy, truly you were too good for this world.
I’m not certain that I really need to specify why this death belongs to Taurus. Explanation honestly feels a little redundant. This self-care queen needed some space to prepare herself for sex, so in the meantime she shooed her partner away for a little time-passing task in the woods. She’s out here on the shores of Crystal Lake yelling bawdy come-ons at anybody who happens to approach her tent, she damn sure isn’t getting up to look out and check who it is first. When threatened directly with mortal peril, what do you think Judy’s going to do, leave bed and run away? NO! She retreats further to the snuggly feeling of the covers! Once she climbed in there, our girl was not to be removed from that sleeping bag.
In the sleeping bag Judy died, and in the sleeping bag she will be remembered. Judy may be the 57th Jason Voorhees victim, but her demise is the number one most Taurean murder to ever be immortalized on film.
Gemini, you’re gonna explode all over the dinner table after serving as an incubator for the chestburster in Alien.
Geminis are hyper-brained and antsy, preferring any activity, however ill-advised, to cautious stillness. Executive Officer Thomas Kane (John Hurt) is the first of the crew of the Nostromo to wake from cryosleep, and the first to volunteer to investigate a derelict ship’s distress signal. He admittedly feels like death after rising from stasis in his pod, but now that he’s up, he’s just got to move around. In a different type of horror movie, Kane wouldn’t be able to resist checking out the creepy basement. Here, he freakin’ lowers himself into a dark hole burned into the floor of a desolate spaceship to investigate what turns out to be a cavern full of extraterrestrial eggs. He’s so curious to get a good look at these things, and of course he gets too close, too clumsy, and thwap! Now he’s got the closest possible view of the underside of a Facehugger.
When he returns to consciousness following the Facehugger’s eventual demise, Kane’s not immediately concerned with the damage that the creature’s acidic blood has inflicted on his ship or on the power struggles between crew members. First things first: he’s fucking hungry. The guy’s determination to have a meal before hypersleep results in him getting a full audience for one of the most gruesome cinematic deaths of all time. The whole crew is gathered, eating and joking; the tensions between personalities seem to ease somewhat in respite from the day’s ordeal. But then, Kane puts a hand to his gut —a cramp, he says. He begins to retch, shake, and seize, prompting the crew to move him flat on his back on the dinner table, where they attempt to hold him steady as he flails.
And then something pops inside his chest. As the entire crew looks on, horrified, a freakin’ creature explodes out through his sternum like a freakin’ jack-in-the-box!!! It’s disgusting but morbidly comical in its abruptness. Every frame of the crew’s dismayed reactions is ideal meme material —absolutely no one liked that, not even a little bit! But the alien is weirdly adorable, something like a slimy Fuggler. It makes a little screech of introduction before scampering off to cause future crew fatalities, leaving Thomas Kane with the immortal distinction of having made first human contact with the Xenomorphs. What more could a Gemini really want from the span of their life, than to discover and unleash something truly remarkable upon the world?
The predatory-creature-disguised-as-an-alluring-human-babe is a classic ploy. It has wiped out countless characters of all signs across hundreds of movies. Small variances, though, keep the trope eternally compelling: we know the duped human in such a pairing will always die, but how will it happen? What impulses and actions will lead them to go from being the subject of lust to object of lunch?
In Jennifer’s Body, a story in which boys mostly serve as a backdrop to the more compelling emotional interaction between BFFs Jennifer and Needy, Colin Gray stands out due to his post-emo scene kid aesthetic. He’s “so dark and emotional and all,” per Needy, but also “a really nice guy.” Following tragedy in the community, Colin develops a crush on popular Jennifer Check (failing to realize until too late, obviously, that the wave of death now plaguing the school springs from the fangs of Jennifer herself, in her succubus form). Maybe it’s that Jennifer’s association with the town tragedy has lent her a projected sense of gravitas in Colin’s eyes. Maybe being reminded of mortality has lent him a sense of urgency to reach out for what he wants, giving him the courage to ask the popular girl out. But more likely he noticed that Jennifer’s been looking like shit lately and started thinking, “She’s so sad…. I can fix her.”
