1. The Red Wedding, Game of Thrones
How they died: Where to start? Everything seems fine until the band starts to play ... then Walder Frey (David Bradley) and his men turn on the Starks in bloody fashion, leading to Robb (Richard Madden) getting pierced with arrows and stabbed, his pregnant wife Talisa (Oona Chaplin) getting stabbed in the stomach and his mother Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) having her throat cut.
Why it's shocking: Though it won't have come as a shock to book readers, somehow David Benioff and D.B. Weiss managed to make The Red Wedding even worse on screen. The addition of Robb's pregnant wife (a character created for the TV show) comes as a blow even to those who know what happens when 'The Rains of Castamere' starts up. No punches are pulled in one of TV's most brutal sequences. We still can't get Catelyn's cry of anguish out of our head.