Today’s lead Halloweek story is an incisive exploration of what it takes to kill or be killed for our viewing pleasure, synthesized from some 60,000 on-screen film deaths.

But it started as little more than a worm in this editor’s addled brain: A trivial, yet taunting question about how Eric Roberts — brother to Julia, father to Emma, rakish star of the music video for the penultimate song played at every white Millennial wedding the world over — could possibly be in every single “Terror on Tubi” original movie I screened from my couch.

I’m so grateful to intrepid journalist and data whiz kid Josh Strupp for turning my chestnut into a story of substance — and for tracking down Eric Roberts to weigh in on why he’s died more than 50 times on film and racked up roughly a credit every two weeks since 2010.

You’ll hopefully be seeing a lot more of Josh around these parts.

In the meantime, scroll his stunning interactive study of Hollywood’s hit list, and read on in this special Halloweek issue for more choice treats, including a fascinating new feature from Danielle Bauter on Germany’s compulsory burial law that’s birthed an underground urn smuggling practice.

— Delaney

Sometimes our iconic on-screen killers are heroes. Sometimes they’re villains. Often they’re something in between. But regardless of which way their moral compass tilts, they’re there to sate our bloodlust.

And they can’t do it without bodies to burn through — bodies often belonging to extras who are undercredited and overconcussed.

By synthesizing data from 60,000 on-screen film deaths, plus perspectives from a professor of entertainment labor and one of Hollywood’s most prolific victims, GraveSite found that killing — and dying — onscreen is big business for a privileged few, while those who put their actual bodies on the line for our viewing pleasure are also the likeliest to be erased from the narrative altogether.

Karl Schimkowski’s plan was simple: bring his mother’s ashes home to Germany to keep them close. It was 2018, and she had died unexpectedly while on vacation in the Philippines. When Schimkowski, a German translator, went to his country’s embassy there, officials demanded to know the name of the funeral parlor that would handle the cemetery burial and told him to bring them the urn so they could seal it.

Hoping to bypass the bureaucracy, the grieving Schimkowski packed the urn directly into his luggage, armed only with the required Philippine export paperwork.

“Upon arrival in Germany, I was subjected to a random control by customs officers at the airport,” Schimkowski says. “When they found out about the ashes, they confiscated them and said they would only release them to a funeral parlor.”