Jennifer Check is not interested in going out with Colin Gray. (“There's a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the Bijou next weekend…” he opens, to which she responds, “I don't like boxing movies.”) But then Jen remembers she needs to consume human flesh to regain her usual lustrous sheen, so she rapidly switches gears and sets up a plan to meet at an address she provides. Confused by the change in tone but excited about the acceptance, Colin shrugs off his misgivings… until he arrives at the dark, unfinished housing development Jennifer directed him to, where his doubts redouble. He’s irritated by this point, and worried — he needs to leave, now — but what if she’s in there? She might be mad if he bails. She’s really been going through it since that jock guy died, maybe she brought him here to talk about it? Shit, maybe she’s in trouble! He’s got to go check, he can’t just leave her there alone…. and that’s why Colin Gray dies.
When Colin finds Jennifer in a candlelit room, he’s unimpressed by the overt sexual tenor of her greeting. (“Do you even know my last name?” he protests, attempting to forestall her advances, still too paralyzingly polite to push her away. “I gotta go…”) But Jennifer never cared about his affection, and now she wants his fear and pain. Colin dies in a high-school experience figuratively common to many individual Cancers: having his viscera agonizingly ripped out and devoured by his crush before she leaves to go make out with her childhood best friend, his blood still on her lips.
Having so much charisma that someone decides to kill you: it’s a rarefied thought experiment for much of the zodiac, but a genuine danger for Leo. In less than four minutes onscreen in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eddie (Meat Loaf) electrifies the residents of the castle to such a degree that jealous Transylvanian scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) takes permanent action.
The backstory is that Frank abducted Eddie at some point, coveting the delivery boy’s sense of magnetism for himself, but became angry when Eddie used his charms on Frank’s groupie Columbia rather than fawning over Frank himself. Naturally, incensed narcissist Frank responded to this insolence by removing half of Eddie’s brain to create a perfect new muscular submissive boy toy named Rocky. (It’s understandable if you don’t pick up the full context here until your seventh or eighth viewing of the movie, but it doesn’t really matter anyway. The underlying conflict is so clear it cuts through a first-time Rocky virgin like an ice pick through… um, Eddie.)
It’s Frank’s big night! Frank is putting on a show, Frank is debuting his creation, Frank expects adulation from all quarters! Frank-N-Furter is finally starting to get the crowd under control again… and then Meat Loaf explodes out of a wall on a motorcycle and every person other than Frank, both onscreen and viewing the film, loses their everloving minds.
It seems ludicrous that Eddie could manage to exude raw animalistic sexuality while repeatedly wailing the lyrics “hot patootie, bless my soul” in a challenging tempo and pitch. But Meat Loaf’s performance absolutely fucks. He intimidates his newly animated half-brain rival and reunites tenderly with his lost love before the start of the first chorus, all without stumbling over a single word. But this dynamic isn’t going to fly with Frank-N-Furter.
There’s only one star in this show, and it’s honestly a miracle of restraint that Frank even allows three minutes of song to pass before debuting the ice pick. That’s the other striking factor about Eddie’s brief appearance in The Rocky Horror Show: the screaming brutality of his killing by Frank. It’s the lone explicitly gory moment in a production that relies more heavily on social violation of norms to achieve its eerie effect, and there’s a lesson in that, Leo. I mean, not that you’ll ever internalize it enough to save yourself from your destiny, but nonetheless, a forewarning: you will eventually die as a consequence of unforced spotlight-stealing.
You didn’t choose death, death chose you. You were just trying to get to work! Virgo’s fatal filmic fate is best represented by the arc of Kat Jennings in Final Destination 2.
I was surprised to learn that the second entry in the Final Destination franchise was the lowest earning of the series. Clearly ticket sales aren’t an accurately predictive measure of cultural impact, because this movie scarred whole generations. No one who happened to catch even a glimpse of the then-ubiquitous promotional trailer in 2003 has ever followed a logging truck on the interstate since.
Like the first, the second Final Destination film begins with a college student and a premonition. Struck with a vision of log-crashing automotive carnage, she blocks the onramp with her car, preventing vehicles from entering and being crushed when the logs do start falling moments later.
The Virgo representative in our cast of near-death survivors is Kat Jennings (Keegan Connor Tracy), businesswoman. She’s frustrated by the delay; she’s got places to be! Unbeknownst to her, Kat’s already been dragged into the Final Destination daisy-chain of death due to the coincidence of her presence on a bus that struck and killed a previous death-dodger in the first film, which subsequently preempted Kat’s preordained fate of… dying in a gas leak at a bed and breakfast? Okay, sure. Kat thinks it sounds stupid too, until her fellows start getting impaled by fire escapes and smashed by falling window panes, decapitated in elevators and so forth. At this point, she gets proactive, driving the other survivors to try to track down the pregnant member of their cohort because blah blah, some shit about how the birth of new life could save them or something. (Everyone watching knows that Death is greedy in the Final Destination universe, and never plans to let them get that far.)
