Bloody Smile

Might want to get that looked at...

Sometimes when a character has Blood from the Mouth, they'll make a horrified look, realizing they're now in real physical danger.

Not these characters.

Doesn't matter if they've been beaten to a pulp, Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, shot, or whatever. They'll give a great big, blood-covered toothy smile, usually at whoever inflicted this on them. These characters are usually Blood Knights that live for the fight, sometimes as an Intimidation Demonstration to confuse their enemy, as part of The Plan to get their Heroic Sacrifice, or simply to show their Slasher Smile if the character is mentally unstable.

If the character is dying, then it's Go Out with a Smile or even Bring My Red Jacket. If it's the bad guy, expect to see this after a beatup with a Psychotic Smirk or Slasher Smile. This may also occur if the character has just eaten something very bloody and possibly alive, and may be showing off Scary Teeth.

See also Blood Knight, Death Seeker (or Thrill Seeker for a less extreme version), and Combat Sadomasochist for characters who like to do this. Contrast Glasgow Grin, where a person's mouth is cut open at the corners to create a bloody "smile" of sorts.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bungo Stray Dogs: During Chuuya and Dazai's battle with Lovecraft, Chuuya activates Corruption, making him into a massively powerful killing machine that can only take pleasure in the destruction he causes while slowly dying from the Ability's toll. By the end, Chuuya is left a manic mess, grinning and laughing madly as he wreaks havoc, oblivious to the blood pouring out of his mouth. Luckily, Dazai nullifies Corruption before it's too late, though Chuuya quickly passes out from the strain.
• A common scene in Hellsing is to see Alucard with a bloody smile on his face, which most of the time is Not His Blood thanks to being a vampire... and more than that, being Dracula himself.
• Naruto: After a brutal fight between brothers, Sasuke Uchiha seems trapped against Itachi, who has Blood from the Mouth. But in the end, Itachi smiles and pokes his forehead as he did when his little brother was a kid breaking his facade and demonstrating that he always was worried about Sasuke, to finally Go Out with a Smile.

Comic Books

• Batman: In the story A Death in the Family (as well in Batman: Under the Red Hood in the prologue), the Joker has just given Robin II/Jason Todd a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. What does Jason do after he gives Joker a Spiteful Spit? He smiles at him.
• A trademark look for the Red Lanterns in Green Lantern, where their mouths can throw and be full of blood. Of course this happens when they smile, which doesn't occur so much.

Fan Works

• In the Kingsman: The Secret Service fanfic the cornice in the ground, Eggsy gives Merlin a bloody grin after he resurrects Harry from the dead and tells him to catch him before he collapses into a coma.
• Friday Night Trepidation, a Game Mod of Friday Night Funkin', features Jeff the Killer as an opponent. In line with him being a psychotic killer, Jeff's constant Slasher Smile is stained with blood on his teeth and around his mouth.

Films — Animation

• Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox has The Flash reaching an Alternate Universe where it's Bruce Wayne who's shot instead of his parents. In the subsequent flashback, Martha Wayne is shown cradling her son's corpse while holding a hand over her mouth, and then suddenly suffers Sanity Slippage as she starts cackling away with a bloodied smile around her cheeks.
• Shrek the Third: When Shrek, Donkey, Puss In Boots, and Arthur encounter Merlin, he offers them his "rock o gratin", which he eats. He smiles at them while saying " it's organic", showing off his rather bloody teeth.

Films — Live-Action

• Batman:
  • Batman (1989): Joker, naturally, sports a bloody smile in the bell tower after Batman smashes him in the mouth a few times. He also tries the old "bloody chattering teeth" gag.
  • Danny DeVito's Penguin from Batman Returns flashes one of these at a female assistant he finds attractive right after biting off the nose of her boss.
  • As part of the Grand Finale for Joker (2019), after being jailed in a police car after the massacre Arthur Fleck made in the talk show and being the ignitor for the Gotham City riot, a truck crashes the police car with him inside. Then it's shown that Joker's followers did it and they rescued him and put on a car hood. After getting up and seeing how their new followers cheer him up, Arthur uses the blood on his mouth to draw a clown smile on his face and face them laughing as their new leader.
• Cries and Whispers: After stabbing herself in the crotch with a broken piece of glass, Karin proceeds to reach between her legs and smear the blood over her mouth as she grins at her hated husband, who's watching in shock.
• In Dredd as Anderson is having a mental one-on-one with Kay she inverts one of his fantasies of forcing her to do down on him by having it appear to be Ma-Ma who looks up at him with a bloody smile, a callback to her "feminising" her previous pimp with her teeth.
• In The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Sean's race with Clay ends with two fairly serious crashes. At the police station afterwards, Sean grins at Clay's girlfriend and his teeth are covered in blood.
• In Fight Club, during a team meeting, the protagonist gets a cheesy compliment from a co-worker and responds by giving him a sneering smile, showing blood in his mouth from the beating he took the night before.
• In Ginger Snaps, while the Fitzgerald sisters are trying to hide all evidence of Trina's murder, Ginger smile bloodily while pretending it's only dyed corn syrup and part of the sisters' school project on suicides.

Literature

• A Song of Ice and Fire: Not actual blood, but Masha Heddle the innkeeper has a habit of chewing sourleaf, which has stained her teeth red. Although she's sweet and kind, Catelyn Stark remembers being frightened by her red smile.

