Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web
Hazel in Watership Down
Well, I wouldn’t say incredibly… Actually, I just wanted to point out that Raistlin and Caramon weren’t identical twins. You could tell by the way they didn’t look exactly like each other.
Oh, and my addition to the list:
Chris Rock, gut-shot and screaming for his daddy, at the end of Nurse Betty.
Saving Private Ryan, definitely. That scene is one of the reasons I’ve only seen that movie once. By the same token, every damn death in Blackhawk Down.
On a literary note, there’s a Robert McCammon novel called Boy’s Life that has an uttelry heart-rending scene of the death of the boy’s dog. The eleven-year-old’s depth of heartache is drawn so effectively I still cry when I re-read it.
Sean Connery in The Untouchables.
The death of Coth in James Branch Cabell’s The Silver Stallion.
Murron, in Braveheart
And let’s not forget Kenny, in South Park… 
Ricky’s death in Boyz in tha Hood.
When Pvt. Pile offs Hartman and himself in Full Metal Jacket, and then at the end of the movie where the guys just keep on and keep on getting shot by the sniper. Extremely intense.
Also, the little boy sailing his boat down the gutter in Stephen King’s It. I have no idea why but that really creeped me out and stuck with me for quite awhile.
When I was young I read a book called Rogue Reynard. I t was about a fox who tried to escape justice at the hands of his fellow animals for his crimes (mostly chicken-murder, IIRC). Being the cleverest animal in the woods, he evades them for about nine chapters, but is then put to death. I had been identifying with him throughout the book, so it really hit me hard.
oh god, yes. That is the single most disturbing murder I have ever seen on film, simply because it is completely and utterly believable. Deeply distrubing.
Mark Wahlberg’s death, which is actually not seen, in “The Perfect Storm”… haunted me. The hopelessness and loneliness of it.
The first death in Jaws.
Gus in “Lonesome Dove” - broke my heart.
Owen Meany. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! (A strong candidate for Best Book By Anybody Ever, winner of Best Character Ever Created)
Romeo. Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
I know there are others, I just can’t remember them right now.
The electrocution scene in The Ice Storm.
The death of an animal in any book or movie is almost too much for me to handle. I’ll second the ‘animal death list’ posted above as being heart-rending, and add these:
Old Dan and Little Ann in Where the Red Fern Grows
Atreyu’s horse Artex in Never Ending Story
the mice at the beginning in The Secret of NIMH
As for human deaths, there’s a few that have never left me:
the girl (forget her name) in A Bridge To Terebithia
everyone in Grave of the Fireflies
Mary Saunders in Slammerkin
main character (again, I forget her name) in Possessing the Secret of Joy
the schoolkids in Battle Royale
Colonel Shaw in Glory
Maximus in Gladiator
and I’ll second Boromir in Lord of the Rings
Not really a movie or a book, but the death of Thuy in Miss Saigon made my eyes tear up more than the end of the musical.
Yeah, that knife in the chest death in Saving Private Ryan really bugged me. Everytime I see it, I wanna yell out at that coward translator/ammo carrier guy to rush in and save the day.
In Black Hawk Down, the first death where the machine gunner in the humvee gets a round through his neck and everything becomes slowmo and the sad music starts playing. Then everything whips back to normal as the Delta Force guy calmly says, “He’s dead”. Also the kid killing his dad after the American soldier slips.
And in Dune (forgot which one in the series), Duncan Idaho was killed the second? or third? time. (Since he was a ghola…basically something like a clone). He said something about his fate was to die over and over in service to the Atreides. That was a whoooa moment for me.
Gandalf’s “death” in The Fellowship of The Ring struck me as very sudden and out of the blue.
In The Perfect Storm I still can’t shake the image of G. Clooney as he looks up while holding on to the boat as it plummets to the ocean’s floor. He definitely took the “captain going down with his ship” to heart.
Yeah, you should definitely have Spoliers in the thread title…
When Lestat “takes” David Talbot at the end of Tale of The Body Thief.
Michael Myers’ decapitation in Halloween H20.
Steven Segal’s surprising early death in Executive Decision.
