Zara got the worst and most terrifying death in the entire Jurassic Park franchise when she was killed off in Jurassic World, and the movies still haven’t come close to topping it. The Jurassic Park series has been gruesomely killing off its characters from the very beginning. In the first film, the bloodsucking lawyer Donald Gennaro got eaten off the toilet by a T. rex and Dennis Nedry got splattered with a Dilophosaurus’ venom in his car. The franchise wouldn’t be making the most out of its dinosaur-infested premise if the dinosaurs weren’t killing people in every other scene.

Part of the fun of these movies is getting to see the dinosaurs run wild and pick off unsuspecting victims. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a mercenary got eaten while stealing an Indoraptor tooth as a souvenir. In Jurassic World Dominion, a guy got eaten off a scooter by an Allosaurus. But not all the deaths in the Jurassic Park franchise have been so fun to watch. One of the deaths in Jurassic World was so deeply disturbing that it stood out from the rest of the movie — and even the rest of the franchise — as a drastic tonal shift.

Zara’s Death In Jurassic World Is The Franchise’s Worst Death By Far

Claire’s Innocent P.A. Gets A Far More Gruesome Death Than Even The Evilest Villains

In the first Jurassic World movie, Claire Dearing is introduced as the park’s operations manager. Her nephews Zach and Gray come to visit her at the park, but she’s such a workaholic that she can’t take a couple of hours off to show them around. Instead, she hands them off to her personal assistant, Zara Young, to give them a tour. It’s established that Zara is a good person just trying to do her job and get through the day, and she’s engaged to a man named Alec.

When all hell inevitably breaks loose and the dinosaurs turn on their captors, Zara’s horrific death is turned into a dark punchline.

Then, when all hell inevitably breaks loose and the dinosaurs turn on their captors, Zara’s horrific death is turned into a dark punchline. A Pteranodon swoops down, picks her up, and carries her into the sky. It drops her into the Jurassic World Lagoon, where another Pteranodon almost drowns her, before the Mosasaurus bursts out of the water and gobbles her up. Zara’s death is dragged out for an uncomfortably long time, and tonally, it sticks out like a sore thumb in a movie that’s a lighthearted action-adventure for most of its runtime.

Jurassic World
grossed $1.671 billion at the worldwide box office.

Usually, when a Jurassic Park movie shows a character’s death in all its grisly glory on-screen, it’s because they’re an evil character who deserves what’s coming to them. Gennaro is the unscrupulous lawyer who abandoned John Hammond’s grandkids to die. Nedry is the one who shut off the power and allowed the dinosaurs to escape in the first place. But Zara got a much longer, more painful, and more horrifying death than either of them, and she didn’t do anything to deserve it.

Fallen Kingdom & Dominion Did Not Even Try To Top Zara’s Jurassic World Death

How Could They?

There were plenty of death scenes in the two sequels that followed Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, but none of them even tried to top how horrifying Zara’s death was in the first one. There’s a death in Fallen Kingdom that’s arguably even sadder than Zara’s death. After the volcanic eruption, as the survivors are fleeing from the island on the ships, they see a lone Brachiosaurus that got left behind, being engulfed in the lava. But it’s not dragged out for dark comedy — it’s played as appropriately emotional — and it’s not gory; it’s just upsetting.

It’s possible that the Jurassic World producers realized Zara’s death was in bad taste and decided not to go down that path again. But even if they wanted to outdo Zara’s death in the sequels, there was no way for them to do it. Zara’s death has three gruesome character deaths rolled into one: getting carried into the sky, getting drowned in a water tank, and getting eaten alive by a giant aquatic dinosaur. The writers could’ve spread that out into three separate character deaths, but they blew all those scenarios on one single, undeserved death.

Jurassic World Might Never Have Another Death That Horrifying Again

The Jurassic Producers Seem To Have Listened To The Backlash

Next year, the Jurassic World series will continue with Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth, but it’s unlikely that it’ll feature a death as horrifying as Zara’s. In fact, it’s unlikely that a Jurassic World movie will ever go that far again. After Zara’s death, there was a lot of backlash from audiences who questioned why the sequence was so unnecessarily brutal and drawn-out. Based on the pared-back deaths of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, it seems as though the Jurassic World producers have listened to that backlash and taken it on board.