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"How much blood would you shed to stay alive?"
A tagline for Saw

A type of Tone Shift and the violent twin of Darker and Edgier. It's a work that is made more graphically violent than it used to be, or than its source material is. Heck, a lot of poorly-done attempts at being Darker and Edgier end up becoming this instead.

In the United States, when the Hays Office disbanded in favor of the MPAA rating system, along with everything else, films got bloodier. One aspect of this was remakes of horror films. This trope often involves the presence of Made of Plasticine and Ludicrous Gibs that were absent in the original. It's often achieved by simply averting the Inverse Law of Sharpness and Accuracy, or turning the Badbutt or Badass Pacifist into a full-fledged badass.

In horror sequels, this is the typical form of Sequel Escalation. Expect the producers to end up Overdrawn at the Blood Bank. In cases of comedies, this is an aspect of Crosses the Line Twice and Black Comedy. Expect to see a lot of High-Pressure Blood.

A Sister Trope to Darker and Edgier, Hotter and Sexier, Ruder and Cruder and Younger and Hipper.

Compare Gorn & Made of Plasticine (both of which this trope almost always involves), Grimmification, Obligatory Swearing and Denser and Wackier. Contrast Lighter and Softer, Bowdlerize and Disneyfication.


Example subpages:

Other examples:

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    Comic Books 
  • Archie Comics:
    • It's not hard to be bloodier and gorier than Archie Comics, but Afterlife with Archie is quite violent. Within the first chapter, Hot Dog gets hit by a car, turns into a zombie, and bites Jughead. It's as gory as you'd expect from a Zombie Apocalypse comic, and it's done in a far less cartoony art style than the original comic.
    • Sister series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina does the same thing but with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It's a horror series and has more than its fair share of blood and Nightmare Fuel.
    • Archie vs. Predator is likewise much more violent than the regular comics, but it gets points for the fact that it's intentionally drawn in the usual artwork style of the regular books. The first issue alone has the Predator gutting Jason and Cheryl Blossom apart leading to the blood of the two corpses splattering all over the gang... who somehow never put two and two together that something's raining blood on them.
  • The Batman Adventures is darker and more bloody than the series it's adapted from.
  • Clone Wars Adventures: While the series had some high-impact violence of its own, the comic was a lot more liberal with depicting not just blood flowing from certain wounds, but vast numbers of brutal, on-page deaths to boot.
  • G.I. Joe as done by Marvel Comics. Well into the triple-digit years, the company answered fan concerns of why some Joes don't die by having several Joes shot dead. On screen. Through the face. No blood whatsoever.
  • The Red Lanterns got their own book during the New 52. They are a Bloodier And Gorier Green Lantern Corps, who vomit blood as a weapon.
  • Infinite Crisis is the Bloodier And Gorier sequel to DC's original Crisis on Infinite Earths. The original Crisis had plenty of deaths, but very little blood. Infinite Crisis, on the other hand, had impalements, decapitations, and even heads exploding on panel ... and very few Gory Discretion Shots or Shadow Discretion Shots. No, the editors wanted to show just how Darker and Edgier they were by having as much gore on panel as possible.
    • And pretty much every chapter in the interquel 52 involving Black Adam has him popping heads, tearing people in half, bragging about ritual sacrifice, etc. Though even in Infinite Crisis he gets one of the best: shoving a guy's mask out the back of his face. "No more silly faces" indeed.
    • The added gore is even the motivation of the major villain Superboy-Prime who lived his whole life back when comics were much more sanitized. The idea of a world with imperfect heroes and gratuitous violence drives him insane, making him a major source of the comic's brutality.
  • The Marvel comics version of Jaws 2 is far more violent than the film itself, featuring several panels of the shark tearing its victims apart.
  • Judge Dredd is pretty cynical and violent to start with, but Heavy Metal Dredd is packed with Ludicrous Gibs and everyone being Made of Plasticine. That's pretty much all there is to it, all the political themes and moral ambiguity surrounding an Anti-Hero like Dredd that make the 2000 AD continuity an interesting read have been excised in favor of balls-to-the-wall splatter.
  • Scott Pilgrim begins as a cutesy, lighthearted series about a 23-year-old man who falls in love with a girl, but must defeat her seven exes in order to win her heart, and his life is like a video game. Sounds innocent enough, right? Until you get to Volume 6. In it, Gideon impales both Scott and Ramona, with very bloody results (yes, Scott comes back with the extra life, and Ramona's wounds heal when she gets her sword, but STILL).
  • Spider-Man villain Carnage received two one-shots in The '90s, Mind Bomb and It's a Wonderful Life. Both were as gory and squicky as you'd expect from comics that feature Carnage as the main character.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story "Body Count" from the mid-'90s, which involved Raphael and Casey Jones teaming up with a woman to help her get revenge on her evil twin brother who happened to be the leader of a street gang, is probably the goriest TMNT story to date — people get their heads cut or blown off, gigantic holes blown through them, shredded by machine gun fire, eyeballs being shot or knocked out of their heads, blown to pieces by missiles, etc.
    • On the other hand, the heavily-bowlderized history of the TMNT as a whole makes for something of an inversion to anyone who's read the first issue of the original series.
  • Transformers:
  • Ultimate Marvel's Ultimatum. It features morbidly obese mutant Blob devouring Wasp's ripped guts, then in Hank Pym biting off Blob's head then later getting blown up by suicide bomber Multiple Man, complete with flying guts and a skeleton being incinerated, then Doctor Strange getting squeezed by his own cape until his head explodes, and so on.
  • Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons: Being a book under the DC Black Label imprint, the series features far more bloody and violent imagery than in the usual Wonder Woman comic.
  • Zombies Christmas Carol is a retelling of A Christmas Carol with zombies, so this trope was inevitable. The single goriest page is Ignorance and Want killing the Ghost of Christmas Present.

