Moe Greene Special

The world is too painful to look at.

Ralphie: I want an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle!
Santa: You'll shoot your eye out, kid.

— A Christmas Story

A character is shot in the eye. Inevitably leads to death or an Eyepatch of Power. Also works with arrows or knives. In cases that don't kill or permanently disable the victim, Magic Bullets are frequently used to prevent the slug from going through that soft, squishy little eyeball and directly into the brain behind it.

Named after the memorable death of Moe Greene (based on Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel) in The Godfather. (Also, the redirect is named after what Ralphie was told over and over and over again in A Christmas Story.)

See also Eye Scream, I Just Shot Marvin in the Face, Pretty Little Headshots and Go for the Eye. Scope Snipe is a Sub-Trope for when a sniper fires a shot through an opposing sniper's telescopic sight. No relation to Moe.

As this is generally a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Duenan is hit in the eye during a training exercise at the beginning of the fourth volume of Appleseed. While she recovers eventually, she has to wear an eye patch for the rest of the story arc.
• Although with less modern weaponry, Berserk features lots of people getting an arrow lodged in the middle of their eyes.
• Subverted in Bleach during the fight between Kenpachi and Nnoitra. While Kenpachi holds this trope faithfully (by saying no matter what Super-Toughness his opponent has, the eye is always a weak spot) and stabs Nnoitra on his eyepatch-covered eye, Nnoitra then reveals that there is no eye behind that patch.
  • Later, during the Thousand-Year Blood War arc, a Quincy shoots Shunsui in the eye. Shunsui barely reacts and is next seen with badass eyepatch.
• In one Case Closed movie, Conan wards off a near point blank gunshot to the eye by the specially reinforced lens of his glasses. Note that he has these glasses specifically made by Dr. Agasa because the killer of the film specifically makes it their trademark to shoot their victims through the eye. Conan's plan is hoping that when they confront the killer they'll immediately attempt their trademark shot to kill him. He's right and is able to take advantage of their momentary surprise when it doesn't work to turn the tables before they can shoot him somewhere else.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Roy ends up injured in one of his eyes. He loses sight in it and is given an Eyepatch of Power.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex If you believe his story, Saito lost his left eye when Motoko sniped over his nose just as he was retreating back behind a wall for cover while they were in a Sniper Duel. He now has a cybernetic eyepatch. Notably, in his story, she was accurate enough to hit his eye at an angle so that the bullet only grazed the eye, as she wanted to recruit him afterwards.
• Golgo 13 serves up a double Moe Greene to a spy satellite image analyst who tried to set him up to become a Boxed Crook; breaking from his usual style to deliver a Karmic Death.
• Gungrave, both anime and video game: when Harry MacDowell shoots his best friend Brandon to death, he finishes him off by pushing his gun through the left lens of his glasses and puts a bullet through his eye.
• Gunslinger Girl:
  • Elsa is shot in the eye because that's the only vulnerable point in a cyborg. It turned out that she shot herself in a murder-suicide with her negligent handler; later, Henrietta seemingly attempts the same thing.
  • Much later, Jose shoots Henrietta in the eye when they go to fulfill their sort-of suicide pact (they resolved to shoot each other instead of themselves).
• In Hellsing, during the final battle, Integra is shot in her glasses. The glass fragments hit her eye. In the post-time skip epilogue, she is seen with a patch over that eye. Actually, it's more like the bullet grazed her eye, which makes sense because of the Major's godawful aiming skills. After it hits, her eye flies out of the socket.
• Vice's little sister in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS gets shot in the eye by an energy bullet he fired. She survived, since it only deals Magical Damage but she was still blinded in that eye. She ends up getting a replacement which is a slightly different colour.
• In the final volume of the Read or Die manga, Joker shoots Yomiko at point blank range, hitting her glasses. Not only is she not hurt, the bullet doesn't even scratch the lens. The fact that Yomiko can see with those glasses at all when you consider the fact that they originally belonged to her boyfriend is amazing enough without them being indestructible as well. What did Donny have those glasses made out of, anyway?
• In the second episode of Valvrave the Liberator, A-drei is shot in the eye by his friend, L-elf, who he doesn't realize has been body-jacked. He wears bandages until episode 7, when he takes them off and has a replacement by then.

