Quotes / Cruel and Unusual Death

He don't deserve no mercy
We ought to shoot him with a gun
But I am not an evil man
So first let's have a little fun

We'll tie that scoundrel to a rope
And throw it overboard
Drag him underneath the ship
A terrifying deadly trip

— Alestorm, "Keelhauled"

Can't even shout, can't even cry
The Gentlemen are coming by
Looking in windows, knocking on doors
They need to take seven, and they might take yours
Can't call to Mom, can't say a word
You're gonna die screaming, but you won't be heard

— Buffy, "Hush"

"You could initiate a horrifying fury that would terrorize even the Grim Reaper — and you don't even want to fuck with that mack daddy."

— Bludworth, Final Destination

When Beyond Birthday committed his third murder, he attempted an experiment. Namely, to see if it were possible for a human being to die of internal hemorrhaging without rupturing any organs. Specifically, he drugged his victim so they fell unconscious, tied them up, and proceeded to beat their left arm thoroughly, being careful not to break the skin. He was hoping to bring about enough hemorrhaging to cause death from loss of blood, but this attempt ended, sadly, in failure. Blood congested in the arm and it turned purplish red beneath the skin, but the victim did not die. He simply shook, convulsed, and remained alive. He had been convinced the blood loss incurred was enough to kill someone, but apparently he had underestimated the matter. As far as Beyond Birthday was concerned, the actual method of murder rated fairly low on the amusement scale, and it was never more than an interesting experiment. It did not particularly matter to him whether it succeeded or not. Beyond Birthday simply shrugged, and took out a knife...'

—Death Note, Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases pg 9 (Leaping over the Moral Event Horizon in the first paragraph)

Know about Bluhm? ...They dragged him into the desert, cut out his tongue, chopped off his manly apparatus and stuffed them where his tongue had been. Then they crucified the poor bugger. Pathologist's opinion is he was still alive when they nailed him up.

—Tim Donohue, The Constant Gardener

The last guy to whack one of Vasquaz's boys had his mouth filled by a Mauser clip and his gums glued up before they set another note to his head.

— Tanner, Driver 2

Of all the methods I employ, this is perhaps the cruelest, causing my victim’s body to shrink on itself, crushing bones and rupturing organs ‘til the pressure inside burst the sac of fleshy skin, spraying its contents for all to see.

— Kain, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain

Death by scratch-and-sniff? What the hell happened to people shooting each other with guns?

— Emerson Cod, Pushing Daisies

"The sentence of the Law in your case is, and this Court doth adjudge,

That you be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution; that you be there hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead; but that, being alive, you be cut down, and your bowels taken out and burnt before your face; that your head be severed from your body, and your body divided into four parts; and that your head and quarters be disposed of as the King shall think fit: and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!"

—Sentence given to Francis Henry De la Motte and others in the British history for High Treason

"He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No — panther claws should rip open his throat — that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me."

—Klaus Kinski, on BFF Werner Herzog

"Those of us who are not claustrophobes are aerophobes. Others are afraid of the dark, other don't want to be burned to death. It's extraordinary; they got together every horror in the American psyche and sprang it on us."

—Gore Vidal on the September 11th World Trade Center attacks

A.wesomeness
R.idiculousness
N.umber of Holes Created in Victim
O.uuaggahhhaaaarrh!!!!
L.imbs Removed
D.elivery of One Liner

—Seanbaby, the Arnold Schwarzenegger Death Rating System

"I can't believe Father Martin one-upped Jesus Christ himself in shitty ways to die."

—Miles Upshur, Outlast

"One of my predecessors used to have men torn apart by wild tortoises. It was not a quick death."

—Lord Vetinari, Making Money

"Well, thanks for that. I know I'll never eat again..."

—Cassie Cage, Mortal Kombat X, after witnessing D'Vorah kill Mileena with thousands of bugs from the inside out.

Christ, I remember that old witch. She scared the hell out of me. I remember when she invited us to watch her perform the rista orn - the blood eagle. It's called that because it looks like you're carving eagle wings into the victim's back. What you're actually doing is cutting the ribs away one by one down to the loins - not enough to kill you, but enough to keep you alive and howling. After removing the ribs, the torturer reaches in and pulls out your lungs. That's when you slowly choke to death.

—"Remembering Gunnhild," Vampire: The Masquerade - Clanbook: Tzimisce

In that fifteen-minute window, Aiden Burghley had been dismembered at every major joint - ankle, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow and wrist - leaving just his head and torso at the base of a tree. That part was still dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt he'd been wearing when I interviewed him. Later stress analysis determined that this was because his limbs had been torn out of their sockets by an extreme axial force strong enough to rip skin and snap tendons. [...] Aiden Burghley's head was a nightmare, the skin of the face having been neatly removed to reveal the dried-meat coloured muscles and tendons beneath. It looked almost surgical, although later microscopic inspection revealed that the tissue had been torn, rather than cut. His face had then been mounted on a tree so that it looked out over the curving rows of identical semi-detached houses that stretched away to the horizon.

