Eyes, teeth and tongues are not the only human body parts that are extremely sensitive and fragile. Our fingers are, too. This trope includes all the nasty things that can happen to them:
Fingers broken one by one;
Fingers cut off;
Fingers shot off;
Fingers bitten off or eaten;
Fingernails pulled off;
Fingernails torn off;
Long sharp objects hammered into the finger bones;
The hand nerves are exposed and pulled to make the fingers move;
Fingers crushed between heavy objects or machine parts;
Any combination of the above.
What makes fingers so attractive for horror writers is that unlike the eyes, we generally have ten of them. The fun lasts five times longer! And that's not counting the toes...
Also, most people can relate to finger and toe injuries, since they tend to be very common in every day life. This makes finger severing and other injuries a lot more cringe-inducing than something as over the top as limb dismemberment or decapitation. Most people have no idea how something like that would feel, but we pretty much all can imagine what a having a section of your finger cut off would feel like, and it seems very unpleasant.
There's also the fact that in humans, fingers have the highest number of touch receptors of any part of the body, primarily as an evolutionary consequence to the human species' tool biased survival strategy that required the use of the hands. As a result, fingers are so sensitive they could even be considered to be sensory organs on par with the eyes. The loss of hands can also be extremely disabling for the same reasons above, just as how the loose of an eye can be.
The title is a portmanteau of "finger" and "gore", and is a cheap pun, too.
See Mutilation Interrogation for Cold-Blooded Torture that often involves this. For this done as a ritual, see Yubitsume. Fingers are a fairly common Creepy Souvenir.
Compare An Arm and a Leg, where an entire limb is lost; Impaled Palm, where the handpalm is pierced by some object; and Agony of the Feet, where it's the toes that are lost. Contrast, among other things, Intertwined Fingers.
Poor Shion and Mion's fingernails.note To be precise, Shion had to tear off three of her own fingernails to earn forgiveness from her Yakuza grandmother Oryuu, and soon later her twin Mion willingly tore three of hers off due to her guilt. One of the best scenes of that arc, and part of the reason that no one will forgive Granny Oryuu.
One of the TIPS reveals that Mion & Shion's mother Akane had this done to her after the disagreement/sword fight she had with Evil Granny over Akane's choice of marriage. It also reveals that Oryuu herself had this done to her at some point when she was young, for some unrevealed transgression. Looks like this is a standard form of Corporal Punishment in the Sonozaki family.
Also, that scene involving fingers and the other kind of nails.
Don't forget the opening from episode 9 where we see a corpse that had metal nails driven through every one of the finger joints on the right hand.
And the door-slamming scene in Onikakushi. This one's made even worse when you find out who the real crazy one is and exactly why Keiichi sees Rena repeating "I'm sorry..." over and over shortly afterward.
Also, the opening song has a line that translates roughly as "I'll cut off your fingers and leave them in the forest."
Later, he gets a screw inserted under every single one of his fingernails.
Trigun has Wolfwood shoot Livio in the hand, leaving him with horrible, jagged bones sticking out. Livio stabs himself in the opposite arm with them later.
Noise Marie from D. Gray-Man gets two of his fingers hit by a level 4 akumas bullet and has to cut both of them off before the blood virus spreads and kills him.
Probably the only positive example on this page: In Pet Shop of Horrors, a dog sold to the child of a musically-focused family bites the girl's fingers so she can no longer play the piano. However, the girl actually hated the constant stress of having to live up to her family's high standards. With pianos out of the picture she becomes able to choose her own path.
In one episode of Madlax, Ninja Maid Elenore breaks a guy's fingers after he makes a fatal mistake of trying to force himself upon her Ojou Margaret. Vanessa's comment? "How vicious..."
Baccano features, among other things: fingers being sliced off by knives, fingers being crushed by the hands of The Big Guy, fingers being ground off on railroad tracks, fingers being ripped off with ropes, and fingers being bitten off. Ryohgo Narita must really hate fingers.
Of course, the aformentioned sliced-off and bitten-off fingers belong to the immortals Firo and Czeslaw respectively, so they return to their owners a few seconds after being removed, with the former not even appearing to be fazed by their removal.
Actually, while the do have Healing Factor on their side, it is made very clear with Czeslaw that it still fucking hurts.
Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid tried going Darker and Edgier, at least in comparison to the first two seasons of the anime, by having Mithril interrogation specialists break The Mole's pinky finger to get him to talk. Tessa forces herself to watch. Kalinin, meanwhile, remarks that if it had been him performing the interrogation, he'd have cut the guy's fingers off.
In The Second Raid, Sousuke also threatens to cut off some sap's fingers if he doesn't confess what he was trying to do to Kaname... starting one finger at a time. Kaname stops him before he starts, of course.
In the first episode of the first season, there is a scene where a young, damaged woman is actually biting her own nails to the point of actually doing harm.
"Let me bite it or please just kill me now"
In Zombie Powder, a villain cuts off all the fingers of someone he's interrogating even after he gets the information.
In the last chapter ofKara no Kyoukai, Ryougi Shiki bites off her thumb to squeeze her left (artificial) hand out of her cuffs.
Shikamaru in Naruto breaks his finger to release himself from a paralyzing illusion, as physical pain is a basic counter to these sort of things. (How, you ask, if he's paralyzed? With his shadow.)
Also Naruto himself, in his attempt to beat Neji in the Chuunin Exam by digging a hole, damaged his fingers to the point that they were bleeding from the nail beds. Worth it, though.
Samurai Champloo has Mugen performing an interrogation similar to Rorschach's in Watchmen. Then Mugen starts to get bored of breaking individual fingers and decides to "break 'em all!"
When confronted with the supposed treachery of Hoji in Rurouni Kenshin, Blind psychopath Usui rips off one of his fingernails to determine if he's telling the truth. Hoji then bites off six more to "punish himself".
In Monster, Grimmer is tortured by Inspector Zeman, an ex-Czech secret police agent. Zeman takes a pair of nail clippers and, one by one, mutilates Grimmer's fingernails as he interrogates him. Zeman and his cronies meet a nasty end when Johan appears and Grimmer's alternate personality, the Magnificent Steiner, is awakened.
In Mezzo Forte, Kurokawa gets a fingernail or two pried off with a screwdriver when he runs afoul of the bad guys.
In Great Teacher Onizuka, one of the kids whom the new Principal was using as a pawn went a little overboard in his actions; when, to protect herself, she disavowed their relationship, he began biting the nail on his thumb to the point of drawing blood.
The severing of a finger is just barely avoided in the anime version of Xxx HO Li C when a woman who has trouble keeping promises (and has manufactured several identities for herself in order to date several men at the same time) ends up with the finger under a guillotine—it was supposed to be a trust exercise with one of her boyfriends, but the guillotine malfunctioned and was about to amputate the finger when Watanuki's tube fox intervened at the last possible moment.
Hellsing has multiple cases, but the most memorable is in the 7th volume/OVA when Vampire Seras is being punched in the face by Zorin Blitz. She bites into the fist and rips the fingers right off at the knuckles. The stumps get an entire moment of shaking bloody animation while the biter spits out the fingers in high quality.
One Piece has a truly painful scenes during the Drum Island arc where Luffy has to carry both Nami and Sanji up a ridged, but almost perfectly vertical cliff and when he loses his grip he starts sliding down and he has to dig his finger into to get it back which grate across a lot of the rocks and get incredibly bloody.
Later on, during during Robin's battle against Yama he tries to violently grab her, but she uses her powers to snap his fingers backwards in a painful-looking way.
Happens in a Detective Conan case, where a Jerk Ass rich man whose daughter was courted by a young pianist breaks the guy's fingers to reaffirm his Parental Marriage Veto. The pianist commits suicide afterwards, and his father murders the rich old man in revenge. He almost gets to the girl, but he fails... and good thing, since she had become a Broken Bird who still pined for her lost love.
Someone being subjected to this is a huge plot point in the Captured in her Eyes movie. It's the excuse that the killer, a former surgeon who switched to psychiatrist, had to kill another doctor who was The Rival to him — and who, in the past, deliberately cut the nerves of his left wrist in an operation, ruining his surgeon career. Years later, after a drunken confession from said rival, he went and killed him, and later started killing the other people involved in the investigation. And then, Ran accidentally witnessed his last attack...
