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A character suffers from an extreme Fate Worse Than Death. Death never comes to free him from it. He is immobilized or otherwise contained, unable to communicate with anyone, and unlikely to be removed from this situation — not even by death — anytime in the foreseeable future. This is often a variation on Taken For Granite in which the victim remains conscious. Some other torture — eternal pain, seeing your worst fears forever, et cetera — may be layered on top of it, but simply being stuck like that forever can be more than enough.
Usually, when this arises, it is eternal unless he's freed by outside forces, but a "mere" years-long or centuries-long fate is possible. For instance, a robot with a 100-year battery life, buried underground. In fact, this is a very common sci-fi trope involving artificial intelligences who are potentially immortal due to being made of software.
The worst-case scenario for tropes such as Sealed Room In The Middle Of Nowhere, Involuntary Shapeshifting, Phantom Zone Picture, and Who Wants To Live Forever, and an especially rich well of High Octane Nightmare Fuel. Of course, it's also Fetish Fuel to some . Which, in itself, is Nightmare Fuel for others.
Sometimes appears as a Backstory, if a Sealed Evil In A Can was aware while sealed away. It's usually not good for a Big Bad's disposition, or sanity. However, if your situation is ameliorated by the fact that at least you're together with someone you love, then it's You Are Worth Hell.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Two examples from Pretty Cure: Michiru and Kaoru Kiryuu spend nearly half of Futari Wa Pretty Cure Splash Star paralyzed at the bottom of a lake, and at the start of Yes Precure 5, Nuts was trapped inside the then-unopenable Dream Collet.
- Queen Beryl doomed Jadeite to "eternal restless sleep" in Sailor Moon after his repeated failures. Which meant trapping him in a giant crystal and sealing him away somewhere. It's a very popular starting point for Fan Fiction. And lest you think this is an example of Never Say Die, Beryl had no qualms with outright killing her failed henchman, leaving this punishment as particularly gruesome in retrospect.
- What about what Shikamaru did to Hidan in Naruto? Hidan gets blown into pieces, and buried in a hole... but he's immortal, and his severed head continues to curse Shikamaru right until he's covered over. Now think about this. Hidan is still capable of feeling pain. He's had his head cut off before, and it hurt. So you have an immortal, in pieces, buried alive, unable to move or heal since the pieces aren't joined... pretty much forever. Bastard deserved it, though.
- According to the recently released databook, Hidan is dead. Once he can't kill anymore, his immortality jutsu stops working. So I guess Hidan got off lucky in a way. Don't mess with Shikamaru.
- Actually, according to the even more recent second fanbook he is going to die eventually, but isn't dead yet. In the mean time, his head is rotting from a lack of nourishment..
- Kakurenbo—While we cannot be sure how aware they are, the children captured by the demons are used as living batteries, like The Matrix but without the potentially cheerful virtual reality. Extra Nightmare Fuel at the very end, as the numbers of child-batteries are revealed, each hooked up with a light above them. And then we see a little boy, whose light flickers, and then goes out.
- The "winner" of the game is possessed by the demon fox and lures the next group of children. Made worse by the fact that the fox goes from possessing a young girl to taking over the brother who came only to save her.
- Episode two of Vampire Princess Miyu — "At The Next Station". This is the fate of the women who fall prey to the temptation of the Shinma Rho-Ah, and take him up on his offer of enhanced beauty... only to end up frozen in time, like beautiful mannequins dressed in expensive clothes, never to age or decay... at the end, you can see that even the one who got decapitated during the battle between Rho-Ah and Miyu, is still alive, just like the rest of them — whimpering and sobbing quietly through paralyzed lips.
- This is not the first time this trope is invoked in Vampire Princess Miyu. In the second OAV, it's downright stated that Ranka's victims end up in a similar state, transformed into bare and listless mannequins that she keeps into her school's warehouse. She even uses one of them as a shield during her fight with Miyu, and Miyu is horrified when Larva accidentally hits the doll with his Razor Floss and not only it emits a whimper of pain, but it bleeds. This is lampshaded earlier, in this conversation that takes place during Ranka and Miyu's first encounter:
Ranka: (pets her newest doll, erm, victim): No longer will you age or grow decrepit. You can live forever, looking the way you do now...
Miyu: (steps in) And thus... will the life energy that you emit become my sustenance...!
- Ninja Scroll: The immortal, regenerating bad guy gets cast in gold and sunk to the bottom of a lake.
- Believe it or not, this was a punishment dealt to Team Rocket (temporarily, thanks to a between-episodes Reset Button) in an early episode of Pokemon.
- In the Pokemon Adventures manga FRLG arc, Silver gets turned into stone along with four other Dex Holders and he alone stays conscious throughout the series until he gets unfrozen along with the rest of them. Also, the two bodyguards who are assigned to protecting Lady Berlitz in the DP arc gets trapped in an alternate dimension.
- In Silver's case, for what it's worth that time was put to good use comprehending Hydro Cannon so he could teach it to his Feraligatr when the petrification was undone. He didn't have a contingency plan in case Gold, Crys, and Team Hoenn blew it... not that he could convey such anyway.
- Baccano! has immortals who can regenerate from any wound. So when the mafia decides to get rid of one particular immortal, they encase his body in cement and dump him in a river to perpetually drown. This doesn't exactly qualify, however, because the character in question was a half-immortal and would eventually die. Well, that and the mafia guys in question do allow the guy's sister to fish them out of the Hudson River, provided that they don't mess around in their business again, so the torture in question only lasted for two years as opposed to around fifty.
- Would eventually die... of old age. And drowning is a pretty painful way to go. I'm gonna say this still counts.
- In the Dead Zone movie of Dragonball Z, Garlic Junior uses the Dragonballs to wish for immortality. Rather than use his new-found immortality to actually defeat his opponents in combat, in which case he would have been quite unstoppable, he instead does the one possible thing that could actually defeat him by opening up a dimensional rift to the Dead Zone, an alternate dimension. He attempts to send the good guys there, but, predictably, the good guys manage to toss him in there instead of them before it seals up. Due to his immortality, he's stuck there forever. (At least until a filler arc in the anime where he escapes, but at the end, is sent back with his previous way of escape destroyed.)
- A professor enjoys doing this to students in Rosario To Vampire. She considers it "art".
- In Bleach, the end of the fight between Mayuri Kurotsuchi and the Espada Szayel Aporro Granz. Due to implanting an egg of himself into Nemu to resurrect himself, Szayel ingests a massive dose of a drug that grants superhuman senses, slowing down his perception of time. With seconds seemingly taking centuries for him, and his body unable to keep up, he is utterly incapacitated. Kurotsuchi then stabs him through the hand and chest, not quite piercing his heart. While this would take mere seconds in real time, it is implied that it would take an eternity for Szayel to actually experience his impending death.
- In Yu Yu Hakusho, Kurama traps Toguro Ani in a plant that drains the energy of its victims until they die, while showing them a hallucination of their worst fear... but since the latter can't die, he's stuck seeing his worst fears for eternity. You've probably seen it mentioned elsewhere on this site that pissing off Kurama is a horrible idea.
- A short manga entitled The Enigma Of Amigara Fault has holes in a cliffside created by some ancient culture as a supernatural punishment. Each hole is the exact match of a human being living on Earth, and if they see their hole, they're filled with the inescapable urge to enter it. As they sink into the earth, in the crushing dark, they can't turn back and the hole slowly... slowly... warps in shape.
- In Part 2 of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure, the villain Cars ends up gaining immortality and an auto-evolution ability after combining the Stone Mask and Red Stone of Asia. Joseph uses this ability against him by throwing him into an active volcano where he hardens in defense as it's about to erupt. He gets launched into space and is stuck floating around forever, eventually his mind shuts down completely.
- In Part 5 of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure, the Boss Diavolo/King Crimson was struck by Giorno's Arrow-struck stand, Gold Experience Requiem, which sent him in a mental, eternal loop of deaths, while his body stayed idle, seemingly comatose.
- Kenji Murasame from Giant Robo: The Day The Earth Stood Still is an immortal in a way — he can be killed, but always comes back to life. He dies several times in the series, only to return again, sometimes injured, sometimes bleeding, but always with a sad smile on his face and an "Eh, such is life, and it will always be. Trust me, I know" sort of comment.
- In the classic Nickelodeon anime Noozles, the soul of Sandy's grandfather is doomed to spend the rest of eternity trapped inside a crystalline orb in another dimension.
- Used for a Karmic Death in Franken Fran. An old, rich woman was seeking to have her youth restored, and had her servants murder any doctor that couldn't come up with a permanent answer. She's also had herself mass-cloned, only to murder her clones one by one and drink a solution made from their eggs, one of the partially-successful treatments. She hires Fran, who comes up with a treatment that seems to have results... then has her men cut Fran's head off afterwards. Unfortunately for the old woman, Fran is an Artificial Human, capable of stitching her own head back into place. She confronts the old woman afterwards, and notes an unusual rash on her arm... Turns out, as aging is caused by programmed cell death, Fran had adjusted the woman's cells to be the one type of cell that is not preprogrammed to die... cancer cells. As she says it, the old woman collapses into a giant pile of cancerous cells. And then Fran tells her that, theoretically, she'll now live forever.
- The Mazoku from Slayers have Raugnut Rushauvna (or however you spell that), a very, very nasty curse that makes its victim completely immortal... while also turning their body inside out and causing it to continually devour itself and regenerate, over and over and over again, for all eternity.
- Angel Sanctuary has a double High Octane Nightmare Fuel version revealed towards the end. The most powerful angel Adam Kadamon said to be mother/father of all angels was imprisoned for probably thousands of years by god because he was afraid of its power and was slowly taken apart to be fed hir children the angels. Yes, you got it right, the cute little angels are fed their mom/dad, no wonder most of them are not so pure. By the events of the books only a deformed head is left which is still conscious and able to talk but gets finally released by the good guys.
- Gundam also uses it on occasions. Zeta Gundam might give the idea of Kamille being thrown into one of those (though probably only life long) situation at the end, but he gets better. Villains like Katejina from Victory Gundam or Shagia Frost from Gundam X end up at least in one way or the other crippled (Katejina is blinded and amnesiac, Shagia is wheelchair-bound Gundam's not that far into mysticism, so no punishment beyond life so far). Though, Gundam X has Lucille Lilliant a.k.a. Lorelei (a good minor character) in a capsule for 15 years or so mostly cut off from the real world.
- The trope is interestingly subverted in Gundam 00. At the end of the second season, Tieria Erde purposely allows the main villain to destroy his physical body, so that he can upload his mind into the nigh-omnipotent supercomputer VEDA, and shut down the machines that are attacking his friends. Tieria seems happy with his decision; he finds completion by accepting who he is, becoming one with VEDA's vast network.
- The manga Blood Alone has a killer who can jump to other bodies when he dies. Unfortunately, the last people he fights are a vampire and rather savvy human. She turns him; and then he breaks his neck just as he turns into a vampire. The killer is now frozen in the body of an permanently broken necked vampire. They lock him up in a room in the basement of a hospital.
- The manga Tokyo Crazy Paradise has a scene in which exhibits on display in cabinets turn out to be human beings, posed like famous works of art. The cabinets contain machinery that keeps their occupants alive and immobile. They are intended for sale to rich collectors who are perfectly aware that the exhibits are alive and helpless, and quite happy to leave them that way. The heroine Tsukasa attempts to free them, but is caught and ends up frozen in a cabinet herself. Fortunately for all of them, the auction is raided and the exhibits are set free.
- In once scene in the manga of Elfen Lied, there's a diclonius who is not much more than a head and a chest within a completely enclosed metal box. The head is covered by the same helmet and mask as the dicloni in the lab. The diclonius' only purpose is to use its telepathic abilities to sense others of its kind and serves as a biological detector device.
- Not only that, but a device is connected to the girl's spine to make her experience continuous pain in order to prevent her from lashing out at her tormentors. Ouch...
- He also stated that after raping her (before cutting her in half), he cut out her vocal cords. This series doesn't have enough generosity to its characters to do it in a clean way, so you must use your imaginations on how that went.
- Because that isn't enough, her psychic projection of herself is nothing but a scarred upper-body with a faceless, missphapen head uttering only "It hurts", "Kill me" and "Run" over and over.
- Greed found himself in this situation in the Fullmetal Alchemist anime (sealed in a skull stuck in a wall for hundreds of years), and chose death in favor of letting it happen to him again.
- In the Endless Eight arc of the Haruhi Suzumiya series, the reality warping main character made it so that the last two weeks of summer vacation looped over 15,000 times. Everyone had their memories wiped after each loop, except for Yuki Nagato, who had to consciously experience the same things over and over for OVER FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE YEARS...and though she is bad at showing emotion, she slowly became very, very sad until it visually showed. The more one thinks about it, the worse it is.
- In Nightmare Inspector, while Hiruko was still Chitose Kurosu his masters broke all of his limbs. All he could do was scream.
- One possible interpretation of the Evas, especially Unit 01, in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! has this. Characters frequently get their souls taken from them and imprisoned in cards or in the Shadow Realm. No idea what they can feel while they're inside either one.
- The manga Oldboy stars Goto, a man who is locked in a room for a decade. Just stuck in there, with no explanation or reason given. The room has little besides a bed and a tv, he is given the same food every day, and he's occasionally knocked out and given a haircut. When the decade is up, he's dumped out in a field with no explanation again. He doesn't take it well. The Korean film based on the manga actually kept him there for fifteen years and had a whole different kind of hell to deal with once he got out.
- The fact that his captors fed him the food he hated the most only makes the situation worse.
- This page from Stray Little Devil. The familiar in question literally cannot scream.
Comic Books
Film
- Imohtep in both versions of The Mummy. The novelization of the 1999 film explains that Imhotep's soul is locked in his body, even after it dies, and in the meantime, he's buried alive with flesh eating scarabs.
- End fate of the slasher in Monster Man, where the survivors manage to steal his monster truck and proceed to avert Once Is Not Enough with it. They plough into him, run him over, reverse over him, and then run him over, again and again for about five minutes straight. As he's been rendered essentially unkillable thanks to his sister's Black Magic, he's still alive and aware even after they finally get sick of it and drive away, leaving behind a great greasy smear of meat-pulp screaming that they haven't killed him yet.
- Awake is about a man who undergoes surgery, during which the anesthetic had worn off but the neuromuscular blocking agents holding him still had not.
- In Being John Malkovich, John Cusack's character attempts to travel through the portal at a particularly inappropriate time, leaving his consciousness stranded in the body of a young girl that he cannot control.
- And, ostensibly, he gets to watch his two former lovers lead happy lives with each other. Salt, meet wound.
- Hey, don't forget Mr. Malkovich himself- being helplessly forced to watch somebody else control his body for the rest of his life? Eesh.
- In The Burrowers, the monsters' venom causes near-total paralysis, save breathing and slight movement of the toes or fingers. Once their victims are paralyzed, the creatures bury their prey with nothing but the nose exposed, ensuring the captive won't suffocate and will provide fresh meat when the time comes. Unfortunately, once the monsters have been killed, the surviving humans don't realize they need to look for a still-living victim, who is left buried up to his nose without hope of rescue.
