Bloodier And Gorier / Live-Action Films

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• Bruno Mattei's two back-to-back Cannibal Film sequels are more shocking, vile and even more horrifying than what other film directors have done in the late 1970s and 1980s.
• Many of Dark Castle Entertainment's remakes of William Castle films, such as House on Haunted Hill (1999) and Thir13en Ghosts.
• The Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland (2010), while not as heavy on the violence as some examples on this page, has considerably more deaths, corpses, and eyes getting jabbed than you'd ever expect from a film called Alice in Wonderland.
• Alien vs. Predator was violent, but down to a PG-13 rating. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem overcompensated on the Gorn, with a common complaint being that it went too far (most infamously involving pregnant women turning into a snakes nest of chestbursters).
• The Banana Splits Movie: Needless to say, the Banana Splits did not kill anyone in the original 1960s children's television series.
• While the murders in the original Black Christmas (1974) were all quite violent, there wasn't that much gore. This is "remedied" in the remake.
  • However, it may be the opposite case with the 2019 remake which is the only version with a PG-13 rating.
• Ditto for The Blob (1988), which likewise ups the gore and special effects to appropriately '80s levels of grossness. For example, the Blob's first victim in the original is a homeless man whose hand gets enveloped by the Blob, gets taken to the doctor, then is apparently completely absorbed off-screen. In the remake, the homeless man tries (but fails) to hack his hand off with an axe as the Blob starts to consume it, gets taken to the doctor, then the heroes find half his body dissolved with his ribcage turned into a hollowed-out, liquefied pile of gore.
• Braindead holds the record for being the goriest movie ever made. So in short, it's pretty much bloodier and gorier to about every other film on this page.
• Casino is by far bloodier and gorier compared to GoodFellas.
• The original Conan the Barbarian (1982) film was, while not blood free or wholly faithful to the book series, in line with the action/adventure films of the 80's. Its 2011 reboot includes feet being impaled and squirting like popped balloons, liquid metal being poured over Conan's father, and a priest getting his head smashed into a staircase.
• Cube Zero is noticeably gorier than previous installments in the Cube series, with people being blown up, dissected, burned alive, melted into a bloody puddle or rotting away from a flesh-eating virus onscreen.
• It was hard to top Dawn of the Dead (1978), but Day of the Dead (1985) managed to do so.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Birds of Prey is the bloodiest film in the setting when it comes to fights.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League features more blood and a few more dismemberments than the theatrical cut.
  • The Suicide Squad is this not only to Suicide Squad (2016), but even to the other two films listed above. For starters, half the cast is brutally massacred before the opening credits, and things do not slow down from there. Perhaps the most gruesome bit is the death of Rick Flagg, where we are treated to a close-up X-ray shot of his heart being punctured by glass.
• D-Day, a remake of Commando (1985), zig-zags this around. Onscreen deaths are accompanied by plenty of squibs and High-Pressure Blood this time round, and one mook even gets blasted into Ludicrous Gibs from point-blank via Grenade Launcher. However, the original has the hero hacking off limbs and scalping enemies which the remake omits. Meanwhile the remake's Big Bad is killed by a bloodless explosion while the original's gets messily shotgunned apart.
• The fifth installment of the Die Hard series, A Good Day to Die Hard, seems to be heading this way now that the movie rating has been confirmed to an R-rating. Although it's not quite played straight; the first Die Hard film was also R-rated and the franchise got progressively Lighter and Softer in the sequels, to the point where Live Free or Die Hard was bordering on Avoid the Dreaded G Rating.
• The fourth installment of the Dirty Harry series, Sudden Impact. Not only is this the darkest and dirtiest installment of the series, it's also by far the most violent due to its strong rape theme.
• The film version of The Equalizer is very much this when compared to the series that it was based on. The former even includes a scene in the climax where McCall brutally dispatches his enemies with appliances at the Home Mart he works at, even killing Teddy with a high-powered nailgun.