Comic Books

• At the end of Airboy vs. the Air Maidens, Valkyrie takes revenge on the crime lord who brainwashed her and the other Air maidens by uses a sniper rifle to put a bullet through his wineglass, his sunglasses and his eye.
• Batman does this with a Batarang in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns during his final confrontation with the Joker.
• Inverted with the DC Comics mercenary/supervillain Deathstroke (Slade Wilson). His wife (a highly-trained soldier in her own right and his instructor in the Army) tried to kill Slade by shooting him in the back of the head. It exited through his eye. And he lived.
• In the Energon Universe series Duke, the Baroness delivers this on Major Bludd, who was just introduced for the first time in the G.I. Joe franchise having both his eyes instead of a patch covering one.
• In IDW Publishing's GoBots miniseries, Turbo kills Cy-Kill by shooting him in his eyes. Cy-Kill's body falls after having huge holes where his eyes once were.
• In an issue of Hawkman, Green Arrow shoots out the eye of villainous archer the Spider to destroy his ability to aim.
• Hellboy: The Baba Yaga. Hellboy shoots her in the eye. It doesn't kill her, but it does banish her from the physical world.
• In Jonah Hex, Tallulah Black's eye is shot out when thugs storm her family's frontier home. She survives, but the rest of her family is killed.
• In Robyn Hood: I Love NY #2, Robyn hits a Lizard Folk in the eye with a thrown arrow. The lizard later delivers the arrow to its boss, who uses in an attempt to frame Robyn for murder.
• In Scud the Disposable Assassin, Drywall loses one of his button eyes after him and Oswald’s attempt to break into a factory full of killer Scud robots goes spectacularly wrong. He lives afterward, but doesn’t get the eye back until the finale.
• In Seduction of the Innocent, the 1954 attack on Comic Books by Fredric Wertham, Wertham claims that he was able to find repeated instances of what he called the "injury to the eye motif" in the comic books of the time.
• In Sherwood, Texas #5, Loxley is hiding in the stables. When a Noble opens the stall, Loxley nails him through the eye with an arrow.
• Subverted in Silent Hill: Dying Inside, after Christabella is shot in the eye she doesn't care in the slightest, since she can't feel it. The only thing she cares about is that the blast from the gun lit her hair on fire.
• In Sin City, this is how Mort kills Bob.
• The page image comes from The Walking Dead, where Carl is accidentally shot in the eye non-fatally.
• In a flashback in Wynonna Earp: Season Zero #1, Wynonna jams a beer bottle into the eye of a biker who is hassling her in a bar.

Comic Strips

• Dick Tracy: During a falling out with one of his hirelings, Mr. Bribery grabs the gun off him and fatally shoots him through the eye through his eyeglasses.
• In the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, the unusually violent story "A Cold Day in Hell" includes an Ice Warrior getting a laser beam through the eye.

Fan Works

• Bad Future Crusaders: The night Ponyville was destroyed, Scootaloo's left eye was put out when one of the lenses of the goggles she was wearing was shattered.
• This happens to Corrin in A Brighter Dark. As the Hoshidan forces retreat from Fort Dragonfall, Takumi spots her among the Nohrian forces and shoots her. We don't see it happen, but the next scene of Corrin involves her inspecting her new eyepatch.
• Blackjack from Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons loses her one remaining eye to grenade shrapnel during a firefight with Steel Rain, leaving her a Handicapped Badass until she dies and wakes up with a new pair of cybernetic eyes.
  • In PH's predecessor, Spike has an eye shot out by an Enclave plasma cannon when he attacks Neighvarro.
• The "Final Boss" from Half-Life: Full Life Consequences. And then he couldn't see.
• In Hecate's Orphanage, Thorn Blackfeather loses an eye while fighting against a monster called a Primordial. It is, however, replaced with a fully-functioning mechanical eye.
• Indiana Jones, in Indiana Jones and the Sword of Arthur, mostly as an attempt to explain why he had an Eyepatch of Power in the '90s TV series.
• In A Minor Miscalculation, Rei Hououmaru is killed by a shot in the eye at the end of the Grand Festival, which blows out the back of her head in a subversion of Pretty Little Headshots.
• The Night Unfurls:
  • Due to Improbable Aiming Skills, Hugh is able to kill a hobgoblin by shooting its left eye with an arrow on the way to the village, Shad.
  • Kyril's first death involves taking a crossbow bolt to the side of his head, hitting his eye, and killing him.

