Gorn - Television Tropes & Idioms

Apocalypse Zero is horrifyingly sadistic on so many levels. It borders on Blue Gender level Anyone Can Die. It also has horrific Fan Disservice, and such things as a woman vomiting her intestines after a giant naked lady smashes her.
Baldr Force EXE, first episode. Expanding, exploding heads. Would be Narm but for the Nightmare Fuel.
Death Note, the series finale. Seppuku gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Elfen Lied, or at least the first chapter, squarely and neatly falls inside this category.
One of the main reasons why Geno Cyber is notable, because of the ridiculous amount of gorn.
MD Geist is the same way.
Parasyte uses this quite effectively. There are several splash panels dedicated solely to horrible death... in fact, the only two deaths that are shown remotely tastefully are Kana's death and Shinichi's mother's death. A good example is Chapter 23, page 25.
Waita Uziga's works. Of these, Mai-Chan's Daily Life is one of the more prominently known (and few translated) titles, infamous for the various scenes that grew into Memetic Mutation.
Tokyo Akazukin is very gruesome manga about girl who does not mind when other play with her intestines while having sex or after, but later it becomes just fantasy gore without sexual content.
A comedic anime example in BludgeoningAngelDokuro-chan.
Kite is another example of a gorntasticly violent anime. There's also Mezzo Forte, which is from the same creator, but not quite as violent.
Shuten Doji is quite possibly the bloodiest anime ever made. The first episode is rather tame, but hoo boy It Got Worse. Packing it with, of all things, Mazinkaiser is either unholy Mood Whiplash or a truly awesome example of What Do You Mean Its Not For Kids.
This is really the only thing that the anime and manga Gantz has going for it at first. It does mature a little beyond that in later parts of the manga.
Megazone 23 Part II falls squarely into this trope. This sequence is pretty much pure High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
Most final episodes of each chapter of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni have quite a bit of this, especially the Shion arc.
- Umineko No Naku Koro Ni does its best to make the stuff in Higurashi look like child's play, what with the faces mashed into an unrecognizable pulp, skin being shredded, and human pinatas, and all.
- The description "human pinatas" doesn't begin to do justice to the act of hollowing out the stomaches of six human beings and stuffing them full of delicious candy and cookies, complete with 'Happy Halloween For Maria' written in blood on the door. Sweet dreams, indeed. Which, by the way, was censored on Japanese television networks that aired it.
- This series even delves further into the eroguro aspect in the anime version with its gratuitous fanservice. Who could forget George mourning the death of his mother, bloody occult stake driven through her forehead, by climbing on top of her corpse and rubbing his tear-stained face in her breasts?
Rin, the protagonist from Mnemosyne, often meets very gruesome fates at the hands of her enemies. Luckily she is immortal, or she wouldn't even have survived the very Squick-y torture scene she undergoes during episode one, which would have made for a very short show indeed. Being immortal makes it worse depending on point of view, since she will certainly survive the entirety of the torture.
Violence Jack: The graphic cannibalism in "Evil Town" will squick you out so badly, you may choose not to finish the series, even though the rest of it isn't quite as horrible. The manga is over 30 volumes long and likely the most violent manga ever made. It's all there in the name, really.
Blue Gender. A situation that springs to mind is in the last episode, where a character is shot to death by so many machine guns, he effectively melts and explodes at the same time.
Several scenes in the last episode of Excel Saga. Played entirely for laughs.
There exists an H-manga entitled St. Margareta (or Margaleta) Academy. It is about the eponymous all-female academy, which includes a sadistic nine-year course designed to turn the students into sex slaves. The curriculum consists entirely of rape of a horrific, torture-filled variety. On the first day of school for the unsuspecting students, the instructors actually come right out and say that these girls are no longer considered legally human and are stripped of their rights and civil liberties. Things quickly go downhill from there.
Black Lion, in all its Narmful glory.
Kentaro Miura's scenes of violence in Berserk sometimes cross over into Gorn territory, with a penchant for massive head injuries that borders on the erotic. And that's not even mentioning the downright nasty scenes of Fan Disservice, among them the rape of Casca during the Eclipse.
The hentai anime Blood Shadow.
Franken Fran is full of it- some of it explicit surgery scenes, some of it the horrific incidents that made such extreme surgery necessary in the first place.
End of Evangelion with the way Unit 02 is killed. The entire 'Naked Rei cutting up people's hands' would also qualify. Now that's gotta hurt like a mother◊
Hellsing is dripping with it.
- There's an entire chapter devoted to Nazi vampire soldiers massacring the people of London in truly horrific ways, including one panel where one of them is seen eating a baby. Don't even ask about Alucard's defeat of Rip Van Winkle or the Seras vs. Zorin fight.
- Poor Rip Van Winkle. No one deserves to be eaten while being impaled by a rifle in an act of symbolic rape.
- It's even worse when you watch the OVA version, in which the Japanese voice actress (perhaps deliberately) lets out a series of orgasmic moans. This gives the whole scene a soundtrack well suited for a hentai with imagery that's anything but. The English dub opted not to go this route.
- The entirety of Volume 7 (and presumably OVA 6 as well) is soaked in blood and gore, as well as the climactic battle between Seras and Zorin, which culminates in Seras going completely ballistic and doing what can only be described as grinding Zorin's face into a wall until there is only a sliver of hair and flesh remaining. Described in the manga omake as 'Cause of death: excessive grating'.
Some scenes in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure border on this, especially scenes involving animals.
Bible Black dips into this on occasion - especially the second series, New Testament.
Baccano! loves it violence, especially when it involves Claire Stanfield and his constant habit of turning his victims into a bloody, unrecognizable pile of flesh. And Ladd Russo certainly doesn't help the content rating...
In spite of many of the characters in Battle Angel Alita being cyborgs, the entire series is dripping with Gorn. Everything from characters purposely exploding their own limbs to brains getting squashed to shredded flesh-and-blood bodies has happened.
Juan Gotoh, who usually does straight Shotacon hentai, has drawn some Guro works about people happily getting killed (yes, these words are in the right order). The most notable of those is a doujin about a high school where graduation ceremony involves every student being beheaded or otherwise killed, with the class president being beheaded in front of an audience (who are, by now, all dead). It's a mix of gorn and comedy; the students are quite enthusiastic about this, frequently commenting how turned on they are by their impending deaths, and use various methods of death as a way to express friendship or sexual attraction (for example, some girls refuse to be killed by anyone but the cutest guy in the class). Some of them may stick in the mind for quite some time afterwards. It's a startlingly common trend that straight shotacons are guro loving like that. Good advice is to run away from websites you notice have any signs of it.
The Kamen Rider mangas such as the Spirits manga or the various ones based on the series were quite gory; in Spirits, Amazon Rider loses his left hand, X gets ripped in half, and Stronger gets a hole in his chest. Goriest of all is when V3's belt pours blood from the two holes after he does a forbidden technique.
Mahou Shoujo Ai clearly depicts dead bodies with their guts all over the place. It nearly goes into guro territory in the third episode, when Touru rapes Ai with a support beam, nearly piercing through her abdomen with it.
Holy Cow, how did anyone miss MPD Psycho? The cover art is bad enough, but most chapters have at least 3 murders, and every single one is graphic.
X/1999 likely counts as this during that part where Kotori is ripped into bits and pieces, with lots of beautified blood and organs flying everywhere. The gratuitous blood is common in that series; the organs, not so much.