A tire blowout sends Kat’s SUV careening into a huge stack of PVC pipes, and still she survives! But here’s where the movie takes a dire turn into the absolute most bone-chilling form of horror for a Virgo: Trapped in the vehicle, overstimulated by adrenaline and noise, Kat snaps irritably at the first responder using the jaws of life to extricate her from the driver’s seat. In a retaliatory act of vindictive incompetence, this so-called rescue worker slams the machinery into the car, and — BAM! — sets off Kat’s airbag, shoving her backward to full-skull impalement on a jagged edge of pipe poking through her headrest.
Virgos have a tendency to depart unpleasant gatherings with a Capital-E Exit, and Kat is no exception. In death, she drops her lit cigarette into a gas leak — again with this pathetic safety response team! — where it burns its way to a news van, which explodes, which launches a chunk of barbed wire fencing through the air at such velocity that it literally dices the stoner character into three chunks of body, which then slide apart. Of course the loss of the film’s most pragmatic character would immediately snowball to this level of absurdity! Along with its generous bounty of inspiration for intrusive thoughts, Final Destination 2 offers moments of profound insight into the human condition.
Your violent movie murder is the legitimate cultural reason millennials don’t answer the phone anymore. I first experienced the iconic opening scene of Scream via a classmate’s verbal recap at a middle-school slumber party. Just as my social studies project partner reached the end of the retelling, finishing with a lurid description of the still-warm body dangling from a tree, the phone rang and we all SHRIEKED like Mrs. Becker did when she found her daughter’s mutilated corpse twelve minutes into the movie.
Watching the scene back as an adult, it’s impossible not to reflect on its enduring legacy. The very notion of answering an unknown phone number, much less bantering with the anonymous voice on the line, was rendered inconceivable by virtue of its depiction in this film. We’re all haunted by what happened to Casey Becker.
What other horror death could possibly represent Libra on this list? The cute sweater, the friendly flirtation, the blithe, mistaken assurance that she’ll remember the popcorn on the stove after skipping away to another room? Diagnosing Drew Barrymore’s Casey as a Libra is an easy initial read. We’re talking about Scream here, though, so it’s the meta aspects that really drive the connection home. Drew Barrymore was famous as hell in 1996, and her face was all over the promotional posters. Most viewers familiar with genre convention expected her to be the final girl. Even savvy horror fans never suspected she’d die less than 15 minutes into the runtime.
But it’s not simply her prior fame and sudden onscreen demise that make Drew Barrymore’s turn as Casey Becker so enduringly impactful. It’s the cinematography and the set design and the writing, it’s the entirety of the thing itself, greater than the whole of its (uniformly excellent!) parts. It’s clear that everybody involved with the making of the opening of Scream threw their whole spines into it. In 12½ minutes, the mini-movie of Casey’s Bad Night takes you through every emotional beat of a full-length horror film. Ending on the shock of death rather than the catharsis of improbable survival originally helped propel viewers into the rest of the story, but director Wes Craven’s loving attention to form and craft allows the piece to stand as an independent work of art even in the absence of further context.
Trashy, slashy genre fare created with the care and respect of fine art? The balance is exquisite. Ghostface wants to know what Casey’s insides look like. In the process of finding out, he also reveals something about the inner workings of a Libra.
All right, look. I’m not saying all Scorpios are hedonistic dopamine addicts with confused stress responses. I’m just saying that the phrase “an experience beyond limits” echoes in the mind. “Pain and pleasure, indivisible”? Sounds intriguing. And I’m certainly not saying that all Scorpios are like Frank Cotton of 1987’s Hellraiser. His creepy sister-in-law seducing ass probably was a Scorpio, apologies to us all, though his particular moral bankruptcy doesn’t necessarily define the sign as a whole.
But consider this, Scorpio: what if the Lament Configuration puzzle box just happened to be in your house? Like, right now? You might not seek it out at exhaustion and great expense, like awful Frank. But what if the box was just there, sitting conveniently on a shelf in your place? How long do you think you could manage to go without touching it?