    Comic Strips 

    Fan Works 
  • Persona 4 SILVER BLUE: Downplayed. The action sequences are much more violent and gruesome here than in canon, and the shadow selves are more vicious than they originally were in the games, but so far, that only applies to the fights against shadows. The human deaths, on the other hand, are about just as bloody as they already were back in the original story.
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon) has more Body Horror than any of the canon MonsterVerse installments, to say nothing of the Cruel and Unusual Deaths.
  • Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), an animation based on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has Pinkie Pie slowly and brutally mutilate her friend Rainbow Dash.
  • Outcast Bandicoot is both this AND Darker and Edgier than the Crash Bandicoot games it is based on (which are family-friendly).
  • The Bound Destinies Trilogy is a lot more violent than the three The Legend of Zelda games that each story is based around; especially in the case of Blood and Spirit, which is quite gory despite the fact that it's set in the generally light world of Skyward Sword.
  • Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness has a LOT of very explicitly described violence, rape, gore, and torture. And it's a fanfic of Harry Potter, a series aimed at teenagers and children at best.
  • Hyrule Warriors is considerably more violent than the game itself; for example, in the third chapter, when Link is badly injured by King Dodongo, Zelda briefly fears that he may have a punctured lung.
  • Infinity Train: Boiling Point has a lot of violence and injuries from fire from Boscha going to town on the Apex, who are mostly children. Savage children that kill and destroy the lives of innocent children, but still, children. And that's only the beginning...
  • The Lion King Adventures became much more violent after Series Three.
  • Impossibly, The Legacy of the Blood Ravens can be considered bloodier than its source material, since every wound and strike is described in slow, painful detail.
  • For the most part, Pretty Cure Perfume Preppy is fairly tame and lighthearted... until Episode 48 when Ashley, aka Leather Ashes, eats a corpse. It's depicted in full detail.
  • My Little Portal, while a very darkly comic fusion of its namesakes, started off rather mildly- then came episode 5, detailing a flashback of the fall of Canterlot. Fluttershy is nearly eviscerated, changelings are smashed and blown up all over the place, Chrysalis rips out Shining Armor's heart and snaps off Twilight's wings with visible bones, Twilight accidentally gores Celestia to death with her horn... the foreboding Content Warning at the start of the video is very much needed.
  • This practice is prevalent in the Pokemon fanfic Natural Liberated, where much of the action is described in vivid detail, particularly the deaths. See Cheren being attacked and Rourke's death as examples.
  • Where to begin with Sonic X: Dark Chaos? All of the battles (especially the ones against Shroud, which take Body Horror to the next level) in the series feature copious amounts of blood and gore. Episode 73 takes the cake when Tsali storms through the Blue Typhoon - Tsali almost fatally stabs Sonic and Amy, shatters Cream's arms, blasts Chris with a radioactive blast of Dark Chaos Energy and finally opens up Tails' ribcage and tears his still-beating heart and lungs from his chest. The story is rated M for a very good reason.
    • And the rewrite is even worse. Episode 68 has Rouge find a gore-filled cannibal larder used by Molly's group to dispose of their dead, while Episode 69 has the Marmolim fortress and the screaming remains of the Marmolim scouts absorbed into the walls.
  • Hail to the King (Thuktun Flishithy) is much bloodier than Godzilla media, although it is roughly on par with the other franchise it crosses over with.
  • A Minor Miscalculation is several times bloodier than its source anime, Kill la Kill, especially when Nui is around.
  • Kingdom Crossovers features fight scenes that are a lot more violent than half the series represented in the fic.
  • Break My Heart, Break Your Heart is an Overwatch fanfic that far exceeds the usual level of violence from the T-rated game. Most of this is due to the fic's treatment of Reaper, who, contrary to the fandom's portrayal of him as a walking edgelord joke, has his Ax-Crazy tendencies cranked up and is utterly terrifying.
  • Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, while it might not reach Gorn levels, doesn't shy away from showing Pokémon battles more gruesome than in the anime.
  • Change Up: The original My Hero Academia could be surprisingly dark at times darker than the color pallet and art style would have you believe. Still, it was kind enough to wait an arc before introducing truly malevolent characters, and not thrust a brutal murder scene on the audience in the very first chapter. Highlighting the brutality of a post-All Might world.
  • In addition to being Darker and Edgier than any of the Jurassic Park franchise films, The Geeky Zoologist's reimagining of Jurassic World is just as bloody and gory as Michael Crichton's novels, with a lot of gruesome deaths and descriptions of dead bodies and maulings.
  • The The Other Side fanfic series, a retelling of Trolls World Tour, isn't necessarily darker and edgier than the original movie (asides from other fanfics integrated into the multiverse that the second fanfic follows upon), but is full of violence and action compared to the movie's mild use of it. While the violent sequences start off somewhat light, they eventually get really graphic and brutalized, with some characters bringing themselves to Blood Knight levels. Even characters like Poppy (who might probably take the cake out of the entire cast, since her fighting style is just that extreme) are not immune to this. And even unlike DreamWorks Animation's more actionized movies/franchises such as Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, it's exempt of Gory Discretion Shots. This is an especially jarring case of the trope for a fan work out of DreamWorks' first franchise explicitly aimed at children.
    • A special mention goes to the scene where Poppy destroys the Strings, drastically changed from the movie and applying Body Horror at its finest. Whereas she suffered no actual harm whatsoever in the movie (only seemingly getting her colors taken away before "Just Sing"), she ends up badly burned here, to the point of vomiting blood and dying as a result. She's eventually resurrected at the end of the first fanfic, but still.
  • Remnant Inferis: DOOM is this and Darker and Edgier compared to canon RWBY thanks to carrying over the gore of the Doom series. There's an immense degree of mutilation, Body Horror, vivisection, and graphic violence to the point where the main characters will more often than not come out of an intense fight covered from head-to-toe in blood and guts.
  • Infinity Train: Blossomverse is a crososver of Pokémon: The Series and Infinity Train and while both of them have had dark moments (the latter being known for a Family-Unfriendly Death that involved a child protagonist slamming their attacker across the wheels of the train while silver fluids splatter across their face), none of them have gotten downright gory. In the series, all bets are off. Violence is shown on screen, blood is depicted, a girl falls to her death and her head cracks open...
  • Invader Zim: A Bad Thing Never Ends: The fights in this story are significantly more violent than canon, with blood actually being spilled and only things like Zim's healing mist helping mitigate the damage. Tak in particular is very deadly in combat, at one point gutting Skoodge, and at another ripping out one of Zim's ribs.