In MW, when Shunsaku Ban is being tortured for information, they (among other things) STICK NEEDLES UP HIS FINGERS. LONG, LONG, NEEDLES. And that doesn't even compare to whathappens after they get what they want from him...
Katanagatari: Nanami forced her brother out of his nail-biting habit by tearing off his fingernails when they were both still children.
In Berserk, there is a point early on when Guts can't hold his sword, because all of his fingers are dislocated.
In BECK, Ryuusuke's fingernails are removed partially as punishment for stealing a priceless guitar. Luckily, only on his strumming hand.
In the yaoi manga Under Grand Hotel when Sen gets his lunch he finds someone's cut off finger among the french fries.
Bleach: In the manga, Loly planned to tear off Orihime's fingernails as a way to torture her.
Ulquiorra breaks and burns Ishida's hand in the anime. In the manga, he actually cut it off
Hunter × Hunter: In a tactically important, bone-breaking dodge ball match Hisoka manages to stop a extremely fast dodgeball, breaking two fingers in the process. And by the end of the match all his fingers are broken.
High School Of The Dead: In the first chapter a teacher's fingers get bitten off by one of "them" and then spit to the ground.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: In the prison, the bird-based Beastman pierces through Viral's hand entirely with his talons while trying to get his attention. Viral's immortality led to the resulting injuries healing right away, but still. Ouch.
Sakurako subjects the painter Terashima to this in Sakura Gari via crushing the victim's hand with a stone. And then she pushes him down the stairs.
In Vinland Saga, the two most notable instances of fingore are Thorfinn cutting off two of Thorkell's fingers with a dagger and Askeladd clipping off the fingers of an English captain with scissors, but there's also a lot of it in the background.
In Wolf Guy Wolfen Crest, Haguro punishes a mook who seriously failed him by taking away his finger like the Yakuza rules demand... but rather than using something sharp, he uses a metal ring he is wearing, grinding the mook's finger against the floor until it comes off.
Post Aoshika's release from her chains and during Inugami vs. Haguro' battle, Haguro gets to slice two of Inugami's fingers, and he eats them in an insane attempt to confirm Haguro is a superior beast to Inugami.
It gets even worse when Haguro slices off four more of Inugami's fingers - and an entire arm!!
Axis Powers Hetalia: During their date, Belarus breaks Lithuania's fingers in retaliation for him being Russia's "favorite". Completely Played for Laughs.
In Tsubasa, Sakura gets her nails ripped off in the Acid Tokyo arc while she's trying to stop herself from sliding down a sheer cliff and get one of the lost feathers.
In the Black Lagoon OVA, Roberta ends up with her index and middle fingers nearly severed by a sniper shot. What does she do? Jolt her hand so they rip off completely and don't encumber her. "Ouch" doesn't even begin to describe it. And then she takes the fight to the melee because she cannot shoot anymore.
In Mawaru-Penguindrum's twelfth episode, we get a close up of Keiju Tabuki's hand— which has rather large scar near to the fingers. In episode 18, we learn the reason why: Tabuki deliberately harmed his fingers as a kid using the lid of his old piano, in a desperate and misguided attempt to fight off his mother's psychological abuse. (The poor kid thought that, if he harmed his hand, she'd stop pressuring him to become a pianist and love him the way he was.) It didn't work.
In Oniisama e..., Fukiko intentionally pushes a kenzannote A device with metal spikes used for ikebana flower arrangement onto her half-sister Rei's hand during a flower arrangement presentation at the Sorority house. Everyone thinks it's an accident save for Nanako, who witnessed it directly; she then goes and bandages Rei's injury in front of everyone.
An early chapter in Uzumaki had a scene where a protagonist's mother used scissors to cut her fingerprints off due to her- not-so irrational -fear of spirals.
This happened in the ex-Elegant Classical Musician Mitsuru Hoshou's backstory, in Tantei Gakuen Q. More exactly: due to a cruel trap from three fellow (and jealous) violinists, Mitsuru got trapped in a snowstorm and, due to the cold, her fingertips fell off. Mitsurulost her mind and was Driven to Suicide few later.
In the Black Jack story "Tetsu of the Yamanote Line", the titular Tetsu (a notorious pickpocket) makes the mistake of stealing money from a guy who turns out to be a yakuza member, and the guy's fellow mobsters take the money back and cut Tetsu's fingers off in retaliation.
Kuniko's boss in the cozy little café she works in used to be a criminal, but now has retired. One of the proofs is that he has heavy scars in his hands. Who is said boss? Why, Tetsuhimself!
In another episode, a famous Russian violinist named Morozov gets severe frostbite when he attempts to recover his prized Stradivarius violin, which he regards as his lifetime companion, in the middle of a snowstorm. In a Tear Jerker moment, Black Jack saves Morozov from dying in the snow but can't save his hands, and must amputate his fingers. Morozov takes his disgrace with surprising aplomb, and the end of the episode he's seen teaching a young boy how to play.
In Soul Eater, when Mifune and Black Star get into a Blade Lock, Mifune grabs Black Star's first two fingers and breaks them.
Comic Books
Watchmen had the thing where Rorschach breaks some guy's fingers to get information.
Rorschach: I have just broken this man's little finger. Who killed Edward Blake?
*silence, horrified stares*
Rorschach: (SNAP) And his index finger. Who killed Edward Blake?
Doctor Strange's origin is based on a car accident ruining his hands and ending his career as a world-class surgeon. The extent of the damage runs from "near-crippling" to "purely psychosomatic," but from time to time people have broken his hands again for additional pathos. The Hulk physically crushed them both in World War Hulk, though Strange somehow made them usable again in later series.
Currently they're damaged again, though he still has a limited range of motion.
Hack/Slash starts right off with an undead cutting Cassie's toes one by one.
One of the interrogation techniques employed by the protagonist of Warren Ellis' Jack Cross is shooting a suspect's fingers off one by one.
Deadpool got his middle finger sliced off during his first fight with Taskmaster. Its failure to regenerate was part of what tipped him off that his Healing Factor was on the fritz.
In Punisher Noir, real-life mobster Dutch Schultz cuts off an underling's finger with a cigar cutter when he fails to squeeze protection money out of Frank Castelione's store. We later see that he's got a whole box full of severed fingers because his men just can't get Castelione to give up that cash.
The Dark Knight Returns shows the extreme measures of the Sons of The Batman, a vigilante splinter group of the Mutants. One member stops a robbery at a 7/11 by shooting the robbers dead with a shotgun. He then cuts off the worker's fingers for not trying to stop them.
In Death Of The Family, Joker has Barbara Kean-Gordon hostage. He cut off her index finger with a ring on it, presents it to young Barbara Gordon, and asks her if she'll marry him.
In King City, the drug "chalk" eventually turns its users into more chalk. One character who's started the transformation breaks off his own finger and sells it to a buddy in need of a fix.
Music Video
The music video for the song Right Now by Korn. Though fingore is the very least of that video's issues.
Film
In Anatomy they have someone turned into an anatomic model while he's alive; they show how the hand nerves make the fingers move among other things. He's obviously nonplussed as he wakes up during the procedure...
Bound has Shelly's finger cut off just off screen with pruning shears. Violet almost has her fingers cut off with the same shears, too.
In Shoot 'Em Up, Smith has all of his fingers broken one by one.
Also, near the end, he shoots a punk tanking cover behind the bar by shooting out another punk's leg to collapse him, then the elbow to swing the arm out, and finally the wrist to jerk the tendons, pulling the index finger, shooting the last punk in the leg with his accomplice's weapon, WITH ALL FINGERS BROKEN!
Of course, he first gets his point on what he hates most by shooting the middle finger off one of them. With a carrot.
In Heathers, Veronica shoots off J.D.'s middle finger during their confrontation in the boiler room.
During Travis Bickle's final rampage in Taxi Driver, one of the pimp's men gets several fingers blown off when Travis cuts loose with his .44 Magnum.