- In the book and movie Johnny Got His Gun, the main character loses all of his limbs and all of his senses but feeling in an explosion and is unable to suffocate due to a tracheostomy. At one point, he thinks in a panic, "What good is living if I can't even tell if I'm asleep or awake?!?" He tries Morse Code to request dying, but is ignored (for pretty much no reason) and implied to live the rest of his natural life stuck like this. The book was meant to be a commentary on the horrors of war. Talk about Anvilicious.
- The Matrix: "Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to... speak?" While it's true that the trope does not fully apply here because Neo was only afflicted for a very short time, the scene still is a haunting literal depiction of this trope.
- In Pirates Of The Caribbean, Bootstrap Bill was tied to a cannon and sent to the bottom of the ocean by Captain Barbossa. However, because of the curse of the Aztec gold, which rendered him immortal, he was fated to spend an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and unable to free himself, until the Big Bad of the second film came along.
- In Pitch Black, a bound, gagged and sedated Riddick tells (in Voice Over) how the animal part of the brain never goes to sleep - which is why he is still fully aware of what's going on during the space voyage.
- Though Riddick, while certainly not the most well-adjusted individual, doesn't seem to be bothered that much by the sensation.
- The evil genie in Wishmaster transforms a sales clerk whom he tricks into wishing for eternal beauty into a sales mannequin. On the bright side, it might end when she has her soul torn out. On the not so bright side... she is having her soul torn out.
- Averted when in the end, the protagonist wishes all of the events of the movie into never having happened.
- At the end of the Fantastic Four movie, the villain Victor van Doom is fully transformed into living metal. His body is heated up and then rapidly cooled, resulting in a crystallisation process that leaves him unable to move, and everyone to believe he is dead. Unfortunately for him, he is still fully conscious. He got better in the sequel.
- Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi: In the belly of the Sarlacc, victims find a new definition of suffering as they are "slowly digested over a thousand years".
- The Expanded Universe story "A Barve Like That", describing Boba Fett's escape from the Sarlacc is a freaking study in this trope...there's something in the Sarlacc's digestive fluids that keeps people alive and conscious, though immobile and in pain, since the thing rarely feeds. Not only that, it's telepathic, can force people to relive their, its, and each other's memories, and apparently becomes sentient through its victims - even after death, they become part of its psyche.
- When does does eventually escape, the Sarlacc appears to express some satisfaction that Fett will "release it from the long cycle". He does not, implying that its own existence is an example of this trope.
- In the original installment in the Saw franchise, Adam is left alone to die in the bathroom in pitch black darkness, his leg still chained to the pipe. It is revealed in Saw III that Amanda asphyxiates him out of mercy.
- Victims of Cecile and Justify in The Skeleton Key tend to wind up in elderly, stroke ridden bodies, unable to take care of themselves, let alone tell anyone what had happened.
- The climax of Audition sees the protagonist injected with a drug that paralyzes his muscles but heightens his pain sensation while his girlfriend starts torturing him with piano wire and acupuncture needles. He is trying very very hard to scream, you better believe it.
- The victim of the "Sloth" punishment in Se7en is kept paralysed in his own flat for a year by the villain, occasionally given antibiotics so as not to die from his bedsores. By the time he is saved and taken to a hospital, his mind is no longer functioning.
- Although the effect is mostly killed by the movie's cheese factor, Casper Meets Wendy does feature a vortex that is magically opened and used to throw victims into which drags them away. After it's closed, very few people can open it again, so a later rescue is out of the question. It's particularly horrific for the ghosts, since a human might be lucky and get bashed in the head but someone already dead wouldn't have that option.
- The third Nightmare on Elm Street revealed Freddy actually devours the souls of his victims, keeping them contained in his body while leeching power from them. Some of their screaming, writhing faces periodically appear on his torso. They actually rip him apart in the fourth movie.
- The fate of the villain in The Fly 2, when fly Marty replaces his mutated genes with the villain ones, thus trapping the villain in a bloated, deformed mutated body that can barely crawl.
- The Silent Hill movie has Alessa Gillespie, a girl who has been confined to a hospital bed for the past thirty years because of third degree burns which covered most of her body. She doesn't appear to be able to talk, and even after joining her fully mobile doppelganger, she still has no speaking parts for the rest of the movie. She's also crazy.
Literature
- The Trope Namer, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, written by Harlan Ellison, ends with someone being put into this situation via Involuntary Shapeshifting to prevent him from harming himself in any way by the supercomputer AM in both the original short story as well as the bad end of the computer game based on it. Oh, call it as it is. He ends up as a freaking blob of dough. Oozing around the inside of a crazy, vengeful computer forever. Did we mention that it can inflict lots of other fun physical tortures on him e.g. heat, cold, hunger etc.? And that everyone else in the world is dead?
- Not only does the last survivor experience this, AM does as well. Think about the situation at the end of the story: Four out of five of the humans it saved for the specific purpose of torturing for eternity are dead. To keep the fifth one alive, it had to forceably shapeshift it into a form that will reduce its ability to kill itself. In doing so, AM has no actual humans to torture any more, and (if memory serves), AM itself is simply a pile of printed circuit boards that itself can't do anything but hate its makers...
- The game provides for a better ending, presumably even for the person who remains to watch over the computer.
- In 1984, the whole world is effectively under this trope. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."
- In Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell, the gentleman with the thistledown hair speaks of trapping someone in the pattern of a Turkish rug... unable to escape from the the endless labyrinthine geometry of a length of carpet? Yeah that would probably drive anyone mad.
- In Twilight Watch an uber-spell is mentioned, though never used, called "The sarcophagus of times". It is meant to encapsulate both the victim AND the caster in the said sarcophagus for all eternity.
- Marvin, the perpetually depressed android from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book series, experiences this a number of times during the books due to frequent abuse of Time Travel on the part of his companions. The end result is shown in the penultimate book in the series, where he's several times older than the universe and profoundly bitter about it.
- In Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness, the god Ra deals with his enemies in this fashion. His ex-girlfriend is a living skull that he uses as a paperweight; one enemy is threaded into his carpet but aware as he is walked upon; other enemies are awake and aware in forms like ashtrays and fireplace pokers.
- In the book The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen by Lloyd Alexander, some soldiers are turned into stone, but find that they can move with great effort.
- Hans Christian Andersen's The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, in which the title character is punished for her vanity by becoming a statue in Hell. She's able to hear everything being said about her by the living.
- In Poul Anderson's short story Kyrie, the main character is telepathically linked to another character who falls into a black hole. Due to time dilation, it takes him forever to die, but telepathy is not affected by time dilation, so she feels his pain forever.
- L. Frank Baum's Oz series has various instances of this trope:
- Tik Tok is a helpful robot who is built to work like a very big wind-up toy, with separate winding keys for his brain, speech, and ability to move. If his body winds down, he's immobilized, but still able to think until his brain winds down. It's especially bad when he wants to help a teammate, but can only watch them suffer/get captured/etc.
- Good fun when his brain runs down first, though; without any actual thinking to govern it, he wanders aimlessly and blabbers nonsensically. Plus, since he's not thinking about it, he's not suffering, so everyone wins!
- Additionally, in one of the Oz books, we are assured that while you are in Oz, you can't die. Which is cool... until it is also stated that you may be turned to stone or into a statue or chopped into pieces or worse. Worse yet, as is also pointed out, the spell which caused this effect made no exceptions — so all babies are eternally babies, and anyone on their death beds are caught up dying forever.
- Those who are turned to ornaments in Ozma of Oz don't seem to be aware, though, so such transformations wouldn't fall under this trope.
- Then there's the Tin Woodsman, rusted solid for years until Dorothy rescued him.
- A later book introduces Captain Fyter, the Tin Soldier, who has the same freaking story!
- Or the Scarecrow, who is stuck on a pole until Dorothy rescued him. Though in his case he only hung there for about a week, just long enough to get the idea that a brain would be a good thing to have.
- Subverted in Jorge Luis Borges' story The Secret Miracle, in which Time Stands Still for a writer who's been placed before a firing squad. He can't move or speak, but it doesn't bother him, because he has a year to finish writing his masterpiece, for himself (and God) alone.
- Not only that, but the writer himself asked God for the extra time exactly so he could finish his masterpiece, and the time stop also prevents him from feeling tired, or feeling any pain.
- In Brian Caswell's Deucalion, two Elokoi (a telepathic alien) were kidnapped and put into stasis by humans, and sent back to Earth for study. However, the stasis did not shut off their brains, so by the time they arrived a hundred years later they had gone completely insane.
- At the end of one of Jack Chalker's Well World novels, Nathan Brazil takes advantage of his temporary control of the master program to put an enemy in a repeating time loop — being torn apart as the prey of some very hungry predators.
- In fact, he is only forced to repeat this loop seven times—one for every person he killed. He isn't actually told this fact, though, and unsurprisingly assumes the worst the first time he wakes up again after dying. If he had been told, he probably would have stuck with his initial plan of thwarting the punishment by jumping off a cliff.
- 0 from Greg Cox's Q Continuum trilogy has been locked outside the galaxy by the barrier for eons, and with his ability to travel beyond light speed shut down by the Q, travelling to another also isn't an option for him — well, it is, but he'd still be alone in space for a very long time. He's gone quite mad, of course... not that he was any less dangerous sane.
- In Roald Dahl's The Witches, the grandmother tells our hero the story of a girl who went missing... only to appear in a painting in the family home. We know she fell foul of a witch, but the fact she was forced to grow up, live and eventually die in a painting, with no means of escape or communicating with her family makes for the horrors.
- In Roald Dahl's short story William and Mary, the Jerk Ass protagonist, who has incurable cancer, has his brain and one eye removed and put in a sort of bowl as a scientific experiment. But then his wife takes him home in order (it is implied) to inflict mental torture on him.
- In Dante's Divine Comedy, the worst sinners in Hell — those who betrayed their superiors and benefactors — are completely entombed in ice.
- The late Dutch sci-fi/fantasy author Paul Harland once wrote an excellent adaptation of Dante's Inferno called Water tot IJs (Water to Ice). The story takes place on a planet divided among alien races who use humans as a resource in return for making them immortal. The effect is indeed hellish - all immortalised humans are forever subjected to experimentation, exploitation and torture. The Ninth Circle still involves people entombed in ice, but in Harland's version they are kept there by a race of aliens who feed on desperation.
- The title character of John Brunner's The Traveller in Black walks the Earth granting wishes, though never in the manner that the wisher intends. In one scene a man wishes he could start a new religion so that he could have all the fine clothes, food and young women he wanted. The Traveller grants his wish by freezing him where he sits. His fellow villagers consider his perfect immobility miraculous and worship him as a god, dressing him in fine robes, giving him food in the form of burnt offerings, and presenting him with young women as human sacrifices. In another scene, a man wishes he could learn all the secrets of a magical tree. The Traveller complies by incorporating the man's body into the tree's, so that he instantly understands how to use its magic but is physically incapable of using it (or of doing anything else).
- L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's fantasy The Incomplete Enchanter has a brief scene in which the evil wizard Dolon shows the heroes his collection of faeries whom he has shrunk and imprisoned in glass jars, and his former apprentice whom he paralyzed into a living nude statue as punishment for spying for the good guys.
- Noirtier in Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo, who was stuck with locked-in syndrome after a stroke. Like the real-life example of Jean-Dominique Bauby, he communicates by blinking.
- In David Eddings' Belgariad, Belgarath encases Zedar in rock. Made worse by the fact that a) they were brothers before Zedar's Face Heel Turn, and b) Zedar is stated in the prequels to be very afraid of the dark.
- The scenario gets a bit worse when you consider the provocation: Zedar joined the Big Bad apparently not of his own free will (even the hero had difficulty overcoming the guy's persuasive mind games), and (the final straw for Belgarath) killed a beloved party member — a death that despite all odds doesn't even stick — while still under control by the Big Bad. Somehow Belgarath sees fits to dish out everlasting punishment and doesn't even see fit to undo it later. In all fairness, the same prequels that establish the fear of the dark indicate that Belgarath had every reason to believe that Zedar was responsible for several fairly heinous crimes, including driving one of their brothers from a state of mere depression into one so profound he willed himself out of existence. Belgarath has indicated that he thinks of that whenever the prospect of letting Zedar out comes up. Even if Belgarath does let Zedar out, Beldin has said he'll go and stuff him back in again.
- Another couple of Eddings examples occur in his Tamuli series. Several of the main villains are placed in a state outside of normal time, still in the world but unable to interact with anything (water can be walked on for example) and then lit with a perpetual fire, thus leaving them to burn alive, without hope of death or respite, forever.
- In The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach, the Galactic Emperor punishes a king who insults his baldness by conquering his planet and connecting him to a machine that keeps him alive. He then starts a galaxy-wide cult in which certain men become "carpet makers", whose purpose in life is to weave a carpet from the hair of their female relatives and sell it to the Emperor. These he collects, and uses to carpet the entire surface of the king's planet, forcing him to watch. For tens of thousands of years.
- The two protagonists of Joe Haldeman's Buying Time were zapped by an experimental drug that had an unamusing side effect of slowing down their time sense precipitously. The result was a two-week inter-planetary trip back to Earth was for them a twenty year, near freeze-frame odyssey.
- Stephen King's short story The Jaunt is about a form of teleportation that takes a split second on the outside, and quadrillions of senseless years on the inside. Most people who use it are drugged and unconscious throughout. Unless you're an inquisitive little boy who decides to hold his breath during the process of administrating the anesthetic gas. Then you get to be conscious the whole time. As in "the whole of time." Yippee. No wonder everyone who goes through it while conscious ends up dead or insane.
- It's mentioned at one point that a woman was Jaunted off to nowhere by her murderous husband. Her husband's lawyer made the mistake of trying to defend him by claiming it wasn't murder since there was no proof she was dead; once the jury had time to think about that, the husband was convicted and executed.
- "LONGER THAN YOU THINK, DAD! LONGER THAN YOU THINK!!!"
- Another King story, Autopsy Room Four, has a man being prepared for autopsy after being paralyzed by a snakebite and mistaken for dead.
- The HP Lovecraft story Out of the Aeons has the Cosmic Horror Ghatanothoa:
Sight of the god, or its image, as all the legends of the Yuggoth-spawn agreed, meant paralysis and petrifaction of a singularly shocking sort, in which the victim was turned to stone and leather on the outside, while the brain within remained perpetually alive - horribly fixed and prisoned through the ages, and maddeningly conscious of the passage of interminable epochs of helpless inaction till chance and time might complete the decay of the petrified shell and leave it exposed to die. Most brains, of course, would go mad long before this aeon-deferred release could arrive.
- The Mi-Go who appear more often in the Cthulhu mythos can fly through space unassisted. Of course, most beings (such as humans) can't do this, so they are turned into brains in jars, and fitted to suitable sensory and motor apparatus when needed. Of course, if they're unplugged, they're in a sensory deprivation chamber that doubles as a robust life support unit which will ensure they have a very long life indeed.
