Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
|
alt title(s): Beat Still My Heart Classic creepout device: This heart no longer occupies the place it's supposed to. But it still beats. Blood seeping from the severed arteries is optional. This may be supernatural (with the heart functioning as a Soul Jar) or natural (in which case it's usually just a momentary gross-out after the heart is ripped from a living victim's chest), but it's always creepy as hell.
Note that the "just ripped out" variety is Truth In Television: heart tissue, unlike other types of muscle, generates its own muscular impulses, so a heart can continue to beat for a brief time after it removed from the body.
Supernatural examples:
Anime
- In a filler episode of Naruto, a ninja disguised as Kabuto links his heart to Naruto's. Any damage to his heart also happens to Naruto's. The guy pulls his heart out of his chest, arteries intact, and as such it is still beating. The scene is why they put a Content Warning at the beginning of the episode.
- In Inuyasha, series villain Naraku controls one his subordinate Kagura by keeping her heart with him at all times. If she displeases him, he tortures her by squeezing it.
- Employed in the second epidode of Darker Than Black, where the episode's antagonist can teleport things into each others' places, resulting at one point in a woman with a chunk of concrete in her chest and her heart lodged in a nearby wall.
Comic Books
- A variation is found in an old Superman comic. In an attempt to live forever, a character is implanted with a pacemaker that is remotely tied to a device at the Earth's core. Too bad that every heart murmur he experiences now sends shockwaves throughout the planet, and vice-versa. Ouch.
- Delirium.
Web Comics
- Though not actually seen, one has made an appearance in Fox Tails, kept in a case by the Morally Ambiguous Doctor, revealing how he is able to control one of the otherwise uncontrollable Kitsune. It's her heart, and apparently, squeezing it is quite painful to her.
- In Digger, an otherwise dead god is kept alive, against his will, by a team of slaves pulling on ropes that force his heart to beat, even though the rest of him has rotted away to bones. When the protagonist skeptically lampshades this, pointing out that the heart isn't even hooked up to anything, she receives the explanation that it's the metaphor of the thing that makes it work.
Live Action TV
- One episode of Strange World featured a surrogate mother who was being used in an experiment, it turned out to be a human heart, not a baby, growing in her uterus.
Film
- Davy Jones in Pirates Of The Caribbean.
- In Bride of Re-Animator, the main characters use Meg's preserved heart when creating the Bride. It's an indicator of Dan's inability to move on after Meg's death — he wants to transfer a part of her life into the new body. In the final shot of the film, the heart lies on a table beside the Bride's dismembered body, stops beating, and shrinks slightly before the Fade To Black. Symbolic, baby.
- In Bordello of Blood, a heart begins beating while outside of the owner's body. (In fact, it reconstructs itself first.)
- In probably the best-known instance of this trope, Mola Ram does this during a cult ritual in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
- Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah, a 2001 Godzilla movie, features this as a Plot Twist seconds before the credits. It's Godzilla's.
- Threatened at the beginning of Red Dragon, although it never happens.
Literature
- In Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" (in which Snow-White is shown from the perspective of the 'evil' queen), the Queen has Snow-White's heart cut from her chest, but it continues to beat, and the girl lives on. When she finally kills the girl with a poisoned apple, the heart stops — but when the prince revives her, the heart begins to beat once more.
- In Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," the killer-protagonist imagines he still hears the beating of his victim's heart.
- Seen in A Song Of Ice And Fire when Danni visits the warlocks.
- The creepiest story in The Tales of Beedle the Bard is "The Warlock's Hairy Heart," in which a warlock takes his heart out of his chest to preserve his youth and life (very Horcrux-like). He keeps the heart in a little box under his house, and because the shrivelled, still-alive thing is so cold, it starts growing hair.
- In The Knight of the Swords by Michael Moorcock, Corum has to kill the Chaos God Arioch. To do this he must destroy Arioch's heart. Which he keeps locked in a tower, so it will be safe. Corum is running around with the Hand of Kwll and the Eye of Rhynn, two other disconnected god body parts, so there's a lot of this sort of thing going on.
- Brutally inverted in Matthew Woodring Stover's Blade of Tyshalle. Tell ya what, just go to the Literature section of Nightmare Fuel Unleaded and search for the Tyshalle example. It would have been less nasty if he took the heart out...