I’d put money on a decent while, myself. There would be the stage of just staring at it regularly, watching to see how the light touched it at different times of day. Even while dusting, you’d be cautious for a time, using a feather to stroke the ever-settling detritus of entropy ever so gently off its surface. But once you notice that dust never really does settle on the box, you won’t be able to resist a gently questing stroke of its surface with a single fingertip. Then it’s only a matter of your willpower slowly crumbling until you open the damn thing. It’s inevitable from the start, your invitation to the Cenobites; it’s just slow.
It could happen way faster, though, if you manage to catch a glimpse of the Cenobites’ fashion through someone else’s misfortune with the box. HelloOOOO extra-dimensional sadomasochistic goth entities!!! Any Scorpio who discovers there’s a possibility of becoming a Cenobite through an extended experience of extreme pain/pleasure is going to open that box — it’s only a matter of when. (The 2022 Hellraiser film isn’t out yet as of this writing, but the promotional images of Jamie Clayton as Pinhead already have me weak.)
Work a shift as a car model, kill a would-be assaulter in a strangely enthusiastic act of self defense, have consensual sex with a Cadillac, and then go home to chill at your parents’ house. Sounds like a pretty regular day for a Sagittarius, yeah? Aside from the serial murdering habit and the impregnation via car, of course.
Midway through the film, Alexia, now living as “Adrien,” the long-lost son of a fire captain, is hoisted to perform atop a truck by a crowd of cheering fellows. The character pauses and contemplates, momentarily shifting from foot to foot. Then, instead of delivering whatever sort of bro moment the firemen expected, Adrien breaks out Alexia’s car showgirl choreography, slithering sinuously, tossing their shaved head. It’s riveting. The watching men are caught in a tense stasis, reduced from clamoring mob of heteronormative gender affirmation to a cringing, foot-shuffling endurance of sexual uncertainty. They’re compelled by the sight of Adrien’s dancing, though they’re pretty certain they’re not supposed to like it. They toss one another an occasional smirk or eyebrow raise, searching for an appropriate reaction, but they remain bound by the performance until specifically ordered away. At which point Adrien has sex with the fire truck.
Sagittarius trends a little less showy than the other fire signs. While Aries loves a pedestal and Leo glows in the spotlight, Sag’s performative preferences tend more toward the side light than center stage. Though absolutely capable of putting on a show, Sagittarius is not necessarily inclined to play to audience expectations. If coerced reluctantly into entertaining against their inclination, here’s the go-to Sagittarian move: they turn out an objectively rad display of artistry that makes everyone else watching feel so uncomfortable they wish to temporarily vacate consciousness. A Sag can take their own sense of discomfort at being observed, transmogrify the sensation into action, and make it everybody else’s problem. I realize this is specific, but it’s so striking: Adrien’s fire truck dance is a gloriously heightened staging of that Sag-on-a-stage dynamic.
Though there’s a certain immortality to be attained in the discomfiting of cis men, the mortal frame must eventually give way… especially if called upon to deliver a titanium-spined baby without medication or medical intervention. Though agonizing and uncomfortable to watch, Alexia’s labor ends on an oddly uplifting breath, with new life and opportunity cradled gently in the fire captain’s arms.
We’re not bringing up Midsommar to talk about the grad students. Those chumps evince nary a flash of Capricorn in their charts between them. Dani? Well, yes. Florence Pugh is an IRL Capricorn, which shines through in much of her work, and it would take a Capricorn personality to accept the May Queen crown as an uncharacteristically drugged outsider anyway. But we’re not here to talk about Dani either! No, to kill off Capricorns in a horror movie, we must look to the elders of the Hårga.
Midsommar is famous for being a bright daylight depiction of horror. It joins The Wicker Man in that genre of witchy people murdering morally dubious “regular” people for earth-renewing reasons that are supposed to terrify us but read more sympathetically with every passing year under late capitalism. The douchey Americans who visit the isolated Swedish community depicted in Midsommar aren’t outright villains, though they’re certainly intellectual thieves intent on taking the most advantage possible of their hosts. Expecting intimate access they can repackage into theses back home, they fail to realize the fatal intent of their invitation into the community. On the other hand, this community they’re observing is a eugenics-based murder cult so, toss up I guess.