—Rivers of London, The Hanging Tree

Hera: Normally my decorum protocols constrain how I address station officers, but I need what I'm about to say to actually sink into Doctor Hilbert's pathetic twisted little murderer's head.

Hilbert: What it is you want?

Hera: What it is I want is to give you a friendly reminder of what's at stake for you personally. Officer Eiffel? He's your deadman's switch. If you let him die, or if you do anything that doesn't fall under the category of Do No Harm, I will go off. I will rain acid on your ass. I will crank the temperature in the room so high that your skin will crack, and bubble, and burn. I will vent you into space through a hole the size of a quarter. And if I am feeling very, very generous, I won't do all those things slowly. Have I made myself clear?

— Wolf 359, Do No Harm

Great Seo: Have you ever seen a Time Lord die, Quel?

Great Quel: I usually leave the executions to my subordinates.

Great Seo: It is not a peaceful death, especially for those with incarnations yet unused; perishing over and over again, different bodies regenerating and rebirthing - only to die screaming. Quite the most horrific agony, I would imagine, and yet... it will still not be enough.

—Big Finish Doctor Who: Singularity

"Firstly, I get four hundred cases of fake dog vomit, I grease the bottoms of them, and when The Flash runs into the them, the whole mess slides into a wall of metal spikes! The cases break open, and what’s left of The Flash is buried alive in phony barf. And then (cackles) EVERYTHING EXPLODES!"

— The Trickster telling the other rogues his plan to kill the Flash, Justice League, Flash and Substance

The Emperor was not pleased when the Death Star was destroyed, and I was chosen to suffer as an example. As I stood in a cage, he released the piranha-beetles through holes in the floor: one bit me, and at the smell of blood, the others swarmed over me. Mandibles with serrated razor edges cut into my flesh, slicing through the skin on my thighs, chest, and cheeks. Thousands and thousands more swarmed at me. They buzzed in my ears, tearing at my eyes, blinding me. I screamed, and begged, but the Emperor only laughed at my pain. After I was blinded, I could feel their pain for an hour or so afterwards, then-

I woke up, whole, in a new body. The Emperor had found me important enough to clone me, giving me the warning that he'd find a more interesting way to kill me next time if I failed him again.

—Bevel Lemelisk, Star Wars: The Essential Guide To Species

He took Sniezawski and changed him, pulling his neck out of true and crushing the rest of him into an eggshape. He fashioned a bony shell, like that of a Galapagos turtle, and slipped the Pole into it. The creature, its moustached head bobbing on an elongated stalk, its booted feet useless as flippers, made a spectacle of itself. Giselle howled with empty-headed laughter. In a moment of compassion, he lopped Sniezawski's head off.

—Bad Dreams

Funkmaster Dee, the worst-dressed white boy Eddie had ever seen, would be plugged into a sound system and booted to death by the throb of his own dance albums. Psychedelic Pstan, who never played a track less than three quarters of an hour long, would be juiced up with hallucinogenics and dipped, in his squiggle shorts and big red glasses, into a vat of steaming chemicals at the world's first Acid Bath Party. Shaggy Andy, who was a folk traditionalist, would be flayed alive by country craftsmen who took pride in their work and stretched his skin over the bole of their mandolins to get a better sound. And Posie would be forced to drink a gallon of water from each of the Third World countries she reckoned were musically in the forefront of civilization, and then be rotted from the inside by fifty-seven different varieties of horrible disease. He would let Achmet and Zorrino off only if they agreed to clean up the mess.

—Bloody Students

Laying down his colossal sceptre, the Overtyrant grabbed at the Black Orc Warboss. Urk's twin axes bit deep into his foe's meaty chest but, undaunted by his own free-flowing blood, Greasus snatched up his opponent with both hands.

Greasus squeezed and squeezed, then squeezed some more. The sound of Urk's armour buckling and snapping under the massive pressure was audible even over the cacophony of the battle. So too was the wet cracking that followed. For long minutes Greasus strained until his bulging arms visibly shook at the effort. The crushed and twitching thing that the Overtyrant finally dropped was unrecognisable, for Greasus had literally squeezed all the fluids out of the lifeless husk. The Ogres cheered, their hoarse bellows answered by geysers of flame erupting from the volcano. This sight was too much for the remaining greenskins, who turned and fled.

—Warhammer: Ogre Kingdoms Army Book (8th edition)

Teykar: You're the one with a gun at your head.
Davros: And you're the one still attached to a magnetic parachute.
Teykar: In the name of the Thal Republic, death to-
Davros: Now, mother!
Teykar: Get back! What's happening?! [screams in agony, before being drowned out by Sickening "Crunch!"]
Calcula: Ooooh. Now that was really quite gruesome. What did I just do?
Davros: By tugging that cord, you reactivated the magnetic field of her chute. The magnetic properties of the planet are too powerful: she's being pulled down to the planet's core.
Calcula: With just a concrete floor in the way.

