Sometimes the best part of a Horror movie is the wild deaths that fans will get to see while watching, and Ghost Ship still has one of the best hooks to reel you in with one of the best death scenes ever. Ghost Ship is probably not the first movie you will immediately think of when looking back on the 2000s, and it’s likely because it didn’t do all that well with critics when it first hit theaters. But despite those poor reviews, the film itself went on to find some major success at the box office as Horror fans flocked to the release.
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Ghost Ship was also one of those films with a rather long tail as it also went on to find even more success and a cult following through its home media release not long after. This is also why it’s important to have as such a strong as an opening as this film does. It really only had one chance to make an impression (outside of the cover potentially getting interested watchers to pick it off the rental store shelf), and it does so with one of the best death scenes ever put to screen.
Ghost Ship Has One Hell of an Opening
Ghost Ship starts innocently enough with a title card that’s completely opposite from the rest of the movie. The film shares a name with a few other feature films released over the decades so it might get lost in the shuffle upon rewatch, but you’ll notice how different this one is right off the bat. Introducing a young girl who dances with a ship captain, a wire suddenly starts to get tighter and tighter in the first few minutes. When a crew member tightens it one more time it suddenly snaps and quickly runs through everyone on the dance floor.
It’s not long before it’s revealed that this wire has quickly cut them all into pieces, with the final reveal showcasing that it not only cut through the captain’s head but cut it in a way where only the top part gets cut. It’s a wicked and memorable opening that kicks off a new story where years later a group explores the ship in an attempt to salvage it for a quick payday. But hilariously, the story of the film itself is probably not going to be as fondly remembered as this death scene itself. That’s how good of an opening it was.
This death scene has become such an icon without Horror that it’s even been replicated in fun ways years later through series like American Dad! (which ended up using a wire slice mass death during one of its most memorable Christmas specials). It’s left the bounds of the film itself, and alone is one of the reasons you should go back and rewatch it if you haven’t seen it in all these years. This is even more true if you have never seen it before as you owe it to yourself to see this death go down. But it also returns in a much more memorable scene later.
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Ghost Ship Doubles Down With an Even Cooler Death
The real secret trick of Ghost Ship, however, is how it uses this wire death opening to then introduce a much more sinister sequence later. This opening sparked the mystery about the central ship as with the present day crew investigating its ruins, they slowly figure out what actually happened. Everyone on the ship had died a mysterious death, and subsequently had their souls trapped there due to everything that happened. It’s then revealed how all of this went down, and it’s much more evil than you’d suspect.
Ghost Ship goes wild with one particular flashback (cued up through some industrial music ominously playing over it) as not only it showcases a different side of the wire death, but also reveals that it was one mass death in a slate of planned murders. The entire crew not only wiped out all of the passengers, but soon enough wiped out one another in a series of violent scenes that still shock to this day. It turned out that this wire death was really only the beginning of what was to come.
Hilariously, Ghost Ship might not be one of the most fondly remembered Horror films of the 2000s because of many of the other icons that had released at the time. But it’s through these death scenes that fans still remember the film all these years later. They might not remember what it was about, but ultimately does that really matter at the end of the day? A really good death scene will live far longer than the movie itself, and that’s what happened here. It was just that good at killing off its characters.