Films — Animation

• In Ark, Baramanda has a number of cyborg bodyguards who's invulnerable to gunfire, with their sole weak spot being their single, glowing central eye.

Films — Live-Action

• In Allied, Max, while trying to prove his wife's innocence, visits a colleague who was shot down on a mission over France and smuggled back to England by Max's wife. He's shown their wedding photo, but reveals his left retina is detached so all he sees is a white blotch, while his right eye was shot out, along with most of the socket.
• Happens in Bad Boys II to a gangbanger who tries to peek through a bullethole. After the firefight, Marcus berates Mike that this is not how you normally interrogate suspects.
• Bangkok Dangerous 1999 has the hitman protagonist's second onscreen kill, a bespectacled target he shoots through the glasses' frame, right in the cornea.
• In Battle of Britain, a lingering visual image is of the rear-gunner in a German bomber who comes second in a gunnery duel with an RAF fighter: the German is seen falling back from his guns with his head jerking up, as his flying goggles suddenly fill with blood.
• Done backwards in The Boondock Saints, where the McManus brothers' signature execution method is for each of them to shoot their victim in the back of the head simultaneously, the bullets exiting their victim's head through the eyes.
• The African dictator Wombosi is killed this way in The Bourne Identity.
• This is how Bradley is ultimately killed in Brawl in Cell Block 99. Also one of the messier examples of the Trope, as the bullet is seen taking a good portion of his head with it when it exits.
• Broadway Danny Rose has a scene where Woody Allen hears about somebody getting shot in the eye. "He's blind?" "No, he's dead." "Oh, right... because it would have gone right through..."
• In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Natasha manages to crack the glass of Winter Soldier's goggles with a lucky shot. It only seems to annoy him though. It should be noted that the glasses are bullet-proof, not his eye, and they get cracked so badly from the shot as to be useless.
• James Bond kills Gettler in Casino Royale (2006) by shooting him in the eye with a nailgun.
• Cemetery Man: In the hospital, Francesco shots a nun in the eye through her glasses.
• The page quote comes from A Christmas Story. Ralphie wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, and every single adult tells him "You'll shoot your eye out."
• In Dead in Tombstone, Guerrero kills Snake with a single shot through the eye (allowing Satan to make a 'snake-eyes' pun).
• Near the end of Deep Rising, the monster entwines Finnegan with a tentacle and holds him up to one huge, bulbous eye, apparently curious about what the tiny creatures it's been pursuing throughout the ship actually look like. Finnegan blasts the eye into spatters of goo with the shotgun.
• Cheech Marin is killed in this fashion in Desperado. This death received a reference in the sequel Once Upon a Time in Mexico; Marin returns as a different character, but nonetheless wears an eyepatch where his character had been shot in the previous film.
• In Die Hard 2, John McClane fights with a mook and ends up having to kill him by stabbing him in the eye with an icicle. McClane is sickened by the sight.
• Happens to Eden as a child in Doomsday. She moves up to Eyepatch of Power and a remote-controllable cybernetic eye as an adult.
• Donnie Darko uses this near the end when Donnie shoots human-Frank. This is foreshadowed by the scene where Donnie stabs at a watery barrier towards rabbit-Frank, causing ripples and then a glow around the eye.
• In Enemy at the Gates, Vasily Zaytsev's grandfather teaches him to always aim for the eye when shooting his rifle.
• Eraser: a Mook is killed through the scope of his railgun using an ordinary rifle by a union man... right after someone makes fun of the guy's shooting skills.
• Escape to Athena (1979). David Niven shoots a German scuba diver through the lens of his goggles when he uses a woman as a Human Shield.
• In the Gregory Hines film Eve of Destruction, he shoots the titular rogue android in the eye to disable her, as the rest of her head is armored. Unlike what he thought, though, the shot doesn't stop her, so out of ammo he stabs her in the other eye with the barrel of his gun.
• Fearless Warrior (Korkusuz Cengaver, Turkish epic film starring Cüneyt Arkın) have the hero, Sahin Bey, brutally blinded by the Big Bad halfway through. He then trains himself to become a Blind Weaponmaster, and in the climatic battle defeats the main villain via firing two arrows (Multishot, typical Cuneyt Arkin style) into the eyes.
• How the main antagonist in Flyboys gets killed.
• Jason shoot one the teens in her eye with a Harpoon Gun in Friday the 13th Part III. IN 3-D!
• In the end of The Fugitive (1972) (a Shaw Brothers film inspired by 70s Spaghetti Western), the hero managed to kill his Evil Former Friend Big Bad by shooting both the eyes out via Mauser. Somehow it doesn't kill the villain instantly, who inrealistically writhes around for half a minute while bleeding his eyes out before he expires.
