In the broadest terms, how a character dies in mainstream film – by whose hand or what logic, whether as murderer or victim, with a good or bad death – is influenced, if not determined, by the gender, sexuality or race of this character, to name the usual suspects on the list of personal specifications. From gunshot or on a hospital trolley, at speed or prolonged, with dignity or decrepitude, cinematic dying is shaped by the ‘social’ make-up of the woman or man in question. By social I mean those recognisable visual, physical or cultural markers that distinguish one person from another. Genre is crucial but not crucial enough: though it determines the function and frequency, if not method, of death in film – the blood fest spurring our main man on to greater heroism in the war film or the ‘monster’ on to crueller carnage in horror – identity is a stronger force. So, for example, in Hollywood, in a serial killer film, the murderer is among the gathered crowd but will not be the black character, and only white people, it seems, and rarely men or the working, or non-working, poor, succumb to terminal illnesses. Though genre, or subgenre, will be spoken of, most of what follows lies outside, or beyond, its mode of classification. The relationship between dying and difference is pre-rather than post-genre, for the scaffolding it stems from came long before the moving image though it would find a natural home there.