Close Anime and Manga

Body Count, an aptly-named miniseries starring TMNT's Raphael and Casey Jones, consists of a generic gangster story which essentially exists as an excuse for Simon Bisley to draw loads of people getting shredded to a pulp by machine guns.
Sin City is certainly worthy of this trope. Sometimes it stops short of actually showing the horrible violence, sometimes it doesn't. In some cases, such as parts of "That Yellow Bastard," the story does seem "concerned with the protagonist's struggle to survive," but other issues (especially the ones featuring Marv or Miho) could definitely be seen as featuring gorn.
Garth Ennis indulges in this frequently in comics he writes. Just showing horrific violence in the art isn't enough; he has to describe the details. A couple of examples from one of his early story arcs on Hellblazer:
- A woman being beaten and then burning to death is described in loving detail. Later, she and her husband team up as ghosts to take revenge; one of the men responsible rips out another's large intestine and chokes himself to death on it.
- Preacher did many many unspeakable things to its characters and the Marvel Knights and Marvel Max Punisher comics. On screen events in MK included a man being fed to a wood chipper, and a character being fed plastic explosives; MAX makes these events look remarkably tame. Both of these were also by Garth Ennis and most of the time the artist was Steve Dillon (except in MAX). Whenever you have the pair of them you know there's going to be something gornny happening.
- One of Garth Ennis's current series is titled Crossed, in which a Zombie Apocalypse is taking place in the United States; The zombies in this case are living infected, much like Firefly's reavers. Very much an Ennis series.
The most recent incarnation of X-Force. A covert team led by Wolverine consisting of a werewolf, Wolverine's teenage clone, a knife wielding strongman, and a guy with wings who turns into a guy with razor sharp metal wings when he goes into berzerker mode. They kill gun-toting religious zealots in gleefully gory fashion. Marvel actually released a reprint of a rather violent cover and censored the gore with pictures of puppy dogs and rainbows. Behold the glory.◊
Ultimate Marvel's Ultimatum written by Jeph Loeb, the event which gave us morbidly obese mutant Blob devouring Wasp's ripped guts. Without any rhyme or reason to it, clearly just for the sake of gorn. And it just got worse from there, as the next two volumes tossed in Hank Pym biting off Blob's head and later getting blown up by suicide bomber Multiple Man, complete with flying guts and a skeleton being incinerated, Doctor Strange getting squeezed by his own cape until his head graphically exploded, etc. Really, they should just stop pretending there's any story going on here and admit it's all about showing off the innards.
DC Comics has been introducing elements of this without warning since 2004 (not coincidentally, the year Executive Editor Dan Didio took over the company). Examples include:
- Elongated Man's wife being murdered and burned up (along with her unborn child), then revealed to have been the victim of rape (in semi-graphic detail) in the miniseries Identity Crisis.
- Blue Beetle having his brain blown away by his old friend, Max Lord, who due to a retcon was revealed to have been evil all along.
- Max later had his neck snapped by Wonder Woman.
- On Infinite Crisis, an insane version of Superman literally ripped off heads and arms of the Teen Titans who opposed him.
- Black Adam killed the Psycho Pirate by pushing his mask through his head. "No more silly faces" indeed...
- The Crisis Crossover "52" began with villain Black Adam ripping a man in half in public and later murdering the populace of an entire country. He also killed or dismembered some superheroes.
- Let's not forget Adam's brother-in-law Osiris, graphically eaten by a crocodile.
- Recently a Teen Titans story had Wendy and Marvin (from Super Friends) eaten alive by their own pet, Wonderdog.
- Recently in In Blackest Night, Black Hand starts his role as the embodiment of the Black Lantern by reducing his entire family into green bones and immediately shooting his own head after that. He gets better.
- Note that none of the above comics had any warning as to their grim contents.
Cross Gen Comics have included some absolutely lavish images of people dying horribly. A few:
- A cute high school girl getting crushed by collapsing scaffolding in the beginning of Route 666. She returns later as a ghost with her limbs still bent out of shape.
- Come to think of it, all of the ghosts in Route 666 look exactly as they did when they died, from the little old lady with the noose around her neck to the teenage boy with pieces of automobile wreckage sticking out of him (and Cassie's "Too-Too", who died peacefully of old age and isn't very gory). The amount of detail, if you can stand to look closely enough, is outstanding.
- Javi's death in Negation, which includes a full two or three panels of him standing there shell shocked with a gaping hole through his chest that is slowly starting to ooze blood and other fluids. The artists have Shown Their Work; you can see the layers of flesh and bone inside the hole.
- Negation has never shied away from gorn. Characters get eviscerated, disintegrated, sliced in half, and blasted with lasers, and even the deaths that are reduced to shadows are damn detailed shadows.
A huge portion of Invincible, since it's early days. Made Of Plasticine civilians & superheroes mixed with Flying Brick godlike beings is not pretty.
- A recent issue featured a young child punching someone's brain out of their head with an uppercut, after flying through another person.
- Another issue has Mark defeating Conquest by headbutting him to death. And then showing you what's left.
Marvel MAX's Destroyer, by Invincible creators Kirkman and Walker. The first issue opens with the eponymous hero punching through a terrorist's head, and the mini-series just gets bloodier from there.
Kid Marvelman's rampage in Alan Moore's Miracleman featured a degree of violence not previously seen in superhero battles. John Totleben's detailed apocalyptic renderings are still acclaimed today (by the few who possess a copy of the book). Depicted are people running from a rain of severed hands and feet, skins hung up on clothes lines, corpses impaled on the hands of Big Ben, the Tower Bridge in ruin, mounds of severed heads, heads on pikes, cars full of people plummeting to earth, mutilated children wandering screaming through the streets, and countless dead bodies.
The Authority in general engages in a lot of Gorn, but one scene in particular (The Authority vs The Magnificent Kev) actually had a character comment about how he was going to masturbate to the image of a headshot woman - and the next page was an ogling closeup of her body, complete with the headshot, inviting the reader to do the same.