- The short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine had a story by Victor Milan called The Casque of Lamont T. Yado. Yeah, lousy pun... anyway, in a twist on Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado, the "Montresor" character helps the "Fortunato" character to steal a time helmet which will let him move so quickly it will seem as if Time Stands Still. The twist is that "Montresor" has sabotaged the controls, so "Fortunato" actually finds himself moving slower and slower until he can't make any visible movement, while his consciousness remains in normal time.
- One of several examples by Michael Moorcock is found in The Queen of the Swords, later collected in the first Corum omnibus. There's a scene in which our heroes encounter a huge army of foot soldiers cursed by the goddess Xiombarg to stand like statues, which they've been doing for 100 years.
- The fate of many of the golems in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. It's mentioned that many of them end up deep underground, ceaselessy working machines alone in the lightless depths, sometimes for centuries. One even spent millennia walking across the ocean floor after the civilization that created it sank. Somewhat subverted in that the golems don't seem to have a capacity for boredom, so it doesn't really bother them much.
- Larry Niven:
- In the short story Wait It Out, astronauts stranded on Pluto take off their helmets to freeze themselves until help arrives: they discover that the low temperature turns their brains into superconductors, meaning they will be completely aware, if totally immobile for however many years it takes for their rescuers to arrive. Assuming they ever do.
- However their thoughts are much slower than normal thoughts and a night seems like just a few minutes to them, so they won't experience as many years as on the calendar.
- Even so, if they're frozen for billions of years it'll still feel like millions...
- In the short story The Ethics of Madness, the main character ends up being pursued through empty space by an empty ship, completely alone, for one hundred and twenty thousand years. He can choose to die if he wants, although his brain eventually becomes so deeply patterned that this isn't really an option.
- Margaret St. Clair's 1953 story Thirsty God: A man who has raped an alien girl takes refuge in what seems to be a shrine but is actually a biological converter designed for another alien species. Once the machines have done their bit, he wakes up paralyzed and thirsty. He is soon visited by the first of many waterlogged amphibian creatures who worship him as a god because his body can now absorb their bodies' excessive moisture. To him it's a horrible physical and psychological torment, and he can never move or escape.
- The April 1999 issue of Analog had a Probability Zero short called Going Home by H.G. Stratmann, which was about the first manned flight of a Faster-Than-Light spaceship. On the outward journey everything seemed fine, but the instant the two-person crew returned home they found themselves incapable of making the slightest sound or movement. Relativity says that information can't travel faster than light, so the universe immobilized them to prevent them from telling anyone what they'd seen... (Of course, because it's a "Probability Zero" piece there's a flaw in this logic — not that that's any consolation to the two victims.)
- In Whitley Streiber's The Hunger, Miriam Blaylock has several boxes in her attic which contain the immortal but eternally-starving remains of the lovers she's turned into semi-vampires.
- In JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion and The Children Of Hurin, Morgoth placed Hurin upon a seat of stone, high upon Mount Thangorodrim, from which he could never move but could see with enchanted eyes all that befell his family under Morgoth's curse. Note that Hurin was much too tough to scream, or cry or plead. He just went on a rampage when finally freed, just as Morgoth planned.
- The Elves who were captured by Morgoth had it worse, since he preferred to keep them alive underground — and they cannot die of natural causes — and if anyone wondered what made Orcs so irritable, consider the fate of immortal beings who, shortly after being born (and having barely learned to speak) were abducted and taken to the Iron Hells of Angband where they were tortured for literally eons while their kin are secluded away in an earthly Paradise.
- Maedhros, who particularly annoyed Morgoth, was shackled to a cliff by his right wrist and left hanging. His rescuer managed to find him because he was singing while he hung there.
- The end of Tad Williams' series Otherland has the co-Big Bad Johnny Dread, a Psycho For Hire Serial Killer, trapped in an illusory world within his own mind in which he's constantly chased across a desert by the women he has killed over his lifetime, all of whom have transformed into relentless hyena-like monstrosities. He can't even stop for a few minutes or they will catch up to him and tear him to pieces. Horrible, but when you consider what an inhuman monster Dread actually was, it was just deserts...
- The Other is itself a perfect example of the trope. At first it seems to be an Instant AI Just Add Water but later turns out to be the brain of a psychic infant imprisoned in a satellite and forced to act as the operating system for the Grail Brotherhood's network.
- Sylvester and the Magic Pebble was probably our first experience with how Nightmare Fuel-ready this concept was, especially given that the eponymous donkey is rescued from his fate by sheer dumb luck. To go into more detail, Sylvester finds a magic pebble that grants his wishes. But at one point, he encounters a lion, and gets scared. To escape the lion, he says "I wish I were a rock." Well, the lion ignores him alright, but he is a sentient, immobile rock. Making things worse, the book goes into detail about how his parents get scared and look everywhere for their son, while Sylvester is unable to move or scream for help. His parents finally give up and try to move on with their lives. They have a picnic on the rock that just happens to be Sylvester and his dad just happens to put the wishing pebble on him and Sylvester wishes himself back into donkey form. Many a little kid has been freaked right the heck out by this story, especially as it is just plain dumb luck that saves Sylvester from his eternal torment.
- Now imagine what it would feel like to slowly erode as a rock over tens of thousands of years.
- Stuck in Neutral is about a boy with cerebral palsy so bad that he has no way of communicating with the outside world, and has all the mobility and responsiveness of a newborn that never cries.
- At the end of the book, author Terry Trueman says that his son Sheehan is like that, and he doesn't know if Sheehan actually is as mindless as he seems or if he's thinking and intelligent, but immobile, like the book's protagonist. His protagonist is content with his life and astral-projects to protest when his father, weeping, wants to euthanize him, saying that his life is good and he doesn't want it to end. Maybe Sheehan Trueman is content to be an adult cared for like a baby, listening to his family talk to him and pretending he can respond, being left at night alone in a room with a fly and barely enough reflexes to close his eyes when the fly lands on them, drooling and unable to decide what to look at, his greatest pleasures being when his mother pokes a sweet into his mouth or his gaze dips briefly into someone's cleavage. Maybe he is happy. After all, it's all he's ever known.
- This is done in the Shannara series with Anthrax. A superintelligent computer system that takes anyone who enters its domain and turns them into cyborgs completely under its control and incapable of free will. However, in order to use the abilities they may possess, their minds are kept alive and CONSCIOUS.
- Here's an example from Remnants. Billy Weir on the Mayflower. The official website's description is pretty damn memorable: "When Billy sleeps, his brain doesn't shut down. He's about to sleep for 500 years."
- Kevin O'Donnell's 1978 Analog story "Gift of Prometheus" uses a variation on the Prometheus story in which a time traveler is shot while trying to use his time bracelet. The bullet ricochets off the bracelet into his stomach, and the malfunctioning bracelet strands him in limbo, surrounded by nothing, incapable of being found or rescued, and frozen in time so the pain will never end. He can only escape temporarily into his own memories, even though they will always lead him back to the pain.
- The Star Trek The Next Generation novel Ghost Ship features a noncorporeal entity that consumes the bodies of its prey, leaving them conscious, but with no senses. When the crew of the Enterprise runs into it, Data manages to make contact with the crew of a Soviet submarine who have endured nearly four hundred years of this and beg the crew to help them die. Picard, uncertain, has himself cut off from all his senses for 18 hours. The description of this experience is particularly gruesome, especially when he loses any ability to track time and has become convinced the ship's been destroyed and he'll be stuck that way forever. Fortunately, in the end, the entity is killed and the submarine crew allowed to die.
- The all-series spanning two-novel series The Brave and the Bold also features a Big Bad who is introduced in this way as Sealed Evil In A Can. And this is how he ends up, this time for all eternity.
- The Give Yourself Goosebumps book Scream of the Evil Genie has this as one of its bad endings: wish for beauty, and you get turned into a beautiful painting.
- In the Goosebumps short story "How I Won My Bat", a kid gets a bat which makes him a near-perfect ball player, and he asks the person who gave it to him if he can keep it forever. The guy says yes, but wants to take a picture of him swinging first. The "camera" turns out to freeze him in place and he gets put up in a museum. He doesn't think it's too bad, though, because, technically, he does get to keep the bat forever.
- No matter how silly you might think I Live In Your Basement sounds there is still such moments being smothered by his friend Keith, who has been turned into a blob.
- The short story There's Nothing Under the Bed by Bruce Coville. It ends with the protagonist being captured by the monster under his bed, and dragged into the hellish nightmare world it inhabits... then turned into an under-the-bed monster himself. He then has to live in a surreal world made of dreams and nightmares, and his job involves him receiving vivid mental pictures of horrible nightmares so he can deliver them to people while they sleep. He's telling his story after the fact and it's implied this has been happening to him for decades. He'll get relief someday, though, as he gets to go back to being human when he captures someone else to replace him. The end of the story is basically an explicit threat that the reader could be next. High Octane Nightmare Fuel and Paranoia Fuel, yay!
- Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels have the Spell of Forlorn Encystment, which keeps its victims alive indefinitely in tiny pockets inside solid rock thirty-seven miles underground. A few victims are (accidentally) released and found to be in near-catatonic states.
- Dungeons And Dragons, which takes its system of magic from Dying Earth, has the exact same spell under the less poetic name "Imprisonment".
- And there's the Epic Level spell "Nailed to the Sky" which throws a targeted creature into orbit, slowly starving to death, with little hope of ever coming down. Admittedly, it's not quite as vicious as most effects on this page, but it's still rather nasty.
- This happens a lot in the universe of the Malazan Book Of The Fallen. Possible ways include being dragged underground by a living house thing, getting stuck under a huge boulder while immortal, dying by a special sword and having one's soul imprisoned inside the same sword in order to drag a wagon forever, being undead and getting too damaged to move, being used to seal a dangerous dimensional rift with one's soul, and many more. In fact, eternal imprisonment is the method of choice for dealing with beings that won't die easily.
- In a short story in one of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1980s anthologies, the protagonist (and everyone around him) is trapped in a Groundhog Day Loop that gets steadily shorter, from hours to minutes and then mere seconds, until he couldn't even get to the end of a thought. The sequence always started over exactly the same, with him being trapped on a traffic island, and the drivers of the cars around him likewise going in circles forever and ever... the protagonist speculates that Earth may have fallen into a traveling singularity or that Time has actually ended because the universe was imploding, but essentially they are trapped in hell, going insane, and no hope even for death to deliver them.
- Dearly Devoted Dexter gives us the "yodeling potato". That's where everything except the eyes (but including the eyelids) is stripped away... and they're forced to watch in a mirror the entire time. Fate Worse Than Death by far.
- In Gods of Riverworld, the insane Star Spoon traps the men who raped her in sealed cells, with fully sensory-interactive recordings of her memories of the rapes playing on endless loops. The cells provide food and water, their Riverworld bodies never age, and she'd set the resurrection equipment to return them to the same spots if they die, so even suicide is no escape.
- Whatever Doc Savage visits under the U.S.A. contains moving rocks and trees that a man who claims to be a junior devil says are low-level damned souls.
- An Edogawa Ranpo short horror story called The Caterpillar featured a Japanese World War 2 pilot who lost all his limbs, much of his face, and the ability to talk, but not the ability to roll around and stare eerily at his wife, who alternately tortured him and treated him like a baby.
- Eric Nylund's A Game Of Universe features two examples. First, there's a magical kingdom where the inhabitants have been cursed and cannot die. Their method of execution is dismemberment, followed by being used as fishbait. The curse means they're conscious through this whole process. The second is revealed as the punishment for those who betray the local assassins' guild: They trap you in a holographic environment designed to prey on all your personal fears: a personalized technological version of hell (which actually does exist in this 'Verse; the hero gets to visit it).
- Qwan from Artemis Fowl turned himself and fellow warlocks into statues when trying to save them from magic gone wrong. He can't come out of the form by himself, and remains stuck as statue while conscious for 10,000 years. Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to have affected his sanity.
- In the Thursday Next series, Aornis Hades is trapped in a time loop of six minutes stuck in a queue at a department store. As soon as she reaches the front of the line, she is transported back to the beginning.
- This is a common way of jailing the difficult. Hundreds of criminals (at minimum) go through this. The time loop and duration of punishment varies. At least you never get hungry.
- In Brisingr, Oromis, Eragon's mentor, tells Eragon that dragons can store their consciousness inside a "heart of hearts", and live long after their body dies through this special body part. However, it's alluded to that this life is similar to this trope, as they are stuck in solid orbs and cannot move or speak (though they are still conscious and can therefore think and transmit thoughts, and that often dragons will beg other riders to destroy the heart that they're stuck in so that they can finally die.
- Dragons have Horcruxes? Wow.
- However at the end of the book, thanks to the Law Of Conservation Of Detail, Oromis and his dragon, Glaedr are slain, and Glaedr is now forced to stay in his own heart of hearts, which he had just, a mere day or two before, given to Eragon. When he realizes his fate, he does, in fact, let out an inaudible dragon roar out of sorrow.
- In Welkin Weasels 2: Castle Storm, this is the fate of Rosencrass and Guildenswine. They kill a bird in the Forest of Lost Birds and are swallowed up by a tree trunk, becoming mere ferret shapes in the wood, as punishment. Luckily for them, they get carved into a ship's figurehead, and this puts them into the category of statues, which in Welkin can talk. Unfortunately, they're still nailed to the front of a ship, and later end up as totem poles in a mongoose village.
- This is a standard part of being a Controller in Animorphs. Of course, you can scream once every three days when the Yeerk leaves your body to feed, but nobody will be able to hear you underground.
- Also, in The Ellimist Chronicles, Toomin is captured by the entity 'Father', who for eons keeps him alive, motionless and underwater, the corpse of his spouse right in front of him, and forces him to mind games with the memories of the dead, all of which Toomin loses - until he figures out that he has an edge over Father in terms of creativity.
- The Yeerks arguably qualify, seeing as they've got a sentient mind inside a tiny body with very limited senses (this is one of the reasons they infest other creatures).
- In the singularly awful book Noir the protagonist is a member of an copyright enforcement squad who likes to separate the nervous system of copyright infringers and place them as wiring in things like loudspeakers and toasters, or embed them in carpets so the person against whom they infringed can stomp on them, play loud music, etc to them. (Yes, this entire book is a poorly-disguised rant about how the author wants to not kill but infinitely torture people anyone he considers a copyright infringer.)
- One suspects someone stole and read aloud some awful poetry he wrote in high school and he was showered by humiliation that he has let fester.
- Everworld has some High Octane Nightmare Fuel when the characters go through Nyflheim, along with the goddess of torture. Twice. Most of the damned are sealed in coffins for a thousands years or buried neck-deep in the ground and used as cobblestones. Others are nailed to the walls of a nearly Bottomless Pit, and if Hel is feeling particularly sadistic, thrown into lava pits forever.
- A short story about a boy who acquired a possessed guitar which made him play beautifully. However, the boy had guitar virgin fingers, without protective calluses, and the guitar decided when the boy could stop playing. So Yeah...