In a Taxi Driver homage, Korean film A Bittersweet Life has someone lose a couple of fingers to a 9mm bullet.
In the movie The Prestige, Christian Bale's character gets two of his fingers shot off during an act that went wrong. And later his twin brother gets the same two fingers cut off because they're pretending to be the same person.
Not to mention when a trick malfunctions and an audience volunteer gets her fingers snapped/bent/crushed when a prop cage collapses the wrong way.
In Park Chan Wook's Thirst, when Sang-Hyun volunteers for the medical study and suffers the effects of the Emmanuel Virus, one of which is his fingernails falling out.
RoboCop: Among the many mutilations inflicted on him before his death, Boddicker's crew starts out by blowing off Murphy's right hand with a shotgun.
The Darkman movie had an awesome (from an evil point of view) scene when the Big Bad used a cigar cutter to chop off someone's finger.
Robert Durant: Now, let's consider my points, one by one. One. I try not to let my anger get the better of me.
[Durant cuts off one of Black's fingers. Black starts to sweat]
Robert Durant: Two. I don't always succeed.
[Durant cuts off another of Black's fingers]
Robert Durant: Three. I've got seven more points.
[Durant cuts off Black's third finger. Black screams]
Alluded to in Van Helsing, where VH gives the heroine a cutting implement and tells her to clip off one of the evil henchman's fingers, should he fail to cooperate. Subverted when she replies that she'll clip off "something."
A character in Hostel loses a couple of fingers and later gets revenge by maiming the villain.
Hong Kong movie called Fatal Move where an evil mob boss tortures someone for information by removing their fingernails and teeth.
And in Syriana, George Clooney's character gets his fingernails pulled out in a torture chamber.
Severed fingers and iron nails are featured prominently on any version of the Cursed Videotape in The Ring — disturbing, to say the least, especially since they symbolize Samara losing her own fingernails while trying to crawl out of the well she died in.
In fact, in the Japanese and American versions of Ringu/The Ring, both of the specters of Sadako and Samara have no fingernails, as they were torn out when they made multiple unsuccessful attempts to climb out of the well.
Similarly, there's a fingernail or two embedded in the wall of the pit in Silence of the Lambs.
In the first Resident Evil movie, one of the minor characters gets part of his hand (including fingers) sliced off by a deadly laser trap.
And in the second, Alice breaks her finger... and has to snap it back into place.
In Live and Let Die, Mr Big threatens to cut off James Bond's little finger and then move on to more sensitive areas of his anatomy.
In Four Rooms, this is played for laughs in the Penthouse. Chester Rush asks Ted to bring him a chopping board, a hatchet and a bucket of ice for a bet that he's holding with his friend Norman, inspired by an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. If Norman can light a Zippo 10 times in a row, he keeps his finger and wins Chester Rush's car. If he fails, he gets his finger cut off immediately by Ted (and then they'll take him to the hospital to get it re-attached, hence the ice). At first, Ted's reluctant to do it, but $1,000 changes his mind. The bet starts...he fails on the first try. Ted slices off his finger immediately, grabs the money and walks away calmly with a big smile on his face. Everyone else panics.
In Casino, Ace's guards use a hammer to smash a cheater's hand.
Blade Runner. Roy Batty breaks two fingers on Deckard's hand to punish him for killing Zhora and Pris. A few moments later he shoves a nail though his own hand to restore feeling to it as he nears the last moments of his lifespan.
In the 1942 movie For Me and My Gal, set during WWI, Gene Kelly plays a rising vaudeville star who slams his hand in the lid of his steamer trunk, intending to injure his hand enough to avoid the draft, because he's just landed a contract on Broadway. He miscalculates and damages the tendons, making the injury permanent.
In the second Wishmaster movie, the female protagonist cuts off the last knuckle of her pinky finger as part of a purification ritual.
Ambrose uses a cigar cutter to snip off the tip of Stamp's finger for daring to suggest that he should stop shagging The Mole in Mission: Impossible 2
Not inflicted on a living person, but in Eastern Promises, Nikolai cuts a corpse's fingertips off quite candidly to prevent identification.
Dinner for Schmucks: At the dinner, the swordsman-schmuck takes a finger off in one blind swing.
In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Robert Downey Jr.'s character has his finger severed by a closed door. It is sewn back together. Only for a few hours later, be hit badly by the villains, and eventually detach. As the ambulance is being called to put it back together... a dog eats the finger.
The opening scene of The Last Shot has Alec Baldwin getting a finger cut off with scissors. It gets sewn back together fine, though.
Garth Pancake of The Ladykillers remake blows his finger off in an accidental explosion. The film concludes with a cat spitting the finger in a trash barge in the river below.
In Grindhouse, Dakota Block accidentally breaks her own fingers in an attempt to open a car door, then later fixes them by cracking her knuckles (Yeah, it's that kinda movie).
Abby from Hobo With a Shotgun gets a pretty serious treatment of this near the end of the movie with a lawnmower when she tries to rescue the hobo and she retaliates against Drake by stabbing him with the jagged bones on her damaged hand.
As punishment for spilling food on her, the Yakuza wife in The Machine Girl hacks off the chef's fingers and makes him eat them. On sushi.
The movie was full of examples of Fingore, and even the title character doesn't escape it.
Freddy Krueger slices off several of his own fingers in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street as a means of freaking out Tina before her quite violent death.
Rocco from The Boondock Saints loses two of his fingers during the course of the movie — one to Il Duce during the big shootout that the brothers have with him, and one to Yakavetta at point blank range with a .357 Magnum shortly before the mafia boss decides to just kill him.
Early in District 9, Wikus losing several fingernails. Later, he cuts off a thumb with an axe.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday - Protagonist is in jail and needs answers from the bounty hunter. The Jerk Ass bounty hunter decides that for every question, protagonist must have one finger broken.
In the remake Andy's fingernails are torn off when Leatherface drags him down the stairs and he attempts to cling to the walls.
The eponymous hero of Django gets his fingers trampled by a dozen horses as a punishment for stealing gold from the gang of Mexicans after having helped them steal it from the army in the first place.
"If you wanna know something and he won't tell you, cut off one of his fingers, the little one. Then tell him his thumb's next. After that he'll tell you if he wears ladies underwear. I'm hungry. Let's get a taco."
Manech of A Very Long Engagement purposely gets shot in the hand in an attempt to get out of the army, losing two fingers in the process.
About halfway through the Cronenberg remake of The Fly, Seth realizes that something is going badly with his experiment when he nibbles on his nails (an established nervous habit) and one of them comes off in his mouth. He manually pulls another one off (they both come away very easily) and squeezes the denuded fingertip, causing pus to squirt out.
In Stir of Echoes, the ghost girl breaks two fingernails while clawing at the floor during the rape scene.
Scene in Man on Fire, where the protagonist pumps a captured enemy for info by duct-taping his hands to the steering wheel and cutting off his fingers one by one. His screams are, well, awful.
And Man on Fire (Denzel version), the main character tortures a corrupt Mexican policeman by removing his fingers one by one and cauterizing the wound with a cigar lighter.
Played for comedy, if you can believe it, in The Return of the Pink Panther. The first time Sir Charles Lytton meets with Pepi, he breaks two of Pepi's fingers. On their next meeting, Pepi gets two more fingers broken. The third time, Sir Charles breaks Pepi's thumb. To add insult to injury (or injury to injury), Pepi gets a metal door slammed on his injured hand ... by his own boss.
In The6th Day, Arnold's character shot the female goon in the hand taking out her fingers and later used her thumb to infiltrate the cloning laboratory.
Me, Myself & Irene: Jim Carrey's character attempts to calm the gunman down by pulling his gun down which end up getting his thumb shot off and later found in the river, where a fish ate it.
Major Payne: In the beginning of the film, Payne breaks his comrade's finger to get his mind off his bullet wound.
The other goons even see what's about to happen and yell for him to stop...then find it knee-slapping hilarious. None offer him first aid, even the Humongous only sees about stopping the LAUGHTER with "No more games!".
In Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy Krueger cuts off all Jason's fingers on his right hand with his own machete.
In The Final, Emily offers the Alpha Bitch one chance to avoid getting tortured: cut off all of Bradley's fingers in exchange for her own safety. When she refuses, Emily offers the same deal to Bradley, who accepts.
In Body of Lies, Leonardo Di Caprio's character is tortured by terrorists and has his fingers beaten to a pulp with a hammer.
Bud in The Abyss almost loses his fingers in the attempt to stop an automatic pressure door from closing. His saving grace: His titanium wedding ring that he wanted to flush down the toilet a few scenes earlier.
Following, Christopher Nolan's first film, uses this in a major plot point: one of the characters claims that she witnessed a mob punishment of the Loan Shark variety where a man had all his fingers smashed before they killed him. In the end she gets a Karmic Death, having all her fingers smashed by the villain.
In The Wind That Shakes the Barley, The Black and Tans interrogate one of the Irish rebels by pulling out his fingernails one-by-one with a pair of wicked-looking pliers.
The Krites from Critters get their first taste of human when one bites several fingers off the daughter's boyfriend Steve.
In Jungle 2 Jungle, Russian mob boss Jovanovic does this to people who displease him, and is about to do this to Richard for supposedly cheating him when Mimi Siku intervenes.
In Jane Austen's Mafia! a mob boss gets his index and middle finger cut off by getting them caught in a shotgun and they fire through the barrel like bullets, it's played in a cartoonish manner so there's no blood.
In Unthinkable, the torture expert played by Samuel L. Jackson begins by cutting off the tip of the terror suspect's finger and it is later shown that he has pulled out all of his fingernails.
In The Burning during the infamous raft scene the killer cuts off several of one of the camper's fingers with garden shears.
In Black Hawk Down a group of US soldiers is advancing through the city when one of them has his gun shot out of his hands, snapping his index finger so badly that it's left hanging by an inch of skin.
The remake of True Grit has a surprisingly nasty scene (for a PG-13 movie) where a whiskey smuggler is being coerced into informing on some bandits by Rooster Cogburn. As he cracks, his partner slips a hidden knife out and brings it down on the man's left hand, severing four fingers before stabbing him in the chest.
There's a similar finger-chopping incident in the 1969 John Wayne version, but it's pretty subtle.
Black Swan might make viewers afraid of doing manicure, due to several scenes with removal of cuticules and aggressive nail-cutting.
Black Swan was a regular Fingore buffet-table; fingers are clipped, cut, scratched, smashed, broken, twisted, and effing peeled.
In Les femmes de l'ombre, the Nazis attempt to elicit information from a captured member of La Résistance by crushing her fingers one by one. It works.
Played for laughs in Stay Tuned, when Crowley— who has been trapped in a frozen wasteland Arctic channel — starts trying to count off how long he's been there, and one of his gloved fingers snaps off.
In UHF, George Newman interviewed a clumsy shop teacher, who then severed his fingers with a table saw.
This happens to the first guy Lai Lai Zhen encounters in The Tournament. He tries to strangle her with a wire, the two are struggling until he tells her he will fuck her after he killed her. This makes her so angry that she makes a wall jump to get behind him, then she cuts his fingers off with the wire, slams his mutilated hand into a wall, beats him up and shoots him dead.
"made me watch him... suck the meat off my fingers"
She uncovers her arm. Everything past the wrist is gone.
"He made me watch. He made me WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATCH!"
Almost happens in Home Alone when Harry attempts to bite off Kevin's fingers as revenge for the torture him and Marv went through. However, Old Man Marley stops Harry by hitting him in the head with his shovel.
In Panic Room, Raoul (presumably) gets his fingers broken when the panic room door slams shut on them, after he had his hand positioned out of range of the door sensors.
In Lone Star State of Mind, Junior is in $2000 debt to a gangster. The gangster threatens to cut off a body part for every $100 he fails to pay back. Earl scrounges up $1900, so the gangster cuts off Junior's pinkie.
In Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom captures Reed Richards by freezing him in ice, then sadistically bends his fingers the other way. Luckily, they don't snap off, but Reed groans in agony.
Twice in Outrage, to be expected since it is a movie about the Yakuza.
In the horror film Husk, the possessed victims hammer nails through their fingers, and then use their hands as weapons.
One of the mob has his fingers crushed in a piano as punishment in Harlem Nights.
In the final fight of Duel to the Death, Ching Wan tries to grab Hashimoto's blade out of desperation when Hashimoto goes to stab him. Hashimoto responds by simply rotating the blade, severing all of Ching Wan's fingers on that hand.
In The Piano, Alistair cuts off Ada's index finger with an axe when he finds out she has an affair with Baines. Considering Ada's passion for playing the piano, this is particularly cruel.
In Five Fingers, terrorists kidnap a pianist whom they have mistaken for a CIA agent and cut off the fingers of his right hand one by one during his interrogation.
Mel Gibson does this to an unsuspecting invader in Signs.
In Project X, J.D. jumps off the roof and breaks his pinky on landing. He's completely nonchalant about it, and his friends fix it with a lot of tape.
One of the most infamous scenes of The Hitcher involves Jim finding a severed finger in his French fries.
In K-19: The Widowmaker, a torpedoman gets his hand caught in a winch during a drill. Extra points for blood spattering the lens.
In Superman II, Superman crushes General Zod's fingers.
Davos had the tips of his left fingers chopped off for his history as a smuggler.
Ramsay again. Donella Hornwood is locked in a tower and left there. She's found dead with her fingers chewed off.
When greyscale hits, it takes the fingers (and toes) first. Tyrion has to prick his fingers regularly to check for it - but at least that's better than Jon Connington, who debates whether or not he should cut off his fingers because he does have it.
The ironborn have a game called "the finger dance," which is basically two-man axe juggling. It's so called because participants frequently lose fingers.
A healer tried to sew Urrigon Greyjoy's fingers back on after he lost a round of the aforementioned finger dance, causing them to get infected and ultimately killing him.
Dennis Lehane's The Given Day has someone lose a finger during a gunfight.
In The Witcher saga, one of the villains dies on a frozen lake. when the ice breaks he holds desperately to the edge of the hole, trying to pull himself up... until Ciri ice-skates over his fingers. Ouch.
In the novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues the main character has one of her oversized thumbs amputated and a finger moved into the thumb position.
In Neverwhere, Richard gets his finger broken by Mr. Vandamar under torture. Later, after he returns to London Above, one of his coworkers asks about it, but then writes it off as his own clumsiness, saying he " probably just slammed it in a door or something".
During the climax of The Lord of the Rings, Gollum bites off Frodo's finger with the Ring still on it, then falls into the volcano still holding said finger.
In Firestarter, by Stephen King, Andy comes home to find wife Vicky's corpse — with her fingernails having been pulled out (apparently with pliers or similar) by her killer(s).
On the subject of King, in Misery, sometime during the later half of the book Annie cuts off one of Paul's thumbs. And then puts it on a birthday cake and serves it to him, making a not-so subtle threat to force him to eat it. "Special candle," indeed...
His short story "The Moving Finger" has the protagonist try to get rid of a finger living in his bathroom drain by dissolving it with industrial drain cleaner (it intentionally doesn't make sense in context), before cutting it off with an electric hedge trimmer.
Outlander. Jamie's fingers are broken with a mallet as prelude to a sadistic rape scene. Claire gets to break them again before she's able to reset them. And they still heal badly, so every so often they'll break again...
That's not to mention the fact that Jamie's hand is nailed to the table, and once he's released, he presses his mangled fingers to the table so the excruciating pain will keep him awake to bargain with Randall.
In the novel Live and Let Die, Mr. Big's henchman Tee-Hee breaks James Bond's left little finger by slowly bending it back until the bone snaps. It gives Bond occasional trouble throughout the rest of the story.
In A Prayer For Owen Meany, the protagonist has his right index finger sawed off by Owen so that the protagonist will not be drafted to fight the Vietnam War and will be in the right place at the right time.
In Making Money a character wears a ring that is much too small for him. His finger gets infected, starts to rot, etc., and eventually gets burned off by Applied Phlebotinum (which probably saves his life).