Close Comic Books

Tiberium Wars sometimes runs rampant with this; the author actively describes just how violent and vicious the combat really is, and tends to describe the effects of fire on its victims with an almost worrying relish.

Close Fan Fiction

Tokyo Gore Police. The name speaks for itself. It is an ultraviolent cyberpunk gorefest that include decapitation/mutilation by chainsaw, public executions, limbs being pulled off because they were tied to four vehicles speeding in opposite directions, repetitive wrist slitting, mutant penises that shoot projectiles, breasts that squirt acid, vagina monsters that eat peopole, katana drive bys, and being propelled through the air by jets of your own blood. A must see.
- To most viewers it crosses the line at least four times.
- Breasts that squirt acid? Could this bee the genesis of Queens Blade?
The Passion Of The Christ, known on the internet as The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre. Many people who enjoyed ~~Fight Club, Pulp Fiction and 300~~ graphically violent movies were shocked by the gore in this film, even more so by the fact that it is shown to many children, often as an "inspirational" film. It should be noted the film is rated R in the US and 18 in the UK: allowing children into the theater is outright illegal in the UK.
Every film of the Japanese movie series Guinea Pig. The second film, Flower of Flesh and Blood was so bad that Charlie Sheen actually mistook it for a Snuff Film and contacted the MPAA who in turn contacted the FBI.
The original Dead trilogy of George Romero get progressively gory by installment:
- Night is very light, Dawn is quite bloody and lacks the guts part until the bit where the bikers invade the mall, whilst Day is full of rotten putrefying zombies ripping people apart realistically. Of course, the taste of the horror viewer expanded as each film was made, and Romero has been stated as saying that he isn't a huge fan of gore and criticizes other zombie films that use it gratuitously, like Lucio Fulci's films.
- Interestingly, the endings of the films are less downbeat as they go along. The first film has that ending everyone knows, making a statement about race; the second has the two heroes escaping to an uncertain future but happy to be alive; and the third has the heroes escaping to a caribbean paradise.
- Hard to call Night very light, for its time it was ridiculously gory. Plus the black and white really takes a toll on the pure goriness (although maybe adds to the creepiness). Admittedly, Dawn did up the ante, but Night was no slouch.
- Actually, the ending of Dawn would have been more downbeat if not for Executive Meddling as the original ending called for the two remaining heroes to both kill themsleves.
The 'ear' scene of Reservoir Dogs screams of Gorn. The actual act of the ear being cut off takes place off-camera, at least in the theatrical version. In the alternate take on the special edition DVD it's shown in all the Gorn fullness.
Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects... don't ask.
The intense swordfight scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 starts off as a regular chop sockey battle but ends up as a prime example of Gorn.
The over-the-top, stylized violence of 300 is emphasized with all the adoring slow-mo and gratuitous splatter shots of an actual porn.
Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. Intensified scenes of ritualised vivisection, decapitation, and mutilating animal attacks, which are no surprise when you consider that it's a film about an ancient Hollywood Mayan civilization.
Deconstructed in Michael Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games (remade in 2008), which is designed to initially titillate the gorehound audience, then force them to admit complicity in its violence. One of the villains is aware that he's in a movie, and is constantly tossing joking asides to his audience about the status of his victims; at the 90 minute mark, he rejects his accomplice's suggestion that they've done enough to the family they're mutilating: "Nah, we're not up to feature length yet. What ''you'' want (Aside Glance at the audience) is a real ending with plausible plot development."
- There are arguments against the effectiveness: attempting to deconstruct Gorn is roughly as effective as whizzing in the ocean. Squeamish folks won't go in the first place (as Jim Emerson put it, "if you really wanted to ace the challenge, you would just not see the movie"), while real Gorn fans won't care about all the moralizing.
An example of a deconstruction of Gorn that actually works does exist. The David Cronenberg movie Videodrome does so quite excellently. It probably did inspire a couple filmmakers on this page, though.
This is one of the reasons why a good number of films are referred to as "Video Nasties".
Before doing The Lord Of The Rings movies, director Peter Jackson was perhaps best known for his work in this genre, particularly the zombie movie Braindead/Dead Alive. Considering the movie has a lot of fantasy battles, Jackson goes into joking detail about why a lot of scenes are less gory than you think they'd be. As reference, 300 liters of fake blood was pumped— at a rate of 19 liters/second at times— during the infamous "lawnmower scene". This was the single most influential scene (by way of a World Record) in branding Braindead the bloodiest movie ever. Of all time.
Hostel, a series of horror films which pretty much consists of nothing but gorn. To give you an idea, in one scene one woman uses a scythe to slit another woman's throat and then she bathes in her blood.
Reazione A Catena, also known as Bay Of Blood, lives by this trope, by having the deaths getting gorier and gorier as the film goes by, with a Mind Screw-y ending.
Richard Roeper has actually said that he left out "Torture Porn" movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes off of his "Worst Movies of 2007" list on purpose because they weren't screened for the critics and he didn't feel like subjecting himself to them afterward. And coming from him, that means something.
The original Evil Dead borders on this. If anything, 2 was gorier, but less shocking because of two factors: 1) a Stooges-like attitude maintained throughout, and 2) no more tree-rape.
Sonny Chiba's grindhouse classic The Street Fighter and its sequels, known for very bloody martial arts fighting, including lots of bone-breaking, eye-gouging, and just being out-and-out vicious with just about every bad guy Terry Tsurugi, Sonny Chiba's character, butts heads with. Or, in the case of the most notorious scene, tears the testicles out of.
Just about everything released by Troma. Their comparatively highbrow Tromeo and Juliet managed, while staying comparatively true to the spirit of Romeo and Juliet, to include a scalping, traumatic amputation, incest, electrocution, someone turning into a pig-woman, and hideously, hideously disfigured inbred children.
