History Main / PrettyLittleHeadshots

* In ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueTheFlashpointParadox'', [[spoiler: the Thomas Wayne!Batman]] shoots Professor Zoom in the back of the head in the middle of his EvilGloating. It's large, you can see inside his and and right through him.

* ''Series/BigSky'': [[spoiler:Legarski]] gets killed by a headshot, which leaves a tiny hole and mere trickle of blood.

* ''Manga/{{Golgo 13}}'''s trademark is killing his targets with a single shot in the forehead, and all of the shots obey this trope. One particularly annoying example had him snipe a target who was in the window seat of an airliner; not only is there no spray of blood, but the other passengers on the small jet don't even notice he's dead -- nobody even notices the hole in the plane beyond a comment about a draft.

* Happened OncePerEpisode during the early days of Manga/KatekyoHitmanReborn. Reborn shoots Tsuna in the forehead, a small spurt of blood, and Tsuna goes all Dying Will on whatever is giving him trouble.

* A rather '''nasty''' subversion happens in the Anime/SpaceRunawayIdeon movie, where [[spoiler: a little girl named Ashura]] dies by being shot in the head... [[spoiler: but since she was shot with a bazooka, ''her head vaporizes''.]]
* Played straight in Anime/BlueCometSPTLayzner, when [[spoiler: Gresco]] shoots [[spoiler: Karla]] to death in the third OAV.

* In ''Film/XMenDaysOfFuturePast'', Trask's headshot entry wound on his forehead is tiny with almost no blood showing.[[/folder]]

* In ‘’Film/{{Casino}}’’ Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) bloodlessly executes a problematic investor by holding a .22 pistol to her head. Truth in television: The real-life victim on which this scene was based was shot in the head five times with a .22 pistol loaded with dumdums. Only one of the five shots exited, and that was through the victim’s ear.

* In ‘’Film/Casino’’ Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) bloodlessly executes a problematic investor by holding a .22 pistol to her head. Truth in television, as the real-life victim on which this scene was based was shot in the head five times with a .22 pistol loaded with dumdums. Only one of the five shots exited, and that was through the victim’s ear.

* In ''Film/XMenDaysOfFuturePast'', Trask's headshot entry wound on his forehead is tiny with almost no blood showing.
[[/folder]]

In Real Life, a headshot virtually ''never'' leaves a neat little exit wound (the entrance wound may, however, be very "neat" in appearance). There is either ''no'' exit wound at all (the result of a low-powered or small round), or a pretty serious chunk of the skull is blown away by the exiting bullet (high-powered or large caliber bullets or a close-in shotgun blast). If the round doesn't exit the skull, the blood will be mostly around the entry wound, with possibly a bit of spatter if the victim jerked or twitched. If there ''is'' an exit wound, there's going to be bits of bone, brains and blood (and maybe teeth) all over. Often it's implied that the neat little hole we're seeing is the entry wound, and YouDoNotWantToKnow what it looks like from the other side -- sometimes this will be {{lampshade|Hanging}}d in order to keep the gore down while at least paying lip service to the messy reality.