• Full Contact sees a mook shot in the eye by Jeff during the nightclub shootout. We even see the bullet about to enter the mook's eye from his POV for a second.
• Ghost Rock: Deciding that Barber is taking too long in killing the last man in town, Killin' Jim Jackson shoots the man through the eye to speed things up.
• One of the ways to dispatch a Neo-Viper from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is by stabbing him through the weaker eye-guards.
• Moe Greene of The Godfather is the Trope Namer; during The Purge Michael commits on his enemies, Greene is shot straight through the glasses partway through a massage and dies instantly. This differs from the book, where Greene is Killed Offscreen months prior to said purge.
• The unstoppable Michael Myers gets a double dose at the end of Halloween II (1981), which succeeds only in blinding him, rather than splattering his brain. His eyes are miraculously restored (along with his skin, his life, and his late arch-enemy) in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Halloween III: Season of the Witch was not Myers-related).
• This happens in Hanna when Eric Heller tries to kill their nemesis in her apartment. The bodyguard looked through the peephole, and then the gun battle started.
• John Woo's Hard Boiled: Tequila Yuen kills Johnny Wong this way in the climax.
• Hard Rain: One of the mooks trying to rob the armored car in gets dispatched this way, he's wearing a pair of thick glasses that only make it messier.
• The same thing happens in Hard Target, with The Dragon firing a silenced Ruger through the peephole.
• The bespectacled radioman in the "B-17" segment in Heavy Metal is found dead with one round having gone through his eyeglasses and left eye (he was shot multiple times before, but this was likely what definitively killed him).
• A Hero Never Dies have the Assassin Outclassin' scene where three enemy hitmen are sent to take out Jack, the hero, in his motel. The first one tries looking through the peephole only for Jack to put a bullet into his cornea.
• Heroes Shed No Tears: Chang Chun managed to temporarily disarm the Vietnamese Colonel by shooting his eye out, and in subsequent scenes the Colonel is shown sporting an eyepatch.
• The Killer (1989) ends with Ah Jong getting killed by having his eyes shot out, one of the most iconic Downer Ending moments in Heroic Bloodshed cinema.
• The martial arts swordplay film, Killers Five has its Disc-One Final Boss, a bandit warlord who's said to be impervious to all damage, which the heroine eventually takes down by chucking her hairpin into his left eye. She then finishes him by hurling her sword into his right.
• Kingsman: The Secret Service: Valentine kills Harry by shooting him in the head and through the eye. In the sequel it's revealed that he was revived in time, albeit with his eye lost.
• Charly in The Long Kiss Goodnight dispatches a mook by knocking on a door, then holding a gun to the peephole.
• Love And Bullets has a mook darted in the eye via Blow Gun.
• Luz in Machete. She ends up sporting the Eyepatch of Power that can be seen in the opening credits.
• Gangster Joe in Once Upon a Time in America is shot in the eye through a magnifying glass by one of Noodles' gang.
• Outcast has an example without bullets, there's the eyepatched leader of a Black Guard platoon gets killed by the protagonist via flung spear into his eyepatch.
• In Plunkett & Macleane, evil General Chance suffers this courtesy of Plunkett. Given Chance's sick fondness for Eye Scream, he definitely had it coming.
• Colonel Graham loses an eye when his ambush of the 10th goes wrong in Posse. He spends the rest of the film sporting an Eyepatch of Power.
• In The Quick and the Dead, the shot of Herod's which kills Sgt. Cantrell takes him directly through the right eye.
• RoboCop 2: Robocop shoots a sniper through the scope of his rifle and right into his eye.
• The Silent Force, a 2001 B-movie, have the protagonist killing a mook by shooting him through the eye just as said mook is looking at the hero through binoculars.
• Similarly in Saving Private Ryan, with a Cold Sniper duel which ends with a Scope Snipe.
• Saw:
  • In Saw II, Gus looks through a peephole with a magnum pistol behind it, and gets this dealt to him for his trouble.
  • In Saw 3D, Hoffman kills Rogers by shooting him in the right eye.
• This is attempted to Superman in Superman Returns.
  • Parodied in Epic Movie (2007): the bullet enters Superman's eye with a messy-sounding squelch, and leaves him cursing in agony and disbelief.
• In The Thing (1982), this is how Garry takes out the Norwegian that was shooting up the camp, with a perfect shot to the eye.
• Taken 2: Bryan performs this on one of the Mooks in the climax with one of the many bullet holes said mook and his partner left following a barrage of shots through a wall.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: The coffee-drinking guard in the hospital gets skewered through his head between his eye and his nasal bone by the T-1000.
• Clarence loses an eye in the climactic shootout of True Romance. Luckily for him, Alabama, and their son, he lives.
• Andrew Scott in Universal Soldier disposes of his commander by shooting his left eye out, in the same scene where he becomes the Dragon Ascendant.