Riki-Oh: The Story Of Ricky, a live-action Hong Kong movie adapted from a manga, which has its title character doing very nasty things to some very Made Of Plasticine bad guys in prison.
Battle Royale. While there is a lot more to the movie than that, most people seem to like it most for the very graphic violence. The movie is a lot LESS gory than the novel and manga. In fact the manga is pretty much straight out gorn.
A lot films by Takashi Miike, such as Ichi The Killer and Visitor Q. Many viewers will tell you that they didn't make it past the first twenty or thirty minutes the first times they tried watching these two. Some had to attempt many times! Even some of the least graphic of Miike's movies, such as the lovably twisted Happiness of the Katakuris, features a man stabbing himself with a sharpened key (leading to a song containing the lyrics "He had a knife, why didn't he use that?") and a woman suffocated under her sumo-wrestler lover.
Any movie directed by Eli Roth. He even admitted in an interview to having an insatiable appetite for blood and gore. Not literally, of course.
Repo! The Genetic Opera has no shortage of this. Vivisection, disembowelment, surgery montages... what else would you expect, from the guy who brought you three quarters of the Saw franchise?
Mix this trope with God Mode Sue and Jerkass, and you have pretty much every Steven Seagal character ever.
1968 Japanese Art House entry, Blind Beast. It takes a long time to get there, but about 10 minutes before the credits roll you see it coming on strong.
Cannibal Holocaust contained scenes that were believable enough, at the time, to result in the arrest of the director, foreshadowing Charlie Sheen's snuff film fears by about twenty years. Includes rape with a foreign object followed by bludgeoning of the victim, dissection, cannibalism (of course), and an incredibly well-designed impalement scene which still is occasionally posted online as a real occurrence.
- It wasn't just "believable"; while no people were killed, all the animals that died in the movie were actually killed. In the case of the monkey, that actually had to kill several of them, because the scene didn't work out the first time.
- It didn't help that the director, Ruggiero Deodato, had made his cast sign contracts binding them to stay out of public and take no new acting work for a year to help sell the illusion that the film was genuine. Deodato finally had to allow the cast to break their contracts to appear in court where Deodato had been charged with homicide in the matter of the actors' "deaths."
Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom, is made up of 100% pure gorn, and quite possibly the most depraved/worst movie ever made. (Also, available from The Criterion Collection!) To make matters worse, the book on which it's based, written by Marquis De Sade, is even nastier. Topping this, the book isn't even complete. Many of the chapters were BURNED by relatives, being too terrible to be released. So it's that bad AFTER editing.
Sweeney Todd (2007, with Johnny Depp) is an example of highbrow Gorn.
- Not exactly surprising. If the stage version with Angela Lansbury (also available on DVD, due to being televised) is any indication, even on the stage, it's as bloody as the limitations of the medium allow.
- With the exception of the latest tour, which utilized a minimalist concept. That would be the medium's equivalent of a gory discretion shot.
Caligula. This is the ultimate, epic, cast of thousands, shining city on a hill example of this trope, literally combining the gore with very intentional porn. Just for whom exactly was it intended to be erotic? Gorehounds find it too pretentious, and anybody who can find it erotic in any way is deeply, deeply disturbed. It is essentially just the ultimate Gorn screensaver. Seriously, it just goes on and on and on and on and on and...
Pink Flamingos, the film to start with if you're interested in the work of John Waters, plays with this trope quite a bit, mockingly. One scene, one very long and uncomfortable scene, features a man having sex with a chicken (resulting in bloody lacerations for the nude gentleman and an onscreen death for the chicken), and another features what can best be described as "a heartwarming torture sequence wherein women are beaten in a basement and raped with a turkey baster, with the resulting babies being sold to lesbians." Thankfully, John Waters is parodying the "True Crime" genre, otherwise this might actually be a little creepy. Who are we kidding? It's lots of creepy. Also combines Gorn with ~~fecalphilia~~ coprophagia. Just about anything involving John Waters falls in here, though it's usually meant to be (disturbingly) funny.
Likewise David Cronenberg has an affinity for Gorn.
Even though the movie Event Horizon, features this trope in a sequence of a few seconds, the sequence practically is the definition of this trope. It's even called the 'Orgy of Destruction'. The director says that the original cut included much more, but it disconcerted test audiences and producers alike. Because the film predates DVD extras, only a little of this footage still exists, taken from low-quality video tape.
Zack Snyder's interpretation of Watchmen. The most deliciously stylized snapping of many, many, many limbs that you'll ever see.
- To the point where several of the most violent scenes in the novel where upped just one more notch: a child's face being chewed on, a man's throat being slit as he's held through prison bars by his tied broken fingers, and a rapist being left in a burning house with nothing but a handsaw to try to cut through his own cuffs (or wrist) were apparently not quite violent enough for the movie.
- Snyder said the handsaw/burning house removal was specifically due to the Saw films.
Grindhouse. It's a celebration of Gorn, a salute and homage to all the great Gorn movies of yesteryear. It's "Gorn: The Movie".
This editor has a very strong stomach when it comes to movie gore, but was almost physically ill at certain points during The Ruins.
Pretty much the only reason the Feast films got made was so the writers and crew could push the envelope on low-budget Gorn.
Many modern horror films capitalizing on the success of the Saw franchise fall wholly into this category - despite the fact that the first two Saw films were rather gruesome but featured very little explicit gore.
Two horror-film-obsessed students treat their high school principal to an over-the-top fake Gornfest in Summer School.
The German short film Forklift Driver Klaus: First Day on the Job is a parody of workplace safety videos that features a forklift operator wrecking havoc and creating buckets of this trope in a warehouse... i.e. people get impaled on the forks, an unsecured thin metal sheet slides off and slices a person in half, etc...
Plot of Machine Girl, more or less: Lots of people get killed, gruesomely, and a girl loses one arm. She has it replaced with a machine gun, which she uses to take revenge. Said revenge is not bloodless for either side.

