These are the death scenes we remember long after the actors have screamed, slobbered, cried, coughed, wheezed, or drawn out to William Shatner-esque lengths their final words. They are a perfect combination of acting, writing, film making, image and idea. Some are shocking. Some are sad or bittersweet. Others funny. Some deaths you cheer on. All are memorable.

Let’s begin to experience ten (technically eleven) great ends, and considering the nature of this list, yes, there are spoilers, and if you haven’t seen some of these movies you have some NetFlixing to do.

10. David Carradine walks it out in Kill Bill Vol. 2

When the film’s name is Kill Bill, it’s likely Bill won’t be standing come end credits. And when it takes two films to reach the promised death, it damn well better be memorable.

Quentin Tarantino’s ultimate achievement in Kill Bill isn’t the fantastic sword play, but how he twists a straightforward revenge tale into a subversive, poignant love story during the movie’s final scenes. We expect an action-packed finale between Uma Thurman’s Bride and David Carradine’s Bill. However, Tarantino delivers a climax pivoting on emotional conflict in lieu of bloody, drawn-out combat. Yes, we know Bill must die. He had it coming. Yet, Carradine saunters Bill out to his death with such dignity and warmth, we can’t help but feel for the murderous SOB.

9. Henry Fonda eats a harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West

So your movie depicts a particularly nasty villain. Guess what? That bastard needs to die (hard). But for the hero to simply kill the baddie isn’t good enough. A quick sucker death for a film’s main evildoer never satisfies an audience’s bloodlust, and I am thirsty. Before the villain departs (hopefully in agonizing pain), he needs to realize the hero has bested him.

Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West pulls off this ego-crushing deathblow to perfection. Not only does Henry Fonda’s family-snuffing villain suffer a slow, gut-oozing demise after losing a duel to Charles Bronson’s Man with No Name, Bronson finalizes his revenge with a symbolic gesture that shuffles Fonda off his mortal coil in utter humiliation.

8. Slim Pickens gets nuked in Dr. Strangelove and Bob Dylan-ized in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

This is my two-for-one cheat. We all know the scene from Dr. Strangelove in which Slim Pickens cheerfully bull-rides a nuke to the apocalypse. It’s iconic. And it’d be a major mistake to leave it off this list. Yet, as far as I’m concerned Slim Pickens owns two brilliant death scenes in cinematic history.

The second and more obscure one (not to mention, the death that inspired me to compile this list) comes from Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Slim Pickens has a minor role as a sheriff helping Garrett search for the Kid. During a shootout he takes a bullet to the stomach. Yeah so what’s the big deal? Cue Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” drop in the eerie setting sun, and the subtle range of emotion Pickens displays as he sits on a river bank dying while his wife mourns in the background. Peckinpah made a career off killing characters in violent, yet visually beautiful ways. Few were as haunting as this scene.

7. Wallace Shawn doesn’t laugh it off in The Princess Bride

It’s THE great scene within a film chock-full of great scenes. The premise is simple. Wallace Shawn must choose between two cups of wine, one of which is said to be poisoned. He picks his cup and his opponent drinks the other. One dies. The battle of the wits has begun. What follows is a gut-busting monologue by Shawn that, well, let’s say over-thinking it is an understatement for his thought process.

The dialogue, tortured logic, the arrogance, the sneaky moves, and that laugh which suddenly falls silent creates one of the most pitch-perfect comedic scenes ever conceived.

6. Marlon Brando absorbs a machete in Apocalypse Now

Much has been written of Francis Ford Coppola’s inability to find an ending for his Vietnam War update of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Yet, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting conclusion to Coppola’s vision of insanity than Martin Sheen slaughtering Marlon Brando as The Doors’ “The End” boils over the soundtrack, all leading to Brando’s enigmatic last words: “The horror… the horror.”

Sometimes improvisation is the gate key to brilliance. It’s a death scene searing with beautiful, yet frustrating poetic madness.

5. John Hurt births a Xenomorph in Alien

Oh, what I’d give to have seen the alien bursting from John Hurt’s chest with an audience in 1979. I’m sure the unsuspecting audience members, jumped, shrieked, and occasionally threw up (yep, those are the type of viewing experiences I crave).

Almost anyone who catches Alien for the first time these days already knows of the infamous dinner scene in which an innocent-sounding cough ends with everyone splattered in blood. The scene’s shock value brought it notoriety. Yet, it’s the sickening, grisly idea of a toothy, penis-shaped beast suddenly blowing your chest inside out that gives power to the scene long after the surprise has worn off.

4. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty fight the law and the law wins in Bonnie and Clyde

Before Bonnie and Clyde, most movie characters who fell victim to lead poisoning grabbed their chest and fell over. No blood. Not even a tear in their clothes. They might as well have died from a heart attack. Nor did you really ever see a gun fire and the bullet hit the human target within the same frame. Then came Bonnie and Clyde and all of sudden the shit got real. The film smacked audiences with the harsh consequences from pulling a trigger. Movie gunfights were no longer constrained to the same bloodless histrionics of children playing army in the woods. Bonnie and Clyde’s violence — extraordinarily controversial at the time — changed the Hollywood’s depiction of violence. Without it, there would be no Wild Bunch or Dirty Harry or Die Hard. However, even 40 years later, the film’s climax, in which the law shreds the titular bank robbers in a thunderstorm of bullets, remains as visceral and savage as anything seen in today’s hard-R flicks.

3. Janet Leigh showers with a knife in Psycho

There isn’t a frame of film showing a knife blade break Janet Leigh’s flesh. Nor do you see any real T ‘n’ A. Yet, viewers think they see it all.

The 45-second shower murder in Psycho is one of those film moments when editing, music, performance, and cinematography merge in perfect unison to accomplish what film was invented to do: To get into your head and make you believe in things that don’t exist. Was Norman Bates real? No. Were the chances likely that you’d meet a knife in the shower? Definitely, not. Yet, several audience members in the ’60s feared taking showers after witnessing the butchery of Leigh. I can’t imagine a higher compliment for a filmmaker.

2. King Kong can’t fly in King Kong

Personally, I prefer everything in Peter Jackson’s King Kong over the original film, including the Empire State Building swan dive (yes, I’m sure that makes me all sorts of horrible things to film snobs). Yet, it’d be plain-ass wrong to place Jackson’s remake on this list instead of the original. After all, directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and stop-motion animator Willis O’Brien created one of cinema’s most iconic images: An overgrown monkey swatting planes on the top of a skyscraper before tumbling to the streets. However, Willis deserves extra credit. With clay, rubber, metal, and fur he managed to evoke a sense of wonder and tragedy from an inanimate doll.

1. Margaret Hamilton takes a steam bath in The Wizard of Oz

The Wicked Witch of the West’s fatal comeuppance is simply the most famous, quoted, referenced, parodied death scene in pop-culture history. The scene is so omnipresent it invisibly permeates everyday life, such as mundane conversation (”Can’t go out in the rain today, don’t want to melt”). But why? Part of its brilliance lies in its unexpected simplicity: H2O kills… evil (that was also the witch-slaying tool in L. Frank Baum’s book). But, movies are full of elegant ways to die. Yet few do it with such bravado as The Wizard of Oz. The film delivers a fantastic demise for one of the all-time great villains — clever, original, colorful, grotesque, well-acted, and 100% satisfying in that you feel the bitch got what she deserved. You can’t ask for anything more when it comes to death on the big screen.