Much too small for him and made of a dangerous metal. There's a reason the real Lord Vetinari doesn't wear the signet constantly.
Detached fingers are a common nuisance for zombie Reg Shoe, whether while shaking hands, playing the guitar, or feeding bits of meat to Buggy Swires' trained buzzard.
Damage to the digits seems to be one of Glokta's preferred methods of torture, notably used near the end of the trilogy when he chops off all of Severard's fingers on one hand, joint by joint.
Though not gory, the descriptions of Craw's constantly-chewed fingernails in The Heroes are... unpleasant.
In The Cobra Event a character's finger is contaminated with the virus and they must make a (very hasty) Life or Limb Decision. IIRC, they hesitate, and get infected anyway.
In Breakfast of Champions, Dwayne Hoover goes on a rampage and bites off part of Kilgore Trout's right ring finger.
In The House of the Spirits, Villain Protagonist Esteban Trueba does this to Pedro Tercero Garcia after finding out that he's the lover of his daughter Blanca. While attacking the poor dude in a blind rage, he manages to sever three of his fingers with a hatchet. It poses a huge trouble since Pedro Tercero is a gifted guitar player, but after an Heroic BSOD he then learns to play guitar without these fingers out of sheer willpower, and becomes a very famous performer.
The second book of the The Dark Tower series opens with Roland losing several fingers on one hand to a lobster-like creature that cuts them off, and eats them mere seconds later. Made worse by the fact that his combat style up to that point was to dual-wield revolvers.
The second book of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Subtle Knife, who apparently marks its next wielder by cutting off the pinky and ring finger of the left hand.
In The English Patient, David Carravaggio is described as "the man with the bandaged hands" because the Germans captured him and cut off his thumbs. The movie has this in a flashback scene.
In the short story "Man From the South" by Roald Dahl, the narrator witnesses a bet where a boy will gain a brand new Cadillac from a man if the boy wins but will have his little finger cut off if he loses. The bet is halted when a women comes in revealing that the man owns nothing, and that she had to win everything back from him where she only has one finger and a thumb on one hand.
Towards the end of the last Mistborn book, Vin's fingers are broken one by one by a Steel Inquisitor.
Occurs in the 1939 novel Rogue Male, when the protagonist is captured in the midst of a mock assassination of an unnamedEuropean dictator. The authorities loyal to said dictator take a dim view of such shenanigans, and inflict a number of tortures upon him, including the removal of all his fingernails.
In Guy Gavriel Kay's novel Tigana, true wizards bind themselves to the land (and thus gain power beyond the most basic magics) by severing the ring and middle fingers of one hand.
The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy, has John Clark interrogating a pair of Arab terrorists after a nuclear bomb detonates in Denver, Colorado, and uses breaking the fingers of one of them to get information to help track down those responsible for the attack. In a rare aversion of the trope, it doesn't work, and they lie about who their backer was.
In The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross, people who are or have recently been possessed by the soul-devouring entity known as TEAPOT will attempt to eat their own fingers.
In the first Tortall Universe book, when Alanna has just arrived at the palace and is being told about the Initiation Ceremony she will have to go through at the end of her training for knighthood, Duke Gareth shows her a missing finger and says, "I lost this in the Chamber of the Ordeal." Word Of God is that he actually lost it in a totally unrelated accident and just says that to make an impression on the new pages.
Palin from Dragonlance is tortured in an attempt to find out why the mages magic is failing them. His fingernails were pulled out over and over each time they regrew, and his fingers were broken dozens of times. This hits especially hard as hands are considered an important part of spell casting. Even worse, he didn't know why the magic was waning, and therefore did not have a cop-out. He was tortured for years.
Deltora Quest has monsters called the Granous who, when they capture a prisoner, force them to answer twenty riddles/logic puzzles. Every time the victim answers incorrectly or fails to answer within the allotted time, they bite off a finger. When they run out of fingers, they start on the toes...
In the final Time Scout: Good going, bad guy, you just dipped your hands in molten bronze.
In the graphic novel Level Up, the protagonist recalls his kindergarten teacher accidentally severing her finger with a paper-cutter.
The Wizard Heir by Cinda Williams Chima, Seph gets the tips of three of his fingers cut off to attempt to blackmail his father into coming to get him from where the Big Bad is holding him hostage.
In Judges 1:6, the Israelites capture the Canaanite king and cut off his thumbs and big toes. This is also an example of Laser-Guided Karma, because this king had previously cut off the thumbs and big toes of seventy other kings he had conquered.
The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book (1983) anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H Greenberg and George R R Martin has a story in which if a person reneges on the their agreement (related to losing weight), a finger is cut off.
In Dave Duncan's trilogy The Seventh Sword, thumbs are cut off as a way to remove a swordsman from office... permanently. (Swordsmen act as police, judge, etc.)
In John Varley's The Golden Globe, the narrator slices off the thumb of an assassin after him. With a chainsaw. He keeps it in a thermos of dry ice. This might be partly revenge for the fact that the assassin had sliced off the fingers of a violinist friend of his.
The Two-Faced Ring nearly squashes the thumbs off of anyone trying to wear it. Oh, and the only way to get it away from someone once they've put it on...
Septimus's thumb starts to inflate like a baloon after he's bitten by a spider in the Wizard Tower Library.
The Truce At Bakura right at the start has Wedge Antilles manually prevent a messenger drone's self-destruct by going out into vacuum in a suit and putting his hand between components. His hand is horribly mangled and he almost dies of that and the cold before Luke saves him. Star Wars medical tech being what it is he ended up fine, but years later his hand gets twitchy when he's out in zero-g for any length of time.
In Tales of Kolmar, Lanen's hands and arms are horrifically burned when she helps one of the Kantri with a difficult birth, and only the work of an expert healer and a friend feeding her lansip fruit let her use them again. The friend can't bring herself to describe it, but apparently there wasn't much left but bone. In the next book Berys has to cut off one of his own hands as payment in order to summon the Demonlord.
Someone threatens to burn Jack's fingers off one by one in Dragon and Thief. Jack retorts that they're trying to be quiet, and he wouldn't be able to keep from screaming if they did that.
The Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" features an client who loses a thumb to an attacker with a meat cleaver. The resulting injury is gruesome even by Dr. Watson's standards as an army surgeon.
In Fate Zero, Sola Ui subjects her fiancé Kayneth to this to force him give her the Command Spells that will ler her become Lancer's Master.
In Roald Dahl's The Witches, the protagonist's grandmother had an encounter with a witch as a child that ended in her losing a thumb. What exactly happened to it is unknown.
The nineteenth century collection of children's stories Struwwelpeter contains the "Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb" in which a boy who sucks his thumbs gets them cut off by a scissors-wielding tailor who appears from nowhere.
In the serial "Attack of the Cyberman", the mercenary Lyton has his hands crushed to bloody pulps by a Cyberman.
"Revelation Of The Daleks" has Davros's one remaining hand blown off on screen.
An episode of the 80s TV show The Paradise Club had a rock star's manager trying to cash in on the insurance policy on said rock star's fingers. Averted, but not before we see Bruce Dickinson (for it is he) with his right hand wedged in a fire door and a thug readying to shoulder-charge it.
It is revealed near the end of an episode of The Equalizer that the real reward on two rapists is from the victim's father, who is understandably vengeful since they cut her fingers off during the attack.
On Scrubs Turk messes up in surgery and now a concert pianist no longer has full use of his fingers, basically ruining his life.
On LOST, Sawyer gets the bamboo shoots under the fingernails treatment when Sayid tortures him for information.
GOB temporarily loses two of his fingers while performing a magic trick with Buster and a sword. "Handle first, handle firstMY FINGERS!"
Mythbusters tackled a myth of a guy severing his thumb while improperly handling a S&W .500 magnum revolver (specifically, by laying his thumb alongside the cylinder gap). It was confirmed.
In Prison Break, Mahone tortures Wyatt by sticking long needles in his fingers and periodically shocking him so he doesn't pass out from the pain.