* RealLife tends to avert this trope. Anyone who has ever been shot in the head doesn't tend to look "pretty" afterward. A look at descriptions of UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln and images of UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy post-shooting can tell you that.
** Deserving mention is the so-called 'Krönlein shot', result of a close range gunshot from a high powered round, in which the skull [[YourHeadAsplode bursts open]], and the brain is ejected (relatively) cleanly and lands some distance from the body. [[SchmuckBait Google some images]] [[Administrivia/YouHaveBeenWarned if you wish.]]
* Also averted with Benigno Aquino. During the preparations for his funeral, his mother explicitly gave orders not to disguise the gory exit wound on his face. "I want everyone to see what they [the assassins] did to my son." Ninoy's wrecked face was visible to all who cared to take a look in the coffin.
* The classic medical text ''Gunshot injuries; how they are inflicted, their complications and treatment'' by Louis Anatole La Garde includes this description of a suicide by rifle:
** Patrick Dolan, Co. "K" 27th US Infantry shot himself November 13, 1911. The muzzle of the piece was probably held in his mouth or near it in a direction of base to vertex of the skull. The extensive destruction of soft parts obliterated all semblance of a wound of entrance or exit. The photographs show extensive destruction. The face above the lower jaw; the entire cerebrum and cranial vault were blown away. "The entire squad-room, especially the ceiling, was stained with blood and fragments of brain." The reporter very properly adds "If this body had been found on a battlefield after an action in which artillery fire had played a part it would undoubtedly be assumed and with good reason that the head had been carried away by either a large projectile or a large fragment of the same."
* This trope was averted BIG time when it came to the death of UsefulNotes/OsamaBinLaden. While real photos of his corpse have not been released, the description of his body, namely that his brains were hanging out through his eye socket(s) after being shot in the head is enough to prevent anyone from thinking the headshot that killed him was pretty.
* The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on January 8th, 2011, focused a lot of attention onto the practical effects of a headshot, according to the laws of physics. The bullet struck Giffords in the head near the temple, and passed completely through her skull and out the back. You see, if the bullet doesn't exit the head it won't create a ghastly exit wound, but that also means that the energy from the bullet's motion gets dissipated inside of the skull, causing massive damage. Thus while Giffords was left with a grisly exit wound, the energy of the bullet didn't get dissipated within her brain, so this was actually the better of the two options. What also saved Giffords' life is that the bullet went clean through the left hemisphere of her brain, instead of tearing through the bridge in the middle between the left and right hemispheres; the catastrophic damage caused by breaking this central bridge is usually fatal.
* There's an infamous video out there, of a kid jumping into the sea and landing face first on concrete bank. Cut to the emergency room to show [[spoiler: the kid's whole face cracked in half like an oyster shell-if you Google it, beware, it is not for the fainthearted, especially not when the doctor closes the face again, just like closing a book)]] Well,as it turns out, the two clips, though edited together, are not related- the first clip has no follow up. The second, face cracked guy was a Gunshot suicide attempt; apparently he put the gun under his chin and it caused his skin and skull to crack and split open so he looked like Predator. Believe it or not, he SURVIVED. If you look hard enough you can find 'after' pictures of his repaired head.
* R. Budd Dwyer, State Treasurer of Pennsylvania in 1987, resigned and shot himself in the head during a press conference he called.
** Although it should be noted that he shot himself in the mouth, and as such, in the video, it was impossible to see either the exit or entrance wound. The headshot itself is also actually anything but pretty, as Mr. Dwyer's mouth and nose gush horrifying amounts of blood. In some photos he does have a lot of blood on the back and top of his head and may be due to the exit wound or his head jerking back and slamming into the wall.
** There is also the story of news anchorwoman [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Chubbuck Christine Chubbuck]], who commited suicide by shooting herself ''on air'' in TheSeventies. The damage wasn't nearly as severe as [[YourHeadASplode head explosions]] or PinkMist as those in the studio thought it was a tasteless prank... until they realized it wasn't. Christine still died some hours later.
* Low caliber cold load bullets (eg. .22 rimfire) - the sort of thing you might load into an actual covert pistol (as opposed to one fitted with a HollywoodSilencer) - have enough difficulty getting through the skull once, and might well leave a small entry wound and no exit wound.
** A .22 with a half powder load fired point blank into the mastoid process behind the ear has on average just enough power to enter the skull but not enough to get out. The wound is barely noticeable unless you know what you are looking for.

* Can be TruthInTelevision if used to cut down on the gore, especially in suicide scenes. A 9mm ball round would take out most of the back of the head, but the exit wound, while not quite so neat, would be smaller than seems realistic. Through the mouth would definitely remove the rear half, but there have been cases of people committing suicide in this way in front of police, and their bodies taking several more rounds before the back is seen.
** If used with a high-powered rifle, however, this is unforgivable.
* UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler's head was apparently mostly intact after his suicide. Certainly, his pallbearers describe only a small pool of blood by his left hand and a small exit wound. No effort seems to have been made to clean him up, so he probably was not too destroyed.
* Yook Young-soo, the wife of South Korean President Park Chung-hee (and mother of the most recent [circa 2016] ROK president Park Geun-hye), was shot (fatally; she died later in the day after surgery) in the side of the head during an assassination attempt on her husband on August 15, 1974. Accounts of the incident describe her as having bled profusely from the wound (and at least one picture of the chair she was seated in when she was shot shows it and the surroundings spattered with blood), but the pictures and TV footage - admittedly rather blurry ones, considering 1970's photography and video tech - of her being carried away by aides show her head and face as seemingly being undamaged. There's also video footage showing her physical reaction to being shot, jerking sharply to the left side and then starting to slump over to the right.
* Averted with the death of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria [[note]]Yes, the same guy Prince Leopold in ''Film/TheIllusionist'' above was vaguely based after.[[/note]] He died with his mistress Mary Vetsera in a SuicidePact, referred to as the Mayerling incident. The back of his head was destroyed, so they had to wrap bandages around it and did some reconstructing with wax for private viewing by his family.