- Played straight in The Game of Wyrm and Soldier. The transforming soldier pieces are conscious and able to hear while in statue form, sometimes for generations. Some of them stay sane, probably because they're essentially Artificial Humans. Some don't. All come out a little bent after several hundred years of this.
- The Doctor Who novel Festival of Death has, as its main villain, someone who intends to reincarnate as his younger self and prevent his parents from dying in a shuttle accident. In order to do this, he wipes out an entire species who have the ability to do this. He succeeds, only to discover that while he inhabits his younger self's head, he can't actually impact on anything - he's just watching. Watching his parents' deaths. Watching the horrible deeds he committed. An infinite number of times. Also doubles as Laser Guided Karma.
- A similar event happens in the anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun. Main character Joseph Bonham steps on a landmine during World War I. He lives, but the blast removes both arms and legs, as well as blinds him, deafens him, and completely destroys his lower jaw, rendering it impossible for him to communicate with anybody.
- In the Orson Scott Card short story Kingsmeat, the main character commits "gross atrocities" against the people of his colony (by cutting off bits of them and feeding them to an evil alien), but it is found by to have been the only way to keep the colonists alive, so the court rules that he shall be "helped to live as long as science and prudence can keep a man alive". The colonists obey the judgement of the court, but they also cut off all his limbs, leaving only a head and a "loose sac of flesh that pulsed with life." This is not quite a literal application of the trope, as he is technically capable of screaming:
"They would, perhaps, have cut out his tongue, but since he never spoke, they didn't think of it. They would, perhaps, have cut out his eyes, but they wanted him to see them smile."
- In the novelization of Return Of The Jedi, Han Solo's time in carbon-freeze is described as "conscious, painful asphyxiation".
- In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Ysanne Isard, the Director of Imperial Intelligence, when finally brough to justice informed her captors that she knew too many secrets to be ever taken to trial. They concurred. Instead, she would be quietly locked away in a section of her ship, with no one to manipulate, no one to hurt, tended by droids and left all alone for the rest of her natural lifespan. Isard's horror at the thought of "life entombed" finally got her to act impulsively, and she was shot and killed.
- And there's the Pawns, who are mildly Force-Sensitive individuals who get embedded in meltmassif and wake up as it digs into their skull and embeds crystals into their key sensor and motor regions of their brain and end up hopelessly under the control of their master.
- There is that whole scene when the black-armored stormtroopers who'd earlier declared their absolute loyalty to Luke all start screaming and apparently having seizures as the meltmassif built into their armor turns into fine needles and works its way through their bodies into their brains. One of the vuctims he hears a sound as it's happening... there's no pain when the needles enter his brain, but he can feel his self being cut away and replaced by a thoughtless blinding rage, and his final thought is that he knows what the sound is. It's him. Screaming.
- Zenna Henderson wrote a short story, The Believing Child, about a little girl who believes whatever she's told — and whatever she believes becomes true. When she's told that the magic word PYRZQXGL from the Oz books makes the speaker able to change the shapes of things, she changes the two little boys who've been tormenting her into rocks — but, "They're scared," she adds, chillingly. "I turned them into scared rocks."
- Implied by Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and confirmed by Word Of God, to be the final fate of Lord Voldemort. Because he split his soul into seven pieces and had them all destroyed without being reintegrated, he is trapped for all eternity in a limbo between life and death.
- Iain Banks, author of The Culture novels, is VERY fond of this trope and has sprinkled his space operas with some truly horrifying examples of it. To name just one: In The Algebraist, a warlord has the head of a particularly troublesome rebel leader removed, sustains it on life support, mounts it upside down on the ceiling of his office, and then uses it as his personal punching bag forever after. A literal example of this trope too, as the warlord has the man's tongue removed after he grows tired of listening to it spit abuse and scream for release.
- In one of the short stories in John Ajvide Lindqvist's Pappersväggar (official English title pending), the main character makes a deal with a supernatural water-being that the ocean will never take his life. So he jumps into the sea only to discover that the bottom of the ocean is cold, and he becomes immobilized from hypothermia and has to remain there indefinitely, unable to drown or return to the surface.
- Though I realized while I wrote that, he would actually starve within days.
- It's insinuated that the pact doesn't just cover drowning but literally that his life cannot be taken in any kind of water. He is therefore pretty much immortal as long as he is stuck under the surface.
- I hate bring up Stephenie Meyer, but... in The Host, some humans whose bodies have been taken by the souls don't cease to exist, but rather their consciousness is shunted aside. They can't move any part of their own bodies, they can't speak, and only very rarely will the soul inside them even know the human is still there.
- Claudia in The Vampire Chronicles. Trapped forever in the body of a six-year-old while her mind matures.
- Also Mekare from the same series. Her tongue is cut out, and then she's sealed inside a coffin that is set adrift in the ocean.
- In Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman, those who die in the rides become part of the scenery. A boy who crashes his car in the bumper cars ride becomes an advertisement for coca-cola. The main character even remarks "If eyes could scream, the sound would be bloodcurdling".
- In the Indian in the Cupboard books by Lynne Reid Banks, a form of time travel requires someone to be locked into a container with a magical key, touching an object from a different era/setting, and they will be transported to that setting into the nearest toy or small figure. In The Return of the Indian, Omri tries this in a trunk without a predetermined toy to go into and ends up as a decoration on the side of a teepee, able to see and hear but not to move, during a battle. The teepee gets set on fire, and he sustains a bad burn and almost dies before he's brought back. In The Key to the Indian, it happens accidentally to Omri, his brother and his father in a car. Omri and Gillon go to India and luckily land in two puppets with faces and everything, which makes them just miniature versions of themselves; but their father becomes a corn doll in an Iroquois longhouse with no face — not deaf, but blind, unable to inhale normally or speak, and with "a smooth face of skin and bone with — no features." Understandably, he describes this as the worst shock of his life.
- Alastair Reynolds is also a fan of this trope. In Redemption Ark the Yellowstone space cops have their heads surgically removed and grafted into their patrol ships, which they control through a neural interface. One of these cops is punished for his brutality by having the life-support core, containing his head and the means to keep it alive, extracted from his ship. The plan is for the cop's head to be kept alive and conscious in an opaque cylinder for decades before he's finally allowed to die. The Scrimshaw suit of Absolution Gap is also specifically designed for this, being essentially an immobilising and sensory depriving human-shaped coffin with sufficient life support to keep the victim alive for years.
- In The Song of the Lioness, part of Tamora Pierce's Tortall metaseries, Duke Roger of Conté is called out on his attempts for the throne by the main character. Roger demands trial by combat, as per his rights as a noble, but he's going up against the best swordfighter in the series, so of course he loses. But he had a contingency plan: a spell known as the Sorcerer's Sleep, which resembles death but keeps the caster's soul bound to his body, making him easy to resurrect if someone powerful enough can be goaded into it. In the months between Roger's death at Alanna's hand and his resurrection at her brother's, Roger is fully conscious of who and where he is and how much time is passing. He has no way of knowing if someone will succeed in bringing him back, though, so he comes back Apocalyptically Crazy.
- In the Isaac Asimov short story Blank!, published in the anthology Buy Jupiter and Other Stories, the protagonists invent a time machine which malfunctions catastrophically during its maiden voyage, becoming "jammed" between two adjacent moments in time. When they open the capsule door to diagnose the problem, they discover the hard way that the machine is stuck in a time-vacuum of sorts, and that normal time in the capsule is now rushing out the door. As their time runs slower and slower, they eventually become stuck in the vacuum themselves to wait out eternity+1...
- Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut. Basically everyone on earth has to relive the past ten years, no chance of changing anything. The thoughts of the people who DIED in the past ten years aren't exactly addressed...
- Subverted in Greg Egan's Diaspora. The Star Puppies elect to spend entire interstellar voyages in simulations of biological forms experiencing real time, but avoid going insane by installing personality adjusting software that makes them feel joy in every experience. Think a few millennia on ecstasy but better.
- I can't remember the name of the book, but there is a story where it is explained that Hell and Purgatory are places where you are placed in your personal horror. The difference is Purgatory is temporary, after a period of seeming eternity you will wake up, as if you have just experienced a nightmare, and you'll have the chance to rethink your life. So how do you know if its only Purgatory? By waking up.
- Virally modified humans in Neal Asher's The Skinner are used as automata by an alien race which removes the brains and upper spinal cords and replaces them with a remote control system. The virus renders the bodies effectively immortal, bar massive trauma... but it is also implied that the excised brains are still fully conscious for the same reasons. One individual has his spine severed and the remote installed without removing his brain, leaving him with all his sensory input but no motor control, stuck with watching his body do another's bidding.
- The fate of Doran the Dragonlover was revealed in Deltora Quest 3: Isle of the Dead to be becoming the Guardian of the Sister residing there, which he originally sets out to destroy to save Deltora. Not only he guards the thing he cannot destroy as a Guardian, but he can't die without someone else killing him.
Live Action TV
- In the series finale of Alias, Big Bad Sloane finds the underground tomb of Rambaldi and uses his secret elixir to become immortal and invulnerable. Jack Bristow then proceeds to blow up the cave they're in, causing it to collapse on Sloane and leaving him to spend eternity buried under literal tons of rock, unable to move, all alone in the darkness, with only the stench of Jack's rotting corpse for company, while the rest of the world thinks he's dead.
- Angel The Series had a baddy ending up like this. After he'd died, his ghost survived by sending other people to Hell in his place. After using phlebotinum to bring him back to mortal life, and realizing they can't kill him without starting the whole thing over again, the heroes instead imprisoned him in a life-extending "cell": a locked closet in an empty basement hallway. Forever.
- Also happens to Angel himself, when Connor, believing Angel killed his adoptive father Holtz, decides that death is too good for him. So he seals Angel in a metal box and drops him in the ocean, knowing that hunger won't kill him, but it will torment him endlessly. He was rescued a few months later.
- Also, at one point Gunn was trapped in a hell dimension where he was strapped to a table, and every single day a demon would rip his heart out only for him to wake up the next day and go through it again.
- He got to scream, it just didn't matter. He also got to spend the non-heart-removal time with a fake life in a fake suburb. But he knew...once a day, it was time to go to the basement...
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "The Witch." Amy's body-swapping witchy mom has one of her spells turned back on her, and seemingly vanishes. At the end of the episode, it turns out she's been trapped in one of her old cheerleading trophies. She presumably died when they blew the school up at the end of season three.
- Which is later referenced when Oz is looking at the trophy case. "This may sound weird, but no matter where I move, this trophy's eyes seem to follow me."
- A season four episode, "Doomed", where the high school ruin was revisited, was apparently meant to show the statue remaining in the rubble, but the shot never made it past the shooting script.
- Angelus was also trapped in a "Hell dimension" for a subjective five hundred years.
- What makes it more tragic is that he got his soul back right before, so it wasn't Angelus, but Angel, who had to suffer this, at Buffy's hands, no less.
- Another season four episode, "Hush" is about demons who steal the voice of everyone in Sunnydale. They then proceed to break into college dorm rooms, cut their victims open and remove their hearts, all while the victims cannot scream.
- In the Doctor Who episode "The Five Doctors", anyone who claims Rassilon's Gift is granted true immortality, as an unmoving (but still aware) stone carving on Rassilon's tomb.
- The story "Mawdryn Undead" features a group of scientists who attempted to steal the secret of regeneration from the Time Lords. Caught by the Time Lords, the scientists were condemned to perpetual regeneration while also being trapped on a ship that is almost completely isolated from the universe.
- In "The Mark of the Rani," some poor fool accidentally steps on a mine planeted by the Rani, turning him into a tree. Initially this just looks stupid, but a few moments later one of the tree's branches suddenly moves to prevent Peri from standing on another mine, thus making it clear that the guy's mind still lives on inside the tree. In fact, a sarcastic comment by the Rani about how he's better off because trees live longer than humans makes things worse, as he could end up tree-ified for decades, if not centuries.
- In the new series, the Doctor did this in a different way to each member of the Family of Blood in the episode of the same name. (Moral of the story: never, ever piss off the Doctor.)
- In "Fear Her," victims are turned into drawings that are somewhat mobile while on the page (and pretty danged creepy.) They can scream. Silently.
- The witches from "The Shakespeare Code" are trapped in their crystal ball. A recent episode has him taking the ball out as part of a Rummage Fail scene, and they can still be heard inside, shouting.
- This also happens to the Weeping Angels in "Blink". They turn to stone when looked at by any other being, including their own kind. They get tricked and end up standing facing each other, turning them to stone forever.
- The Doctor himself in "Midnight" falls under the control of a malicious alien and can't move... except for being forced to repeat everything she says, leading the others to think he's the malicious alien and try to kill him.
- Torchwood: In the season 2 finale, Jack is buried alive under Cardiff, constantly suffocating, reviving (painfully), and dying again... for 1874 years. He was buried in 27 CE then dug up in 1901, then cryogenically frozen (yes, in 1901, Torchwood could do that then) to bring him back to the present, paradox free.
- Attempted by the villains in part 2 of Children of Earth, as they try to contain Jack by encasing him in concrete. Fortunately, he gets rescued by Gwen, Rhys and Ianto pretty quickly.
- This is after, having blown up Torchwood base (to try to wipe out Torchwood), they find only a few of Jack's bones. They cart them off to their headquarters, only to then find that Jack's regenerative abilities are still active, and he is completely regenerating from just those few bones they had found, growing into a horribly mangled-looking corpse, with bloody bones and a few internal organs, at which point he starts screaming.... nonstop. He only stops many hours later once the rest of his muscles, skin and various other body tissues have finished regrowing.
- Also done by the aliens to the children.
- CSI featured a serial killer that would pose his victims as they were dying so that rigor mortis would freeze them into "whimsical" poses. They found the last victim trapped in a complicated rig, just barely alive.
- The very first episode (excluding the Poorly Disguised Pilot) of CSI New York involved the phenomenon of "Locked-In Syndrome." "Locked In Syndrome" was also used in an episode of Scrubs (See Real Life Examples.)
- Tin Man: The eponymous lawman was trapped in an iron maiden and forced to watch a hologram of his family being tortured and killed until DG and Glitch let him out.
- Presumably, the "iron maiden" also provided full life support, possibly including muscle-toning since he can move easily even right out of the box. He's not even hungry or thirsty. It may be some form of stasis that does not shut down mental function. A Wizard Did It, quite literally.
- The low-budget horror anthology series TerrorVision has a 15-minute episode (referenced here) in which a pair of elderly clothing store proprietors lure young women inside on the pretext of giving them modeling auditions, then use their "special camera" to turn them into mannequins. The special effects are very bad, but at least the concept is still scary.
- In the season 2 finale of Heroes, Hiro Nakamura takes revenge upon Adam Monroe this way by sealing him in a coffin, buried deep underground. Since Adam is immortal, he's likely trapped in there for eternity.(Or at least until season 3.) In the graphic novels, it is shown that he is repeatedly dying, presumably of suffocation, only to be brought back to life by his regenerative powers again and again. Beware The Nice Ones indeed...
- And in season three, Angela is temporarily rendered unable to move except for her eyes by her husband.