Literature

• In the Dale Brown novel Act of War, Zakharov gets shot in the eye, but his escape vehicle gets away before the kill can be confirmed. The characters are savvy enough not to count him out yet, and indeed he does return in Edge of Battle.
• A young soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front, coerced into signing up for the military by his teacher, is shot in the eye almost as soon as the battle starts. The worst part is that he doesn't die until another enemy shoots him again.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Bardic Voices novels, a minor character is a dashing romantic figure with an eyepatch, and he tells all sorts of exciting stories about how he got it. When his girlfriend in private asks him the real story, he swears her to secrecy and says, "You know what every mother says to a boy who plays with a sharp stick?"
• Orson Scott Card has used this a couple of times. In both Shadow of the Hegemon and Empire, a major character is killed with a point blank .22 shot to the eye. In both cases, it's because the killer needs to smuggle the weapon into a secure area. A .22 handgun is small and light, but doesn't have much penetration—if a head shot doesn't go through the eye socket, it's pretty likely to just bounce off the skull.
• In the climax of the Ciaphas Cain novel Death or Glory, Cain finds himself in a Duel to the Death with the enormous ork warboss Korbul, whose mega-armor is completely immune to Cain's chainsword and puny little laspistol. Fortunately for Cain, orks don't wear face-enclosing helmets, so he finds a way through by getting inside Korbul's guard, jamming the barrel of his laspistol into Korbul's eye socket and pulling the trigger, splattering the ork's brains against his armour's backplate.
  Cain: That's right, get a good close look!
• In Dragaera, Vlad is a member of a fantastic mafia-equivalent and when assigned to make someone Deader than Dead, generally stabs them through the eye. Since this damages his victim's brain, they can't be brought back.
• A battle in The Harsh Cry of the Heron is abruptly ended when Shigeko Otori puts an arrow through the enemy general's eye from across the field. He survives and happily marries her to seal a peace treaty and alliance.
• In The Howling (1977), Karyn shoots a transformed Marcia in the eye with a silver bullet in self-defence, killing her almost instantly.
• In Lords and Ladies, Magrat is cornered by a bunch of elves in Lancre Castle, and when one of them peeks through the keyhole of the room where she's hiding (which happens to be the armory) she shoots him in the eye with a crossbow.
• From The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming:
  Scaramanga: I have never needed more than one .25-calibre bullet to kill. I shoot at the right eye, Mr Bond. And I never miss.
• In Brazilian novel O Homem Que Matou Getulio Vargas (released in English as Twelve Fingers: Biography of an Anarchist), Dimitri, the Serbian assassin protagonist, tries to kill the titular Brazilian president in a horse racecourse using a gun hidden inside a paper picker. Given that using the pick filled the gun with grass and dirt, when Dimitri shoots it instead backfires, with the flung lid giving him a black eye.
• RCN: Adele Mundy's pistol fires ceramic pellets that don't have much penetration so her preferred aim point is her target's eyes where there's no concern for bone deflecting the pellet.
• The Redwall book Salamandastron had a shrew get shot in the eye with an arrow. He dies.
• Subverted in Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers. Chmeee gets shot in the eye socket with an arrow while having sex with a large number of other people's wives, but the autodoc fixes him up with no more than some missing fur.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Xiahou Dun survives an arrow to the eye. After plucking the eye out and eating it, he then kicks the asses of those who ambushed him.
• Prince Yongxing from the second book of the Temeraire series is accidentally killed by an enormous flying splinter going straight into his eye when a giant wooden stage platform is broken in the midst of a dragon fight.
• Vanas Heritage: Nirvy shoots an arrow into a Skjalls eye. Jord gets speared in the face by Ghazghar.
• Words of Radiance, second book of The Stormlight Archive: When Adolin realizes that the Smug Snake Highprince Sadeas intends to keep undermining the heroes even in an apocalyptic crisis, he dispenses with the political machinations, attacks the man on the spot, and uses his greater physical strength to force a knife through his eye.

