KILL YOUR CHARACTERS.
We’re at the end of the third act of the film. The monster has been defeated, the danger has been averted, and most importantly, the main character and all their friends have survived despite perilous odds and are now free to resume their lives. Everyone’s happy. Well, almost everyone. The audience on the other hand might be feeling quite the opposite. Let’s examine some of the reasons this might be the case.
Character Fatigue
Maybe this one won’t apply for our protagonist who we depend on for the story to actually reach its conclusion, but more for any allies or even villains in the story. When we have a really captivating character, we often want to see them die in a blaze of glory - going out the way they lived, so to speak.
When you have a character that is there to shock, to menace, or be generally badass (for lack of a better term), a good place for them to die, or disappear from the story even, is following their most shocking, most menacing, or most badass act (forgive me). By doing this, the character is bowing out at maximum shock-factor, and their impression on the audience will be as full as possible.
Obviously this isn’t mandatory and these characters can very well be kept around to great effect. But what this avoids is the impact of great characters waning over the course of the story. If you allow your character to repeat the same trick over and over again, eventually their shock-factor runs out and they lose what once made them interesting. But conversely, keeping this character around, but without any high-stakes action, gives the feeling of a once-great character limping towards the finish line, and this causes the character to feel like wasted potential.
EXAMPLE: Snatch (Spoiler Alert)
Vinnie Jones’ appearance in Snatch as “Bullet Tooth Tony” is brief, but it’s all the better for it. He is a bounty hunter brought in to help track down a missing diamond. In just the space of a few minutes, we see him accidentally kill someone by running them over, talk down three people who had him at gunpoint using pure intimidation, and instantly shoot-to-kill someone who was armed with a grenade launcher. It’s hard to imagine how much further they could go with this character, which is why it feels right that he is killed not long after. Even though this is an easily-enjoyable character, his death doesn’t feel like a kick-in-the-teeth, A. because he had the diamond within his reach, thus did the job he set out to do, and B. he died in accidental crossfire, not due to any of his own shortcomings, meaning his death doesn’t negate or rewrite anything that we already knew and liked about the character.
Lost Patience for the Character
Stories at their root are about change. The change character X must go through to get from point A to point B. By the nature of this, no character is meant to be the finished article at the start of the story. They will have to make mistakes to learn, but this needs to be a balancing act. If we think about films as a pitch for why character X deserves the ending they get, it helps to keep the audience on side during the pitch, keeping in mind that they’ll be formulating their own idea for what ending they want to see for X character.
If the character makes too many mistakes without displaying any redeeming qualities, the audience may lose patience for them and at this point it can be very hard to win them back over. Imagine an action-thriller based around survival where the character keeps making mistakes that drag them further into trouble, rather than solve any problems. At some point, the audience may start to think “god I can’t wait for this guy to get eaten.” When this becomes the case, it may not be the worst thing to give them that ending.
They Saw It Coming
Two key words for this one. “Plot” “Armour”. When it becomes obvious that a character is too integral to the plot to be killed this early on. There are times though when an audience can accept plot armour, when they agree that it would make no sense to kill that character at this stage.
EXAMPLE: Star Wars (The Original Trilogy) (Spoiler Alert)
The original trilogy was rife with plot armour. When we watch, we’re aware that Chewbacca, Han, and Leia aren’t going to be crushed in a trash compactor or wrecked in an asteroid field. The audience however, is aware that if they went on a similar mission as those these characters went though, they would also encounter close shaves, and tricky situations like these. How Star Wars pulls this off effectively is that they showcase these situations for what they are, a threat, but nothing more. There’s no shifts into slow-motion, long drawn out violin acoustics, or characters weeping as they look into each other’s eyes and say their final goodbyes. The audience can accept them not dying cause they haven’t fully bought into the idea of them dying anyway.
An ending earned by plot armour is best achieved when their survival isn’t presented as a triumph, or is treated as secondary to a triumph more largely related to the plot (In Return of the Jedi, few seconds are spent celebrating the characters surviving, with more time spent celebrating the fall of the Empire). It’s hard for the audience to share in the triumph of the character’s survival when they know that if they repeated the same actions in real life, there’s a certainty that they wouldn’t survive.
Audiences want to find stories they can invest in and be surprised by. Stories are allowed to have their characters survive life-threatening incidents, it can be necessary at times, but done too many times and their survival ceases to surprise the audience. They may start to wish characters, whom they have no reason to dislike otherwise, will die in such incidents just so they can actually feel surprised. When this becomes the case, their reaction when they do finally witness a character death, rather than the genuine shock or devastation the writer intended, might just be to throw their hands up and say ‘about time!’
Rules Were Broken
Death isn’t really something you can come back from. There are very very exceptional circumstances in the real world where one can come back from the point of death, but when they do, they’re consistent with science as we understand it. We expect the same in film, that characters who return from the point of death to do so in a way that is consistent with the rules of the story they are in.