Close Film

American Psycho, the novel. More exquisitely detailed descriptions of torture and murder are hard to find. The book has garnered more than its share of accusations from critics that it is actual porn.
Many of Graham Masterton's novels (notably Night Wars).
Amazingly, one of Shakespeare's plays, Titus Andronicus, falls rather neatly into this category. The Zeroth Law Of Trope Examples strikes where you would least expect it! The Bard may have been intending parody, here. (Condensed version, if you're wondering: Rape and mutilation, murder, forced cannibalism — the two rapists/mutilators just alluded to are killed, minced, baked into a pie, and served to their mother — honor killing, regicide, etc. The final scene features three separate murders in as many lines.)
Just about everything that Clive Barker has ever done falls into this category, elevating (is that the right word?) blood and torture to the level of fetishes. Hellraiser is a classic example.
Stephen King is good for these. Example in The Raft, an acidic lake creature crushes a man through a one inch wide space, squeezing his organs and blood out of his facial orifices while he is being dissolved. The de-gloving in Gerald's Game can also come off as this.
While likely intended as a morality story, the seventeenth-century pulp The History of Moridos often falls into this category. The premise: a witch enchants a notoriously lecherous king into marrying her, they consummate their marriage right there in the church, she kills him and feeds to him demons over the course of a week, and the resulting septulets meet gruesome ends through embodying the seven deadly sins. For instance, Sola, who represents pride, scrapes off her flesh with a knife because she's enchanted into thinking she's ugly. The only daughter who truly deserves her fate is Lucina, the envious daughter; the rest have deaths worthy of Roald Dahl.
Chuck Palahniuk seems to be fond of these.
- Check out books like Haunted, in which a man's death by scalding in a boiling hot spring is described in gruesome, loving detail.
- Be sure to check out "Guts", in which the narrator masturbates at the bottom of a pool and gets his entrails sucked out through his anus. Or better yet, don't. Palahniuk actually caused 80 people to faint during his on-tour readings, though to his surprise, the people of New York City seemed nonplussed.
The battle scenes in The Iron Dream are written like orgies. Additionally, the hero's magical weapon, the Truncheon of Stag Held, is described very, very… suggestively. He wades through his enemies, swinging it through flesh and bone, causing great gobbets of sticky fluid to fly forth... yeah. Of course, that's probably supposed to be intentional, since the author of the book within the book is Adolf Hitler.
John Dies At The End is all about this. Descriptions of horrible mutilations as far as the eye can see, and human remains referred to as "hamburger."
Author John Ringo has described his Posleen War Series as "carnography". In this series the Posleen, a Horde Of Alien Locusts with superhuman fecundity and mostly subhuman tactical skills, are slaughtered in the billions by the human military, often in grotesque ways. Plenty of exceedingly horrible and grotesque things happen to the humans too, any time they fail to slaughter the billions of Posleen fast enough.
The works of the Marquis de Sade are so sadistic the word is derived from his name. Note that while Juliette was so bad that he ended up spending 13 years in prison for it, the companion novel Justine was worse. Arguably the whole point of them is that true gratification only comes from doing terrible things to people.
The rat in The Eye Of Argon. More like Garm, one is tempted to say. Purple Prose can do that:
"With a loud crack the rodents head parted from its squirming torso, sending out a sprinkling shower of crimson gore, and trailing a slimy string of disjointed vertebrae, snapped trachea, esophagus, and jugular, disjointed hyoid bone, morose purpled stretched hide, and blood seared muscles."
One of the few positive things ever said about the Baldurs Gate novelisations is that they're action-packed. No, they're not. Even the fight scenes suffer from a lack of action as much of the time is spent describing... something else.
Dexter, in books and TV series, tends to keep away from this, which may seem strange considering what his profession is.