• Five Nights at Freddy's is much more explicitly violent than the games. The games preferred to avoid depicting gore onscreen, other than in 8-bit mini-games or the occasional Shadow Discretion Shot, and the only instance where anything resembling realistic blood appeared was some red liquid on the tops of the nightmare animatronics teeth in Five Nights at Freddy's 4, which arguably still has enough plausible deniability to say it could be just rust. In contrast, the movie shows a lot of brutal kills both on and offscreen. A security guard has his face sliced open by a Freddy-shaped torture mask with built-in saw blades, Carl's face gets eaten by Carl the cupcake (with the aftermath directly shown onscreen), Max gets decapitated by Freddy, and Mike is visibly bleeding after the ghost children attack him in his dream.
• Final Destination, in every progressive film, ups the ante in terms of Rube Goldberg style deaths and how bloody/convoluted they can become.
• The remake of The Fly is way more gross than the original film, substituting the original "man with fly head" character with a slow and incredibly painful transmogrification from the inside out, in the gooiest special effects that the 1980s could provide. What else do you expect with David Cronenberg in the director's chair, and Chris Walas (responsible for the melting heads in Raiders of the Lost Ark) providing the effects?
• While the Godzilla franchise hasn't shied away from blood, Shin Godzilla does feature more than usual, with bunker busters causing Godzilla to bleed a ton from his back and early on, even spurts blood from his gills. A deleted scene shows Godzilla vomiting blood that's hot enough to warp metal and melt tires.
  • The monster scenes featured in the 1960s Godzilla movies are surprisingly bloodless as special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya was strongly against the depiction of blood and gore in his special effects scenes, even becoming angry at one crewman for suggesting to have Godzilla bleed. After his death in 1970, the movies got a lot bloodier, with Godzilla and other monsters bleeding profusely and more instances of Family-Unfriendly Violence.
• The Green Goblin's Last Stand's final battle is much more brutal than depicted in the comics, with Peter's mask half-torn and his face bleeding, and the Goblin sliding down a bloody wall after being impaled.
• Rob Zombie's Halloween II (2009) is much gorier than his already very violent remake. Whereas the previous film had some brutal stabbings and beatings, the sequel turns it up to eleven five minutes in, what with its graphic depiction of emergency surgery, decapitation by broken glass, head-crushings, and more.
  • The original Halloween II (1981) was quite violent compared to its predecessor as well. John Carpenter specifically made it gorier — feeling it had to be so to compete with the other gory slashers that had popped up on the market.
  • As a direct sequel to Halloween (1978), Halloween (2018) was this. While not as graphic as the remakes, it still is loaded with intense and bloody violence, especially compared to the original's Bloodless Carnage. Somehow, its sequel Halloween Kills is even worse; it ratchets the gore all the way back up to Rob Zombie levels, with Michael viciously and gruesomely murdering dozens of victims with all sorts of horrific Improvised Weapons, including his own thumbs.
• The Hellboy (2019) is way gorier than the original source material. The original comics could get pretty dark and grim at times, but they were more about Gothic menace and sinister monster designs than gore, and what bloodshed we did see was more artistic than gratuitous thanks to Mike Mignola's unique art style. This film, by contrast, is filled with blood and gore and contains many scenes of people being sliced up, squashed, ripped to pieces and flayed alive by monsters.
• House on Haunted Hill (1999) remake compared to the original. The original had relatively few deaths and none of the murders were shown; in the remake, all but two of the characters are killed, and some are violently dismembered.
• They seem tame now, but the Hammer Horror films were considered quite a bit bloodier and gorier (not to mention Hotter and Sexier) than the Universal Horror films they were re-imagining.
• The villain of the book I Know What You Did Last Summer never successfully killed anyone, while he kills several in the film, the sequels to which also up the red significantly.
• Licence to Kill is far bloodier than previous and following James Bond films, even up to this day, with Krest’s Explosive Decompression and Dario getting shredded by a cocaine grinder being among some of the most brutal deaths in the series to date. It was the first in the series to be rated PG-13, and even originally got an R-rating before it had to be trimmed to get a friendlier rating.
• The Lone Ranger is as bloody and gory as a Disney movie gets, and the bloodiest and goriest Disney movie thus far (not counting any film released by Touchstone or Hollywood).
• The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe was a lot bloodier than the original.