EXAMPLE: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Spoiler Alert)
The abstract concept of the force was something that had been built up for seven movies up to that point. We understood what it allowed it’s users to do and what they couldn’t do. When Princess Leia sees her resistance ship destroyed by missiles, we assume she’ll die as to date we haven’t seen anyone use the force to survive the impact of an explosion, nor has the force ever allowed anyone to survive in the vacuum of space. It’s by no means inconceivable that the force could extend beyond mind-control and telekinesis, but the initial capabilities of the force were hinted towards or built up in training scenes. The fact the rules of the force were essentially re-written during this scene to fulfil such a major plot-point is why this scene was so jarring to many, in itself and in how it managed to get past a single test-screening.
Wasted Emotions
In the same way an audience shouldn’t be forced to triumph in a character’s unearned survival, they shouldn’t be forced to excessively mourn the death of a character that isn’t really dead.
EXAMPLE: Stranger Things (Spoiler Alert)
Four Minutes (3 minutes and 54 seconds) is the time we spend hearing Hopper’s letter to Eleven, which he wrote several episodes before he supposedly died. Audiences are well tuned into visual, audio, and tonal cues that tell us that a character has died, and in this segment, Stranger Things crams in as many of these as possible. The slowly building up stringed arrangement and the endless shots of characters crying, all exist so that over the course of this scene, you are forced to feel emotional that the character whose voice you are hearing is no longer alive, whether you want to or not, whether you believe it or not.
When does the reveal that he’s still alive come? The very next scene.
Wasted Antagonist
In the words of Roger Ebert, “Each film is only as good as its villain.” Villains can be made to look as scary as possible but in the end, there’s one factor above all that decides the effectiveness of a villain - their actions. A four-armed, 7 foot 2, melee-trained cyborg with gold reptilian eyes certainly sounds scarier than Anthony Hopkins, but if I asked who was the scarier villain out of General Grievous or Hannibal Lecter, you would probably lean towards the latter.
Viewers want to fear the villain as it makes the film experience all the more captivating. A tried-and-tested way to build fear around a villain, thus making their eventual defeat all the more triumphant, is to allow them to kill a prevalent character. Taking out a character that the audience had already formed a relationship is a sure-fire way of letting them know that the villain isn’t messing around and that no one’s safe in the story.
Conversely, if once the villain is defeated, your core set of characters are all still alive and completely unharmed, the audience may wonder why they bothered worrying in the first place. If you make a villain look and act as intimidating as possible, but without allowing them to do any of the things that make a villain effective, the audience can still enjoy them, but they will also view them as a waste of potential.
Survived, and for what?
If you evaded a certain death, there’s no telling the amount of ways this could ripple into your life. Maybe your close circle will see the need to be more protective of you, maybe you’ll see the need to be more protective of yourself and others. Maybe you’ll see that life isn’t guaranteed and want to live your life to the fullest. Maybe a career change or a change in scenery. Maybe you’ll want to strengthen certain relationships and sever others. Maybe not long after, you’ll be unrecognisable to those you were closest to.
If a character evades what they thought was certainly their end, there are endless ways this could bleed into and influence the rest of the story. New tests for their relationships with others, a new relationship with violence, opportunity for a complete tonal shift.
However if this close encounter with death has no repercussions in the rest of the story, it will be hard to understand why this character was written into danger in the first place. If a prominent character evades death, only to see their role greatly reduced from there on and have little bearing on the rest of the story, it will be hard to understand why they weren’t allowed to die there and then.
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The audience is better equipped at dealing with death than they are often given credit for. This is because our enjoyment of a character is based on our memories of them and our time spent with them, the way their stories ended is rarely factored in. When we remember great characters like Anton Chigurh, Scarface, Bane, Maximus Decimus Meridius, or Ryan Gosling in Drive, one thing we rarely dwell on is whether they survived in the end or not (see how many of their endings you can actually remember).
The apprehension, particularly from franchises, to kill off characters often comes from a belief that those characters are what brought the viewers in the first place. This is very rarely the case. For everything great about the character of Saul Goodman, the prequel series to Breaking Bad could have been centred around Hank Schrader or Todd even, those returning fans would likely still have returned, attracted by the cinematography, the location of Albuquerque, and the tension & unpredictability of Gilligan & co’s writing. Had Stranger Thing’s subsequent seasons been anthology-based, with a new location and set of characters each time, it’s reasonable that the fear and mystery of the upside down, the soundtrack, and the vibrant 80’s nostalgia would have been enough to lure viewers into returning time after time.
It is very rare that the death of a character will be the tipping point that prompts the audience to pack up their bags and leave. When a character consistently evades pretty certain death, it may be the writer paying too much credit to the importance of that character, and not enough credit to themselves or the rest of the story they’ve created.
There is a quick fix though. If you have absolutely no plans to kill a character, stop writing them into consistent life-threatening danger. Okay fine, maybe once, but that’s it.