    Films — Animation 
  • Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was already violent, but the animated version is gorier in many scenes, including the deaths of Gotham's mayor, Dr. Wolper, and TV host David Endochrine. It was the bloodiest movie in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies line until Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, which itself would later lose the title.
  • The climatic battle in Felidae is best summed up as Scar Vs. Simba made Bloodier And Gorier.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete. In the Final Battle, Sephiroth brutalizes Cloud by stabbing him eight times in mid-air, the last stab through his foot and knee. Ouch.
  • Justice League Dark: Apokolips War ups the gore and violence a lot, including iconic characters getting killed or maimed in gruesome ways, including being dismembered, ripped in half, or even devoured.
  • The 1978 The Lord of the Rings cartoon, even compared to the live-action ones that came out later. As The Nostalgia Critic said, when someone gets stabbed, you can feel them getting stabbed.
  • Night of the Animated Dead: Being an animated adaptation of George A. Romero's original movie, as well as audience tolerances for blood and gore being much higher than back in 1968, this movie is much more visceral than the original. For instance, when Johnny has his head struck against a headstone in the graveyard, a large pool of blood forms under his head, and we see him bleed out through his nose and eyes. Also, the zombies get much more brutalized, having hands and fingers stabbed through, having holes blown through their bodies, and having their heads blown off.
  • Princess Mononoke is by far the goriest Studio Ghibli film; people get decapitated, limbs torn or shot off, impaled, ripped apart, or melted.
  • In Tarzan when Kala enters the treehouse to find baby Tarzan, there are bloody pawprints of Sabor on the floor with the corpses of Tarzan's human family nearby, which is pretty gory for a Disney movie.
  • Up: At least, in comparison to other Pixar films, which are normally bloodless. Carl accidentally hits Steve (a construction worker) on the head with his cane, and a large gash of blood is shown. Kevin the bird is bitten in the leg, and the bandage Russel applies to her has blood visibly seep through. Both of these moments are Played for Drama.
  • Watership Down was already a bloody book but in the film, there is more focus on the bloody battles and kills off one of the characters who survives in the book.
  • Downplayed in Hercules. Hercules decapitates the Hydra on-screen while still inside its neck; true to form, the Hydra grows even more heads, and all of those get decapitated too. The only blood spilled is a slimy green Alien Blood, but there's plenty of it.
  • The Transformers: The Movie is this to the original cartoon. The og cartoon was at worst mildly violent. The movie starts with an absolute carnage of Transformers and Decepticons alike and by the end of the first half pretty much all the major characters of the cartoon are dead.

