Line #38 Literature/RawheadRex


1	[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/pu_rawhead_rex_00fc.png]]
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3	A short story by Creator/CliveBarker, which is a part of his third ''Books of Blood'' anthology from 1984.
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5	A farmer in England digs up a large stone in his lands, [[DugTooDeep only to set loose]] a malevolent monster from the past, called Rawhead. Free from [[SealedEvilInACan the prison that had held him for centuries]], Rawhead then proceeds to cause mayhem across the countryside.
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7	!!This short story has examples of:
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9	* AchillesHeel: Rawhead loathes women who are on their period, and refuses to touch them. But what he really fears is the sight of pregnant women; in the end he is defeated with a talisman that's carved to look like a pregnant woman, which makes him helpless against a mob that kills him.
10	* AntagonistTitle: Rawhead is the title antagonist.
11	* AnthropomorphicPersonification: Rawhead Rex is an abomination that personifies the male sex drive as a living and malicious organism. Even his head is phallic shaped.
12	* AssholeVictim: Detective Sergeant Gissing, one of Rawhead's first victims, is a pedophile.
13	* BringMyBrownPants: When Rawhead recognizes the talisman as it's being brandished at him, he voids his bowels in terror.
14	* TheBrute: Some of it's probably because he's been buried underground for hundreds of years, but generally, Rawhead isn't very intelligent and knows he has little in the way of foresight and planning, preferring spur-of-the-moment mass slaughter.
15	* BuriedAlive: The people who defeated Rawhead in the past were too superstitious to finish him off, and simply forced him into his tomb where he has been waiting to be free again for centuries.
16	* ChestBurster: The offspring of Rawhead's kind is mentioned to have been too much to handle for human wombs, and they tended to burst out on their own.
17	* ChildEater: Rawhead is never shown eating anything other than children, both human and non-human.
18	** He does eat a horse shortly after waking up. It’s not so much that he eats children exclusively, but he finds the taste of children to be far more delectable than other forms of meat.
19	* CruelAndUnusualDeath: Detective Sergeant Gissing has his balls ripped off by Rawhead before being burned alive.
20	* TheEndOrIsIt: After Rawhead is killed, the narration gives suspicious amount of focus to its bladder emptying of liquids that then flow to the nearest ditch.
21	* EatsBabies: Rawhead is a ChildEater already, but he considers babies, newborns in particular, to be a delicacy.
22	* EvilSmellsBad: Rawhead’s breath is described by one of his soon-to-be victims as smelling quite terrible. Given that he’s a monster that was buried beneath the ground for centuries and never seems concerned with bathing or cleaning himself, the rest of his body probably doesn’t smell like roses either.
23	* FangsAreEvil: Rawhead has two rows of sharp fangs in his mouth.
24	* FishOutOfTemporalWater: Downplayed. After waking up, Rawhead adjusts to his new surroundings rather quickly, he's just not entirely familiar with their terminology, calling cars "boxes", for instance. Part of this may be because he's not very smart.
25	* GothicHorror: A typical aspect considering it's the brainchild of Creator/CliveBarker after all. It's basically a gothic monster story with gore galore.
26	* GroinAttack: After flipping over a police car, Rawhead drags a constable out of the wreckage and rips off the guy's testicles.
27	* HoistByHisOwnPetard: Along with the AchillesHeel mentioned above, Rawhead is also done in when he discovers flammable liquids and uses them to set the whole town of Zeal on fire; the fire burns out of control so fast even he gets caught up in it and badly burned, including having his eyes damaged, which keeps him from recognizing the talisman for what it is until it's too late.
28	* ImmuneToBullets: Downplayed as bullets do in fact hurt Rawhead, but they don’t seem to do much besides drive him away. He seems to heal up after resting so unless there was some military-grade firepower involved, small-caliber weapons probably wouldn’t have stopped him.
29	* ItCanThink: While he’s not particularly intelligent, Rawhead is somewhat cunning and able to make observations about the world around him. Case in point, he knows better than to charge a group of armed police officers head on because of the damage their firearms can cause him; in that instance, he opts to flee to fight another day. As the story nears it end, Rawhead is trying to destroy the town by causing fires with cars he destroyed; he specifically knew to do this after having noticed that cars explode when sufficiently damaged, something he noticed earlier in the story. He’s no great thinker, but there’s an almost human like intellect in that twisted head of his.
30	* KarmicDeath: Detective Sergeant Gissing is an unrepentant pedophile, so it comes off as karmic for Rawhead to castrate him. Of course, Rawhead most likely didn't know, and if he did, didn't care.
31	* LastOfHisKind: Rawhead was not the only one of his kind to exist. He recalls his “brothers” in times long past, suggesting that there were a good deal more creatures like Rawhead running around. Thank God there’s only the one left...
32	* MoreTeethThanTheOsmondFamily: Rawhead has a great many razor sharp teeth in his mouth which he uses to tear his meals apart. His meals typically consist of children by the way...
33	* OurOgresAreHungrier: Though Rawhead Rex is never explicitly called an "ogre," that's plainly what he is; a big brutal sadistic not too bright humanoid ChildEater.
34	* PoliceAreUseless: Justified in this case as the story is set in a small town in the English countryside. As such, there are only a handful of police officers on call to handle Rawhead and they’re not particularly well armed: against a monster like Rawhead, the best they can do is drive him away. Later in the story it is mentioned that the police called the military to come and help them, but we never see this actually happen because the story ends rather quickly thereafter.
35	* PsychosexualHorror: The main antagonist, Rawhead Rex, is an ancient evil creature that personifies the male sex drive as a living and malicious organism, to a point where even his head is phallic shaped and he is repulsed by menstruating women.
36	* ScareTheDog: A pony refuses to go into its stall because it could [[EvilDetectingDog sense the presence of the titular demon waiting inside]], and is so terrified that it craps itself.
37	* SealedEvilInACan: Rawhead was buried beneath the earth for centuries because the people who defeated him so long ago were too superstitious to kill him. This actually served as a deserving punishment for the monster as his solitude ate away at his psyche; he was forgotten by the world and denied freedom. But then some moron with a shovel comes along...
38	* WeaksauceWeakness: Justified and played for symbolism. Rawhead is repelled by menstruating women, even representations of them. This is because he's the personification of the male sex drive.
39	* WouldHurtAChild: With vengeance. Rawhead is a ChildEater whose earliest victims in the story include a little girl. Later, he snatches a boy into his jaws as the boy's father can only helplessly watch.
40	* VillainousGlutton: The first thing Rawhead Rex eats when he wakes up is a pony and then its owners in the farm.
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Context Literature / RawheadRex