The Quentin Tarantino Movie With The Highest Body Count
Quentin Tarantino is a cinematic auteur, known for his filmmaking trademarks like ensemble casts, extended dialogue, nonlinear storytelling, alternate history, neo-noir, pop culture references, dark humor, and extremely stylized expressions of violence. Blood and Tarantino go together like peanut butter and jelly, and over the course of his filmography, he's killed a lot of people on screen. Tarantino death scenes are iconic and frequently parodied, my personal favorite being the episode of "Bob's Burgers" where they recreate the ear cutting scene in "Reservoir Dogs" but replace the blade with a licked finger to deliver a wet willy.
With nine feature films under his belt, we got to thinking: which Tarantino movie has the highest body count? With martial arts, war dramas, and western style shoot-outs to choose from, it felt like any film in his repertoire could qualify. That is ... until you consider one pivotal scene in a Tarantino movie that puts the rest of his films to shame in terms of kills. We checked the numbers, and we've figured out which Tarantino film has the highest body count.
The Runner Ups
It's likely not a surprise that both "Jackie Brown" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" were tied for the lowest body count at four. "Jackie Brown" deals with double crossing and smuggling, and violence need not be the center of attention when you have a star like Pam Grier at the forefront. As for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," this revisionist look at the murder of Sharon Tate shifts the violence toward the Manson family, with the only deaths belonging to a handful of members of the would-be murderers.
"Death Proof" boasts six deaths, "Pulp Fiction" only seven, "Reservoir Dogs" at 11, "Kill Bill: Volume 2" with 13, and The Hateful Eight" with 18. From there, Tarantino's filmography takes a flying leap up the charts with "Kill Bill: Volume 1" jumping to a whopping 62 kills, almost exclusively enacted via samurai sword. Just ahead, "Django Unchained" takes up arms (and dynamite) and earns a kill count of 64. That leaves just one film left, and unless Tarantino goes absolutely haywire in his next film, this will likely remain the Tarantino film with the highest number of deaths.
The Inglourious Basterds Fire Claims Hundreds
With an absolutely bananas number of bodies at 396, "Inglourious Basterds" is hands down Tarantino's most violent film. There are plenty of kills throughout the film (this is World War II, after all) but after Shosanna Dreyfus (alias Emmanuelle Mimieux) finds her cinema chosen to be the venue of the premiere of "Stolz der Nation," she hatches a plan to take down the heads of the Nazi regime. Simultaneously, Lieutenant Aldo Raine's commando unit known as "The Basterds" infiltrates the screening with the intention of taking out Adolf Hitler and his men. As the film comes to its climax. Shosanna's spliced-in footage announces to the audience that they are all about to be killed by a Jew, as a pile of film catches fire, the doors have been locked, and all inside are going to die. Basterds Ulmer and Donowitz add insult to injury by breaking into the opera box housing Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, machine-gunning the two before firing into the crowd as bombs go off and kill everyone in the theater.
If Tarantino ever tops this, we're in for a quite a ride.