    Literature 
  • Anno Dracula, a semi-sequel to Dracula following an alternative ending in which the Count defeats Van Helsing and company during his initial trip to Britain, depicts far more graphic violence than its Victorian source material would have ever been allowed to. It also features some pretty spectacular Body Horror.
  • The Belgariad and Malloreon series becomes steadily more descriptive and violent as it progresses — probably due to the main character growing from innocent boy to mighty hero chopping heads off left and right. Expect bouncing limbs and gobs of brains as you get to the end of the seemingly kid-friendly series.
  • While the first Circle of Magic quartet isn't devoid of violence (there's an extended battle with pirates in the second book), the danger mostly comes from natural sources and we don't see too much aftermath. Its sequel quartet changes this since all of the plots revolve around crime sprees. Magic Steps, the first book, has a scene of bloody and violent assassination early on (without Improbable Infant Survival), there are messy stranglings in Street Magic and Shatterglass, and Cold Fire goes into terrifying detail about what fire and smoke does to a person.
  • The Chronicles Of Alice: This story is a darker version of Alice in Wonderland. There are lots of murders, with blood spraying everywhere.
  • Count and Countess starts off as violent, but is subtle enough that a kid could probably pick it up and read the first few chapters. By the final chapter, it has become an outright bloodfest.
  • While Digital Devil Saga was pretty bloody already, all the blood was censored during the battles and devouring happened off-screen. That is not the case with Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner. The gore is given realistic and highly disturbing descriptions (instead of plain old blood) to the point of Body Horror, and that's without touching the Heroic RRoD and its villainous counterpart that are also extremely frequent.
  • When reading certain Eighth Doctor Adventures (part of the Expanded Universe of the family timeslot show Doctor Who), you can get blind drunk if you take a shot every time there's a gory injury. The Doctor in particular gets hurt in a majority of the books.
  • The Hunger Games: Mockingjay is probably the bloodiest of all the books (though none of them are gory, per se), but this applies much more clearly in-universe to the Quarter Quells, which are all extremely violent and in-universe intentionally made even more brutal than the "normal" Games.
  • The Looking-Glass Wars certainly was intended to be this. However, there's only really two acts of violence that stick out from all the books in the trilogy. Otherwise, the violence is pretty standard and no more different than any other cheap YA series.
  • Oliver Twisted: The most gore the original story Oliver Twist contains is Oliver getting shot in the arm, Nancy's murder by Bill's hands, and the latter's dog spilling his brains upon falling from a roof. This take on the tale intentionally upscales the gruesomeness with the additions of children having blood harvested from their necks, close encounters with zombies, gluttonous orphans feasting on each other, and Bill Sikes being blown apart from the inside.
  • The Ship Who... is a short series where every entry is co-written with Anne McCaffrey and a different author and is largely independent of the other entries, though callbacks abound. The City Who Fought, written with S. M. Stirling, is the longest, darkest, and most sexually explicit. Much more fighting happens in this book than the others, often without a Gory Discretion Shot, and No Dead Body Poops is averted. Memorably, Street Urchin Joat sets a trap with Razor Floss and gleefully waits for the enemy to blunder into it, but her gloating turns to horror when she actually sees the immediate aftermath - there's so much blood, internal organs are sloshing onto the deck, and a maimed survivor has reached for her severed legs, split her hand in half on the wire she couldn't see, and started to scream in incomprehending terror.
  • Spectral Shadows:
  • The dark Cinderella adaptation Sunny Ella features an unnecessary throat surgery performed on Cinderella by her stepmother and multiple stabbings. There's also a mildly gruesome vampire subplot.
  • The Sword of Truth is a Bloodier And Gorier, Darker and Edgier, and Hotter and Sexier version of the works of Ayn Rand.
  • The novelization of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) remake is several times gorier than the film it's based on. For example, in the film, Kemper dies when Leatherface bashes him with a sledgehammer; in the book, he survives this and, convulsing and bleeding profusely, is dragged down to the basement, thrown on a table, and killed when Leatherface hacks into his throat with a meat cleaver.
  • Inverted with Erin Hunter works. Out of all their series, the original Warriors is the most violent by far. Seekers, Survivors, and Bravelands don't quite feature nearly as much blood or as many gory deaths.