Live-Action TV

• In Arrow, Oliver Queen uses his bow to administer one of these to his enemy Deadshot. He gets better, however he is not able to return to work without a new eye. Second incident occurs in a flashback, revealing that once Slade become a villain on the island, Oliver had believed he had killed him with an arrow to the eye. Cue the return of Slade Wilson in the present day as Deathstroke, with an eyepatch and one hell of a mess of an eye.
• Battlestar Galactica. Tigh, soon after he discovers he is a Cylon, dreams that he shoots Adama in the eye. Note that by this time in the story, Tigh had already lost his eye.
• In Brimstone, a cop who goes to Hell for murder (ing the bad guy who raped his wife and then got off on a technicality) gets sent back to Earth by the Devil with a promise of a new life for him and his family. All he has to do is find 100 damned souls who've escaped Hell to Earth, and send them back to Hell. He has to shoot them in the eyes (because they are the windows to the soul).
• Emmett in the third season premier of Chuck.
• Deadliest Warrior - In the Samurai vs Viking episode, the samurai expert shows off the effectiveness of the Yumi, the samurai bow. He does so by calling his shots on a practice dummy, then hitting them perfectly. Then the expert calls "Left eye" and after that "Right eye"... plus you get to see it happen in slow motion on the replay.
• In Deadwood's very first episode, Wild Bill Hickock takes out a bad guy this way.
• Dead Man's Gun: In "The Bounty Hunter", Raymond Jakes' first kill is a penny-ante thief who tries to rob his store. Jakes' shot from the eponymous gun nails the crook right through the eye.
• Justified in an episode of Elementary where the Body of the Week is shot in both eyes. The victim had arranged his own murder, paying the hitman to kill him that way to conceal the fact that he had contracted cancer of the retina.
• Firefly - Mal shoots Dobson in the eye at the end of the pilot. In the comic continuation "Those Left Behind," Dobson returns with an Eyepatch of Power and Mal shoots out his other eye. Plus a few more in the brainpan, just to ensure that he won't be coming back again.
• Heroes: Bennet gets shot right through the lens of his famous horn-rimmed glasses. He dies, but then he gets better.
• Theo Tonin in Justified apparently suffered this fate before the events of the series. The perpetrator was the mystery man of Season 4, Drew Thompson.
• Lost - Flash-sideways Mikhail dies like this. For bonus irony points, it's the one he lost and wore his Eyepatch of Power over in the main timeline.
• Mad Men: Ken Cosgrove is forced to entertain the Chevy executives by taking them hunting, and one of them spots a bird...behind Ken's head. Ken wears a eyepatch for the rest of the series.
• Happens in an episode of Moonlight, where an assassin sent after a witness pretends to be a pizza delivery guy who then shoots the cop through the peephole.
• In The Please Watch the Jon Lovitz Special Alex Rocco cameos as Moe Green, getting shot in the other eye.
• Preacher. In the episode "Sundowner", Fiore, DeBlanc and Jesse are hiding in a hotel room from the Seraphim. There's a knock on the door.
  DeBlanc: Probably just... the towels.
  [Fiore looks through peephole, then closes his eye in resignation]
  Fiore: It's not. [Seraphim shoots him through the peephole]
• This is how the first victim of the week dies in the beginning of Silent Witness episode "In Plain Sight". The episode also shows the aftermath of what really happens if you killed someone this way. No Pretty Little Headshots here, just shots of the inside of the back of the man's ruined head.
• In The Sopranos, Big Pussy specifically uses the phrase "Moe Greene Special" to describe the killing of low level associate Brendan Filone for hijacking a truck under Uncle Junior's protection. Leads to a brief, light-hearted aside when he has to explain the reference.
• The Walking Dead (2010):
  • Carl Grimes has his eye (accidentally) shot out. He survives, and is left with a gaping hole that's covered with a large bandage.
  • In Season 3, the Governor has his eye stabbed out by Michonne. It doesn't kill him. Cue Eyepatch of Power.