• Roman Polanski's film version of Macbeth was controversial at the time for its violent nature. The opening scene with the witches sets the tone — with them burying a severed human hand on the beach. The violence was thought to be heavily influenced by the real life murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson Family.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • An aversion combined with What Could Have Been: Agent Coulson being Impaled with Extreme Prejudice would have made The Avengers Disney's first R-rated movie not released by Touchstone. It was released as a PG-13-rated movie after minor edits to the offending scene.
  • Some of the later movies, especially Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron and especially Captain America: Civil War, become rather increasingly bloody and violent, where instead of the usual Bloodless Carnage, there may be rather gruesome fights, injuries, or even deaths.
  • Actually inverted by the first and second Captain America movies. Both have scenes where a hapless mook is thrown into the engine of a flying vehicle — but in The Winter Soldier, when the title character throws a SHIELD agent into a Quinjet's open turbine, the guy pretty much just ceases to exist and vanishes in a cloud of smoke and flame as the Quinjet crashes. In the previous film, there's a fight scene in the climax where Cap unintentionally knocks a HYDRA goon into the spinning propeller of a plane, said goon immediately turns into a giant cloud of bloody mist. It's still the most gruesome kill in any MCU movie, and not by a little bit either.
  • Werewolf by Night (2022) is probably the goriest MCU film yet, with lots and lots of limbs severed and bitten off and plenty of bloody, gruesome kills. Although since it's in black and white, it's able to get away with being as gory as possible with a TV-14 rating.
• Mortal Kombat (2021) has plenty of blood, which is closer to the game series it's based on than previous movies based on it.
• As part of the Darker and Edgier approach, the Netfilx film Mowgli is much more graphically violent than any previous adaptation of The Jungle Book, and at times even the book itself. When Bagheera finds Mowgli, he's covered in his parents' blood; we're treated of a shot of a bloody cattle carcass; Shere Khan, at one point, sinks his claws into an unconscious Mowgli's shoulder and slowly slashes his arm; and in the climax, Khan gets stabbed several times by Mowgli's knife.
• Needful Things: In both the book and the movie, Nettie comes home after playing her prank on Buster Keeton to find that her dog, Raider, has been murdered. The book has him "merely" getting impaled with a corkscrew, but in the movie, Raider was skinned alive and hung up in Nettie's closet.
• Night Watch: For Anton's fight with the vampires in the beginning. In the novel, Anton uses the vampire's seal to instantly ash him. In the film, the vampire turns invisible and repeatedly stabs Anton with scissors. Anton finally kills the vampire by smashing his head on a sink. Geser later pulls pieces of scissors from Anton's bloodied torso.
• Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, despite being a Christian film, is infamous for seemingly relishing in the brutal torture of Jesus Christ. Even when this film was re-edited to remove the most brutal moments so it could be lowered from an R to a PG-13, it wasn't enough, and it instead went unrated. Justified, though, as this film seeks to be accurate to Jesus's real-life execution according to the Gospels, while other passion plays (at least in English-speaking cultures) are much more sanitized in comparison.
• The 1989 and 1998 versions of The Phantom of the Opera are much gorier compared to the rest, especially the former with its flayings and decapitations.
• Piranha 3D to the original Piranha. Such examples include a woman getting cut in half by a wire, a woman getting her head mutilated by a boat propeller,a man getting his head smashed between two boats, etc.
• While the Predator series always had blood given it "stars" alien hunters bearing all sorts of lethal weaponry, The Predator is as gory as an exploitation film, with decapitations, bisections, impalements, ripped limbs, etc.
• Though The Punisher isn't exactly lighthearted family fare in any incarnation (well, unless he's paired with a more traditional hero who prevents him from killing anybody), compare the second movie to the reboot, Punisher: War Zone. The second is about action-movie-normal when it comes to the killing, but the third basically said "screw plot, spurting blood is all we need!"
• The Purge was already a violent movie franchise, but its Grand Finale The Forever Purge really ups the blood and body count.
• The Pusher trilogy by Nicolas Winding Refn is fairly violent throughout, but the third installment ends on a particularly gory scene.
• The Raid 2: Berandal is this to The Raid. The original was already brushing up against an NC-17 rating, but the sequel pushes the envelope of the R-rating still further with faces being mangled by claw-hammers, people being eviscerated by shotguns in close-up, and all sorts of horrible things being done with baseball bats and kerambit knives.