Live-Action TV

• In the first episode of The Boys (2019), after Translucent tracks down Hughie with the intent of punishing him for placing a bug in the headquarters of Vought-Corp., Butcher arrives and confronts him. Butcher gets pummeled by Translucent since he can't see him, and as it looks like Translucent is going to finish him off, Butcher flashes a bloody smile and spits on Translucent's face allowing Butcher to keep track of his position.
• One poster for Daredevil (2015) shows Daredevil with a bloody smile, cracking his knuckles, which is seen commonly during the series.
• Dominion: A flashback shows Michael slaughtering scores of humans on the orders of God as punishment for them worshipping angels instead of Him. Michael is about to kill the sole survivor of the massacre, a little boy, when Gabriel comes to his rescue. The flashback ends with Michael sporting a Slasher Smile showing his bloodstained teeth.
• The Expanse: In the season 4 finale, Amos does this after Murtry punches him, giving him the perfect excuse to Pay Evil unto Evil offscreen as revenge for Wei's death.
  Amos: Thank you. (initiates beatdown)
• The Handmaid's Tale: In "Ballet" Janine and Esther are at the Red Center eating chocolates. The latter tells Janine, "You know, I really didn't like you when we first met." Janine laughs, but she continues "And I was right about you." Just then, both start coughing up blood, and Janine realizes that the chocolates are poisoned. As if to emphasize the point, Esther flashes a smile like this; she'd rather die than be a Handmaid.
• MacGyver (2016): In "DIY or Die", Mac and Jack first appear tied back-to-back and enduring a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Jack keeps antagonising their interrogator, so he keeps hitting him instead of Mac, finally taunting the guy with a bloody grin of triumph... because while the man was occupied with Jack, Mac was busy sawing through the ropes.
• Magnum, P.I. (2018): In "Day I Met The Devil", Magnum is captured by Ivan and beaten for the location of an FBI informant. He (lying) describes how the informant was blown up earlier by a drone and flashes a bloody grin. Ivan, who was flying the drone, isn't fooled and tells The Dragon to keep going.
  Ivan: Wipe that smile off his face.
• Oz: Having been fatally wounded by Saïd, Adebisi walks out of his cell and flashes all of Em City a bloody smile before he collapses to the ground, dead.
• South Side: A bizarre gag involves Officers Turner and Goodnight in their patrol car, with Turner having complained about Goodnight's breath. He's shown using a flosser so hard it pulls out a chunk of flesh from his mouth, and when he smiles at her after his teeth are stained red. Neither of them finds this particularly strange.
• Supernatural: In Season 6, Sam is cornered by two demons, only for them to stop in their tracks because they've stepped inside a Devil's Trap drawn in blood on the ceiling. Sam smiles at them with blood on his teeth, revealing he bit open his own wrist in order to draw the runes.

Music

• The music video for Blue Öyster Cult's "Joan Crawford" presents a very loose interpretation of Mommie Dearest, the biography of the daughter of Joan Crawford. One among a sequence of nightmare images shows Joan Crawford's boyfriend mobbed by schoolgirls, who overpower and kill him; one of the girls smiles at the camera, revealing vampire teeth and a mouth full of blood.
• The music video for "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd starts with the protagonist after a beatup with Blood from the Mouth but laughing. Then it's shown that he went to Las Vegas and met a Japanese singer which was his Love Interest, being beaten by The Mafia after that. But anyway he got happy after that, seeing him not just smiling and laughing but dancing in the middle of the streets.

Professional Wrestling

• Becky Lynch had a memorable instance of this during a go-home episode of WWE Raw in November 2018, where she got in a brawl with Nia Jax and accidentally took a stiff, bloody punch to the face, genuinely breaking her nose and concussing her. Amazingly, Becky worked off the injury and continued with the brawl, and the image of her in the aftermath — with a bloody, visibly broken face, but still smiling and proudly defiant — is widely cited as what catapulted her to megastardom.
• Mick Foley's utterly psychotic smile in his infamous Hell in a Cell match with The Undertaker at King of the Ring 1998, where he was visibly bleeding from the mouth as a result of a steel chair falling on his face earlier.

Video Games

• Classic Doom has Doomguy's mug in the center of the status bar. As he takes damage, his head gets more disheveled and bloodier. Lower than 40% health will cause bleeding in his nose and mouth, visible when he picks up a new weapon, smiling at his increased killing power. It hurts less making hellspawn hurt more.
• One of the more famous stills in promotion of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Lynch has a nosebleed that lets blood into his mouth, with the tagline, "REAL IS BLOOD IN YOUR TEETH".
• As a reference to the 2019 movie, one of the Joker's intros in Mortal Kombat 11 is to pick a knife and cut his finger so he can paint his trademark smile in red while using the same knife as mirror.
• Made to look like this in the Pikmin animated short "The Night Juicer" after three Pikmin see (what they think) is Olimar blending a chopped-up red Pikmin and drinking it. He then turns around and gives a smirk as they see the red liquid remains on his teeth. Turns out it's just Pikpik carrot juice, but the Pikmin are still freaked out.

Webcomics

• In the commentary of one Penny Arcade strip around when Undertale was first released and the fandom was at its peak, Tycho said that the game was "smiling, but it has blood on its mouth" to metaphorically describe how its tone came across to him: a hostile satire that presents itself as an Affectionate Parody of Role-Playing Games while simultaneously denouncing them as evil. In other words, what the game uses as a love letter to games that came before, he saw as a Compliment Backfire.

Web Original

• A sex joke between friends that became a gross Memetic Mutation is the image of a man with his mouth or face covered with blood smiling, accompanied with the phrase "A real man loves his woman all 365 days."

Western Animation

• A scene in the The Loud House episode "Lynn-er Takes All" originally had Lynn use four toothbrushes to brush her teeth extra fast, resulting in her gums bleeding as she smiles. In the version from the actual episode, all that happens is she loses a tooth.
• In the Moral Orel episode "Turn The Other Cheek", Orel does this throughout the second quarter of the episode, with him being repeatedly beaten up and tormented, yet smiling because he is "turning the other cheek".

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