- In the Stephen King novel IT, Stuttering Bill kills the titular Cosmic Horror by tearing out Its heart and smashing it between his hands.
Mythology
- Koschei the Deathless, out of Russian myth — his soul/heart (a vortex of flame) is hidden inside a needle, which is hidden inside an egg, which is hidden inside a duck, which is hidden inside a wolf, which is kept in an iron chest, which is buried under an oak tree, on an island that flickers in and out of existence. Someone still manages to find it and destroy it. Koschei is immortal until his soul is destroyed.
- I've heard one version where the wolf was replaced by a pig. Wait, what?!
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: "Lisa's Rival" had Lisa taking rival Allison's diorama of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and replacing it with an animal heart. Then, in a direct Homage to the poem, she imagines herself hearing the heart in the gym floorboards. So, yeah, subversion.
- In another episode, Homer picks a fight with a group of Shaolin monks during a trip to China - their retaliation concludes with one of the monks ripping his still-beating heart out, showing it to him, and then shoving it back into his chest, whereafter he walks away no worse for wear (and was mildy annoyed that he didn't wipe his hands).
- And then there's the episode where Bart's girlfriend dumps him. Bart imagines her tearing out his heart and throwing it in the garbage.
- The earliest mention on The Simpsons is When Flanders Failed where Bart references a move in the arcade game to cover having ditched karate lessons he was forced to attend: the Touch of Death, where one person rips out the other person's heart in a single jab. (He proceeds to threaten Lisa with the move when she disbelieves him, creeping the shit out of this troper and anyone else who seriously thought about Bart Simpson wielding that kind of power.)
- Happens in an episode of the The Itchy and Scratchy Show, of course.
Video Games
- 'The Heart of Darkness' from Legacy Of Kain. In the first game, it was nothing more than a healing-potion with a creepy graphics and a nifty description: "Torn from the chest of the greatest vampire to have ever existed, Janos Audrin, the Heart of Darkness restores vampiric un-life. Life is precious, Janos discovered, as it was torn - throbbing and bleeding - from his own body." In the later games, it becomes an important Mac Guffin, since Janos Audrin can be revived by putting the still-beating heart back into his chest.
- In the Oblivion quest 'Mehrunes Razor', you find that the final test that must be passed to obtain the titular artifact is to devour the still-beating heart of Mehrunes' previous champion — after you've torn it from his chest, that is. Doing so will turn you into a vampire, if you haven't already immunized yourself.
- In Shadow Warrior, one of the 'weapons' you could acquire — the final one, in fact — was the still-beating heart of a type of demon. By squeezing the heart, you could summon a demon to fight for you. Nifty.
- Baldurs Gate II has one part of a quest where you need to get one of these from a demon to complete a quest and be able to leave.
- One of the "decorations" in Doom 1 & 2 is a still-beating heart on a pedestal.
- The object of the game Vexx is to collect hearts that still beat.
- Red Falcon, a recurring Contra boss, is a giant beating heart that may or may not be attached to anything.
- There is also a giant beating heart in the depths of a Strogg Factory in a [[Quake Quake 4]], You have to destroy it before you can move on by increasing the electric shocks it receives to keep it beating until it beats so fast that it dies of a heart attack. To make it creepier, you can hear a distant scream from some unseen source as you do this.
- In the original Mortal Kombat (and in many of its sequels) the fighter Kano's fatality involved him reaching into the chest of his victim and pulling out their still-beating heart.
- In Gothic, the demon final boss is protected by five hearts that must be slain before he can be killed.
- In Grand Theft Auto IV the beating "heart of the city" can be found in the Statue of Happiness.
Tabletop Games
- Vampire: the Masquerade has the Setites, whose custom Discipline, Serpentis, includes an ability that allows them to remove their heart and place it in a jar, which keeps them from being sent into torpor when staked.
- In Exalted, one of the weirder things the Sidereal Exalted can do with their Martial Arts And Crafts is to inflict "Jigsaw Organ Condition" on a victim, which causes their body parts to be very easily seperable. Said parts still function when detached, making it possible for them to pull someone's heart out and hold it hostage against their good behavior.