Close Literature

Because they know that their fanbase is utterly insane, Supernatural can do this quite a lot, especially it seems when it comes to Dean.
- A few examples include being tied to a chair and getting a hot poker in the shoulder (and this was a episode that had a massive Deliverance subtext running throughout), being pinned to a wall with his organs liquefying and making honest-to-god squelching noises and being suspended in Hell, with chains and meat-hooks tearing him apart.
- Sam gets his fair share too, including a hot poker to the arm, being crushed into a wall until the wall cracks, and getting tied down by a pair of critters who slit his wrists and eagerly lap up the blood. Then there's the Christmas episode with dismembered bodies being hauled up chimneys and a fingernail getting ripped out onscreen. Every fringe character seems to have his or her own torture scene at some point. And don't forget all those victims of the week who die horribly just to draw the brothers into the case. Yup, televised Gorn at its finest.
When you've got a character with regenerative powers, like Claire from Heroes, you can do this quite a lot.
Kamen Rider Amazon had Gorn quite a bit, the monsters were killed in quite graphic manners and Japan's Moral Guardians, the PTA (yes, Parent Teacher Association is the PTC of Japan) complained and the show ended in the mid-twenties episode range.

Close Live Action TV

The music video for Nine Inch Nails's "Happiness In Slavery" is practically guro, depicting an artist with a penchant for sadomasochism getting torn apart by a chair. It can't even be shown on TV. And this was originally meant to be part of a twenty-minute gorn film, which never even got released. It's entitled Broken Movie, and some have seen it. It's...well, it's quite something.
The artist mentioned is Bob Flanagan, masochistic fetishist performance artist known chiefly for nailing his penis to a board, depicted in all it's graphic fullness in ''Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist". Making this example Truth in Music Video.
Death metal has an entire subgenre of "gore death" (e.g. Cannibal Corpse), characterized by lyrics (and often album art, too, and even stage shows) full of Gorn. Even death metal bands that are not gore death tend to succumb to Gornographic lyrics every now and then.
Some death metal and grindcore bands employ Gorn in an even more literal way by actually including sexual or pornographic elements in the violence, such as in Cryptopsy's "Pathological Frolic", which is about anally violating the corpse of a teenage boy who choked himself to death while masturbating. You can gouge your eyes out now. The Ur Example of this are the early releases by Carcass, up to the point where people believed the members took medical courses, such was the detail. Fun fact: they were all vegetarians.
The grindcore subgenre of powerviolence is dedicated to taking gore lyrics to their (sometimes completely il)logical conclusions. The band Anal Cunt is a fine example of this subgenre, with song titles like Body By Auschwitz, I Sent Pictures Of Your Kid To NAMBLA, I Sold Your Dog To A Chinese Restaurant, and Jack Kervorkian is Cool.
Not really death metal, but Megadeth seems to have a knack for this, highlighted by "Good Mourning/Black Friday". How that song got into Rock Band with only its one f-bomb censored is beyond knowing.
Bloodrocuted
The Dark Lotus song "I Hurt Myself."
While their songs don't always fall into gorn, GWAR's stage shows absolutely do. Anyone within about 20 feet of the stage will drenched in fake blood, pus, bile, and other bodily fluids from both the band members' own characters and anyone they "kill" onstage. Oh, and also from the pair of "gore cannons" they usually bring with them. Because, you know, killing people onstage just isn't bloody enough.
Apoptygma Berserk's "Deep Red".

Close Music

A fair amount of Warhammer 40000 artwork demonstrates just what happens when, say, Bloodletters of Khorne get into close combat with Imperial Guardsmen.
- One of my favourite flavour pieces from the Tau Empire Codex involves the discovery of a human Imperial tank that had been struck by a 'hyper-velocity' railgun round. It had punched through both sides of the hull at such speed that it sucked all lose objects in the vehicle through an exit hole about an inch in diameter. Including the crew, who ended up as a reddish smear some metres long.
- Descriptions of almost every single piece of weaponry and its affects on the unfortunate victims falls into this trope harder than an Exterminatus. One of the most common weapons (the Boltgun and variants thereupon) is essentially a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket propelled grenade launcher for fjord's sake, not to mention the delightfully insane prevalence of chainswords (and chainfists, and chainaxes, and Eviscerators, and...). Other horrible instruments of death include but are not limited to rounds impregnated with vials of mutagenic poison, webs of monofilament wire that bind the target as it slices into them, guns that fire pure heat, guns that fire dark matter, guns that tear open the fabric of reality and send the target straight to hell, ravenous beetles fired into the target, ravenous fungus beasts teleported inside the target, and the various psychic "gifts" provided by the Warp, ranging from making Your Head A Splode to turning the target into a plague infested zombie.
The Book of Vile Darkness, a Dungeons And Dragons supplement named after an in-game artifact, dabbles in this trope throughout the book. One such example is the spell Rapture of Rupture, which makes the victim's skin explode (illustrated in loving detail◊, complete with Eye Scream). Then there are the kythons◊, which create equipment to kill their victims as painfully as possible.