    Live-Action TV 
  • And Then There Were None (2015): In spades - not only are the deaths more bloody (Brent goes from being jabbed with a syringe to outright stabbed in the neck with her own knitting needle), but several characters have hallucinations and dreams that expose their crimes in gruesome detail, particularly Armstrong's nightmare.
  • Criminal Minds went from merely implying the violence in Season 1 to gradually showing the effects of it in later seasons to, by Season 6, having huge displays of blood and gore, often the results of "creative" crimes.
  • Compared to the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Daredevil (2015) is this by a country mile and then some. There's a very good reason it got a TV-MA rating, with its brutal beatings and some utterly horrific death scenes.
  • Deadliest Warrior was already a pretty gory show with all the dummies and pig carcasses getting chopped to bits, but the second season began filling their mannequins and pig carcasses with fake blood so that EVERY hit would result in copious bleeding (and with the pigs, gigantic pools of blood soaking the floor).
  • Doctor Who:
    • Leela stands out as being an unusually violent companion. There had always been Action Hero companions in Doctor Who, but usually they stuck to wrestling, Flynning, or were generally kept bloodless (for example, Jamie had a knife, but was never allowed to stab people with it). Leela, meanwhile, was allowed to knife villains and poison them with thorns. It didn't help that her Stripperific leather outfit made her a lot Hotter and Sexier than the other companions had been up to that point, as well. And the story she was introduced in had the Doctor threaten people with a crossbow, throw a man-eating beast onto someone (with a Bond One-Liner), and kick a man into an electrical fence. Both viewers and Tom Baker felt Leela was too violent for the show, and she was toned down considerably in the next season.
    • The mid-'70s period with Robert Holmes as script editor and Tom Baker as the Doctor had everything from blood squibs to impalement to severed heads, with stories like "The Brain of Morbius" and "The Robots of Death" pushing the envelope. Seasons 21-22, featuring some incredibly violent stories like "Attack of the Cybermen" and "Resurrection of the Daleks", were also infamously brutal and contributed in part to the show's 18-month hiatus. Suffice to say that the pre-2005 series got away with a lot that wouldn't fly now. Even then, both of those eras were terminated by large-scale media criticism and consequent Executive Meddling.
    • Torchwood episode 1 features a man being killed by an alien. Whilst this happens blood spews out from him as though he were a hose. This could be seen as part of the show's attempt to look Darker and Edgier than its parent series.
  • Winx Club had dark moments, but they were presented in a sanitized way because it was for children. Fate: The Winx Saga pulls no punches on showing blood, burns, or mutilated bodies.
  • The Hell banishments in the live-action adaptation of Hell Girl are generally much bloodier and more violent than the ones in the original anime, which rarely used blood during the banishments.
  • Kamen Rider franchise does have some share of blood and gore, but a few of them stand out:
    • Kamen Rider Amazon is this for the franchise. The enemies there aren't Made of Explodium (except for some), they bleed a lot of technicolor blood and are easily decapitated. Just look at the deaths.
      • This even carries over to Amazon's appearance in Kamen Rider Decade. It's actually more subdued than the original show, but it's still Bloodier And Gorier since it's from a series where every other villain blows up when destroyed.
    • Kamen Rider Amazons proudly carries on the tradition of its parent, especially since it's a web-exclusive series aimed at adult fans of the franchise. The result includes such features as the main character inflicting Your Head Asplode on a monster via Rider Kick, severed limbs in multiple episodes, and people being Eaten Alive.
    • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid is much gorier than other mainline entries (although it's toned down from Amazons in comparison), since it's a Crapsaccharine Combat Medic-themed entry that deals with the diseases and having more body count that's comparable to war films. Some characters do bleeding on occasion, especially in The Beast Rider Squad special. The main character Emu does bleed as well.
  • The Longest Day in Chang'an has more graphic violence than the majority of Chinese dramas. Among other things, it features a man getting a knife driven into his hand on-screen and a woman being Buried Alive. Not to mention the man who had his eyes gouged out, and who appears in several scenes with his face covered in blood. Or Yu Chang getting her arm caught in the tower's cogs and cutting it off to free herself.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The show is more explicit when compared to the Jackson movies. While there's nothing that would push the show past a TV-14 rating, some of the violence in the series is bloodier than one might expect for an adaptation of Tolkien's work. Such examples would be the victims of the Warg attack being seriously injured, multiple close-ups of Bronwyn bleeding to death, or the burned survivors of the pyroclastic flow from Orodruin having their wounds being shown on a Game of Thrones level of explicit.
  • One Piece (2023) is fairly more realistic with its violence compared to the manga. From the first episode alone, Gold Roger's execution via impalement is fully shown, Alvida smashes a man's head in with her mace and Koby has to clean up the bloody aftermath, and Zoro kills Mr. 7 by segmenting his body into pieces with his swords.
  • The Punisher (2017) dips into Gorn with its Anti-Hero, managing to make the already gory Daredevil look incredibly tame in comparison.
  • Roots (2016) is this compared to the original 1977 miniseries. While the original was groundbreaking for its harrowing depiction of slavery, the remake holds no punches in its brutality largely due to it being on cable. For example, Kunta Kinte being tortured into saying his slave name is a longer and far more brutal scene in the remake's first episode than it was in the original miniseries.
  • Saturday Night Live had a satirical take on this in a sketch consisting of a documentary where Mel Gibson discusses a movie he made called The Passion of the Dumpty, which is shown to be a more graphic take on the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty where the egg-man's great fall results in a brain and intestines coming out of his egg shell as well as the usual insides of an egg.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation has the episode "Conspiracy", which culminates in the confrontation of a parasite-possessed Starfleet member that ends with Picard and Riker forced to blow his head off and burn a hole in his torso to draw out the queen parasite.
  • Star Trek: Picard is significantly more violent than TNG.
    • The reclamation surgery that is performed on a Borg drone is quite violent with its Facial Horror, as the flesh beneath the patient's ocular processing core is exposed.
    • The scene where Icheb is mutilated for his Borg implants is disturbing to the level of Torture Porn.
    • Bjayzl briefly becomes Ludicrous Gibs when she's shot by a phaser rifle.
    • There's a slow-motion sequence of green arterial spray gushing out from a Romulan with a Slashed Throat courtesy of Elnor's sword.
    • A Zhat Vash initiate gruesomely claws at her own face in close-up, breaking through the skin.
  • The first season of Stranger Things had its moments of violence and blood, but toed the line as to how graphic it could be and relied more on the Gory Discretion Shot. The second season ramps things up a little bit, particularly with the death of Bob, showing a pack of demodogs chewing on his corpse. Season 3 has significantly more gore and bloodshed than previous seasons. The monster of the season has a body formed from a noxious soup of blood, flesh, and organs, and it gathers resources for this by melting (or exploding) rats (and people) into literal puddles of bloody goo. Note that it's not restricted to the monsters either, in the final episode of the season we get to see a guy being killed when he falls into a giant spinning drill machine. It's very quick, but he very clearly splatters everywhere. Of course, the opening scene of season four ups the ante yet again with the depiction of the aftermath of some sort of massacre at Hawkins Lab, seemingly at Eleven's hands, which leaves behind the blood-soaked corpses of the majority of Eleven's "siblings".
  • Supernatural is certainly Bloodier And Gorier than previous shows in the genre, such as The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, etc., as it pretty much revels in Gorn. Which is really saying something, considering The X-Files didn't shy away from squick itself.
  • The Tales from the Crypt television series is this to the original comics (which were far from being bloodless already). In almost every episode, at least one character is guaranteed to be messily murdered, and usually an Asshole Victim at that. On top of that, it has far more gratuitous nudity and swearing.
  • Ultra Series: Much like with his work on Godzilla, Eiji Tsuburaya forbid the usage of blood and gore in Ultra Q, Ultraman, and Ultraseven (though some moments of Family-Unfriendly Violence did slip past his radar). After his death in 1970, more gruesome acts of violence committed between Ultras and monsters or monsters and humans appeared, most blatantly in Ultraman Ace and Ultraman Leo. This was toned down in the 1980s after Moral Guardians began to crack down on violence in Toku.
  • The second season of V (2009), with Anna killing a Visitor with her scorpion tail, making it rain blood (or some similar substance) and skinning a Visitor alive.

