If you’ve seen any action films in the past ten years, you’ve probably watched a scene where some tough muscular guy (or demon, vampire, etc.) grabs a poor defenceless innocent, takes hold of their head and twists it sharply. This, we are led to suppose, breaks their neck (with a loud snap probably made by sound fx artists breaking celery or spaghetti) and renders them dead instantly.
If this forum was General Questions, I would probably ask if this is possible or likely to work. But I’m more interested in the question of how this has come to be such a popular method of despatch in the past 10 or 15 years. The earliest film I can recall seeing this in was some Arnie movie from the mid 1980s - I forget which one.
So my first question is: is this method of killing a relatively modern invention in film, or are there older examples I’ve missed? I’ve seen the technique drifting into mainstream TV like Angel. I was also wondering if the reason it has only come to prominence quite recently is due to fears in the past that people would copy it.
Also: have there been any complaints about film or TV showing it, or stories of copycat violence? I imagine it’s not as easy to do as it appears, but when ninja stuff was all the rage, there were lots of stories about kids doing flying kicks into glass doors. Is there a plague of kids with broken necks across the nation, and if not, why not?
And finally, how exactly did people in films do unarmed killing prior to this? I recall from my childhood talk about karate chops to the windpipe and suchlike.
I think there are actual martial arts moves that use leverage to dislocate the neck and or spine. Somehow this have evolved into simply twisting the persons head like one was opening a jar.
This seems to be pretty recent. I recall Arnold Schwartzenegger being the first guy to start killing people with rather offhand neck twists, too, but it was relatively late – I think it was True Lies. Before that people generally strangled, stabbed, or karate-chopped people to death. In Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal the titular Jackal kills the Forger (who’s trying to do a bit of blackmail on him) by twisting his neck. “In the small apartment it sounded like a gun going off.” comments Forsyth. In the 1972 movie, though, Edward Fox’s Jackal offs the Forger with a karate chop. And an off-screen chop at that.
This thread reminded me of Will Sasso’s impression of Steven Segal on MadTV. It’s hilarious! He just nonchalantly breaks the neck of pretty much anyone that speaks to him, and each break is accompanied by a funny celery-snapping sound effect.
My IMHO is it is a way to show quickly that the person is dead (no reappearence later in the film) and since no blood is spilt, maybe it gets past the censors a bit easier.
From a Mrtial Arts perspective, the ways for breaking necks taught (but not of course practiced to full ability) involve a whole lot more leverage than shown in film.
Anyone who has been to a Chyropracter will recognise the sound effects though, yuck.
It looked pretty real in The Hunt For Red October, when Sean Connery snapped the KGB agent’s neck. I’m sure the victim wouldn’t die instantly; they’d lie there and gasp for a minute or two, and then die.
You don’t break a neck in real life like you do on film, where the guy just grabs a head and twists. All that would do is turn the person’s head so he’s looking over one shoulder… might give him a sore muscle or two if he resists.
When you break a neck for real the head is twisted sideways in a very ugly looking and unnatural manor with plenty of leverage (think touching your right ear to the right side of your neck while your chin is being pushed to the ceiling from the side along with some pulling). You have to know what you’re doing to pull it off, so that’s probably why the hospitals aren’t full of casualties after every episode of Angel.
And actually Bruce Lee snapped Chuck Norris’s neck in Return of the Dragon (before Enter the Dragon in '73)… though it looked like more of a guillotine choke.
That would be a pretty funny bit, actually—hero grabs villain and twists his neck. Villian looks momentarily annoyed and says, “What did you do that for?” and then shoots him.
IIRC, and what are the chances of that, it was Commando, and they were seated side by side on a plane. The quote would be “Don’t wake my friend, he’s dead tired.”
Except, 2trew, it wasn’t a neck twist in Commando; Arnold elbowed the guy under the chin hard enough to snap his neck (yet, strangely, not hard enough to leave marks on the front of his neck visible to the flight attendant).
In one of the early Tarzan novels, in the 19-teens, Tarzan killed a lion by getting it in a full Nelson and squeezing until its neck broke.
There is a martial arts killing technique that relies more on torque and momentum than leverage, and it more closely resembles the movie technique than the one mmmiiikkkeee described, which is more effective, even though I’ve not used it firsthand.
The movie technique makes it look a lot easier than it actually is, though. We used practice dummies that were very realistic, and it was HARD to quickly wrench the head around on the vertical axis like that. mmmiiikkkeee’s technique is actually easier to do effectively, but it doesn’t look as cool and isn’t as easy to do very quickly.
Nope, that elbow was just to stun the guy. The blow snapped his head back, his head hit the seat and then bounced forward into Arnie’s headlock, and Arnie snapped his neck in the headlock. My question is why no one else heard the snapping noise or saw the commotion.