Tabletop Games

• In GURPS a hit to the eye, while difficult and requiring the right sort of weapon to pull off (bullets do qualify), is essentially treated as a hit to the skull — and with it the brain for accordingly huge damage effect modifiers — against which the skull's own damage resistance does not protect. Oh, and you'll probably lose the eye, too.

Video Games

• Alpha Protocol loves this, as a number of characters (such as Deng and Le Land) can be executed via shot to the eye.
• Raul Menendez in Call of Duty: Black Ops II suffers this, courtesy of Alex Mason. If the pistol had been only an inch to the right, history would have unfolded very differently.
• Devil May Cry 4 sees Dante, following the last Agnus boss fight, killing the latter in just this manner. In a cutscene, of course.
• Dusty Revenge have the intro of McCoy, Dusty's trusty basset hound ally and an expert rifleman, who snipes a coyote mook trying to shoot Dusty from behind in the eye. Later on he injures the villain Craven via bullet into the right eye, but Craven survives and returns with a green prosthetic replacement eye.
• In Dynasty Warriors Xiahou Dun lost his eye when Cao Xing shoots him with an arrow. He then pulls out the arrow out, and eats his own eye. Just as he supposedly did in Real Life.
• In Fallout and Fallout 2, the player can target enemy characters' eyes. "Crippling" someone's eyes causes their Perception stat fall to almost nothing. Fallout 3 removes this option, but players can still target enemies' heads. Do this to a Super Mutant, and he'll grab his eyes and scream, implying that that's where the bullet hit him.
• Pauline Wins will threaten to do this to you in Fallout: New Vegas, but she's rather lacking in the credibility department.
• In Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Phoebe inflicts Blind on enemies that she attacks with her Bow of Grace.
• A couple characters in Grand Theft Auto IV go out this way. Most memorably, your first execution involves Niko putting his gun up to Jerkass loan shark Vlad's eye and pulling the trigger, which results in his brains being blown out and a fountain of blood spraying out of his eye socket.
• In the Killzone series, you normally have to shoot the helmets off the Helghast to score a headshot. Aim for their Glowing Eyes of Doom, however, and they'll go down in a single shot.
• A sure-fire way to learn that you will be playing as one of your allies from now on in LISA: The Hopeful is if Beltboy gets a bullet to the eye.
• In Medievil, Sir Daniel Fortesque was killed by being shot through the left eye by the very first arrow fired in the battle against Zarok. When he is revived as a skeleton a century later, his right eye comes back but the left eye socket remains empty.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, The Sorrow's broken lens and the blood leaking from the eye behind it heavily imply this trope. Seeing as his assassin was his lover The Boss, her method of execution was probably meant to be as quick and painless as possible in addition to professional.
• In Mortal Kombat 11, this is how Kano finally bites the big one. Namely, via Past Sonya blowing a big hole right through Past Kano's non-cybernetic eye, which also kills Present Kano who only moments before had Past Johnny Cage at knifepoint and was threatening to kill both him and Cassie by killing him.
• In Purgatory (RPG Maker) 2, Oliver gets stabbed in the left eye with the cleaver he gave Enri in the first game. Because he is a Cyborg, he had a terminal behind his left eye acting as a life support system for his brain, and most of his body was covered in Explosive Reactive Armour, there wasn't much else Enri could do against him.
• In the Team Fortress 2 promotional video "The Sound of Medicine", Sniper takes an arrow to the eye from his robotic counterpart. It goes straight through the scope of his rifle.
• Emily in Until Dawn can die this way, if she gets bitten by the Wendigo. Of course, it's up to the player to decide.