In the first episode of Heroes, Claire accidentally has her fingers transformed into a bloody mess by a sink-based grinder trying to retrieve a ring. Good thing she can heal.
In the last episode, Emma is forced to play the cello. It even shows blood drops flowing down the strings.
In an episode of NCIS, Gibbs is grazed by a bullet that results in some rather graphic damage. He still manages to shoot the bad guy through Lee.
And in another episode of NCIS, a corpse is found with evidence of torture, including removed fingernails.
Sons Of Anarchy's second season had the return of an accountant mook who had a compulsion to stick his hands down his pants and... yeah. Apparently the Chinese gang he was being forced to work for didn't appreciate that, and in-between seasons realized he only needed two fingers to type.
"Becoming": Angel breaks Giles' fingers while trying to get information out of him about how to wake Acathla.
"Doppelgangland": a vampire version of Willow was using finger breaking to recruit a gang of vampires.
Evil Willow: Who do you work for? Vampire: I'm not tellin' you nothin'! [She breaks one of his fingers. He screams.] Evil Willow: Who do you work for? Vampire: Wilkins, the mayor. [She breaks another of his fingers. He screams] Evil Willow: Who do you work for? Vampire: You.
Channel Four gangster Mini SeriesTop Boy featured two underlings sent to remove a specific finger from a rival with a pair of garden secateurs. In the heat of the moment they screw up and take the wrong one... so decide they'd better take the right one as well, just to be on the safe side.
In one episode of The X-Files, Mulder gets a finger deliberately broken by someone questioning him. (Averting Hollywood Healing, he's shown with the hand still obviously injured for at least one subsequent episode, and the interval between episodes on this show is usually somewhat indeterminate.)
In "Leonard Betts": Betts is a Monster of the Week with impressive regenerative powers. When he's handcuffed to a car handle, he tears off his own thumb. He will soon grow a new one, but it was obviously extremely painful.
An episode of Deadwood includes Swearingen getting his finger cut off by a rock hammer.
In an early episode of Highlander: The Series, a croupier loses a large sum of a casino's money, and one of the owner's Mooks gives him five days to repay the money, breaking one of his fingers each day.
The first episode of Farscape's third season featured Scorpius torturing Grunchlk by implanting him with a mind control device and forcing him to bite off his own fingers.
The final episode of The Singing Detective has the main character attacked by two of his minor characters for not giving them names (it's a weird story). They start to pry apart his hands, which are permanently clenched into fists due to his arthritis.
One episode of The A-Team mentioned as a torture method shoving bamboo under someone's fingernails.
A woman is kidnapped and gets a power sander used on her hands to get her to cooperate.
In "The Box, Part 2, Arvin Sloane allows Jack Bristow to cut off his finger with a wire cutter so he could turn off a security system that required a finger-print scan.
Sloane gets mailed his wife's finger to prove she's still alive.
The Derevko sisters have a disturbing tendency toward this. In "A Dark Turn", Irina stabs a bad guy in Bangkok through the hand with the knife he was using to play five-finger filet. In "Crossings", Katya takes metal chopsticks used for galbi in Koreatown and stabs another bad guy, though both hands this time.
In True Blood, Jane Bodehouse (under the influence of Maryann) cuts off her own finger as some sort of a sacrifice... offering... thing. She gets it sewn back on once it wears off, though.
In FlashForward (2009) Simon Campos sacrifices one of his own fingers (as we later learn) to conceal the fact that he knows his kidnappers and Is however reluctantly, in cahoots with them
In Dead Like Me, George accidentally gets her middle finger sliced off in the shredder at work. She immediately reattaches it, though - it's her Reaper-speed-healing.
In Battlestar Galactica, a Freud-wannabe Cylon prisoner notes that all of the first phalanges on Starbuck's right hand have a clean break right in the middle, and muses on the significance. We learn later that is was her mother, who put her hand in a door jamb and slammed the door, as punishment for a harmless prank. Ouch.
Doc Martin accidentally distracts a cook using a spiral meat slicer that causes said took to cut off part of his index finger. And then everyone in the kitchen had to find said finger tip. Amazing that the doc didn't pass out
In Jekyll, Tom Jackman's alter-ego celebrates his first proper evening alive by beating the crap out of a man who'd humiliated Jackman earlier. Though most of it's offscreen, we do get to see him break all the fingers on the guy's right hand with a single stomp.
On Dexter, we see the Trinity Killer calmly take his teenage son's finger and bend it back until it breaks as punishment for smashing up his car.
One episode of Taggart showed a gangster shove a young baker's hand in a pie making machine, amputating all his fingers.
On Rome Pullo enlists the help of his teenage boss Octavian (later to be the emperor Augustus) in finding out whether Vorenus's brother-in-law cuckolded him. When they have the guy cornered and he's not talking quickly enough, Octavian tells Pullo to "torture him."
Pullo: Juno's cunt, you're salty. And I was worried about bringing you along. Octavian: Go on, then. Pullo: I've never actually tortured anyone. I don't know how. Octavian: You don't know how? Pullo:They have specialists! Octavian: Why not cut off his thumbs? Pullo: Good enough. It's a start.
The Tales from the Crypt episode "Cutting Cards" features two compulsive gamblers who hate each other, after a failed Russian Roulette they decide to play "Chop Poker" for each losing hand the loser would get a finger chopped off with a meat cleaver, we see that by the end they have each lost all their limbs.
Mad Men: Cosgrove rides a lawnmover into the office to celebrate bringing in an account with John Deere. Later on, it gets brought out, with the blade spinning, during the party celebrating Joan's last day and ridden by a secretary who didn't know how to drive it until she runs over someone's foot. It rips apart a good part of the front of his foot, splatters blood everywhere, he couldn't feel anything while Joan made a tourniquet, and he ends up losing the whole foot (and he could have died).
1000 Ways to Die: In "Bot-ily Harm", a college-age dude rigs a robot with spinning blades to start up by detecting motion with infrared sensors. While working on another robot, he accidentally drops a screw. The robot sees it while the creator bends down for the screw... sliced appendages, anyone?
In another case, a Yakuza boss performs a sort-of Yubitsume on a karaoke singer and then swallows it whole. One of his henchmen tries the Heimlich maneuver... and does it incorrectly, killing the boss.
And in yet another case, a bad actor with a criminal record tampers with his gun to kill the dude who got the leading role in a B-movie over him. The gun was so over-charged that, when fired, it blew the guy's hand off alongside firing a piece of metal into his thigh and cutting a large artery, killing him.
In Boardwalk Empire black gangster Chalky White finds his driver lynched one night. He tries to find out who did it, starting of course with the local KKK boys. With the help of some Dirty Cops, Chalky has one of the leaders brought into an interrogation room, where he explains how his father was a self-taught carpenter who was lynched by the Klan after doing work for a white man. Sometime later Chalky exits the room, confident that the Klan had nothing to do with it. When asked why, he responds that after a certain point if a man is still telling the same story, he has to be telling the truth, and Chalky and the Klan leader reached that point 10 minutes ago. Chalky then holds up a severed finger with a Klan ring still around it, and wonders if the man will want the ring back or if doing that would just be pouring salt in the wound.
Later, Irish gangster Owen Sleater tracks down an old enemy and garrottes him. The man manages to get a few fingers up before the garrotte tightens, but Owen just pulls hard enough to make the wire cut right through them.
In Black Mirror the first episode has the kidnapper cut off the hostages finger and then mail it to the press, complete with a lovely video of him doing it. In a twist though it turns out to be the kidnapper's finger.
In Blade The Series, Blade's sidekick gets captured and has his fingernails ripped out one by one by Krista, who's secretly a good guy but has no choice but to play along. When Marcus orders her to move on to breaking his fingers, she instead breaks her own fingers (she's a vampire with a Healing Factor), while the sidekick pretends to scream in pain.
CSI NY Danny and Hawkes are taken hostage by drug dealers. Danny gets several of his fingers stomped on and broken during the ordeal.
In the Smallville episode "Spell", the evil witch Isobel puts a curse on Lex Luthor to make him play the piano indefinitely. When Clark visits him the next morning, not only is Lex practically half-dead from thirst and exhaustion, his fingers are bleeding. Clark breaks the spell by knocking the piano away.