Obi-wan Kenobi losing the saber battle against Darth Vader in Star Wars.
I’ll second some of the deaths in Battle Royale (although you knew from the beginning that there would only be one survivor).
He was already dead but when Robin Williams gets stuck in the Suicide section of the Afterlife trying to rescue his wife in What Dreams May Come.
Brad Pitt at the beginning of Joe Black.
Henry Blake’s death as reported by Radar on MASH*.
Although you don’t see them die but-you-know-they-will, MacReady and Childs in the closing shots of The Thing.
Two from Enemy at the Gates. First is Koulikov (Ron Perlman) as he makes the jump across the missing section of floor. Second is Commisar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) when he offers to reveal the location of the German sniper.
The one that has always struck me as the most powerful was the the selfless act of Father Karras in The Exorcist when he commands the demon to come into him. He retains just enough of his humanity to leap through Regan’s window and down a very steep flight of steps to his death. I’ve sought out these steps in Georgetown, found them, sat on the bottom step and thought about life, the universe, and everything.
Noone has spoken up for what I consider the most shocking death I have seen on film - but only the 1st time.
I am a huge Star-trek fan - and growing up - that meant the original series in re-runs with no hope of ever seeing another series or movie. Then they came out with Star Trek The Motion Picture - and I loved it even though I could tell at the time it was a subpar movie (and a sub-par episode of the original series even with some better effects). When they came out with Wrath of Khan a couple of years later I had to be there! (now this is before the internet so if you went to see the movie on opening weekend you did not know what was going to happen or how the next movie was going to cancel what would happen).
So, Wrath of Khan unfolds as the best of all the Star Trek movies (and it is a great movie even for folks that generally do not like Star Trek), with all the great suspense, twists and turns, etc and there comes the near the end scene when Spock goes into the radiation chamber to save the ship. When Kirk gets there and realizes what has happened (that Spock already has a lethal dose of radiation) the scene between those 2 was almost unbearable to watch (for me - being a young star trek devotee whose favorite character had always been the logical vulcan) as 2 old friends said goodbye to each other.
I still tear up a little thinking about it even though they totally wiped that scene out with the later movies (esp Search for Spock which somehow brings him back to life). They follow with the full dress uniform bagpipes playing “amazing grace” funeral and I was blown away coming out of that movie.
I also remember Col Blake’s death on Mash - at the time my father thought that the actor playing Blake had actually died and they had then had to kill off his character - this made me more sad thinking of the real actor being dead too - I was amazed a few years later to see him in some other (horrible) series - and finally proved to my Dad he was still alive:)
Yup, another vote for Saving Private Ryan. Also, same film, the medic’s death, when he feels his own wounds with his hands and knows his internal organs are smashed. Grim.
And another Spielberg film: Schindler’s List. There are lots of deaths, of course, but the one that springs to mind is the woman engineer, who appeals to Ralph Feinnes character over some detail of the work they’re doing, and he casually orders her to be shot.
And a book. The character I’ve most identified with in a novel was a Royal Navy fighter squadron commander in John Winton’s book ‘Aircraft Carrier’ (awful title, but a very decent, sensitive novel set in the Pacific in WW2). This character’s reactions to events large and small, his sense of humour, hopes and fears, and even his knowledge about some matters and ignorance of others, seem to be more like my own than any other character I’ve read about. Plus the heroic task he’d been given by his author appealed to me greatly (safe and cosy as my un-warlike world is :D). At the end of the book, after his squadron learns that the Nagasaki bomb has been dropped, they go on one last mission. The last 2 pages of the book describe the main character’s agonising descent after his plane has had a wing blown off. He tries and fails to open the canopy to bale out, and eventually, in extremis, with the sea getting closer, tries desperately to radio his carrier for help. Reading this, and empathising and identifying with him as I did, was a great shock, but despite this it’s definitely one of the most memorable things I’ve ever read.
Princess Suldrun in Jack Vance’s Lyonesse: The Green Pearl.
Add another:
Most of the deaths in Final Destination, especially the bathtub death scene and the burning kitchen scene. Yikes.
Umm, adamant, I did mention Wrath of Khan earlier. 