Webcomics

• Erfworld: Lord Manpower the Temporary, Stanley the Plaid's last warlord, takes an arrow through the eye◊ and out the back of his head, resulting in a Non Sequitur, *Thud* and a hastily summoned replacement that sets off the plot.
• Grrl Power: Peggy does this to Vehemence. The first time, it damages his eye. The second time, he blocks an anti-materiel rifle bullet with his eyelid.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Vax frequently goes for his opponents eyes. Vex and Percy also score kills this way, occasionally.

Western Animation

• Family Guy:
  • In the episode "Lottery Fever", one of the acts that Peter coerces Quagmire and Joe into doing after he wins the lottery is performing in a vaudeville act while he shoots at them with a BB gun. He shoots Joe square in the eye, which Quagmire decides is the last straw, and when Peter tries to apologize later, Joe points out that he had to get a glass eye.
  • In "Throw It Away", Stewie kills Peter with a crossbow bolt to the eye. He's perfectly fine later.
• In a deleted scene from "Burns' Heir", The Simpsons inflicted this on a Richard Simmons-esque aerobics robot. It regenerated the eye à la Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The deleted scene was shown during "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" clip show.
• Arcee blasts Shockwave in the eye in the Transformers: Prime episode "Out of the Past". By the next time we see him, he has his eye back thanks to some offscreen Self-Surgery. Ah, the joys of being a robot.

Real Life

• Ironically subverted by gangster Bugsy Siegel, the real life basis for Moe Greene. While his autopsy report did show that his left eye was blown out of its socket after being shot multiple times in the head, he was never actually shot directly in the eye (his eye fell out due to overpressure of his skull from the other bullets that had passed through his head).
• Supposedly happened to Osama Bin Laden when he was killed by Navy SEALS.
  • Reports indicate the shot hit him in or just above the eye, and blew out part of his skull, crossing this trope over with Your Head A-Splode.
• Lampshaded by comedian Dennis Miller:
  "I go through glasses like Moe Greene".
• Attempted, at least according to legend, on Rasputin, among other things.
• Rapper Bushwick Bill from Geto Boys was shot in the eye. He survived. And they put it on the album cover.◊
• Cherokee outlaw Ned Christie was blinded in one eye when a gunshot tore through his nose and exited through his temple, taking the eye with it.
• Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov was shot during one of his early battles with Turks. The musket ball hit him in the temple, wounded his eye from behind end exited through other cheek, and everybody assumed it fatal. Surprisingly he recovered, and even didn't lose the vision in that eye — his Eyepatch of Power was due to the fact that the eye still was wounded and ached if he used it for an extended time.
• From the same era, Marsal André Masséna took a bullet in one eye... courtesy of Napoleon, during a hunt. It seems that the bullet only grazed his eye, though, and the wound was treated quickly enough that he managed to retain his vision.
• There are conflicting accounts of the 1066 Battle of Hastings, but according to some of them King Harold of England was hit by an enemy arrow to the eye, which either killed him outright or at least incapacitated him so he couldn't get away or otherwise prevent being hacked to pieces by Norman knights. The Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold attempting to yank an arrow out of his eye right before a mounted Norman cuts him down.
  • Historians generally agree that there's no reason to believe this actually happened. "Arrow to the eye" was the most common way for your hated famous enemy to die, back then. Except for red hot poker up the ass (Edward II).
• Israel Defense Forces General (and later Israeli Minister of Defense) Moshe Dayan gained his trademark Eyepatch of Power while doing reconnaissance for the Haganah (the predecessor to the IDF) in Vichy France-controlled Lebanon during World War II: while casing a police station, he was hit with a French bullet through his binoculars.
• Legendary Marine sniper Carlos "Whitefeather" Hathcock combined this with a Scope Snipe during the Vietnam War, sending a bullet straight down an opposing sniper's scope and through his eye. Hathcock admitted it was just an extremely lucky shot (especially because it means his opponent was lining up on him at the exact same time. Hathcock just got his shot off first).
• A late 2nd-early 3rd century Chinese military officer Xiahou Dun got hit in the eye by a stray arrow during Battle of Yan Province. The incident earned him a nickname "One-eyed Xiahou", a nickname he hated for the rest of his life.
• In July 2021, Jovenel Moïse, the President of Haiti, was assassinated by a gang of gunmen who shot him at least 12 times. One of the bullets shattered his left eye, and may well have been the fatal shot.

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