The deaths that show our would-be anthropologists and Dani that they’re not in proverbial Kansas anymore are performed by two elders of the village, who jump naked from an ättestupa overlook to perish in the opening sacrificial rituals of the group’s midsummer ceremony. Give end-of-movie Dani 48 years or so and she’ll probably be up there jumping with them. Eighteen years of childhood, 18 years of pilgrimage, 18 years of work, and 18 years as a village elder: those are the cycles of the Hårga. Basically, at age 72, they call the game and jump out!
This seems alarming to the other signs but — in the context of fantasy — seems somewhat ideal to a Capricorn. The youngest Cap alive believes themself to be an ancient of long toil, struggling wearily toward the finish. And as for an older Capricorn, the idea of retiring? Hahahaha! The driving force is work; y’all can’t tolerate yourselves unless you feel like you’re contributing to the community! Thus, Capricorn’s horror demise is the gleeful self-directed splat of an honored elder.
In real, non-horror life, cut yourself some slack. It’s not possible or desirable to be productive at every instant of life, and time lived is never time wasted. Jump into bed, instead of off an overlook. Blow off some steam with a maypole dance before a comically large mallet starts to look appealing.
Aquarius, you will perish when a piece of media you are watching physically crawls out of your screen and frightens you to death. I realize that, ironically, this places you in the company of the single straight-presenting character of the 2002 Japanese horror remake The Ring, a movie about children with bad vibes and jaded gay women whose lives are touched by psychic VHS tapes. But Noah Clay (Martin Henderson) is a pretty great horror victim, you have to hand it to him! Excellent surprised face, perfect hair. Initially skeptical of the connection between visual media and death, he reviews evil spirit Samara’s eerie sequence of images with the succinct comment, “very student film.” As a video analyst, you’d think he would realize that amateur editing is often fatal to viewers, but I suppose he, too, is jaded by things he has seen.
“That tape didn’t scare you?” Naomi Watts insists.
“No not really, sorry,” he demurs, biting into a convenient apple for inscrutable thespian reasons.
Noah’s probably fortunate that he perished in 2002; he clearly doesn’t have what it takes to make it as a shitposter in the 21st century. His downfall stems from his choice to courteously keep the weird video his ex showed him to himself, rather than compulsively sharing it to ruin some other innocent’s day. Believing himself safe after Samara’s body has been reinterred and the prescribed period of seven days has passed, he’s surprised when the CRT in his studio turns on and begins playing on its own. Once again, the Aquarian instincts jump out! Instead of running screaming from the apartment, he sits down to watch the video. For his prioritization of audio-visual entertainment over personal safety, Noah is rewarded with the ultimate cinematic experience: the monster in the movie comes out of the TV and kills him.
That’s how you’ll die too, Aquarius, though you may be able to forestall the outcome by regularly inflicting the worst lo-fi art videos you encounter upon your social media mutuals, rather than hoarding them quietly to yourself.
Pisces, there’s simply no other way to put this: You’re going to get harvested into a weirdly aesthetically pleasing goo in the alien void pool of Under the Skin, your vacated outer layer of flesh left waving gently like a chiffon scarf in the endless liquid darkness.
It’ll probably happen in the same fashion as the swimmer whom the unnamed extraterrestrial Woman (Scarlett Johansson) meets on the beach. Though polite, the swimmer doesn’t seem as receptive to the Woman’s flirtations as other people we encounter in the movie, and quickly becomes distracted from her advances as he notices a couple struggling in the ocean, drowning as they attempt to reach their dog swept out in the tide.
The swimmer races to their aid and manages to save the man, returning him to shore, but the effort is wasted when the man chases back out after his wife in the water, where both perish. Ignoring the cries of the couple’s abandoned baby, the Woman studies the swimmer where he lies prone in the surf, exhausted into immobility. Perhaps seduction is not the necessary tool to collect this specimen, she seems to reason, and so she bashes him in the head with a rock before transporting him to her black liquid void. He’ll do less wild swimming now, more floating disconnected and meatless in the harvest pool, a remainder of rippling skin.
This is kind of a messed up horror death to end on, I realize. I thought about assigning Pisces something goofy from Deep Blue Sea, letting y’all go out with some jokes about super-brained sharks. I can’t in good conscience cheat you of your essence, however, and the poignancy of that desperate beach scene, followed by the gorgeously disturbing images of the harvested men in the void? It’s all viscerally Piscean in a way that not even Samuel L. Jackson getting crunched to death by a giant CGI shark can hope to approach. In oblivion, Pisces will float.
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