    Music 
  • Eminem's early work was known for its outrageous Heroic Comedic Sociopath violence, but it was also treated as cartoon slapstick with Major Injury Underreaction, silly sound effect adlibs inserted between lines, Eminem's cheerful delivery, and the effects of the violence not really being dwelled on. While his work is considered Horrorcore, the cartoonish silliness of the execution led to it being Tex Avery-core if anything. His post-overdose comeback album, Relapse, indulges in far more graphic violence with the outcomes being dwelled on. Compare him ripping off Pamela Lee's tits and "smack[ing] her so hard it knocked her clothes backwards like Kriss Kross" in "My Name Is" to him spending a whole verse stalking Britney Spears, ending with him shovelling handfuls of sleeping pills down her throat until she vomits on them, making a suit out of her skin so he can become her, and cheering her on as she struggles and screams, in "Same Song And Dance".

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Try comparing the Mexican world wrestling council, CMLL, where any blood spilled will be edited out of the regular TV show, with the Puerto Rican world wrestling council, WWC, which all but invented the barbed wire match. Even though WWC is an old-school promotion, considered "the last of the territories", CMLL is the oldest continuously extant promotion in the world, so it still fits this trope.
  • Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling took everything WWC did, got some more ideas from Jerry Lawler's USWA, turned them all up, added explosives and set out to put on a show bloodier than New Japan and All Japan.
  • While never reaching the insanity of FMW, the CZW managed to eclipse the ECW shows in the sheer amounts of bloodletting and mutilation, largely thanks to the efforts of one "Sick" Nick Mondo. CZW's Cage Of Death is also this to CMLL's version.
  • Big Japan Pro Wrestling, a more direct successor of FMW, likes to take other promotions' Gimmick Matches and make them even bloodier. Where Nick Mondo got the weed whacker banned from sports in the United States while working for CZW, Big Japan decided to top it with buzz saws!

    Roleplay 

    Visual Novels 
  • While Spirit Hunter: Death Mark was no slouch when it came to Body Horror, Spirit Hunter: NG really turns up the amount of gore and blood. The Kubitarou case has on-screen decapitations, to name just one example, and children and animals aren't safe from bloody, explicit deaths either.
  • Danganronpa:
    • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: The executions from the previous two main Danganronpa games were brutal and hardly bloodless, but not especially prolonged (mostly consisting of different forms of crushing, stoning and stabbing), with most of the torment involved being psychological. By contrast, V3's executions feature things like very gradual strangulation (over the course of hours, if the clock in the background during this execution is any indication), being forced to climb up a spiked rope while being sliced by buzzsaws, being boiled alive, and being stung hundreds of times by wasps before being impaled and then burned to death with a flamethrower.
    • In the Fan Games Danganronpa Another and its sequel Super Danganronpa Another 2, the murders and executions are bloodier and more twisted than the canon games (which is saying a lot when taking everything above into account).
  • The T-rated Ace Attorney series has always had its fair amount of blood, considering the murder mysteries seen in the games. However, Dual Destinies has bloodier images, specifically those related to a particular backstory seen in the last two casesnote , including a young Athena Cykes, covered in blood, smiling over her dead mother's body. It's highly possible that this was a reason the game had an M rating.note 

