Line #16 Main/MessyMaggots


1	%%
2	%%
3	%%
4	%% This list of examples has been alphabetized. Please add your example in the proper place. Thanks!
5	%%
6	%%
7	%%
8	%%
9	[[quoteright:350:[[Toys/TheTrashPack https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/grotty_bot_fly_trading_card.png]]]]
10	[[caption-width-right:350:It's not just the [[FlyInTheSoup flies in the soup]] you have to worry about sometimes.]]
11
12	Flies, especially house flies, are attracted to the smell of rot. From garbage to feces to corpses, they love the stuff. And their babies love it too! As such, something gross can be easily be pictured as even grosser if swarms of maggots are covering it, while characters that happen to ''be'' maggots have this gross trait often magnetized towards them in their personality.
13
14	However, as mentioned as SomewhereAnEntomologistIsCrying, maggots are rarely used to play actual maggots. In their place, mealworms, a type of feeder beetle larvae, are often used.
15
16	Compare FliesEqualsEvil for their grown-up form's brand of stink attraction. See also ScavengersAreScum for other corpse-eating animals depicted in a negative light, and YouDirtyRat for similarly gross animals.
17
18	----
19	!!Examples:
20
21	[[foldercontrol]]
22
23	[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
24	* In a chapter of ''Manga/FrankenFran'', Fran comes up with a maggot-like cocoon that [[UterineReplicator allows human babies to gestate outside the womb]], preventing many pregnancy-related problems (while the people she presents it to are squicked out by the idea, another one steals the idea and markets it). Unfortunately, people are a lot more careless with the cocoons than with a pregnant woman, and most of them suffer [[FamilyUnfriendlyDeath Family-Unfriendly Deaths]] (eaten by cats, infested by insects, {{squashed flat}}...), and even worse, it's implied the process was faulty as one baby that emerges normally is insectoid in appearance.
25	* Horror mangaka Creator/HideshiHino (of ''Manga/PanoramaOfHell'' fame) uses this trope ''a lot'', alongside festering sores, sometimes ''in combination''.
26	[[/folder]]
27
28	[[folder:Comic Books]]
29	* {{Subverted\|Trope}} in ''ComicBook/WormwoodGentlemanCorpse''. While Wormwood is actually an extradimensional larva who [[ParasiteZombie possesses a corpse]] for greater mobility, he's not particularly disgusting and fits in quite well among the ghosts, medusae and other supernatural characters.
30	[[/folder]]
31
32	[[folder:Comic Strips]]
33	* Inverted in one ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes'' strip, where Calvin's mom persuades him to eat his dinner by telling him they're maggots. Calvin being a NightmareFetishist, it works.
34	[[/folder]]
35
36	[[folder:Films -- Animation]]
37	* The ''WesternAnimation/CorpseBride'' has a talking maggot (who is [[NoCelebritiesWereHarmed modeled after]] Creator/PeterLorre) living inside her skull. Despite the creepiness of it all, [[DarkIsNotEvil both she and the maggot are very friendly]].
38	* ''WesternAnimation/FlushedAway'': Roddy has prepared a meal with Rita's supplies.
39	-->'''Rita:''' This is quite tasty.\
40	'''Roddy:''' Thanks. I don't think it's too bad, considering I only had an apple, four raisins and a box of rice.\
41	'''Rita:''' Rice?\
42	'''Slug:''' ''[singing]'' What is that urge from deep inside? The need to hurl can't be denied. That isn't rice, that's maggots you're eating.\
43	'''Maggots:''' Larva, larva, larva, larva... ''[Roddy tosses the maggots away]''\
44	'''Roddy:''' Well, that explains why it all went to one side when I put salt in it.
45	* ''Anime/GraveOfTheFireflies'': Seita's and Setsuko's mother is gravely injured by the opening bombing raid and spends the last moments of her life as a BandageMummy. The audience learns that she is dead when we are treated to a shot of her maggot-infested body being carried away.
46	[[/folder]]
47
48	[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
49	* In ''Film/BattleshipPotemkin'', the crew of the Potemkin is forced to eat rotten meat full of maggots. When the captain is thrown overboard during the mutiny, a shot of the water roiling after his fall is intercut with a close up of the wriggling maggots that led to the mutiny.
50	* ''Film/BloodBags'': When Tony and Alex are rooting around in the house at the beginning of the movie, the camera cuts to the inside of a jar with maggots crawling around inside it.
51	* ''Film/BloodWidow'': While in the crawlspace underneath the school building, [[spoiler:Laurie]] is scared by a dead body with maggots crawling on it.
