Death By Burning - Portrayal in Film

Portrayal in Film

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc), though made in the late 1920s (and therefore without the assistance of computer graphics), includes a relatively graphic and realistic treatment of Jeanne’s execution; his Day of Wrath also featured a woman burnt at the stake. Many other film versions of the story of Joan show her death at the stake – some more graphically than others. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, released in 1999, ends with Joan slowly burned alive in the marketplace of Rouen.

In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a mob attempts to execute a woman (actually a robot in the guise of a woman) by burning at the stake. The Seventh Seal (1957) shows a woman about to be burnt at the stake. In The Wicker Man (1973) a British Police Sergeant, after a series of tests to prove his suitability, is burnt to death by the local population inside a giant wicker cage in the shape of a man to assure the next year’s crops and simultaneously assuring his entering heaven as a martyr. In the film adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1986), the innocent simpleton Salvatore (Ron Perlman) is seen to die horribly, burnt at the stake. The fate is also suffered by Oliver Reed’s less innocent character Urbain Grandier in Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). In 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), several people are burnt at the stake.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) features a British officer being burnt at the stake by a Huron tribe, though he is put out of his misery with a bullet fired by the protagonist before the flames could do further harm. In Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), an innocent gypsy woman Esmeralda is almost burnt at the stake, but rescued by Quasimodo. The nineteenth episode in the third season of The X Files contains a scene where a security officer discovers a man being burned alive in a crematory. The film Elizabeth (1998) used computer graphics to enhance the opening scene where three Protestants are burnt at the stake. In the 2005 horror sequel Saw II, a subject burns alive in a furnace while attempting to retrieve two antidotes to a gas that is slowly killing every person in the game. When he pulls the second syringe down from the ceiling of the furnace, he locks himself in and sets the fire alight at the same time.

In the 2007 film adaption and many of the musicals of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd throws Mrs. Lovett into an oven and watches her burn briefly before closing the door, as revenge for leading him to believe that his wife was dead. The horror film The Hills Have Eyes (2006) graphically portrays a man being burnt to death while tied to a tree. In the 2006 film Final Destination 3, two teenage girls become trapped in overheating tanning beds and are burnt to death when fires erupt. Silent Hill (2006) depicts death by burning as a punishment in two separate scenes. The Brazilian film Tropa de Elite (2007) depicts an execution by burning in Rio de Janeiro. In the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (2009), the third of four kidnapped cardinals is burned to death, after previously being branded with the ambigram “fire”; later in the film the main villain commits self-immolation in St Peter’s Basilica. In the film Sherlock Holmes (2009), a scene graphically portrays the American Ambassador Standish erupting in flames after shooting his gun, before jumping out of the window and falling into a carriage below in a vain attempt to extinguish the flames. The cause is later revealed to be a flammable liquid raining on Standish, who mistakes it for the actual rain at the time, and a spark from a rigged bullet in his gun. The film Black Death (2010) includes scenes of death by fire associated with a knight of the military orders who is assigned to witch hunting. The movie-within-a-movie in Even the Rain shows Christopher Columbus's forces burning Taíno leader Hatuey at the stake for his resistance to the colonization of Hispaniola.

In Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the people in a small Massachusetts town believe horror hostess Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) to be a witch and attempt to burn her at the stake.

In the 2011 film Red Riding Hood, an autistic boy named Claude is burned to death in a Brazen Bull shaped like an elephant in an attempt to force him to reveal the identity of a werewolf.