radiodormouse
🎃 31 Days of Halloween – Day 15 🎃
Death Becomes Her (1992) ★★★★ Watched 15 Oct 2025
Although Death Becomes Her isn’t based on a 1950s horror comic, it may as well be. The film is like an extended morality play from one of those macabre anthologies. Not just Tales from the Crypt or The Haunt of Fear, but the even more lurid imitators that followed. That’s fitting, since the HBO Tales from the Crypt series had already begun airing by the time this was released in 1992, and Death Becomes Her shares its creative DNA. Both were executive-produced by Robert Zemeckis, alongside Richard Donner, Joel Silver, and Walter Hill. As the director of Death Becomes Her, Zemeckis brings that EC Comics spirit fully to life. The film is colourful, over the top, and mean-spirited in the best way possible.
One could argue Zemeckis has been riffing on EC his entire career. Back to the Future resembles several of the time travel stories in EC's science fiction books. The scene where Marty is mistaken for an alien by a family of farmers even pays direct homage, as the misunderstanding is triggered by a comic book clearly based on EC’s Weird Science. It’s touches like that which show Zemeckis was born to bring EC to the screen.
Death Becomes Her also taps into the “splatstick” humor of films like Evil Dead II (1987) and Braindead/Dead Alive (1992). Like those fiendishly funny films, Death Becomes Her treats the distortion and mutilation of the body as cartoon slapstick, though it’s toned down to suit a mainstream—if R-rated—Hollywood comedy. Released mere weeks before Braindead, it’s notable that both films (one from the Hollywood machine, the other from New Zealand’s splatter scene) explored similar territory. The focus of both is the slow decay of women who refuse to let go of their youth. Braindead even features dialogue where Uncle Les confirms he knows the only way to deal with zombies is “full bodily dismemberment” because he “read the comics.”
Death Becomes Her serves as a bridge between the outrageous body horror of Peter Jackson’s early films and the mainstream supernatural comedy of Beetlejuice or Ghostbusters. It’s no wonder Zemeckis later tapped Jackson to make The Frighteners (1996), a film originally conceived as a Tales from the Crypt spin-off, and which ultimately represented Jackson’s own attempt to translate his splatstick sensibilities to a studio comedy.
Despite all the Braindead-style cartoon violence and rubbery CGI (courtesy of makeup legend Dick Smith, whose work here remains impressively grotesque), Death Becomes Her holds together as a story. It has a clean three-act arc with a surprisingly deft message. Bruce Willis’ weary Ernest learns that death—and, by extension, the natural cycle of life—gives existence meaning. It’s an excellent performance by Willis, distinct from all his other roles, once again proving he was more than just John McClane. Meanwhile, the two vain immortals (played perfectly by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn) are condemned to a fate worse than death: eternal decay and even more eternal bitterness.
It’s a hilarious, disturbing morality tale. If William Gaines and Al Feldstein of EC Comics had ever been given a blockbuster budget, this is exactly the kind of story they would have told.