- In Scion, the Aztec Scions have the ability to, once an enemy is defeated, rip out their still beating heart and eat it to gain supernatural powers, that make them rip open their chests and expose their beating heart, which is on fire. No other internal organs are shown.
???
- There's the classic Bill Cosby routine about him listening to a radio drama about a chicken heart that not only keeps beating...but grows...and grows...and grows. I forget if that was an actual episode he was remembering.
- Lights Out, episode "The Chicken Heart".
- A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show featured the heart of a vampire.
Natural examples:
Anime
- Under this header because the characters react like it's a biologically natural occurrence, and no supernatural powers are stated to have been used, but in Hunter X Hunter, Killua rips a man's heart clear out of his chest during one of the tests in the Hunters Exam, and stands several feet away from him, holding the still-beating heart in his hand. The guy, however, is still very much alive (if in extreme pain), even begging for Killua to "give that back," and doesn't die until Killua crushes the heart to bits, at which point he instantly falls over, dead as a doornail. What the hell are humans in Hunter X Hunter made of, anyway?
Live Action TV
- Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern have both swallowed beating snake hearts on camera as part of their Travel Channel shows. (See Real Life, below.)
- The Doctor Who episode "The Girl In The Fireplace" features the repair robots of a damaged starship repairing its systems with the organs of the crew - an eye as the lens of a camera, and a beating heart as a pump wired into the pipes.
Film
- In one of the Friday the 13th movies, Jason shoves his hand through a guy's chest and rips his heart out.
- In Airplane!, a still-beating heart intended for transplant jumps around on a desk.
- In Tomorrow Never Dies, James Bond is threatened with this. "He should stay alive just long enough to see it stop beating."
- Several scenes in Apocalypto feature these.
- While it's a dream sequence, Dumb And Dumber has Lloyd removing a heart (which beats), putting it in a doggy bag and returning it to the victim...
- Sci Fi Channel movie "Yeti". The title monster rips the heart out of a victim's chest and it continues beating in his hand.
Literature
- In Philip Jose Farmer's Nature Hero deconstruction Lord Tyger, the horny Tarzan-like title character at one point rips a baboon's heart out of its chest, and while it's still beating he (Painfully NSFW) shoves it into the reluctant heroine's vagina like an organic vibrator until she comes.
- Why, oh WHY did I read that spoiler?! DAMN my curiosity! DAMN IT TO HELL!!!
- WHAT.
- There is not enough bold in the universe for that NSFW warning!
- I'm picturing the scene in hentai format, and it isn't sickening at all that way. Rather... erm, never mind.
Western Animation
- Kano's heartrip (see below) was performed by Luna on The Boondocks. Not in the game, but on a live person she had defeated in a mystical martial arts tournament on a mysterious island . . . Shang Tsung shouted at her to "finish him."
Video Games
- Kano's fatality in the first Mortal Kombat is to rip out his opponent's still-beating heart. Jarek and Kira both used this as one of their fatalities, as well. This is Hand Waved by how they're also members of the Black Dragon, like Kano.
- Almost every fighting game with fatalities has used a similar move at least once. Mace: The Dark Age gives it to the heroic priest. Primal Rage and War Gods have variants where the character eats the heart afterward.
Comic Books
- Battle Angel Alita at one point pulls out her robot heart to use as stakes in an arm wrestling game - placing it directly on the table, on her right side. It's still attached and functional though.
- In a similar (but grosser) vein to the trope, she also attaches a severed head to her circulatory system to keep it alive.
Real Life
- Tropers and their acquaintances have personally witnessed this occurring with fish, reptiles, and amphibians.
- Extremely fresh snake hearts are a delicacy in Vietnam, and swallowing them on camera is a popular stunt among tourists. Look if you dare.
 A great many amateur YouTube videos document the same phenonemon.
- On a lighter note, Aztec sacrifices◊, anyone? Yeah, it's old and it happened.
- One rather strange darwin award involved a guy trying to NSFW use a cow heart as a sex toy using a car battery to make it beat, and ended up electrocuting himself.
- Was he reading that Philip Jose Farmer book beforehand?!
|
|