Close Tabletop Games

The Way: Despite the 16-bit Super Nintendo RPG style graphics, there are very gruesome deaths, especially in chapter 5. For starters: Heads being ripped off, the body collapsing into a bloody heap, characters being graphically impaled on stalagmites, having their faces ripped off, scalped, being ripped in half, having limbs amputated, getting ripped in half at the torso, having guts exploding out, and a bird graphically tearing strips of flesh from a corpse, all with blood splattering all over the ground and walls.
Turok 2 was one of the first games to include hit-based cosmetic damage for different enemies. For example, shooting a Raptor in the head with a shotgun would blow it clean off... followed by a disturbing "headless chicken" death animation. Conversely, shooting a Sentinel in the head with the exact same gun would shred off the flesh surrounding it's morbid, chattering skull, etc. Then, there was also the Cerebral Bore, arguably the nastiest weapon ever conceived.
Judging by the frequency of and loving attention paid to death sequences, Haunting Ground would probably fall into this category as well. While you don't actually see what happens after you get a Game Over, the noises that accompany them certainly sounds gorny...
Mortal Kombat and its copycats has been accused of being Gorn-like in their various (insert noun)-talities.
While other genres of Video Games are contented with dismemberment and exaggeratedly cartoony sprays of Ludicrous Gibs, you have to go to Survival Horror to find truly disturbing Gorn. Games like Resident Evil, D2, Parasite Eve and The Suffering bask in lingering cutscenes packed with more over the top violations of human anatomy than you can shake a vaguely phallic razor fanged pulsating stick at.
The Silent Hill series. Aside from things like the guro nurses, there is actual, literal gorn, most notably Pyramid Head's "execution" of the mannequins. The fifth Silent Hill game has even more gorn than the first four and prequel.
Manhunt, a game that makes Grand Theft Auto look like a good citizenship course. The second game had to be censored to avoid an AO rating, but is still quite intense. The sequel was actually banned in Ireland. We know what you're all thinking about the Catholic theocracy and all that, but the censorship boards have softened a great deal since the days of the Committee for Evil Literature: it takes a lot for a game or movie to get banned outright.
The Soldier Of Fortune series. Many games feature dismemberment. Soldier of Fortune is one of the few that lets you gorily destroy each individual body part, with extremely graphic results.
Gears Of War distinguishes itself from industry standard explosive dismemberment by giving the player a gun with a chainsaw bayonet, complete with blood splattering the non-existent camera. The developers had the stated intention to up the gore level of Gears of War 2, and accomplished this by having the main characters chainsaw their way out of a giant worm. The scene is bloody to the point of ridiculousness, and gives us this line.
Baird: Ugh. I'm coughing up blood that ain't even mine!
The God Of War series contains some content that can be truly gut wrenching, featuring violence and gore that rivals Manhunt for sheer brutality. Of course, considering that this is a game concerning a Darker And Edgier version of Greek Mythology with one of the most evil protagonists in any video game, this is to be expected.
The only reason God Of War is considered "Darker And Edgier" is that most of the English retellings of the Greek myths tend to be either Lighter And Softer or bowdlerized renditions of the originals. Homer was doing straight-out gorn in The Iliad.
Judging by preview videos God Of War III will take advantage of the PS3's power to take this even further. Look forward to the sight of a graphic disemboweling of a centaur (complete with falling organs) and the high-definition recreation of the already common place "Ripping off the cyclops" eye finisher which now includes torrents of blood gushing from the socket and a dangling optic nerve.
Subverted in the worst ending of Disgaea 2. Taro and Hanako's deaths are extremely violent. The fact that you only hear what's going on arguably makes it worse. It was so horrifying that it got censored in the US version if you don't have the Japanese voices turned on.
Hanakanmuri has been described as "The Gorn Platformer." Every single way to die has a rather detailed image, if not cinematic, depicting it. Every. Single. One.
Demonophobia. More has been said better elsewhere, and since roughly half the game is discovering the many, many ways the protagonist can die, most of it counts as spoilers. Its upcoming sequel, Xenophobia, is just as bad, if not worse.
Blitz: The League and Blitz 2 could count, given the X-ray style close ups of snapping bones and tearing muscles during the cheap hits.
The original Splatterhouse games (one on the TurboGrafx-16 [an arcade port] and two on the Genesis/Mega Drive) range from borderline Gorn to full-on Gorn — while a majority of the enemies are monsters that sometimes only vaguely resemble an actual person, their deaths are suitably violent and bloody (green blood, anyway). The upcoming PS3/XBox 360 Splatterhouse seems to be purely focused on being Gorn — most of the lower-level enemies are more humanoid, their blood is spilled everywhere as you kick their asses, and the lead character (Rick) can actually lose limbs and have flesh removed from his body (which serves as the game's version of a "health meter"). It doesn't help matters much when you know that Rick's appearance in the games is based on Jason Voorhees — which game you're playing determines how close the resemblance is.
~~Dorf~~ Dwarf Fortress. How do you get Gorn in an ASCII game, you ask? They track each individual component of dwarves, goblins and so forth. Use of certain items, such as big spinning circular saws of death, leads to the spread of goblin components over quite a wide radius. They will track damage down to lungs and fingers if necessary. Future versions will have individual tissue layers. As well as individual teeth and ribs.
Dead Space seems to only exist to allow players to carve up monstrosities into barely recognizable shapes. However, to be fair, the necromorphs do graphically repurpose the human body into a weapon, like fusing bones into a big blade and running at people with these sword arms extended. Not only that but some of the player death animations are the most brutally drawn out sequences ever witnessed. It really says something about a game when the weapons consist of mining equipment re-purposed for ripping bodies into several dozen tiny pieces.
- Player's death animations are pretty good example. Only one of them doesn't remove any body parts. Coolest death animation is shown when player dies to tentacle-zombie-head thing - his own head is severed and the zombie one attaches itself to the neck, thus reanimating the fresh corpse, which then helps the head to secure itself in the neck.
- Dead Space really isn't as bad as the concept implies, though, partially due to Narm; the physics engine is cranked up way too high and it's not uncommon for the results of all the cutting to fly around comically, rather than disturbingly, because Isaac isn't walking any closer to the bodyparts than giving them a wide berth. The Necromorphs are mutated enough that their horror comes from their appearance and psychological effects, cutting them up isn't very evocative of real gore. Finally, the limb-cutting is a game mechanic designed to make gameplay more interesting than shooting enemies in the head like Zombie Apocalypse games, and plot handwaves are then built around this. The way Necromorphs work isn't too ridiculous in context, but the fact that the game gives you no less than four reminders through the first hour of play about the mechanic, all but one of them obvious disguised tutorials, ruins the emotional impact of the act.
- The dismemberment itself eventually gets old - eventually, you'll realize that your character is essentially a set of blocks that become separated when you die. Think of LEGO Star Wars, but with blood.
The Fallout series has a trait (Perk in Fallout 3), Bloody Mess, which transforms every single kill (of non-robots) in the game into Gorn, usually by way of Ludicrous Gibs. On top of that, the third game's Vault Assisted Targeting System (VATS) lets you do it in slow motion. You'd think that slow motion exploding headshots would get old after a while, but it never does!
Saya no Uta is a hentai visual novel with tons of this, especially prevalent if you keep the "guro filter" off. Oddly enough, this game has a good plot as a result of the guro, as said game involves MANY scenes where the guro is integral to furthering the plot. Even more odd, the guro is rather subverted in the case of a few people, who see guro where it doesn't actually exist.
F.E.A.R. runs rampant with this, with people being boiled down to skeletons, blood splatters covering entire rooms, bodies hanging from ceilings or walls, bodies being crushed in elevators, and enemy soldiers being decapitated, blown in half, or blown to vapour by shotgun blasts...
- Project Origin has one scene where you have to crawl through a ventilation shaft coated in blood, knocking aside the errant heads and limbs of various enemy mercenaries as you move along. And that's not factoring in the Abominations' tendency to indulge in expressive art with the bodies of their victims.
- The literal heaps of bloody and vaguely unidentifable viscera the Abominations tend to leave lying around.
Mad World. Where punching a guy up, stuffing him in a barrel and throwing him into a sawblade is classified as routine violence!
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Uncaged Edition is the most ridiculously over the top violent and bloody superhero game ever. As Wolverine often says, he's the best there is as what he does and what he does includes stuffing enemies into cement mixers, ripping off limbs and then beating their previous owners to death with them, and making enemies blow their own heads off with their shotguns. In the final cutscene Logan pulls the skin of his own hand off like a glove to free himself from shackles. Yeah, it's a little bloody.
Prototype. Dear ~~God~~ ZEUS, Prototype.
In Blood Rayne 2, blood isn't just the heroine's snack, it gets splattered all over. Rayne's blade attacks can be pretty messy; one in which she grabs an enemy by the head between her heels, flips over and stomps his skull into the ground, another in which she lifts an enemy impaled on one blade then spins him on it, cutting off all his limbs with the other blade. The game rewards you for finding clever ways to use the environment, stabbing them with a chained harpoon and flinging them into spikes, blades, meat-grinders, acid, fire, electricity, etc.
Two words: Brutal Legend.