* In ''22 Bullets'' this is [[Creator/JeanReno Charly Matteï's]] "signature", followed by a shot to the body.

* ''Film/TheIllusionist'' has this happen with [[spoiler: Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince]], although there is a little squirt of blood, but that's pretty much it.

* In the ''VideoGame/SoldierOfFortune'' games, the results of a headshot are actually handled comparatively realistically -- even your 9mm pistol leaves very large and ugly entry and exit wounds, and if you use your shotgun, .44 Magnum or sniper rifle, you blast their head clean off, leaving only a ragged bit of lower skull. The problem comes in that these results occur even [[LudicrousGibs farther away than these weapons would produce such wounds in real life.]]

* The near-ending cinematic in ''VideoGame/PsiOpsTheMindgateConspiracy'' has a straight example, when Sarah shoots [[spoiler: her twin sister]] from behind.

** ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemption'', on the other hand, subverts this trope by making any headshot actually create an in-game "model" of an exit and entry wound appear on the head with very grotesque results. This applies to all [=NPCs=], [[CrossesTheLineTwice even women.]]

* ''VideoGame/DeusEx'', based on the [[GameEngine Unreal Engine]], was fairly realistic for the time as far as gameplay was concerned. For example, you could shoot someone in their gun arm to make them drop their weapon, and headshots greatly increased the inflicted damage - although some of the tougher enemies could actually survive a headshot if inflicted with a low enough skill level and with a weak gun (and certain important characters, like Alex Jacobson, were [[PlotArmor immortal]]). However, graphically, the game was the description of this trope. Point-blank hit to the forehead with an autoshotgun blast? Target falls on the ground in one piece, with the only indication that he's dead being (aside from the obvious stillness) a little pool of blood under his corpse. The game did feature gibbing, but as with most games that do, there was no middle ground between "slight bleeding" and "[[LudicrousGibs meat chunks all over the place]]".

*** ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'' subverts this. When Adam Jensen goes to the morgue to obtain the interface from the augmented terrorist, part of his skull and brain have been cleanly blown off. And yet, [[GameplayAndStorySegregation no matter how many times you score headshots on your enemies, nor with what weapon used, their skulls are always intact]].

* Games made by Creator/RockstarGames in the HD generation zig-zag this trope.
** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIV'' is, for the most part, a perfect embodiment of this trope - headshots cause a blood splatter and the enemy falls down, disconcertingly intact. One rather classy exception is during a cutscene, when Niko shoots [[spoiler: Vlad]] in the face. Not only does the wound spew an impression fountain of blood, but Niko knows it is coming and shields his face before firing. Curiously, one of the earlier games from the same developer, ''VideoGame/{{Manhunt}}'', quite strongly averts this trope. And, actually, averted in previous ''GTA'' games, where a typical side-quest is to "pop a dozen [random gang] heads with a sniper rifle" and this literally leads to said Mooks' heads exploding. It's interesting that ''GTA IV'', in many ways the most realistic title in the series, went for a less realistic depiction of headshots.

Generally subverted in video games, where bullet wounds will often be displayed as a large and messy blood texture placed over the point of impact, and anything bigger than a pistol will frequently have the capacity to cause [[LudicrousGibs more obvious damage]]. The head usually still remains intact, though.

Generally subverted in video games, where anything bigger than a pistol has the capacity to cause [[LudicrousGibs obvious damage]]. The head usually still remains intact, though.

Contrary to popular belief, a gunshot wound to the head is not actually always fatal in and of itself, nor is it an InstantDeathBullet. Probably the most famous example of this was the head wound of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage Phineas Gage]], who managed to survive a three foot long steel rod through his brain (not without ill effects though). For more details, see the [[Analysis/PrettyLittleHeadshots Analysis page]]

** ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemption2'', like its predecessor, averts it hard. Not only do headshots leave very gruesome wounds, using a shotgun or explosive ammunition will literally cause the target's head to explode in a shower of blood.

* A variation happens in Film/DantesPeak, where Dr. Daltons fiance gets nailed in the head by a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_bomb Lava Bomb]]. The issue here is that the rock in question was able to punch a hole in the roof of the truck she was in that was about the size of Harry's fist. A rock that size, coming down that fast, and with that much force would've effectively turned the poor woman's head inside out, but since this is a PG13 film, she only has a little blood to show she'd been hit.