- In a situation similar to Adam Monroe's above, another immortal on Highlander: the Series once sought out Duncan for revenge. Why? Because Duncan had left him stranded on a tiny, barren island, where he'd died of starvation every day until rescued.
- A few characters suffered this way in Highlander The Series, including one, a Nazi, who'd been bound with weights and thrown into a river, resulting in him drowning, reviving, drowning, reviving...
- A third was entombed for a hundred and fifty years.
- Yet another was locked in an insane asylum for seventy years. No wonder these guys hate MacLeod.
- In Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Skin of Evil", the creature called Armus fits the trope. The result of an alien race's attempt to transcend evil, Armus is a self-loathing creature with no redeemable qualities, filled with emptiness, and living on a dead planet with no way off or any company. Totally sucks to be him.
- Although it's hard to feel pity for a literal pool of evil who kills for fun and really does have no redeeming qualities.
- To say nothing of those that the Borg assimilate. As Picard implied shortly after being removed from the Collective in "The Best of Both Worlds", they're privvy to everything the Borg-them is doing, but are helpless to do anything about it. That Picard was able to break through his "Locutus of Borg" personality and tell Data how to defeat the Borg was nothing short of a miracle.
- In Supernatural, Sam and Dean bury Doc Benton (who's immortal) alive, chained up in a refrigerator. Another thing to consider: although he can't die, his body parts wear out, so eventually he'll rot away into a sentient and forever conscious pile of dirt.
- The episode "The Rapture", in a slight subversion, has the good guys bestow this kind of fate upon another good person. Jimmy, the vessel for angel Castiel, begs Castiel to possess him to save his daughter from having a similar fate. The whole episode pretty much was a Player Punch for the audience.
- Also, Hell. You're basically tortured, daily, in unimaginable ways, for decades on end, unless you agree to do the same to others. Main character Dean is able to hold out for thirty years before giving in.
- Also intentionally given by the good guys to the H.H. Holmes, the USA's first recognized serial killer. They left the ghost underground, encircled by rock salt. And barricaded the place. And for good measure, sealed the entrance up with concrete. That ghost is NOT going anywhere anytime soon.
- Early in Stargate Atlantis, a Living Shadow that was revealed to have been trapped in the lower levels of the city for millions of years started stalking the team. As Sheppard said, "I know I'd be pissed."
- Subverted in Farscape: the crew stops on a planet where the royals are customarily turned into living statues for eighty years. However, rather than being viewed as a punishment that drives them insane, it's a duty that makes them wiser by allowing them to observe royal court proceedings.
- Juken Sentai Gekiranger: At the end, Long, an immortal god of evil, is forever imprisoned in a metal ball (which is then put through a Humiliation Conga.
- In an X-Files episode, a corrupt army general learns the secret of voodoo immortality... just in time to be buried in a coffin before he revives.
- In season three of Desperate Housewives, the question of how to punish the season's Big Bad when doing so would lead to a main character going to jail was solved when she stroked out and ended up with Locked-In Syndrome. Her son then twists the knife a little further: "I'm going to turn your head now so you can watch me walk away. It's the last time you'll ever see me."
- The Smallville episode "Forever" features this trope with the Monster Of The Week, whose touch can turn people to wax. They clearly remain conscious during this, though, as the camera shows their eyes still moving. Shattering the wax statue, however, is implied to be fatal.
- Implied to be the fate of another immortal:
Clark: What'd you do with Knox?
Martian Manhunter: Your father and I had a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it came to crime and punishment. I suggest we abide by the same rules.
Clark: You didn't kill him, did you?
Martian Manhunter: Knox is immortal, Kal-El. You can't kill him.
- An episode of ER featured Cynthia Nixon as a stroke victim who could perceive what was happening to her but not communicate with anyone.
- In Babylon 5's incredible second episode we meet the 'Soul Hunters', a brotherhood who capture the spirits of the dying in little globes. Problem: They don't ask permission first. The Minbari at least consider this a fate MUCH worse than death.
- Notably, the Soul Hunters themselves view it as the highest compliment, as they believe souls die with the body without their attentions.
- House had an episode featuring a patient with Locked-In Syndrome. Most of the episode was shown from his perspective.
- A particularly dark example was in Crossing Jordan, which, for those of you who didn't know, is a show about a coroner's office. The victim is shot and spends the most of the episode paralyzed. He used the be a prosecutor and Macy's friend, but underwent a Face Heel Turn to Amoral Attorney when Macy refused to falsify evidence to put away a serial killer. He keeps pleading with Jordan and Macy not to autopsy him, promising he'll change. He's only saved when Macy digs the bullet out and realizes he's still bleeding. Turns out he and his two guests (who were killed) had improperly prepared Fugu, and his secretary shot him. On his way out of the hospital, Macy gives him a bell, and tells him that people used to be buried with strings attached to bells in case they were buried alive. The lawyer points out that Macy just effectively admitted the coroner's office is at fault, and he'll both be suing and representing to woman who shot him. Then he walks outside and gets hit by a bus. The last shots of the episode is the team looking down into his body bag, and their evaluator asking if they're sure he's dead. The bag is closed up, using the same POV shot from the lawyer's perspective as earlier, and then we hear a bell tinkling.
- In part seven of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, "Autopsy room four", the protagonist is bitten by a venomous snake and falls into a paralytic state extremely similar to death, except he's fully aware. When he's taken to the hospital, the doctors prepare for an autopsy...
- A pilot filmed for the So Bad Its Horrible American adaptation of Red Dwarf played this for laughs - Kryten is being disassembled at the time of the accident and his disembodied head was left on a shelf, fully aware, for three million years. However, he was apparently perfectly happy reading the "Now Wash Your Hands" sign on the opposite wall over and over.
- In Lost, Nikki and Paulo get bitten by Medusa spiders, which paralyzed them into a death-like state where they were fully aware, but pale, cold, and unable to move. This culminates in them being buried alive by the rest of the Lostaways (who think they're dead), and slowly suffocating to death underground. The dog is the only one who realizes something is wrong.
- In "Stiff", a season-ten episode of Law And Order, a woman is found comatose because her husband has been injecting her with near-overdoses of insulin (with her consent) in their sex games to render her immobile but conscious. It turns out that she's not comatose at all: her daughter has replaced the insulin with a drug that permanently puts her into a locked-in state. Permanently.
- On Charmed, there was a magic school that was enchanted so that you can't die as long as any part of your body is on its grounds. You can be beheaded, and your still-conscious, talking head will stay alive, even outside the school, as long as your body remains at the school. Now, think about what that means for that one guy Gideon blasted into a pile of ash while there.
- On Dead Like Me, George, the main character is a Reaper who must take people's souls out of their bodies at specific times. On an early episode, she decides to not show up to take a soul. It then shows the person trapped in their dead body receiving an autopsy and screaming in horror.
- An Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, "Breakdown", involves a man getting paralyzed in a car wreck and mistaken for dead.
- Are You Afraid Of The Dark: The Tale of the 13th Floor. At the end, Karin involuntarily shapeshifts back to faceless, mouthless alien form, and is stuck frozen on Earth for another ten years.
- At the end of "The Super Specs", the protagonists from the "normal" universe are trapped in a crystal ball.
- The pilot episode for the Swamp Thing TV series showed the title hero fusing the still-living body of one of the bad guys into a tree, leaving him a half-man, half-tree hybrid, in very much the same fashion as the Doctor Who example above - although in this case the effect is even more disturbing, as the bad guy's face is left frozen in a way that very much brings Munch's The Scream to mind.
- In one of the later episodes of Dinosaurs, Earl is struck by lightning, causing him to switch places with a tree. In an example of High Octane Nightmare Fuel, Earl's face is sticking out of the tree's trunk.
- Myth Busters has done a few torture myths in which this trope was in effect:
- In "Chinese Water Torture," being shackled to a board and unable to move more than an inch drove Kari to the brink of her composure, causing her to burst into tears at least once on camera, and abort the test in less than an hour (both due to the emotional distress, and due to near-fatal physical stress levels).
- Conversely, Adam, who was simultaneously undergoing the same test sans restraints and in a rather comfy recliner, was hardly bothered at all; the worst he had to endure was the water drops keeping him from taking a nap.
- In "Bamboo Torture," they tested a myth of a WWII torture technique in which POWs would be stretched out and tied down over a budding bamboo shoot, then left there as the shoot grew into their back and through their abdomen. It only took four days for the bamboo to grow through the torso, but when you're strapped to the ground for hours with the hot sun beating on your face, a plant growing into your back, and maybe some occasional harassment from your captors...
- Only?! Well, hey, I guess being impaled over the course of 96 hours isn't TOO bad.
- The Twilight Zone had a few of these, if this editor remembers correctly, but one that comes to mind are the famous "Time Enough Now", where, now that the rest of humanity has been destroyed, Burgess Meredith can finally read all he wants. Unfortunately, his coke-bottle glasses slip of his head, and shatter. Another, the name of which this editor can't remember, has a man discover a stop watch that literally stops time, and using it to rob banks, and things like that. Until it falls out of his pocket and breaks while the rest of the world (and presumably the universe) is still frozen.
- Probably "A Kind of Stopwatch" — the 1985 remake was "A Little Peace and Quiet" in which an overstressed homemaker can stop time to escape the pressures of everyday life, until she freezes time during a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States, and she can see an inbound missile frozen over her own town.
- In another episode, "The Long Morrow", an astronaut is sent into space for forty years. He is to be put into suspended animation, so he will be the same age when he returns, and won't have to deal with the loneliness of space. However, he releases himself from suspended animation early in the flight, so that he will be the same age as his girlfriend when he gets back. After forty lonely years in space, he returns, only to find that she froze herself to wait for him, and she is still young.
- In a season one episode of Carnivale, Dora Mae is murdered in Babylon, a town that has been cursed with immortality. If you die there, you have to stay forever, meaning she has to spend eternity as a whore to a town full of similarly cursed miners.
- As with the Animorphs and The Host examples, being possessed by a Goa'uld in Stargate SG1 leaves the victim fully aware but with no control whatsoever over their body. What makes this particular case even worse is that the host can be kept alive in this state for thousands of years.
- Not to mention, Goa'uld are sadistic. They like to torture their hosts, both by causing pain in the central nervous system, and also by forcing them to watch as their loved ones die by their own hands. And this can continue for thousands of years. Or at least until the host gives up.
- Dollhouse's Attic.
- Well, goodness gracious, but it is good to be out of doors... unless you happen to be one of the women that Terry Karrens kidnapped, kept paralyzed but aware, and used as mannequins in his own personal twisted croquet game.
- Recurring baddie Frank Breitkopf from Criminal Minds injected his victims with a drug that left them paralyzed but fully awake while he vivisected them. As he's been active for around thirty years, its implicated Frank's done this to around two-hundred people.
- The UnSub from "The Uncanny Valley" kidnaps women, drugs them with a paralytic, and keeps them as dolls in a hellish tea party.
Music
- "Hyperspace Cryogenic Insomnia Blues" by Tom Smith in which the singer is awake during his cryogenic sleep. The "We're two weeks out of Terran orbit Ten years left to go..." line left me shuddering.
- "One" by Metallica, inspired by Johnny Got His Gun, focuses on a soldier who has his eyes, ears, mouth, arms, and legs destroyed (by a WW 1 German artillery shell in Johnny and a Vietnamese landmine in "One"), but is still conscious. Though he eventually manages to communicate with the doctors and military men keeping him alive, they refuse to disconnect his life support, and he presumably must exist in that condition (unable to communicate with anyone, see or hear anything, go anywhere, ect...) for the rest of his natural life. Now there's an unsettling thought...
- The song "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath is about a man from a post-apocalyptic world where everything was devastated by a man made of metal. He travels back in time to warn the people of the past, but something goes wrong during the time travel process and "he was turned to steel." He is aware of his surroundings, but unable to move or speak, and he is completely ignored by everyone who sees him. He is driven insane and when he finally regains mobility, he goes on a rampage and devastates everything.
- Queensryche's "Screaming In Digital" perfectly inverts the Trope Namer, taking the POV of a sentient AI which, though granted consciousness by its domineering maker ('father'), is callously denied the option to exercise free will or communicate with anyone else.
Mythology
- Prometheus' fate to be chained to a rock and have his liver serve as a buffet for an eagle for eternity.
- In Aeschylus' tragedy, Prometheus Bound, lots of people come past his rock — not to point and laugh but sympathise and chat — a chorus of Oceanids, Io, etc. That's probably just one take on the myth, but still. Ultimately, he was rescued by Heracles, who obviously had to know where he was. Is it wrong to find that scenario perversely comical? ("Hey, Prometheus, how're you doing?" "Oh, you know, Julius, same shit, different day." "Say, the 10:15 eagle is running late." "Yeah, that guy's a slacker. [eagle arrives] Hey, where ya been? This liver's not gonna eat itself!" )
- Well, one Horrible Histories book did try for a moderately humorous version in which they refer to each other as "Prommy" and "Eddie". This being a HH book, Prommy announced at the end that he was going to eat the eagle's liver.
- And in the animated series based on Disney's Hercules, the eagle brings an onion with him because a diet consisting entirely of liver doesn't provide enough roughage. Prometheus hopes he gets indigestion from eating his liver with an onion.
- Prometheus still exults in being able to resist telling Zeus the secret of his eventual overthrow, a fate that Zeus has been anxious to evade ever since the start of his reign.
- Atlas being condemned to bear the heavens (not the world) on his shoulders for eternity.
- Then being turned to stone by Athena, using Medusa's head.
- Although in some versions he asked to be turned to stone, as carrying the heavens had become too much forhim to bear.
- The biblical mentions of Hell describe burning, darkness and being alone.
- Later theological works describe it as, for example, neverending itching.
- Alice Cooper made the analogy of a toothache over your entire body. For eternity. And then Sesame Street decided to use that in a Muppet short during the episode in which Alice Cooper guest-starred. That's... kinda creepy.
- Loki, the bad boy of Norse Mythology, was chained to a rock with a serpent eternally dripping caustic venom in his face. His wife, Sigyn, stands over him catching the venom in a bowl, occasionally has to turn aside to empty the bowl before it overflows. When she turns aside to do so, or if she allows it to become oveerfull and spill, his spasms of pain cause earthquakes. (Considering how many bastard children he's supposed to have fathered with giantesses and the like, one wonders if it's entirely accidental.)
- Neil Gaiman made Loki's punishment even worse in The Sandman. Same as before, except Loki's neck has been broken and his eyes ripped out, the Corinthian being responsible for both, meaning that now he has snake venom dripping into his eye sockets.
- Niobe, who was turned into a weeping rock, presumably still conscious.
- Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for taking a last look at the home she lived in for so many years. Whether she was conscious after the transformation is to be debated, but if she was she couldn't move or speak while her salt body was slowly eroded by rainfall and winds (and maybe some local deer).
- Philemon and Baucis, who were turned into trees. They seemed pretty happy about it, though, and it was a reward. And since they asked to die together, it's likely they weren't conscious any more and the trees were more of a marker.