Henry Taylor, the husband of the president in the seventh season of 24, gets a finger cut off after being captured by the terrorist of the moment. The terrorist threatens to continue cutting them off one-by-one, but when the president doesn't give in, he decides she's not going to break and orders him killed, but he gets rescued (though not before getting shot.)
In Orphan Black, Vince gets a hand mutilated by a paper cutter when he is unable to produce the cocaine Sarah ran off with.
Manhwa
Flashbacks of Gahui's past in Manhwa/Redrum327 show her hands bandaged and the tips of her fingers bloodied from trying to escape the safe she had been locked in for a week.
Music
Midnight by The Birthday Massacre has an example in the first three lines: "I can't decide. Which one of us should leave here alive? Your fingers breaking as I place them over mine."
Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath had the tips of his fingers cut off by a metal cutting machine on his last day of work before becoming a professional musician. He ended up creating plastic fingertips covered with leather for grip and used lighter strings to be able to keep playing guitar. Also a reason he started tuning down his guitar giving the added bonus of a deeper, darker sound. This is a rare positive version of Fingore.
Tom Lehrer's 'I Hold Your Hand In Mine' has the lines "I Hold your hand in mine, dear, I press it to my lips.../I take a healthy bite from your dainty finger tips."
Pete Townshend of The Who has a famous "windmill" method of playing guitar. This tears the hell out of his fingers. In fact, there are several occasions where the strings have taken his fingernails right off.
According to Aztec Mythology, the rain god Tlaloc specifically demanded sacrifices of young children; To bring the much needed rain for the crops, the tears of the young needed to be poured, so the priests tore the nails of children as young as 4 to make them cry before sacrificing them to the god.
Tabletop games
In The Dark Eye all priests of the demigod Kor cut off their left pinky as part of their initiation ceremony
Theater
The play Dog Sees God climaxes with Matt breaking all of Beethoven's fingers over his piano, which leads to Beethoven's suicide.
The 2010 theme for Busch Gardens's Howl-o-Scream, MyX, is centered around a band whose lead singer Sylvie chooses a man from the audience at each show, gets him backstage, and amputates his index finger with her guitar strings.
Video Games
Seen being done to a corpse's hand in a flashback from Beyond the Spirit's Eye. The severed finger is later found frozen in ice, and must be used to bypass a print-keyed electronic lock.
Altair (and, presumably, all fledgling assassins in Assassin's Creed) must cut off their own ring finger as part of their initiation rituals. It is nominally replaced by a spring-loaded stiletto that shoots out into roughly the same place. In the sequel however, Ezio requires no such sacrifice, due to the blade's mechanism being modified in the 13th century (likely by Altaïr as outlined in the Codex pages), to keep Assassins from being identified so easily.
Assassins Creed Brotherhood further expands on the ritual. Instead of losing a finger, new assassins get red hot iron tongs placed on the top and bottom of the base of their ring fingers, likely to symbolize the cutting off of the finger.
No, ACII did it first. Its the end of the Venetian missions with... well...
GirolamoSavonarola was shown to have lost his pinky finger, albeit it wasn't revealed why and served merely as a way for Ezio to track him down after he stole the Apple from Ezio.
In Yakuza, Futo Shimano cuts off the pinky and ring finger of one of his henchmen with the straight razor that was being used to shave his own head just a few minutes earlier. An instance of Truth in Television — see the Real Life example below.
Used for a horribly hilarious joke in Marathon Infinity.
Near the end of Condemned, SKX cuts off Ethan Thomas's finger. First Person Fingore.
In Planescape: Torment, you can swipe a decaying finger with an interesting looking ring on it from a mentally deficient cannibal in Ragpicker's Square. You can't get the ring off the finger to examine it. So, what do you do? Bite off your own finger and use your Healing Factor to graft the rotting finger to the blood-spurting stump. All of it in lovingly explicit detail. For the curious, it is sort of worth it; the ring is a "cursed" (meaning you can't take it off without a specific spell) ring that increases your protection, which is quite helpful in a game where you can't get much in the way of armor. At the very least, it can be sold for a good sum, which helps you get other stuff.
You can also lose a fingertip (or a whole hand) by touching the Black Birds of Ocanthus (black, superchilled, sharp blades whirling in the air atop a pedestal) at Yvana's Galleria. This one's actually Played for Laughs a bit; your reaction is "Wait for your fingertip to grow back, hope no one saw that."
In Heavy Rain, you can choose to cut off Ethan's finger with any of the tools present in one of the Origami Killers challenge... or not. If you do, that level is as painful for the player as you can imagine.
God Of War III has you engaging in a little Fingore on Cronos. More specifically, during the battle you slash off the end of one of his gigantic nails using your Blades of Chaos, and then pull the remains of the nail right off.
You can also severe one of Gaia's hands.
In one of the Bad Ends of Remember11, Utsumi slices off Satoru's fingers (and then stabs him to death) when he tries to protect Hotori during Utsumi's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
In Lollipop Chainsaw, Juliet saws off several of Killabilly's fingers, but he can regrow them.
Jack from Zebra Girl performs a spell that is bound by a nail driven through his thumb.
Goblins subverts this in an incredibly nightmare fuelerrific way. The Well of Darkness is home to a gigantic Eldritch Abomination - like creature aptly nicknamed by the fans "Mr. Fingers" due to consisting mainly of hands with abnormal amounts of fingers. K'seliss rips one of the fingers off with the intention to eat it... and that's where the horror starts... but for K'seliss, not Mr. Fingers.
In Survival of the Fittest v3, in the showdown between the final four Lulu Altaire slices off two of J.R. Rizzolo's fingers (left pinky and ring) with a scythe. Needless to say, he is not happy after this...
Parodied in the -Trollvorlord blog, where Trollvorlord cuts his finger slightly and, to his confusion, the "Mortals" start freaking out about the "goriness".
Trapped starts with discovering a severed finger in your wallet. Subverted in that it's a prosthetic.
Tom Bishop winds up having one of his fingers horribly mutilated by the Big Bad's mooks in The Proxy. Sarah's Healing Hands fix it - and apparently transfer some of her powers to him, although he doesn't realize that last part until it's all over.
Western Animation
Happens in the episode of Spongebob Squarepants where Spongebob wants to get into the Salty Spitoon. Spongebob cracks his knuckles and his fingers break, resulting in him putting them into some ice cream to relieve the pain.
If we're counting toes as well, there's also that gruesome scene in "House Fancy"...Squick.
King of the Hill Dale's inattention causes Hank to accidentally cut Dale's finger off with an electric saw. It gets reconnected though.
It's been mentioned that Boomhauer lost his pinky toe in a camping accident.
After being blown out of a tank, Bill cheerfully says his carpel tunnel is gone... and shows the guys his severely broken hand, including twisted fingers.
Also, in the first season episode 'Lawn & Garden', Beavis tries to use a chainsaw to kill a grasshopper that Butt-Head is holding, resulting in another lost finger. Thanks to the Reset Button, it apparently has grown back in time for the next episode.
Subverted in a scene cut from The Incredibles where Mr. Incredible absent-mindedly brings a knife down on his fingers in full view of his neighbors while in his Secret Identity, and the blade bends right around his fingers. Upon noticing what's happened, he quickly clutches his perfectly-intact hand and screams in mock agony as he and his wife hastily leave the barbecue for "the hospital."
Steve tries to pull a stunt with dynamite to impress a lady — just to get his thumb blown off.
In another episode a professional actor who pretends to be a bum fighter bites off one of his own thumbs, as it turns out he wasn't aware that he did it, and he doubled as a hand model
Another episode features an insane Roger biting off one of Stan's fingers.
A similar stunt was performed by Randal in Ugly Americans, only his entire hand is blown off. He's a zombie though, so he got better.
Subverted in "Wheels and the Legman in the Case of Grandpa's Key", in which a criminal apparently sends Steve and Roger Stan's chopped finger, but it turned out Stan himself sent it and it was actually a mozzarella stick with the crust sucked off.
