The horse whose severed head appears in Jack Woltz’s bed in The Godfather is named Khartoum. Woltz is a powerful Hollywood producer who refuses Don Vito Corleone’s request to cast Johnny Fontane.
The scene is one of the film’s most famous demonstrations of the Corleone family’s ability to intimidate without openly announcing its involvement. Woltz wakes beside the remains of his prized racehorse and immediately understands the warning.
Khartoum is sometimes misremembered as the name of a person or as a reference to Sicily. The name is actually the horse’s proper name. The sequence was filmed using a real horse’s head obtained from a food supplier, rather than a special-effects replica.