Tabletop Games
- In both the old and new Vampire games (Masquerade and Requiem) had a variation on this. When Vampires are staked or starve for long enough, rather than dying, they are sent into torpor, a kind of stasis. This is far from mercy, as vampires in this state experience time more or less in realtime, but suffer terrifying nightmares. And considering that very few kindred would willingly starve themselves into this kind of state, this probably means that said vampire is trapped somewhere, meaning that this state can go on indefinitely. No wonder a great many ancient vampires (and possibly the antediluvians and Caine in the original series) have been driven utterly insane when revived.
- It gets worse. One sourcebook mentions that the nightmares tend to involve what put you into torpor in the first place, with kindred starving to torpor stuck in an eternal loop where they hunt a human and never reach them. Go into torpor through violence, or being staked, and god help you because you're going to relive that losing battle until someone finds it in their dead heart to revive you. That is if they don't decide to chow down on you instead, in which case, you'll simply scream inside your immobile body and watch as your saviour devours everything that made you who you are and all your memories, before crumbling into a pile of ash. And even then, your torment isn't ended because it is rather heavily implied that you survive within your devourer's body for the rest of eternity.
- The Tzimisce in Vampire The Masquerade do this for kicks to whoever screws with them, and even a few who don't.
- Similarly, the Hierarchy in Wraith The Oblivion does this to whoever causes too much trouble. Their ghostly corpus is "soulforged," boiled down and rendered into a permanent shape, be it a sword, a coin, or an ashtray. Those who carry weapons made through this process swear they can hear them weeping some times...
- The Warhammer 40000 short story Into the Maelstrom has a traitor Space Marine imprisoned in a Dreadnaught battle suit, normally an honor, but never released, so he is doomed to live forever in a small metal box, with no limbs. This is in fact the fate of all Space Marines encased in Dreadnaught armour, with the occasional mindless rampage, but it isn't always this trope (and is a good example of how a different attitude can affect the outcome). Regular Space Marines, both those encased and their brethren, consider it an honour as they can fight the Emperor's enemies even after death, albeit with slowly degrading mental faculties. Chaos Marines however, being Sense Freaks taken to the literal utter screaming extreme, consider it to be the worst punishment imaginable, as even while battling they can't feel the joy of slaughter and while inactive their brethren have to chain them to a wall to prevent the completely bugfuck insane Marine (even by Chaos standards) from breaking loose and killing everyone.
- Warhammer Fantasy has Count Mordrek the Damned, which under normal circumstances would be a redundant title for any Chaos warrior. This one suffers from constant and horrific mutations, but unlike most that suffer this fate, he remains sealed inside his armor, and his mind has been left intact. It's also mentioned that every time he dies the Chaos gods resurrect him, and this has been going on for so long that no one remembers which god he worshiped, or what he did to offend them.
- Call Of Cthulhu:
- Human brains extracted by the Mi-Go and placed in "brain cylinders" will eventually go mad due to their hopeless situation.
- Humans who see the deity Ghatanothoa are petrified into living, immobile mummies. The internal organs are perfectly preserved and the brain remains fully aware; it will eventually go incurably insane.
- Dungeons And Dragons has, as noted above, the Imprisonment spell, which entombs the subject for an indefinite amount of time somewhere "far beneath the surface of the earth".
- Used in the cartoon by Venger against another wizard who had ticked him off.
- Thankfully, Imprisonment first puts the subject into temporal stasis, so they aren't conscious of the time spent underground.
- However, in Baldurs Gate this doesn't seem to be the case as the player is threatened with this spell (and the emphasis of suffering) by a Harper, and one could free a Drow Mage who went insane from the spell.
- The supplement Book of Vile Darkness has the spell Eternity of Torture. Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- Imprisonment is still around in 4th edition too. Thankfully, it's now a level 29 Ritual that takes an hour to cast. While it does put the target into suspended animation, they have no memories of what happened while they were Imprisoned and you do have to set at least one specific condition that will cause them to be freed automatically; it doesn't say that said condition has to be fair (or even possible) and it can only be undone otherwise if a person can first find the demiplane in which it traps them (which means they need to be at least level 29 themselves). Otherwise, they'll be trapped forever.
- And now Druids, Shamans and Wardens can get on the act with the lower-leveled but otherwise fundamentally the same Primal Prison. This ritual has the added choice bonus that it's the caster who chooses whether or not the subject ages, and whether the victim is aware of what's happening or not.
- Dungeons & Dragons' Ravenloft setting has a monster known as the Wall of Flesh. It's created when the rage and fear of a person who has been imprisoned within a wall mixes with Ravenloft's special flavor of magic.
- Several named NP Cs of the Land of Mists have likewise suffered an And I Must Scream fate. Elise Mordenheim, trapped in a decaying and shattered body that her Mad Scientist husband struggles in vain to restore, is perhaps the most prominent example.
- The Transmogrification spell from GURPS: Magic keeps the target's mind intact and active but makes them in to an inanimate object for a while. The Entombment spell traps the target in a tiny bubble deep beneath the earth for eternity unless it is somehow undone.
- Exalted, like Wraith The Oblivion, has soulforging as a common practice in the Underworld. Hell, it goes past "common" — soulsteel is considered one of the five magical materials, and the Deathlords are all too willing to make their undead subjects into arms and armor for their Abyssal soldiers.
Video Games
- Happens to the Big Bad in Disgaea 3: after defeating the would-be "hero", Mao decides against killing him and concludes that his immortal body would make him a perfect lab rat for his experiments... old school Mad Scientist type-experiments that usually involve rusty needles and a complete lack of anesthesia. For thousands of years.
- Dragon Quest V has a sequence in which the protagonist and his wife are turned into self-aware statues for the better part of a decade (primarily as an excuse for a Plot Relevant Age Up for the protagonist's children).
- Another case appears in Dragon Quest VIII, where the townspeople of Trodain are immobilized via magical vines by Dhoulmagus. Its clear to see that judging by the expressions on their faces that they are completely aware of what's going on... they get better when the curse is broken after defeating Rhapthorne, natch. Also, according to Jessica, anyone being controlled by the staff must feel this way considering they are being controlled by Rhapthorne.
- According to the lore behind The Elder Scrolls, this is what happens to Daedra when they are banished or killed. They can come back, but spending a few hundred years in such a state may explain why most Daedra are so keen on destroying that place where so many pesky Daedra-killing heroes come from.
- Strangely, this doesn't bother them at all. They are, after all, truly immortal, and being inconvenienced for a few hundred years when you've lived for tens or hundred of thousands and can expect to live for hundreds of thousands (or millions) more isn't a big deal, especially if you're not a creature which has to worry about 'sanity' and other tedious things. As for the coming back; perhaps it is just something to do.
- This doesn't seem to happen to them when you kill them normally on any of the planes. They only seem to return to some sort of spawn point in their (masters') plane in Oblivion. However, if you by means of strong magic manage to cast them into the void, they have to find their way back to a plane before they can do anything. Supposedly finding a (fairly) stable spacetime in the void takes a long time.
- Big Bad Mehrunes Dagon suffers a particularly ironic version. As the Daedra Prince of Destruction, he exists to destroy everything and his Daedric realm reflects that, being a wasteland. However, due to the nature of Oblivion (the dimension that all daedra call home) and the immortality of all daedra, he can't actually destroy anything for good. He's the embodiment of Destruction, and he can't do squat in his own realm. It's his main motivation for trying to enter Tamriel — there, he can cause lasting destruction.
- And another Daedra Prince, Jyggalag the Prince of Order, suffers a similarly ironic version thanks to the other Princes. He was cursed to become Sheogorath the Prince of Madness, the opposite of everything he originally embodied.
- This seems to be the fate of Mantorok in Eternal Darkness. Impaled by spikes and trapped between realities by his own Magick, Mantorok is often referred to as 'The Dead God', despite being clearly alive. One popular theory holds that, although being technically dead/dying, Mantorok is immortal and will therefore never actually die. Also, theoretically, no force in any universe can save him because his Magickal alignment is supreme.
- In Fallout 3, Vault 112 contains a set of pods that keep their occupants alive forever, their minds trapped in a Virtual Reality simulation as the playthings of the sadistic Overseer Dr. Stanislaus Braun, who tortures, kills and revives them at his leisure. When the Lone Wanderer becomes trapped in the simulation with his/her dad, he/she can activate a hidden fail-safe that kills all of the Vault's residents except for Braun, leaving him trapped alone inside the simulation, presumably forever. And this is the "good" option!
- In the same game, recurring character Harold has ended up grown into a tree on a cliff due to what is presumed to be the result of a FEV-induced mutation on his forehead some time in the past. According to himself, he has been rooted down for twenty to thirty years by the tree, named Bob, whom Harold calls Herbert for his own amusement (much to the tree's chagrin, apparently). In addition, he was eventually found by some of the wasteland residents, believing him to be a tree-god due to him having transformed the post-apocalypse-scarred area into a green oasis of trees and grass. These wastelanders went on to create a druidic, non-technological culture and religion with Harold as its center and god. The screaming part came when the religious "Treeminders" calculated that Harold would likely live entire centuries, if not millennia, rooted in the same place. Needless to say Harold, who was already extremely melancholic and tired from the decades he'd spent merged with the motionless tree, was Driven To Suicide following this revelation. But as a tree surrounded by religious loons who refuse to even as much as glare at their "god" the wrong way... yeah.
- Depending on the player's choices, nobly subverted if you convince Harold that his existence brings happiness to others. He'll find a source of solace in this and, presumably, stop trying to off himself.
- Feh. It's Fallout. Use a flamer.
- Final Fantasy VII. After being hurled into the Lifestream by Cloud after the Nibelheim Incident, Sephiroth spends SEVEN YEARS immobile at the Northern Creater, absorbing the knowledge of countless dead & gradually learning how to manipulate Jenova. Is it any surprise that he's a little bit ticked off at his spikey headed nemesis?
- Adel of Final Fantasy VIII was locked into a technological "tomb" and launched into orbit to keep her sorceress powers sealed, and spent seventeen years this way before being freed by Ultimecia to use as a vessel. Rinoa almost undergoes the same process voluntarily, but Squall talks her out of it.
- Just to top up your nightmare fuel tank, remember that scene where Rinoa and the SeeDs attempt to get into the TV station in Timber, and pass a big screen showing red static? Rinoa says it's caused by radio interference. If you look closely, though, it says, "bringmebackthereiamalivehereiwillneverletyouforgetaboutme" over and over again. And what, do you remember, caused the interference? I am alive here...
- In Final Fantasy X, the only known way to defeat Sin is for a summoner and his guardian to perform the Final Summoning, killing the summoner in the process and transforming his guardian into the Final Aeon. If the Final Aeon defeats Sin, the guardian becomes Sin, helpless to stop Sin's mindless carnage and trapped inside its body until a new Final Aeon takes his place.
- In Final Fantasy V, the Big Bad, Exdeath, has been transformed into a tree for the last thirty years.
- Wrong, Exdeath was a tree from the start. More accurately, a tree used by an old tribe to seal away various demons. Somewhere along the way, the intense evil magic power made him gain sentience and shapeshifting powers. During the final battle, all of those evil spirits are released when Exdeath loses control over the void. Whoops.
- In Half Life: Opposing Force, the eventual fate of Adrian Shepherd is to be "preserved" in a place where he can do no possible harm... and no harm can come to him. This takes the form of floating through an alien dimension on a plane, alone, indefinitely. (Some fans argue that this is similar to Gordon Freeman's stay with the GMan, which he came out of some ten years later, looking just fine, so it may just be a cryogenic sleep of sorts.)
- Also, the Headcrab Zombies. Oh sweet merciful crap, the Headcrab Zombies. Just go ahead and kill them before the damn things have to suffer for one more second. In this instance though they can scream, and they are very, very vocal.
- Legacy Of Kain: Defiance implies that between the end of Soul Reaver 2 and the start of Defiance Raziel has spent half a millenium in the spectral realm, presumably being tormented by the Elder God, though it may actually be that the 500 years passed much slower than they actually would in the real world, due to the fact that Time Stands Still in the spectral realm.
- Mother 3: Pokey/Porky's fate in the Absolutely Safe Capsule, shortly after being defeated by the heroes. Subverted somewhat, in the fact this may just be exactly how he likes it.
- That's probably because Porky shortsightedly didn't realize that he would never be able to escape the Absolutely Safe Capsule.
- The game's creator mentioned in an interview that even 5.5 billion years later, when the sun dies and the world grows cold, Porky would still be alive inside that thing.
- Also, Klaus in a more psychological sense and Giygas depending on your interpretation.
- Three characters from the Myst series ended up this way, at least before the Trap Books were ret-conned into Prison Ages. It can also happen to the player in some of the 'bad' endings.
- Semi-aversion: While they are naturally very long-lived (even without their periodic centuries-long hibernation,) the most esteemed elders of the Vahnatai race in Exile/Avernum are offered the chance to be magically infused into special stones, becoming immortal, magically powerful, but completely unmoving crystal souls.
- Not averted in Exile 3/Avernum 3 if you talk to the two Crystal Souls in the single Upper Avernum/Exile Vahnatai city: These are the two guys abducted by the Empire, and experimented with in unspoken ways for many, many years. One can't help itself from mentally 'screaming' into your mind when you 'talk' to it, and conversations can end with a horrible screeching sound if you try to ask too much about the Empire and its time with them. Though I guess since the Vahnatai did eventually get them back, and all the other ones are safe deep down in the earth, generally, it's not that bad.
- The Wall of the Faithless in Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. Nothing says Hell quite like having your soul fused to a wall for eternity as it slowly envelops you and consumes your psyche. Bishop gets to experience it first hand.
- The eponymous Betrayer's punishment, to become a mindless hunger that possesses people, sends their souls to the previously mentioned wall while forcing them to eat other souls/spirits.
- Interestingly, one of the game's endings implies that you devour the god responsible, as well as several other gods, giving Kaelyn the Dove a much better chance at bringing the wall down. Another ending has you voluntarily stay on the Wall.
- Trilby gets this treatment in Yahtzee's Six Days A Sacrifice, where he or one of his clones is absorbed into Chzo's body to suffer for eternity beyond casual interpretations of space and time. The same goes for Cabadath, an ancient druid who summoned but failed to control Chzo ages ago, and whose soul was joined to a tree, essentially granting him immortality and allowing him to manifest himself as The Prince to whoever disturbs the wood of the tree.
- Also, the short story Expedition set in the same universe has denizens of the Magical Realm, beings whose physical bodies have become almost entirely atrophied from a reliance on magic. When one is captured by The Prince the narrator realizes that the low hissing sound he makes while being tortured is him trying to scream with his mostly vestigal vocal chords.
- Lisa from Resident Evil. She's kidnapped, experimented on, basically turns immortal, only wants her mother, kills her mother by mistaking her as an impostor, wears her mom's face over her own so she doesn't forget her face, was abandoned by the scientists, is left living forever in what might be grueling pain wandering around a mansion, and by looking at the original Resident Evil and the Umbrella Chronicles, Lisa has "died" three times. First Jill or Chris make her fall into an abyss, then Wesker shoots her down, then Wesker shoots her down SOME MORE until he traps her under a chandelier leaving her to die inside the exploding mansion.
