Sci-fi movies have a knack not only for showing us fantastical stories we could only dream of, but also for presenting nightmarish character exits that often require cleanup with a mop and bucket.

If you have to make an exit, you might as well make it memorable. That’s certainly true of character deaths in movies. Some of the most-iconic moments in film history involve a character dying.

Left to Right: Steven Yeun in "Nope," the alien in Steven Spielberg's "E.T." and Scarlett Johansson in "Under the Skin" (Universal Pictures / A24) It didn’t take long for stories about ...