Homer Simpson gets his thumb cut off while trying to take a slice of brownie from the tin as Marge is still cutting it, in a Season 12 episode of The Simpsons ("Trilogy of Error"). It gets sewn back on later.
The McBain episode featured in "Last Exit To Springfield" if you look carefully (you might have to slow this scene down or pause it) but when he mows down Mendoza's henchmen you can see the one eating cake gets his thumb blown off.
In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "Insane in the Membrane", Baxter Stockman only becomes convinced that his new body is unstable when he watches his index finger spontaneously melt off.
In an episode of Drawn Together Captain Hero while yelling at Xander casually cuts off his own fingers with an opener in a fit of rage.
There's also the scene when Clara, in a very Hostel-esque setting, starts ripping Foxxy's fingernails. When Foxxy has finished saying her comfort words, Clara actually has one of her fingers in the pliers.
In another after thinking the others are dead from the rapture Princess Clara at one point sticks her hand into the garbage disposal and cuts off all her fingers.
In the Green Lantern First Flight animated movie in the climax Killowag steps on Sinestro's hand so he can't use his ring anymore, breaking it and all his fingers.
In the Ren And Stimpy episode "Hermit Ren" Stimpy hammers a nail into his own finger while hanging a picture.
In "Magical Singing Cheeses" Stimpy had earlier given the cheese to a giant to use as shoes, later he decides that he's hungry so he attempts to get them back while the giant is sleeping, after pulling on them he gives up and tries a new idea he takes a crowbar and accidentally jams it into one of the giant's big toes ripping off one of his toenails in the process.
In the Tex Avery cartoon "The Cuckoo Clock" at one point the cat reaches for the cuckoo bird inside a mouse hole the bird takes the cat's thumb and paints it to look like himself, the cat thinking he has the bird pulls out a gun and shoots it, he screams in pain and we see his thumb with a hole in it and it deflates.
A similar thing happens in a Looney Tunes short in which Sylvester chases Tweety into a dollhouse, as he reaches for him Tweety paints his finger to look like himself and Sylvester shoots it, Sylvester screams in pain and looks at his finger which has the top blown off and it's burnt and steaming.
In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Carnival Knowledge" upon arriving at the carnival Slippy shows Rocko and Heffer his latest victim ("a satisfied customer" as he calls him), a pig covered in cuts and bruises while wrapped in bandages and crutches walks by, he weakly gives Slippy the thumbs up before his thumb snaps and breaks off with blood spurting from the severed thumb.
In an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force a living murderous dummy cuts off Carl's fingers and keeps them by his side when pretending to not be alive.
The Mechanist from Avatar The Last Airbender has three missing fingers, one for each failed attempt at creating a knife sharpener.
The Adventure Time episode "Dungeon" has Finn trying to imitate Jake's ability to turn his hand into a makeshift key to open a lock, with predictable results.
In the Sym-Bionic Titan episode "Roar Of The White Dragon" while fight a giant slime beast with long arms at one point they use the Titan to break one of the monster's fingers causing it to scream in pain, they then rip off its arm and beat it with it.
In an episode of Superman The Animated Series, a mook attacks Superman with gloves that allow him to control giant hands. Superman breaks the giant hands, and the same thing happens to the mook's hands.
In The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy Halloween special "Underfist" after recovering from a beating Hoss Delgato threatens a monster while shaking his finger at it, only for his finger to snap and break off.
Averting this trope is a big selling point for newer brands of blood-sugar-testing kits, marketed to diabetics who are tired of pricking their fingers.
Researchers studying populations of very small mammals, such as meadow voles, sometimes "mark" animals they've already trapped and released by clipping off unique combinations of toes. This is necessary because dye on the specimens' fur would be removed (and ingested, which can be dangerous) when they groom themselves, and such tiny creatures can't be banded or collared because of weight concerns.
A classic old Chinese torture involves several strips of bamboo placed between the fingers. It has been depicted in several period dramas.
Also removing fingernails.
It was also used by the Japanese.
At least two of the great silent comedians suffered injuries that cost them part or all of one or more fingers.
Buster Keaton had the tip of his right index finger amputated after it was crushed in a clothes-wringer.
Harold Lloyd lost his left thumb and index finger when a prop bomb he was posing with for publicity photos exploded.
James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott in the original Star Trek, lost his right middle finger to friendly fire during the invasion of Normandy.
Any country worker (cowboys, charros, huasos, gauchos, etc.) who uses a lasso is very liable to end up losing at least one finger by handling it. E.g., in the Mexico Special of Globe Trekker, Ian Wright was shown talking to a charro who lost his pinky finger like this years ago, and there were more than one close-up to his hand...
Among the many injuries that James Hetfield got when he got badly burned onstage in 1992, there were the third degrees burns on his left hand and arm.
Declawing cats. To remove their claws, their fingers are cut off at the first knuckle. Some shelters will require any prospective cat owners to sign an agreement not to declaw their cats as a result; if it discovered that the cat was declawed anyway, the shelter will be legally able to reclaim the cat for breach of contract (animal cruelty, in this case, being hard to prove).
Pinioning is the avian equivalent of declawing, to keep birds from flying. This is where the wing joints furthest from the body are removed; it is primariy done to domestic birds such as ducks, geese, and chickens. "Clipped wings" in regard to pet birds, such as parrots and budgies, are a bit of a misnomer; only the feathers are affected. Done properly, it is like cutting fingernails; it doesn't hurt and the feathers will grow back.
A British man tried to shoot a wart off his finger with a gun. He shot off most of the finger.
Walter Jones, the actor who played Zack on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, is missing a finger on his left hand. The camera crews did a very thorough job concealing this on the show to avoid discrepancies with the Zyuranger footage.
During the assassination of the third Muslim Muslim Caliph Uthman ibn Affan by particularly radical followers of his rival, Ali ibn Abu Talib, his wife threw herself upon him to protect him. She raised her hand, and her fingers were chopped off for her trouble. Uthman's relative, Muawiyah ibn Abu Sufyan, displayed the wife's chopped-off fingertips to Ali as a challenge: why won't you bring the assassins to justice. This eventually allowed Muawiyah to take the Caliphate.
Studying Culinary arts will endanger your fingers. Sliced, cut, burned, it will happen. The only consolation is that fingers heal shockingly well.
Even a household sewing machine is capable of stitching through a human finger, nail and all.
A common risk when dealing with any kind of industrial machinery that you have to manually guide things through. Things like circular and band saws are quite capable of shearing off fingers, as are paper cutters designed to cut many sheets at one time, meaning that the user has to pay attention and know what the fuck he or she is doing when operating them.
In the extended DVD interview for The Two Towers,, John Rhys-Davies revealed that he's missing the end of one of his middle fingers, so his Gimli gloves had a prosthetic fingertip. He also relates a story where said fingetip was damaged in a way that looked like a serious injury, and as a prank, Rhys-Davies put some fake blood in the "wound" and told Peter Jackson "Pete, I've had an accident." To say Jackson was a little freaked out would be to horribly understate it.
The reality series Bizarre ER on Discovery Fit & Health seems to love profiling these. Mutilated fingers have popped up too many times to count, from fish-hooks,a butcher's accident,a farmer gored by his bull,and quite a few more.
For those learning about first aid, you'll most likely be shown a diagram of a person with avulsions on their fingers. An avulsion is like an abrasion (such as skinned knees), but Up to Eleven, like here.◊
Many rock climbers make a point of taking their wedding rings off when they climb in order to avoid a nasty injury known as degloving. It's exactly what it sounds like - the ring catches on something and comes off...peeling all the skin on your finger neatly away with it.
Believe it or not, alot of ways to heal a broken nail or mis-grown nail is usually to tear it out. Example A: Due to the nail either not healing well, or causing damage the the finger/toe it's ripped off. Example B: some people (usually the elderly) can have their toenails grow a little weirdly (like the nail won't cover the area of the toe it grows from). Usual solution: Rip it off!
In The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra delivers a judo chop that landed on a coffee table with such force that it broke his finger, which never fully healed. And they left the actual shot in the movie.