- Resident Evil 5 has a lite version of this: Jill Valentine, after supposedly having fallen to her death, was rescued by her (and your) nemesis Weskerm, who initially wanted to use her as his first subject for his new toy, the Uroboros virus. Turns out Jill's exposure to previous viruses has made her organism create antibodies for them, so she spends several years in suspended animation for Wesker to harvest those antibodies for his research. Then she is connected to some apparatus releasing mind-control drugs in her bloodstream and made to serve as his enforcer and right right hand. Yep, that's her in the intro video, watching the man get consumed by Uroboros. The bad part? At least during her mind-control, she was aware... she just couldn't do anything about it, right up to the point when she and Wesker fought against her former partner, Chris. Subverted in that in the course of the campaign Chris and Sheva get the gizmo off, but still...
- Sonic The Hedgehog subjects Erazor Djinn to this fate in Sonic and the Secret Rings, using the third wish from Erazor's own lamp in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- In The Suffering, after he was executed in the seventies, Horace Gage's spirit was bound to the electric chair he died in, still being electrocuted and unable to communicate with the living. It's not until the disastrous events of the game that he's allowed to temporarily leave the chair and travel the prison as an electric ghost, and even then he's still in horrible pain.
- Warden Elroy's approach to solitary confinement, which Ranse Truman calls "akin to live burial." It involves the victim being placed in a lightless, soundproofed room and left alone to scream and cry and attempt suicide. And since death isn't as permanent as it was, the inmate's tortured souls are still there, still screaming.
- Tales Of Symphonia: Anyone who's been sacrificed to an Exsphere or Cruxis Crystal suffers this fate, even if they retain their body to a degree, like Colette and Presea. Most who do retain their ability to speak after becoming an Exsphere beg to be killed or have the Exsphere broken, even the Big Bad. Most of the time, The Hero Lloyd ends up shattering the thing and freeing the person's soul, but in the sequel, even though his own MOTHER's soul is trapped in HIS CRUXIS CRYSTAL and he knows this, he's still using it.
- He uses it because he has to. Since he's collecting Exspheres to destroy, he's going to have to fight people who have Exspheres and don't want to give them up. Without an Exsphere himself, he would be putting himself in a lot of danger fighting an opponent better equipped then him. In the sequel Sheena DOES say that eventually the original cast is going to have to give up their Exspheres, too. But for the moment, so long as other people have Exspheres, they need to keep them since they're the people governments trust to do things.
- And then in Tales Of Symphonia Dawn Of The New World, Richter's fate if you get the neutral or good ending is like this. He has to burn alive for as long as the mana in his body lasts, functioning as a living door to the demon world. According to Ratatosk, it'll take 1000 years for him to be able to free Richter. So if Richter's mana can last that long, he'll be free. If not... well...
- The point-and-click adventure game Uninvited had two endings where you become a member of the undead. Made especially creepy as it was nearly all text, narrated in second person and played dead-serious.
- The backstory of Utawarerumono: Witsarnemitea granted the scientists their wish by reducing them to immortal slimes. And you learn this after you beat the living crap outta those slimes. Because it's not like you can kill them.
- And presumably they're still there, eternally trapped as screaming red jelly. The bastards.
- Aaron from Clive Barkers Undying was chained in a dungeon and eaten alive by rats, with his jaw removed so he couldn't scream.
- This is what happened to Ner'zhul when Kil'jaeden captured him and transformed him into the Lich King between Warcraft 2 and 3.
- Revealed in Metal Gear Solid 4, Big Boss was held in suspended state by the Patriots, somewhat aware and somewhat not.
- EVE Online chronicles has a few: First there are the High Octane Nightmare Fuel Methods of Torture. Then there is a story about an Amarrian useless prince has been holding court and pronoucing judgements on people for literally the heck of it. A Speaker of Truth shows up with a commoner mob at his back to exact judgement on the prince: A piece of flesh for each person he wronged. The catch is that he can't be killed because he is a prince, so they keep him alive all the way through surgery. Finally, there is the Jovian Wetgrave, where the test subject is successfully connected to a spaceship's sensors and controls, allowing him to pilot the ship with his mind. Unfortunately, he can't maintain the connection to the ship and can't connect back to his body, leaving him trapped within himself.
- Alma from F.E.A.R. was sealed inside a psychically shielded chamber as an eight-year-old child and kept in an induced coma, and used to manufacture psychic Super Soldiers. However even while comatose, she remained fully aware of what was happening to her, right up to the point that she was killed. And even after death, her mind remained intact and sealed inside the vault for another thirty years. It isn't difficult to understand that when she finally gets out, people die.
- X-COM Terror From The Deep gives us the Bio-Drones, brains that have been attached to antigravity life-support units and then butchered into submission to the aliens. They can scream... but only to power their sonic weapon and kill others.
- Emperor: Battle For Dune - there are three factions the player can side with: the noble Atreides, the profit-driven Ordos, or the malevolent Harkonnens - each seeking control of the spice planet, Arrakis. If the player sides with the Ordos, they become strategists whose imperative is to seek control of territories on Arrakis. However, if the strategist doesn't fulfill their contract, they will be "terminated" (meaning have their head severed from their body and kept alive in robotic devices) as a permanent reminder and motivation to their eventual replacement. One unfortunate strategist quips: "Why don't they just let us die?"
- How can one miss Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and the Itemizer? You turn a Pokemon into an item, essentially sealing them away. It becomes even more disturbing when they get turned into, say, an Apple...
- Diablo. See, there are these things called soulstones, used to imprison the spirits of the main Big Bads of the game. But one of them, Baal, managed to shatter his. The biggest shard left wasn't powerful enough to hold him. A very powerful mage named Tal Rasha selflessly offers his powers to contain the demon in the soulstone. Guess what this entails? They strap his body to a giant stone tablet in an ancient tomb in the middle of a desert, shove the stone into his chest, and leave him to eternally battle a demon for his mind! About halfway through the second game, the main evil party releases baal from his body, with the side effect of killing Tal Rasha.
- In another example, an immortal angel made a stupid move to attack one of the main villains when not thoroughly prepared. Proceed to angel being captured by a pissed off Big Bad. They slowly ripped off his wings, and then put huge barbed hooks through his skin and stretched it out. After that, they trapped him in a chamber of mirrors, with his eyelids torn off. So that the only thing he can see for all eternity is his torn, bloated figure.
- As revealed in Mega Man Zero 4, this was The Punishment to Dr. Weil for his orchestration of the Elf Wars. His consciousness was implanted into a constantly-regenerating armor, making him somewhat immortal. If that wasn't enough, he was sent to exile on the barren wasteland that he caused, forever banned from returning to the last place in the world that was inhabitable. If he's bad enough back then, he only got worse now because of THAT... Death really wouldn't let him escape this fate.
- Gremio's fate in Suikoden 1 - if being eaten alive by flesh-eating spores isn't a classic case, I don't know what is.
- Jovani in The Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess sold his soul to the Poes and was turned into a living gold-and-jewel statue.
- Also, in A Link To The Past, the Flute Boy in the Haunted Grove turns into a living tree, and in Majoras Mask, the Deku Butler's son was also turned into a tree.
- In the first Jak And Daxter game, the Big Bads' ultimate fate is being sealed, still alive and conscious, inside a silo of Dark Eco.
- Anyone in Silent Hill who dies in the eponymous town is eternally trapped there, forever subjected to whatever tortures the sadistic Genius Loci can conjure. Some deserve it. Others... don't.
- Emperor: Battle for Dune This is what happens to the player's commander should they fail to accomplish their directive for House Ordos. Mentat Roma Atani: "Fear is an efficient tool of management".
- In Dragon Age: Origins'', Shale was unactivated, but never the less capable of thought, for 30 years in the middle of some little peasant village. As a result of this, she constantly talks about her fear and deep loathing of pigeons and the various peasants whom she had the pleasure to watch.
- Apparently, even before this, she was stuck, unactivated in the deep roads in the complete dark for a few CENTURIES.
- In Maple Story, the hero Aran was frozen in ice for hundreds of years. Although he was asleep during this time, his/her Empathic Weapon Maha remained fully conscious.
- A nice handfull of people in Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep have pretty horrible fates. No worries, though. Sora's probably going to save 'em, along with any other good person who dies and/or disapears in the series.
Web Comics
- This sort of thing happens way too much on The Wotch. Scott has been transformed into an immobile, conscious statue three times so far, though it didn't last very long. Rosetta wasn't so lucky, as she got turned into a statue by a crazy wizard, kept that way for some time, then released following said wizard's Heel Face Turn — only to be turned back into a statue by a basilisk without anyone knowing what happened to her. It's been mentioned that some statues in museums and mannequins in department stores are transformed people. And some people consider this a humorous comic.
- (Incoming High Octane Nightmare Fuel!) A manga link. It's from the artist who did the Idle Minds.
- Not quite over, for those of you who thought you'd escape sane. (The pictures to go with the first strip's ending narration.)
- Ian Samson is a big fan of illustrating "turned into an object" comics. He's done things like having the super-heroine Synthia Stretch trapped forever as a bouncy ball toy. A girl with clay-based shapeshifting powers losing her ability to control her form and being turned permanently into a clay urn. And possibly most disturbing, a girl who's witch sister has ruined her life by constantly turning her into various articles of clothing. The witch eventually assumes that because she has no friends and no social life, she must prefer being an object, and decides to stop turning her back into a human. Unable to complain, seeing as how clothes don't have vocal cords, her sister spends the rest of her life trapped as one article of clothing after another.
- Being one of his works, City Of Reality deals with a lot of this. Magic World is full of people who, thanks to Hinto Ama, have been transformed into all manner of things, from turtles to clothing to water. At least there's the Manumitor, who goes around saving as many of these victims as he can.
- This almost happened in The Gods Of ArrKelaan, but the goddess of death personally intervened.
- In Drowtales, Kharla'ggen of the V'loz'ress clan has a creepy hobby when it comes to dealing with those who catch her fancy or resist. Using surgery to remove the bones in their arms and legs, along with their teeth, eyes, tounge, hair and fingers (sometimes their ears too), turning them into living dolls◊.
- Jack by David Hopkins has a short story about a guy who gets offered a very nice apartment for free, ostensibly so he can convince other prospective buyers. Things get increasingly weird, and it turns out he can't leave. He demands to know where he really is, even though he's warned that he won't be able to come back to this paradise... turns out he's in a particularly unpleasant part of Hell. And he stays there.
- Jack is full of this - It's in large parts about Hell, after all.
- This LegoRobot comic is a haunting six page horror story about this trope.
- In the completed sprite comic In Wily's Defense, Dr. Gabriel Knight was killed in a lab accident, but his soul survived in one of his incomplete robots through some divine intervention. The robot was kept frozen in stasis, unable to move or speak, but Gabriel could still see and hear everything happening in front of him. His wife, also a scientist specializing in robotics, disappeared for a year to mourn. Needless to say, Gabriel had completely lost his marbles by the time the robot was finished.
- In The Zombie Hunters, there's a type of zombie known as the Basilisk that has the ability to paralyse any normal human that locks eyes with it. The paralysed human then has no choice but to lie there helplessly as the zombie gets closer and eats them. Slowly. One Basilisk started with a guy's face.
- The Dragon Doctors brings us the story of Rina, who was Taken For Granite and left for two thousand years in a cave with nobody to talk to and no sensation at all. Fortunately the eponymous doctors rescued her. The comic also features Tanica, who was accidentally turned into a tree by Sarin. She can communicate with the others through magic, though.
Web Original
- The horror inherent to this trope is part of what makes the SCP Foundation's SCP-231 one of the most horrifically disturbing things imaginable.
- 231 has nothing on SCP-439.
- The Sentinel's backstory:
The stronger, having cast her spell in aggression, found herself imprisoned in a darkness containing all manner of monsters and vicious creatures.
In this place, blind and filled with rage and fear, she found the farthest thing from peace.
Centuries passed, and for the god in the box, each scraped over her like nails on skin....
- Arcana Magi Zero opened the story with Alysia Perez turning to stone and completely aware of it, resulting in post trauma.
Western Animation
- In Transformers Animated this seems to be the fate of anyone hit by a device that Swindle made, and Bumblebee seems to be freaked out that he had to spend even an hour like that. Bumblebee is then fine with intentionally deflecting the beam back upon him, freezing him forever to be taken apart and sold at a police auction. Yeah... Though luckily not the last part.
- In the Double Dragon Animated Adaptation, the Big Bad's favorite punishment for underlings who have screwed up once too many is to make them part of his mural.
- Turns up a time or two in Batman Beyond. A man with an intangibility device finds the effect spreads to his body without the device being engaged. In the end, his Power Incontinence winds up causing him to phase through Batman's hands, through the floor, and into the Earth. The best case scenario is that the lack of Required Secondary Powers will mean incineration by the mantle, or death by suffocation, starvation or dehydration. If not, he's permanently phased into the core of the earth. Forever.
- Another villain, Inque, can shapeshift by turning into liquid and reforming. A guard at her prison who had a crush on her is sweet-talked into helping her, but wants powers like hers in exchange. She gives him an incomplete version of the formula, leaving him an immobile half-liquid blob. His guard is seen talking to him just as he once did with Inque, hinting that history may repeat itself, but that's unrealistic: he can't move, and doesn't know enough about the formula to instruct her on how to fully Inque-ify him were she to agree.
- And there was that guy that eventually fused with earth itself, leading his daughter to find his still conscious skeleton later after it ended up causing a bunch of massive earthquakes.
- Justice League Unlimited is usually nicer to its villains than Batman Beyond, but makes an exception for Mordred: Morgaine Le Fay's spell gave him eternal youth and life, but he's stuck as a child. When tricked into making himself an adult (thus causing him to disappear, as he'd cast a spell that teleported all adults to another dimension) it turns out that by breaking the youth spell, "all he has is eternal life." He's 1500 or so years old and counting, showing every bit of it, and is now essentially immobile in a chair at his (still-youthful) mother's home. And it's only going to get worse.
- At the end of the two-parter "The Once And Future Thing", Chronos winds up permanently trapped in a timeloop, being forever berated by his shrewish wife. Might be a subversion, however, as Chronos does not appear to be consciously aware of his fate.
- The famous "Roswell That Ends Well" episode of Futurama had Bender's fall off of the back of the Planet Express ship as it was returning to the present, causing his head, which holds the AI, to be buried under the New Mexican ground for 1,000 years until the crew picked him up. To him, however, it was pretty good until the crew showed up.
- The episode "A Head in the Polls" begins with the collapse of a titanium mine, trapping all the robot workers inside (some of whom are seen pinned in the entrance, still twitching). The proposed rescue plan is to "pave over the area and get on with our lives."