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 

    Web Videos 
  • Forklift Driver Klaus, (watch it here,) a parody safety video featuring bisections, decapitations, and impalements, certainly qualifies.
  • Played for Laughs in the With Blood series on YouTube, which adds in bloody effects to scenes from Home Alone and Back to the Future. The result is both disturbing and hilarious.
  • Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
    • The fifth episode, where Duck Guy's organs are torn out and eaten, and later his entire body is mutilated.
    • Inverted in Episode 6, which doesn't have any significant blood or gore, and focuses instead more on psychological horror.
  • Lasagna Cat: Some of the more recent uploads fall into this category, highlights include Odie slitting his wrists, Garfield giving an insane Jon a gory lobotomy, and a Polish woman giving birth to a stillborn baby in the toilet.
  • Unwanted Houseguest: The Comic-Book Adaptation contains much more explicit violence, and the graphic deaths of human beings.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time with a couple or two of episodes after the first season.
  • Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake is a sequel/spinoff to Adventure Time, but it's now rated TV-14 rather than TV-PG, so there's a lot more actual red blood rather than using Bloodless Carnage anymore, on top of also being Ruder and Cruder.
  • For its first season, Aqua Teen Hunger Force usually had characters "disappearing" after getting blown up with Bloodless Carnage thrown in. Starting with "Super Birthday Snake" in Season 2, the deaths became much more violent with tons of blood added; some deaths include the cast's bodies blowing up after getting stuffed with mermaid eggs, Shake getting all of his blood sucked out of his body with a vacuum cleaner, and the group getting their skulls ripped out of their heads.
  • Arcane: Compared to League of Legends's stylized cartoon violence, getting hurt is depicted much more realistically here. Characters are visibly injured on-screen, spit blood when hurt, and generally react realistically to being punched, stabbed, knocked, and thrown around violently.
  • The original Celebrity Deathmatch was a violent and bloody show to begin with. However, the short-lived MTV2 revival that aired in the mid-2000s turned out to be much bloodier than the original, which is quite a feat.
  • Family Guy:
    • The later episodes of the series can get quite gory with things like people's limbs being torn off, disemboweled, heads exploding, torn in half, etc, when in the earlier episodes hardly any blood was seen. Even when a guy was shot about 20 times and died, not a single drop of blood was shown coming from him.
    • In the parody of Return of the Jedi, nearly every single injury of people who weren't wearing full-body armor had pretty realistic-acting blood spill. This was probably to compensate for all the pain Seth MacFarlane had with Ewoks and FOX's pressuring.
  • Futurama:
    • In the sixth season of the episode "Prisoner of Benda" a member of a stage audience gets his arm cut off, however all you see are rings representing his skin, muscle/blood, and bone. Later, in the Season 7 episode "Tip of the Zoidberg", Zoidberg is forced to give Fry a liver transplant for his Simpson's Jaundice brought on by excessive bleeding, with Leela as the donor. Cut to the rather catastrophic end result: Leela is sawed in half at the waist, her upper torso hopping around the operating table, with blood dripping from the incision area into a clearly visible pool of it.
    "All you had to do was stop cutting my spine when I said 'Stop! You're cutting my spine!'"
    • The series finale tops this with Fry committing suicide by jumping off a very tall building and exploding into a mess of blood and guts. Repeatedly.
  • G.I. Joe: Resolute, although it's not really to excess, largely avoids the A Team Firings from the original series and actually shows Snake-Eyes getting his muting injury, though it's covered in a cloak.
  • Gravity Falls becomes noticeably bloodier after its first season. While there was nothing worse than a nosebleed in the first season, by the time of the second, there's Alien Blood everywhere, characters regularly and explicitly get covered in red and bloody scratches, and by the time of Weirdmaggeddon the imagery has progressed to literal waterfalls of blood, and mounted animal heads oozing thick, copious amounts of blood due to supernatural haunting. It's to the point where they use the gore for comedy; Big Bad Bill Cipher introduces Dipper to a "head that's always screaming!" then reduces it to nothing one layer of skin at a time before Dipper's eyes.
  • Harley Quinn (2019) is aimed towards older audiences, and the trailers already provide a couple of examples demonstrating the show's violence, such as Joker getting roughed up by Harley batting him in the face, Joker killing one of his mooks with a gun, a Harley-looking doll getting decapitated by a closing elevator door, and so on.
  • Looney Tunes Cartoons has considerably more brutal violence than the original shorts. Highlights include Bugs deflating into a grotesque abomination and pleading Elmer to wear him, Sylvester killing himself after being neutered, Tweety breaking Sylvester’s rib cage apart, Bugs pulling out a mummy’s organs from an urn, Petunia Pig breaking almost every bone in her body trying to get a picture of a squirrel, etc.
  • The Ren & Stimpy Show had this throughout its run, with characters' organs flying into the air and characters getting shot. There's one episode where Ren and Stimpy get their heads impaled on spears, and in some episodes, blood is even seen.
    • The episode "Magical Golden Singing Cheeses" has a disgusting scene of a jester skinning his hand with a cheese grater, then putting lemon and salt in the wound.
  • Rick and Morty was already a surprisingly violent show from the beginning, but it was a lot more measured in what was depicted and tended to happen quickly. Immediately starting with Season 3, the violence was pushed up a lot further with entire crowds being eviscerated in gory, even creative ways. While there is an argument of Asshole Victim for many of the people being killed, it is largely done by the main characters personally, and much more of a given episode is about the protracted, violent action sequences.
