How the Movies Got So Good at Smashing Heads

There’s a reason cranial destruction is such a frequent fixture in horror these days.

Bloody Fun
A brief celebration of onscreen carnage.  

In Obsession’s most horrifying sequence, the audience senses something awful is about to unfold several beats before the frenzy of blunt-force head trauma actually takes place on screen. About five-sixths of the way through writer-director Curry Barker’s indie horror blockbuster, Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston) is having a quiet conversation with Sarah (Megan Lawless) about his increasingly violent and manipulative girlfriend Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette in her breakthrough performance. Mere seconds after Sarah hints she may also have romantic feelings towards Bear, Nikki — out of nowhere — smashes through the parked car’s driver-side window and repeatedly smashes Sarah’s head into a brick on the steering wheel. With each impact, Sarah’s face disintegrates into a bloodier pulp, her bone structure buckling under every successive thud until Nikki has finally and irrevocably rendered the character a faceless corpse.

To hear it from Obsession’s visual effects supervisor Peter Timberlake, the scene is more than just violence for the spectacle of violence’s sake. Narratively, it marks a point of no return for the characters. “Curry builds this grinding tension throughout the first two acts. But almost nothing physically violent had happened up until this moment,” Timberlake says. “By the time this violent moment arrives, we’re almost grateful for the violence to release that tension, paradoxically. It’s sort of like a DJ giving us a massively long buildup, making the drop that much more satisfying.”

Having grossed a gargantuan $522 million worldwide (on a slender sub-$1 million production budget), Obsession now stands as this year’s highest profile showcase for cinematic noggin smashing. But thanks to relatively recent innovations in gore-filmmaking technology and a seemingly new audience appreciation for facial and cranial destruction, the Blumhouse-produced/Focus Features-distributed thriller is hardly the only horror hit laying waste to the face these days. Over the last half-dozen years, a spate of scary movies — Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, Neon’s Longlegs (2024) and director Ti West’s slasher flick X among them — have spotlighted squeam-inducing sequences where characters variously lose their looks, minds and lives to devastating brain injuries. “Advances in special effects have made this form of movie kill more achievable as well as believable,” says Paul Lê, a Rotten Tomatoes-certified horror film critic for outlets including Bloody Disgusting, Fangoria and Dread Central. “They’ve perfected them in a way that is no less graphic but they’re also way more plausible. An explosive prop head doesn’t have to be the default method anymore.”

I ask him if there is a zeitgeist-y component: Why so much head-smashing? Why now? “The trend could be a reflection of the times,” Lê ventures. “The bleakness of our current state of life and how we feel in the midst of it. There’s some hope to be had for the gunshot wound victim. Or someone who’s been stabbed. Or even impaled; a character could survive in specific scenarios. The smashing of someone’s head comes with a sense of finality. It’s over and done with and the chances of coming back from that are typically zero.” 

For the third-act interrogation scene of Longlegs, the horror-mystery’s occult obsessed serial killer (played by Nicolas Cage in heavy prosthetic makeup) punctuates his free-associative jailhouse ramblings with a stunning act of self-annihilation. Left momentarily alone, the gender-bending character — an uncooperative suspect if there ever was one — repeatedly smashes his face into a table, first obliterating his nose en route to an increasingly skeletal appearance and death; Quiet Riot’s anthemic 1983 FM rock single “Metal Health (Bang Your Head)” ironically soundtracking the carnage. “What we did was actually quite simple,” Longlegs VFX supervisor Chris Van Dyck told Collider. “It was modeling a collapsed nose cavity. As he keeps lifting up, we are revealing more of this 3D collapsed nose and then adding pools of blood. It was pretty clinical, rooted in performance matching to Nicolas Cage.”

The head crushes and smashes of so much yesteryear horror often tended to be funny, even if not intentionally so. In Wes Craven’s 1986 sci-fi/grindhouse romp Deadly Friend, the killer android at the heart of the action obliterates a curmudgeonly old lady’s skull with a basketball. “By today’s standards, it looks so crude and over the top it’s almost surreal,” says Lê, “but the overall effect is pretty pleasing nonetheless.” (The elevator head crush in 1989’s schlocky but underrated The Fly II, by contrast, is more realistic and perfectly punctuated by Daphne Zuniga’s bloodcurdling scream.)

Prosthetic makeup designer Iván Pohárnok is the founder and chief executive of the Hungarian special effects company Filmefex which has facilitated indelible noggin-busting sequences for horror films like Midsommar and Alien: Romulus (where the xenomorph smashes a character’s eye with its jaw). He has a two-part explanation for such scenes’ rising prominence. “It’s a very strong and dramatic effect because you are basically destroying the character the audience is connected with,” Pohárnok says. “That’s how you communicate with a person: you’re looking in the eyes, looking at the face. So especially if there’s a familiar face that you’ve seen before and it gets destroyed in a gory way, it’s so effective. That’s why it’s so disturbing.”

The second consideration is practical: great leaps forward in gore technology. “In the old days, they’d create a realistic looking head and smash it. But if you smash it the wrong way or something goes wrong, it would take at least five exploding heads to do such an effect. Nowadays, you don’t really have time to put them out there and change the head out and put it back again. It has to go ‘pah pah pah’ and you move on. The days when they spent hours and hours doing such things are over,” he says. 

For Midsommar’s disquieting cranium-smashing sequence — in which an elderly member of the pagan death cult attempts to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, fails (he just breaks a few limbs), and requires a brain-bashing coup de grace by mallet-wielding village elders — Pohárnok devised a novel alternative to those exploding heads. He built a dummy with a collapsible face utilizing hidden hinges and pneumatic canisters that basically caved itself in at the push of a button and then un-smashed after every take. “For many years we had been trying to do such effects that could be infinitely repeatable,” he explains. “To do that, such a head should be mechanized. Obviously it takes a longer time to build and costs more money. But then the director has more freedom to shoot it as many times as he wants.”

For Obsession’s car-interior facial demolition, however, the filmmakers took a simpler “vintage” approach. They shot multiple passes of the scene then stitched together footage of pre-attack Megan Lawless with shots of her dummy double (with Navarrette smashing its head against a brick on the steering wheel) and a bloody version of the dummy double. “This allowed us to transition from Megan’s natural appearance to a much bloodier version of her face with each impact,” Timberlake says via email. “By capturing everything we need in-camera, we ensure we’re cooking with ‘all-natural, certified organic’ ingredients — and that we get a photoreal result.”

As the film’s sole flashpoint of outright ultraviolence, it also reframes the more idyllic parts of Nikki and Bear’s relationship as something more sinister. “The head smash is less about technical innovation and more about the sequencing and storytelling that lead us to this moment,” the effects supervisor continues. “When the head smash happens, we look back at all the intimate moments we’ve just witnessed and they become completely recontextualized. Those were intimate moments with someone — or something — capable of murder. And those sweet moments — the cooking together, the playing guitar together, the cuddling — curdle into memories we’re sort of disgusted by.”