- Also, although it is not exactly the trope, as it was consensual, not forced; Fry's dog Seymour, from the past, spends the last twelve years of his life doing absolutely nothing but sitting in front of Panucci's Pizza, waiting for Fry to come back. In the end, he dies without ever knowing what happened. The most horrifically tragic part about it is the fact that Fry actually found his preserved corpse a thousand years later, and had the opportunity to revive him, memories and all. He decided not to because he thought that Seymour lived a long and happy life and deserved to be left alone. If only he knew...
- This was later subverted when it's discovered that a time duplicate of Fry goes back in time and gives Seymour much love and attention.
- Lampshaded in the episode "Raging Bender" when George Foreman says, "As a head without a body, I envy the dead."
- An episode of Captain N The Game Master featured a villain who turned his victims into living Tetris blocks.
- In the Sonic The Hedgehog Saturday morning cartoon (as well as Sonic Underground, and the Archie comics), roboticizing a person meant turning them into a machine, eliminating their free will. However, their minds still function, causing them to be used as slaves to Robotnik, knowing what's happening but incapable of doing anything about it.
- In Thomas The Tank Engine, Duke relates the story of a misbehaving engine who was turned into a generator, with his face still intact and presumably still consious. It gets even more horrifying when the Fridge Logic sets in that he was likely buried along with the rest of the old railway and might still be down there underneath several feet of dirt.
- Duke himself was abandoned in his shed, which was covered over by nature and buried for many years, until he was unearthed in "Sleeping Beauty".
- This is probably averted, since from what we've seen when the fires in one of the engines are dropped the go to sleep, so the engine in Duke's story probably is not concious, but is more likly in a coma-like state.
- Paradox in Ben 10 Alien Force found himself trapped in the event horizon of his time tunnel for hundreds of thousands of years, unable to escape or die.
- In an episode of Darkwing Duck, "U.F.Foe", Darkwing finds his brain taken out by aliens and his body controlled by remote. Although he has no mouth (or beak) and we "hear" his screaming thoughts, amazingly he can still kick ass as he destroys the computer brain and saves Launchpad from the same fate!
- Similarily, in an episode of Duck Tales, the Beagle Boys manage to take control of Gizmoduck's armor by remote - while Fenton is still wearing it. He's not at all happy with being forced to rob his own employer in broad daylight... or stealing his crush's car, for that matter.
- Kim Possible gives us Monkey Fist's fate— as a statue.
- The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury has the eponymous hero go up against a madwoman who "collects" criminals and keeps them awake but practically frozen in artistic poses as part of a grotesque, living gallery.
- To be specific she created a type of stasis that slows their bodies down to a crawl but allows their minds to be fully functional. It takes them a day and some excruciating pain to even blink their eyes.
- In The Fairly Oddparents, it is eventually revealed that everything a child wishes for are put into "storage" in giant lockers. This includes any wishes that result in sentient creatures. And since they are immortal, they are stuck in a small, dark area forever. The fact that no one bats an eye at this says something.
- "Paralytic fluid" in the Aeon Flux episode "Ether Drift Theory". The Habitat laboratory is submerged in a lake of said fluid, which paralyses those who fall in it, with no hope of rescue. But they are still conscious. This happens to Aeon herself at the end of the episode.
- In The Venture Brothers episode "Return to Spider Skull Island", Doctor Orpheus deals with two Jerkass rednecks by trapping their souls in a Homeboys figurine. The can actually be heard screaming.
- A version of this happens in Robot Chicken where a Werewolf is reduced to a bloody pulp by More Dakka, creamated, had it's ashes snorted and later crapped out and roasted in the sewage treatment. This is then shown to be a Tabletop RPG, where the Game Master states that it's technically still alive because the bullets weren't silver.
- The Secret Saturdays: In one episode, the family face against a warrior king whose thirst for power long ago could not be quenched. Seeking to use the Methuselah tree, which makes all the water on earth, he ended up entombed in salt due to the tree proctectors (giant insect-like crab cryptids) causing an earthquake. Years later he breaks out of his imprisonment when the salt crystal gets exposed to water. Anything that he touches with his right hand turns or gets encased in an unbreakable layer of salt, which he uses to almost accidently turn the tree itself into salt. In the end its revealed his thirst for power has now became a literal, unquenchable thirst, yet unable to touch water to quench it. He demands Zak retrieve the sap from the tree to finally end his suffering. Later he uses a flower from the tree to finally quench his thirst. As it turns out, he became nothing but living salt and drinking the sap from the flower reduced him to a pile of salt, finally ending his suffering.
- In Trollz, Zirconia was turned into a tree for 3,000 years. It's a bit more complicated than that, though; at first, she was simply imprisoned within the tree. As time passed, she became part of it. She was conscious the entire time.
- Spinell, her husband, was trapped in the form of a dragon. That couldn't talk.
- The short film Alma is about a little girl lured into a sinister toy shop by a doll that looks just like her, ending with her becoming the doll after touching it and the shop setting out another doll to lure another victim.
- In Gargoyles, the Gargoyles whose bodies composed the Cyborg Coldstone are given a moment of freedom by a spell that allows them to possess the bodies of their living bretheren in the clan. Coldstone and his mate briefly contemplate keeping the bodies, but eventually give them back up shortly after it's discovered that the Gargoyles they're possessing are still concious in their bodies.
Fan Fiction
- There is a bit of controversy in Teen Titans fandom over whether the fate of Terra, who was transformed into stone at the end of season two and possibly revived in the series finale, involved this or not. Creepily, a few particularly vindictive Fan Fic writers have her remain conscious during her stone imprisonment, going against the fan consensus that she is/was probably unconscious or in a death-like state. Those who see her as The Woobie sometimes do this as well to portray her in a more sympathetic and tragic light.
- Early in a Werewolf The Apocalypse fan fic, the main character suffers sleep paralysis in his bathtub and wakes up right before drowning. As if that wasn't High Octane Nightmare Fuel enough, the character is later kidnapped by the villains and forcefully possessed by an evil spirit. He likens it to the episode he suffered earlier, except he actually drowns.
- The brilliant and utterly horrifying Silent Hill fanfiction Praying in Vain takes this trope, adds some Silent Hill Mind Screw, then multiplies the result with itself. Over the course of the story the protagonist finds and frees the victim/s and the murderer/s of several killings throughout the town's history, trapped in its Dark World ever since they were killed and continually experiencing their moment of death (including but not limited to bleeding to death, dismemberment and immolation). It's heavily implied that every single person killed there is in a similar state, forever tortured to sustain the town's Genius Loci and at the end, though pissed at the loss of its food, the personification of the aforementioned loci assures the protagonist that she has accomplished nothing, and that there is plenty more where they came from.
- In the The Legend Of Zelda Ocarina Of Time fanfic "The Legend of Link: Lucky Number 13", an unfortunate mage has his heart ripped out by a god (who "holds the threads of his life together, not allowing him to die"). The god then chains him in a Sealed Room In The Middle Of Nowhere, torments him by pummeling him until his bones shatter, chilling and boiling his blood at random intervals and finally coating the still-beating heart in honey before impaling it on a stalagmite. This is where it gets good; the mage is left to suffer an army of insects feasting upon the heart (which still transmits the pain to his body), which is restored periodically to prolong the agony, for eight years. He is freed eventually, and is shown to have gone absolutely insane; he is killed by that same god within minutes.
Real Life
- There are personal anecdotes in Troper Tales: And I Must Scream
- One of the most common forms of this is Lou Gehrig's Disease. If you have Lou Gehrig's Disease, your motor neurons, which are responsible for triggering actions, gradually decay away while the rest of your nervous system (including your brain) remains perfectly intact.
- Poor Stephen Hawking gets more of a taste of this then anyone ever wants, though he at least gets sight, hearing and enough eye movement to control his computer, along with retaining his incredible mind.
- During REM sleep, your ability to move is suspended in order to keep you from acting out dreams and such. The phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis, and you are more often than not wholly unaware of it... unless you happen to wake up in the middle of it. Doing so, as with many sleeping disorders, is usually due to stress in one's waking life, and it can be quite disturbing, especially when it's accompanied by nightmares and strange sensations (some of which have inspired legends of Horny Devils, but that's another story). One's time-sense is also distorted in this state, so it can seem like a very long time before you fully awaken.
- This can be especially disturbing if you happen to be a sleepwalker.
- A similar experience can be had either just before sleep, in a Hypnagogic state, or just upon awakening, in the Hypnopompic state, when the body goes into sleep paralysis too soon, or comes out of it too late. However, this can also lead to Hypnagogic Hallucinations, where the body is frozen, and the mind experiences audio, visual, and/or tensile hallucinations, whether pleasurable or not, sometimes leading into extremely intense lucid dreams.
- When former editor of Elle magazine Jean-Dominique Bauby was struck by locked-in syndrome after a stroke, he managed to communicate through a system of eyeblinks, and wrote a book about his experiences called The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, later made into a film.
- One eventually does die, but being trapped under a rock slide, 1000 feet below the earth, is no way to go. Especially as your light slowly goes out, and panicked breathing causes further constriction of the rocks and mud pinning you (and the passages are often just barely big enough to squeeze through on your stomach). This is of course one of the easiest way to die when spelunking. See also the movie World Trade Center.
- My dad relates this one at times: Imagine four or five men crawling through a narrow tunnel deep under the earth, in training for (I forget the military position). One man in the line panics and either (a) stops crawling or even (b) dies. Now, those ahead of him are fine - they can continue to crawl until they get to the end of the tunnel and out. But they can't bring his body with them. Those behind them are screwed: You can't go back the way you came, not in that kind of tunnel. Imagine being trapped in a tiny tunnel behind a dead body without any possibility of rescue attempts.
- Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP). A horrible, horrible genetic disease where, if you muscles are damaged in any way at all, your body decides to replace the damaged muscle- not with more muscle, but with bone. By the time you're thirty, most, if not all of your joints have been locked into place by newly-grown bones and you die of starvation/suffocation because you can't move your jaw or ribs.
- A bad experience with the psychoactive herb salvia divinorum can cause horrifying sensations of being trapped in an eternal loop or transformed into an inanimate object.
- Not just salvia but almost any psychedelic drug. Time dilation plus ego death equals this trope becoming very, very real.
- During surgery, hospital patients are supposed to receive neuromuscular blocking agents (which keep them paralyzed so they don't twitch and mess up the surgery), sedatives (to keep them asleep and give them amnesia), and an anesthetic (to numb them so they don't feel anything). There are numerous reports of patients who have had the sedatives and anesthetics wear off during/after surgery but KEPT ON the neuromuscular blocking agent. So essentially they are completely paralyzed and wide awake and have no possible way to give the doctors a sign that they are in excruciating pain. Luckily, the autonomous systems keep functioning and react to the pain as normal (quickened breathing and pace, heightened blood pressure, sweat), so a good doctor would probably be able to tell and administer more anesthetic. Hopefully.
- And now you know why at least one troper is terrified of ever having to have surgery!
- Actually that point of anesthesia was to block pain to you don't move and screw up the surgical prodcedure. That way you don't have to strap the patient down. We've all had injuries before so is a safe but painful surgery really that frightening. I never got novocaine at the dentist, ever.
- Polio often caused paralysis. Sometimes of limbs. Sometimes of the various breathing mechanisms. Iron lungs, for a very long time, meant lying down in a sort of cylinder, with only the head outside◊. That's a nonintrusive way to keep someone breathing, and it's fine and dandy as a temporary thing. Most people who needed them only needed them for a week or two. But some polio patients were never able to breathe on their own again, and it was years before smaller long-term breathing machines were invented. Why We Immunize has a good article on that.
- There's Elizabeth Moon's essay on polio. Put your chin on your chest.
I did some volunteer work in a children’s hospital. There was only one polio patient: one of the last cases, then a teenager, in an iron lung. By then there were no more specialty polio centers, no more polio wards, in which at least the inhabitants could talk to someone who understood. In a ward for children, where the other patients were kids who’d had some other treatable illness or injuries, there was his iron lung. He wanted no part of the cheerfulness we tried to bring to the ward.
And no wonder. Unless he could adapt to one of the smaller respiratory assists that came later, he was stuck for life in a huge, unwieldy, scary case... immobile, having to be tended by people who reached in through portholes on the side to clean him up, change his diaper... and who, increasingly, would not have a clue what his life was like because people like him were so few now. He could not see his body, engulfed in the machine that kept him alive. He could see only what was directly above him or reflected in the mirror over his head. None of the electronic aids for the disabled existed then... or for another decade or two.
There were, and are, more lethal diseases than polio: those with a higher mortality, and greater infectivity as well. But polio had a special horror to it.
- This is basically the gist of Locked in syndrome, wherein you appear comatose, but are actually 100% aware of everything going on. This can go undiagnosed, everyone thinking they're just plain comatose.
- An actual case. This man was thought to be in coma for 23 years. 23 YEARS of lying around and nobody cares for or speaks to you because they think you aren't there.
- Severe cases of cerebral palsy or otherwise brain injury can result in a person being in a state like this.
- See the references to Johnny Got His Gun up there? One unfortunate Gulf War II veteran is living the nightmare.
- You may have seen that picture on shock sites of the guy who blew his jaws and most of his face off with a shotgun, and survived. He literally has no mouth and must scream.
- Elizabeth Bathory. Since she was a noble she couldn't be executed for her multiple murders as her servants were. So she was locked in her room for the rest of her life with no human contact. She lasted three years.
- Empress Dowager Lü Zhi of the Han Dynasty, after having the young prince Ruyi murdered as a perceived threat to her son Hui's throne, tortured his mother, Consort Qi, by hacking off her hands and feet, putting out her eyes, deafening her, and tossing her in a pig pen to live out the rest of her life. (Emperor Hui was so traumatized by his mother's unspeakable and pointless cruelty that he took to drink and died.)
- Carlos II of Spain.
- In the book "Musicophilia", Oliver Sacks describes the sad case of conductor Clive Wearing, who suffers from an acute case of both retrograde and anterograde amnesia (i.e. he has lost almost all memories of his past, and is also unable to form new long-term memories, like the protagonist in the film Memento). Wearing is aware that something is terribly wrong with him, but he has no way to learn what has happened or come to terms with it, and is left only with a constantly recurring realization of having been robbed of all past experience. At one point, Wearing's therapist suggested that he might try keeping a diary...
But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements "I am awake" or "I am conscious," entered again and again every few minutes. He would write, "2.10 pm: this time properly awake....2.14 pm: this time finally awake....2.35 pm: this time completely awake," along with negations of these statements: "At 9.40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims." This in turn was crossed out, followed by "I was fully conscious at 10.35 pm, and awake for the first time in many, many weeks." This in turn was canceled out by the next entry. This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages." (pp. 203-204)
Wearing has been keeping this diary for more than twenty years.
- This may well be what certain forms of wasp do to their hapless caterpillar victims... until the eggs laid in the caterpillar hatch and the wasp larvae eat their host, anyway.
- This experiment involving MRIs implies that people in persisted vegetative states may be completely aware of their surroundings, even going so far as to answer complicated questions. What's worse, the BBC broadcast talking about this implied the moral and legal obligations of such a claim, that someone stuck in this state and capable of asking for it would not be legally allowed assisted suicide.
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