  • Samurai Jack Season 5 compared to the previous seasons, thanks to the shift over to [adult swim]; while previous seasons had a lot of Machine Blood from the Robot Mooks Jack carved his way through, Season 5 pits him against the very human Daughters of Aku, leading to such images as Jack slashing one of the Daughter's throats with her sword before realizing he's taken a very deep knife wound to the stomach, one of the last scenes being Jack floating down a river in a cloud of his own blood.
    • Genndy Tartakovsky decided to one-up himself with his next Adult Swim project, Primal (2019), where main characters Spear and Fang get into plenty of gory and brutal fights with all sorts of Prehistoric Monsters. One episode where Spear Hulks Out on a prehistoric Super Serum has him charge into a group of hostile ape men, punching them so hard most just explode into a cloud of shredded meat and bone when hit.
  • In the early episodes of Sealab 2021, the characters underwent Amusing Injuries, but in later seasons, more graphic violence began appearing on the show.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Often how Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials work. For "Treehouse of Horror V", in response to critics who said the specials were too bloody and gory, Matt Groening urged writers to make the bloodiest and goriest special that they could.
    • In one episode, Ned Flanders and Mr. Burns make a movie retelling events of The Bible in incredibly gory fashion. For example, when King Solomon gives his legendary judgement, he simply cuts the baby in half then and there - and then has a My God, What Have I Done? moment and cuts himself in half.
    • The Simpsons in general was much more violent than any mainstream cartoon series that had preceded it when it first aired in 1989-1990. Even if you leave out the Itchy & Scratchy sequences (which often take the Bloody Hilarious trope and run with it), there have been quite a few examples of bloody violence being Played for Laughs and/or shock value. "Bart the Daredevil", for example, ends with Homer falling down a cliff, much as Wile E. Coyote or Goofy once did. But instead of Bloodless Carnage, we have Homer getting busted open with every rock and crag his body impacts on the way down so that by the time he hits the bottom he is grotesquely bruised and has blood smeared on his face. Then the skateboard he rode down on bonks him on the head. (And then, after they airlift Homer out of the gorge on a stretcher, the ambulance hits a tree, causing Homer to roll out and fall down the cliff again, getting his bandages torn open and accumulating even more injuries!) It was obviously intended to depict Homer as an Iron Butt Monkey, but it almost certainly frightened or unnerved many children.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants has this in spades when it comes to the first seven seasons. Nearly no violence happens in Season 1, but each successive season for the next ten years had more punching, hitting, skin getting ripped off, veins popping, and of course, blood. Needless to say, this was downplayed a bit in Season 8 and especially after The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.
  • Though still child-friendly, Steven Universe: The Movie is rather violent compared to its original counterpart, as it shows a chemical burn (with blood-red tissue clearly visible in a few frames), a nosebleed that lasts for quite a while and a necrotic arm.
  • Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie in comparison to its origin serise , as well as all other animated adaptations the franchise which tend to feature Bloodless Carnage. The movie opens up with a future version of Leonardo wounded and bleeding quite obviously, and later shows him spitting up a fair amount of blood while getting beat up and tossed around by Krang. Pretty notable for a serise that started off as aLighter and Softer adaption.
  • Transformers:
    • Beast Wars was the worst about it, having characters blown or hacked apart. Of course, they were almost always put together just fine, making it pretty hard to believe in the deaths of some characters, who endured much less than Waspinator does every day of his life (his spark is in his head).
    • The Transformers: Generation 2 comic was probably the "goriest" incarnation of Transformers ever. It had all the visual trappings of the Dark Age of comics with truckloads or blatant robot substitutes for organs and blood.
  • Young Justice: Outsiders moved the series from Cartoon Network to the DC Universe streaming service, giving the production team fewer restrictions regarding the amount of violence shown (although the first two seasons did push the limits of what could be shown on Cartoon Network). Examples of harsher violence include:
    • A young girl being kidnapped and forcibly turned into a metahuman and sent to fight the Justice League in space. When Black Lightning tries to incapacitate her, he accidentally stopped her heart, killing her. He shortly learned afterwards that she was a young human girl with a weak heart. And this all happened in the first few minutes of the premiere.
    • The aforementioned girl's brother goes through a similar transformation, eventually coming back to his senses thanks to Black Lightning and the Outsiders. However, shortly after regaining control of himself, he is shot by an old man straight through the heart, who mistakenly thought the "monster" was still a threat.
    • Halo/Violet. Over the course of the season, so far she has had half of her face burnt off, her neck snapped, and been stabbed in the stomach by Lobo. Of course, with her healing powers, none of these things have killed her.
    • In "Home Fries," Ocean Master seeks to blow up Iris West-Allen's house, which at the time contained the loved ones of nearly every single member of the superhero community. This in of itself would qualify, but he is confronted by Lady Shiva towards the end of the episode, who says that murdering the loved ones of the heroes is considered "the nuclear option," and is only considered as a last resort given that the heroes will retaliate with full force. Ocean Master refuses to back down, so Lady Shiva cuts off his head.
    • Also in "Home Fries," Lobo has a part of his pinky sliced off while battling the Outsiders. This doesn't do much other than annoy him, however.
    • What happens to Victor Stone. He gets caught in an explosion when he accidentally trips a wire in his father's lab. When the dust clears and Silas finds his son, the viewers see his broken and bleeding body, complete with half of his skull exposed, and a large gaping wound in his chest that even shows his still-beating heart. To date, this is the most violent version of the accident that created Cyborg.

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