—Big Finish Doctor Who: I, Davros - Corruption

Kin growled. "Look, it went over the waterfall, and then into vacuum and then hit the ship! What sort of description to do you want? It looks like an explosion in a morgue!"
Kin was used to violent deaths. Oldsters died that way - freefall diving without a backpack on, deliberately wandering near when they released the cloned elephants on a new world, banjaxing the safeties and stepping into the hopper of a strata machine - but then the ambulance crews took over. There had never been anything to see, except in the strata machine case. And that was only a strange pattern in a freshly-laid coal measure.

—Strata

"Stabbed? Takes a second. Crucifixion lasts hours. It's a slow, horrible death."

—Centurion, Monty Python's Life of Brian

"Somebody stuck his blades in all his major organs in alphabetical order!"

—T-Bird, about Tin Tin, the first guy to fall to Eric Draven's Roaring Rampage of Revenge, The Crow (1994)

"Let me tell you something you might not know... Being burned alive is one of the most painful ways to die. First, the skin burns off... Then the muscles themselves begin to fall apart. In the end, they all wail... 'Please... Kill me! Please!'"

— Surtr, Fire Emblem Heroes

Patel went missing, but they assumed he was dead when they identified his thumb and part of his left hand by its fingerprint. Awan was found partially flayed – thankfully, I believe, the shock killed him first; Koshdel had been strangled with his own intestines; Akute's head was discovered on her bedroom floor, we're not entirely sure where the rest of her body went. Pensley was set on fire. Ah, now Dhawan managed to put up a bit of a fight, which unfortunately collapsed the entire building he was in, making identification a tricky process – dental records, eventually.

—Sinclair, A Madness Of Angels

Newscaster: But death by lawnmower is not the end of the strange twists in THIS case.
Detective Anderson: 'Course, it's hard to be real specific at this point, but yes, apparently parts of her are missing.
Newscaster: Do you know which parts or how many?
Anderson: Uhh... like I said, it's hard to be real specific... at this point. She's just one giant jigsaw puzzle.

—Frankenhooker

Zakk: Y'know - it's weird, but I think he would have wanted to go out like this.
Brodie: His eyes ripped out, face grinded off and then head mounted under a car engine?
Zakk: Totally. For whom the bell tolls, old man.

—Deathgasm

"Every bone in his body must be broken. But I'm not sure that's what killed him."

—Mary Royce, It! The Terror from Beyond Space

Veruca Salt was once en pointe
but watch as we dislocate each joint.
Her ballet career is looking grim
as we tear her apart from limb to LIMB!

—The Squirrels and Oompa Loompas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

"This is what she used on my brother and her sister, hacked them to pieces. We found parts of their bodies all over the house, in places you wouldn't think. A funny thing is the heads have never been found - hands and feet and things like that, but no heads."

—Watson Pritchard, House on Haunted Hill (1959)

"Why don't we cut you up into little pieces and feed you to your pooches, hmm? And then we'll see just how loyal a hungry dog REALLY is!"

—The Joker to the Chechen, The Dark Knight

"Ah, face mutilated with a meat tenderizer, throat slit, and this one had her ass beat in."

—Lieutenant Anderson, The Gore Gore Girls

I am a man of my word. Prepare to receive your bellyful of gold.

—The Crooked Man, The Book of Lost Things

The poison in [hemlock water-dropwort] causes death by muscle constriction. All of your muscles contract; your heart is made of muscles, your ribcage and diaphragm use muscles to enable you to breathe. So if all of your muscles all constrict and stay constricted, it's bad. In the final stages of poisoning the muscles of the face will constrict, so hey, at least you die with a smile.

—Atomic Shrimp, "How To Get Started Foraging - Practical Guidance For Absolute Beginners"

“Shall we make an apple tree?” Goss said. “Shall we make a tortoise? Fold and fold and fold.” He began to fold. Anders began to scream. “I’m not as good at it as you!” Goss laughed.
Goss folded, with wet-flesh sounds and cracks. Eventually Anders stopped screaming, but Goss continued to fold.
“I don’t know, Subby,” he said, at last. He wiped his hands on Anders’s coat. He squinted at his handiwork. “I need more practice, Subby,” he said. “It isn’t quite as much like a lotus as I’d have liked.”

—Kraken

"There's countless ways to defeat your enemy. You can shoot them. You can punch them. Beat them, mash them, stick them in a stew, list goes on. But man, one thing that really makes me laugh...? That's right:
Burying them under a mound of scorpions."
"You're messed up in the head, Bill."

—Symbiotic Scorpion item log, Risk of Rain 2: Survivors of the Void

"At 6:31 CST a momentary increase in AC Bus 2 voltage occurred. Nine seconds later, both Grissom and Popovich exclaimed “Hey! Fire!” over their microphones and the sounds of hurried, frantic motion were being picked up by mission control. Due to the nature of the air in the cabin, made exclusively of oxygen, the fire grew rapidly into a conflagration which consumed the entire interior of the module. Ironically, the hatch that was meant to serve as a shield from the heat wound up serving as the door to a giant oven, cooking the explorers with nary a way out, as the inner latch to release the hatch grew stuck in the heat."

—Blue Skies in Camelot