• The more sequels the Rambo series gets, the more bloody the movies become. The fourth and fifth installments take the blood and gore up a notch.
• Aside from the video games, the violence in the third Riddick movie is a lot gorier than in previous films, including a partial decapitation shown in full detail.
• The Saw series increases the level of blood, gruesome death, and blood expelled via gruesome death with each subsequent film.
  • To be specific, Saw and Saw II were relatively light on the gore, using the anticipation of it to build fear more than the actual act of it, which in the first film's case was fairly tame when it did happen (two of the most violent acts in the film, Lawrence hacking his chained foot off and Adam beating Zep to death with a toilet lid, happen almost entirely offscreen). Saw III and beyond throw this idea completely to the wind and include scenes involving people putting their hands through buzzsaws, a head being crushed between two ice blocks, a man getting vivisected by a swinging blade, a woman having her ribcage ripped open (after being forced to put her hand in a container of acid), a person getting crushed by a room with walls that move inward, a man getting impaled by spikes that inject acid into him until he melts into a pile of guts, and more.
  • Saw III included brain surgery as a plot point and Saw IV opened with an autopsy. Neither situation contains any horror elements, but the gorn evidently merited their inclusion.
  • Saw 3D takes the gore to new heights. As well as finally showing what happens when the iconic Reverse Bear Trap opens fully without the victim escaping, the film also contains a trap (known as the Horsepower Trap) that couldn't be included in any of the previous entries due to its sheer gruesomeness. The result of said trap is that a woman tied down with barbed wire has her head crushed under the wheels of a car, a man has his arms and jaw ripped off, another man is run over by the same car and the man in the front seat is sent flying through the windshield when the car crashes (and since he was glued into the seat, this causes a huge chunk of his skin to be ripped off).
• Scream:
  • Lampshaded by Randy in Scream 2 when discussing the rules on how to make a sequel. "Death scenes are more elaborate; more blood, more gore. Carnage candy."
  • Inverted for Scream 3, which had to be toned down, as the censors were afraid it would be in poor taste after Columbine. At one point they tried to push for no gore to be in the film whatsoever.
  • Scream 4 is probably the goriest film in the series — involving scenes where a cop gets stabbed in the head and walks around bleeding, someone getting their throat cut through a mailbox and an especially brutal death for Olivia.
  • On a more general note, Ghostface claims more and more lives as the films progress: five in the first film (six if you count Maureen Prescott), eight in the second, nine in the third, and 11 in the fourth (not counting the deaths in the Show Within a Show).
• Sleepy Hollow (1999) — Another Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration, retelling the legend of the Headless Horseman. Features buckets and buckets of blood (autopsies, beheadings, and dismemberment).
• Star Wars:
  • A New Hope: When Obi-Wan chops off an alien's arm with his lightsaber (the first time one was shown in use) and blood is seen on the floor, as well as seeing the still smoking skeletons of Luke's Aunt and Uncle. For the rest of series, all the violence is nothing but Bloodless Carnage, with the Watsonian explanation that lightsabers and blasters instantly cauterize any wounds they cause, so this appears to have been an oversight.
  • Attack of the Clones is downplayed compared to other parts of the franchise, but is rather bloody for it's PG rating, when a creature lands bloody claw marks on Padme, or the Alien Blood that comes out of squashed Geonosians.
  • Revenge of the Sith was notable for being the first film in the series to get a PG-13 rating, and upping the violence of the saga as a whole, but especially the prequels. Instead of the Mecha-Mooks, the heroes are forced to slice up living creatures a lot more, with decapitations and hacking off limbs given more focus. Anakin's disfigurement involves being set on fire and his skin boiling off in a close-up.
  • The Force Awakens doesn't go too extreme, but the opening scene has a fallen stormtrooper place a Bloody Handprint on the helmet of a comrade, an image never shown in the movies before. Other stormtroopers are also shown flying with some explosions and blaster fire, with added chunks of armor being blown off, although that would be more Symbolic Blood. There's also a scene where in a fit of rage, Kylo Ren is pounding at his blaster wound, where blood is leaking out copiously, in contrast to the usual Bloodless Carnage that blasters usually result in.
• Stepfather III features more gore than the other three films in the series combined.
• Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li compared to Street Fighter. Especially when Chun Li shoots a mook while he's incapacitated and snaps Bison's neck.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street — the stage show had false razors that squirted about a tablespoon of blood. The movie drenches a large room in one man's blood.
• Tales from the Darkside: The Movie got to do a lot more gore than the TV show Tales from the Darkside, including a gargoyle clawing and biting people to death, and a cat killing someone by Orifice Invasion through the mouth and then leaving through that mouth.
• Transformers Film Series:
  • The Transformers franchise didn't had much gorn, but Transformers (2007) really cranked up the dial on show how much damage a Transformer could take, what with all the sparks flying, metal bending, and micro-explosions within their bodies. When Sam shoves the Allspark into Megatron's chest, that results in a molten hole.
  • In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, Optimus Prime snarls out a "GIVE ME YOUR FACE." at the climax of the film. And that line doesn't cover the staff impaling that follows up.
• While it is in no way gory, TRON: Legacy is way more violent than the original Tron. While in the original programs would simply explode into light before fading away when killed, the programs here shatter apart like glass and even let out bloodcurdling screams when killed. And it also doesn't help that Anyone Can Die this time.
• The film adaptation of Watchmen is significantly bloodier and gorier than the book, which hardly shied away from violence itself. Just for an example: In the book, Dr. Manhattan killed people by disintegrating them. In the film they explode into Ludicrous Gibs. While even in the books his victims left bloody smears, the gibs were never visible.
  • The scene where Big Figure's stooges are trying to break into Rorschach's cell during the prison riot. Rorschach traps one of the thugs' hands in the bars of the cell, and in the comic, one of the other guys just slits his throat to get him out of the way. In the film, however, he hacks off the dude's hands with a circular saw.
  • An exception is the destruction of New York, which was changed to a Nuclear-level bomb based on Dr. Manhattan's energy signature, which leads to surveying the damage standing at the edge of a crater, rather than the comics giant psychic quid which leads to seeing the streets covered in blood and entire crowds of people mutilated.
• The Wolfman (2010) is far gorier than the original. Numerous extras are mauled to death and even decapitated. The main character's transformation is also considerably more painful.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • The Wolverine: In the extended cut, there is no Bloodless Carnage, up to and including a number of ninjas being sucked into a snow-blower and scattered across a few buildings.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse:
    • The film has some noticeably more violent moments than most of the previous films, such as during Wolverine's rampage through the Alkali Lake base.
    • When Jean Grey incinerates him with the Phoenix Force, Apocalypse's skin is shown melting off, revealing his skull underneath.
    • At one point, Apocalypse decapitates a group of three men with his powers onscreen.
    • During the Battle in the Center of the Mind between Apocalypse and Professor X, it can be surprising that the resulting No-Holds-Barred Beatdown that the former inflicts on the latter after growing in size (throwing Charles against a wall, no less) does not actually kill him. Just before pleading for help from Jean, Xavier is reduced to crawling on the floor, and not only is he covered in his own blood, but he is also lying in it.
  • Logan: The high amount of Gorn in most cases are insane, really showing what results from a main character with claws resembling razor sharp knives. People get decapitated, impaled through areas and limbs get cut off. It notably uses the R rating to its advantage, and got the special C rating in Mexico (which means adults with ID) mostly because of its gore alone.
• The films of Quentin Tarantino are notorious for their stylized violence, with frequent forays into Overdrawn at the Blood Bank and Black Comedy. So it's quite a surprise to watch Reservoir Dogs, which contains relatively little blood and guts; the heist that's so critical to the plot happens off-screen, and what violence there is is treated with the utmost seriousness. Even the notorious scene where Mr. Blonde severs a police officer's ear leaves just enough to the imagination to be brutal in its realism (compare The Hateful Eight, which borders on slapstick). Two years later, however, Vincent Vega accidentally shot Marvin in the face; while Pulp Fiction as a whole was still quite capable of playing violence for horror, this scene led to one of the most comedically golden subplots in the whole movie, and the rest is history.
• Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi is perhaps the goriest Zatoichi film of all, with much dismembering and gallons of blood. So much so that it feels like a Bloody Hilarious Black Comedy at times.

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