Close Video Games

Electric Retard.
Jack is very prone to this as well, especially when Drip is involved.
Kagerou. Interesting in that the author seems to get apologetic every time things get gory... but boy, what a way to find out you have a blood fetish!
This, from the spanish webcomic CROWLEY.

Close Web Comics

Prevalent in Survival of the Fittest on a number of occasions. One such instance is the death of Jin Li-Jen in V2, which involved, among other things, a character being castrated, decpapitated and all around torn to pieces. Other examples include an evisceration using nothing more than very sharp fingernails, and somebody being raped to death with their own arm.
The now-defunct websites Ogrish.com and Goregasm.com.
One cannot think of this trope without immediately referencing Happy Tree Friends. Or Retarded Animal Babies, especially in any episode involving Satan. Or sharp edges.
Contemplating Reiko is nothing but cute, cuddly Gorn. No, really, watch it and see.
Objectionable Apparatus 2 (really NSFW), is probably a movie about the cyclical nature of Gorn. Or a criticism of this sort of it. It's hard to tell, really, and no matter how you interpret it, it's very, very good.
Tricky Madness 2 by the famed Krinkels, which is without any doubt also Nightmare Fuel Unleaded. Features (and this is the least disturbing part) a lipless zombie clown wearing a welding mask. The entire "Madness" series by the same creator is a clear example. There is literally no plot other than watching Hank massacre dozens of hapless mooks in creative and painful ways.
Adult Swim's game based on Caligula. You can turn into a werebear, set people on fire, and raise skeletal armies, among other things. If you hook a microphone up to your computer, you can actually scream to make your character stronger, eventually getting powerful enough that your murders cause blood to splatter on your computer display screen. If you collect all 26 weapons, you can unlock the Orgy Room. The real Caligula would probably laugh at how tame the game is, however.

Close Web Original

Some scenes of South Park fall nicely into this trope, even at one showing a comedic blood orgy. Fun fact: in the Netherlands South Park has a 6+ rating, even the most gory episodes. As in, it's okay for 6-year olds and up? The Christmas Critters episode comes to mind, a bunch of animals murdering and raping other animals as a sacrifice to Satan. It's a very good example of gorn, and should not be viewed by anyone under the age of 16.
Drawn Together is even worse, on every level.
Metalocalypse finds itself on this side of the line frequently, such as the Queen of Denmark + metal cake incident.
Adult Swim programs tend to have this a lot. The worst culprits are probably Metalocalypse and Korgoth Of Barbaria, which feature violence so over the top that it sometimes goes past Crosses The Line Twice and heads straight into High Octane Nightmare Fuel. New show Superjail seems to be following in this tradition.
The 1986 Transformers movie contains a disturbingly large amount of robotic gorn. Prowl gets blasted in the shoulder, his eyes light up and smoke suddenly pours out of his mouth as his internal systems melt. Ratchet and Ironhide get blown full of holes by at least a dozen Decepticons in a graphic and prolonged manner, with Ironhide surviving long enough to get shot in the head by Megatron at close range... This is a ''kids'' movie, by the way. The Darker And Edgier Generation 2 comic series was exponentially worse (or... better?) in this regard. Blood and entrails were barely disguised as robotic equivalents as robots ripped each other apart and fought with huge chunks of themselves missing. Artist Derek Yaniger commented that he was able to get away with far more violence than he ever could in a comic with flesh-and-blood characters.

Close Western Animation

A good lot of Dead Baby Comedy ends up falling into Gorn, banking on the Rule Of Funny to keep people from recognizing it as such, or Refuge In Audacity to make people not care.
The Grand Guignol Theater in Paris specialized in this sort of thing. Remnants from the butchers' shops featured prominently in the special effects.
This.

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