52	* When Gary goes looking for Karen in ''Film/EvilBreedTheLegendOfSamhain'', he finds her murdered body in the shed with maggots crawling out of her eyes and mouth ([[FridgeLogic despite the fact there would have been barely enough time for flies to lay eggs in her body, let alone enough for them to hatch]]).
53	* ''Film/TheFly1986'' has a notorious nightmare sequence where the female lead is in hospital, seemingly having a miscarriage, but instead she gives birth to a ''[[FetusTerrible writhing, blood-soaked maggot the length of a man's arm]]''.
54	* In ''Film/FridayThe13thPartVIJasonLives'', when Tommy digs up Jason's grave to cremate his corpse, we get a GrossUpCloseUp of Jason's rotting corpse full with coffin fly maggots, earthworms, cobwebs and other things found in a 10-day old coffin.
55	* ''Film/GhostShip'': Dodge and Munder find canned food which somehow didn't rot after forty years of being in the ship and proceed to eat it. Except it turns out that it did rot and they have been eating maggots all along.
56	* ''Film/{{Gladiator}}'': after he's taken into slavery, Maximus wakes up to find a fellow slave putting maggots into the open sword wound on his shoulder. Justified, as the slave explains the maggots are eating the dead flesh, cleaning the wound.
57	* Mealworms appear in ''{{Film/Hellraiser}}'' in the filthy remnants of Frank's kitchen as Larry and Julia move into his abandoned house. Much later on, while Kristy is hiding from Frank she discovers a dead body overflowing with maggots. The [[Film/HellboundHellraiserII second film]] features a mental patient who hallucinates that maggots are eating him alive. Then someone hands him a straight razor...
58	* ''Film/ImThinkingOfEndingThings'': Jake tells the young woman a story about his parents' pigs being infested with maggots while alive. The janitor later hallucinates said pig, bleeding onto the school floors as it walks.
59	* ''Film/{{Master}}'': Gail is the first female black "master" of a residence hall and a professor at one of the US's oldest universities. She is horrified to find a drawer full of maggots and has her home fumigated. Later on, she finds that a portrait of her (an oil painting) has maggots spilling out of the mouth. This is her clue that there is something rotten going on at Ancaster.
60	* ''Film/NobodySleepsInTheWoodsTonight'': When Julek finds a partially-eaten deer corpse, it's shown to be covered in red maggots. There are also maggots present on the corpses in the basement of the twins' home.
61	* ''Film/OneMissedCall'': While the female lead is searching the AbandonedHospital, she comes across a phone-holding corpse which has maggots all over it.
62	* In ''Film/{{Poltergeist\|1982}}'', one of the parapsychologists investigating the house goes to the kitchen to get something to eat. He gets a chicken drumstick from the refrigerator and starts eating it. When some supernatural hijinks start, he spits out the chicken leg and sees that it's crawling with maggots.
63	* ''Literature/TheRing'': One of the scenes in the cursed video is maggots crawling around something. As with the rest of the video, [[OrphanedReference this was supposed to foreshadow something]]; a DeletedScene has Noah visiting Shelter Mountain Inn and coming to the deserted check-in cabin, which has rotten food with maggots all over it. [[spoiler:The owner had watched the video and was killed by Samara a while back, explaining why the cabin is empty. His body is found by Noah on a boat in the middle of a lake.]]
64	* In ''Film/StrangeNature'', one shot is of a dead frog with maggots crawling all over its exposed innards.
65	* In ''Film/Suspiria1977'', When the girls dress up for dinner, maggots starts raining from the ceiling. when the staff goes to the attic to investigate it, it turns out to be rotten food that's sent from a 'reliable firm that we thought to be honest.'
66	[[/folder]]
67
68	[[folder:Literature]]
69	* One of the [[SpeciesSpecificAfterlife Dark Forest]] cats in ''Literature/WarriorCats'' is named Maggottail. He's not a very nice cat, and one popular fan theory suggests his name came from his tail being infested with, well... The narrator also notes that he's quite repulsive, noting his "stinky breath and baleful eyes".
70	* In [[Creator/IainBanks Ian Banks]]' [[note]]the missing "i" from "Iain" tells you it's not a science-fiction work[[/note]] novel ''Literature/TheWaspFactory'', a child is thought to be severely retarded -- it's revealed that a fly has slipped under his protective covering and there is a seething mass of maggots where his brain ought to be.
71	[[/folder]]
72
73	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
74	* One segment in ''Series/OneThousandWaysToDie'' is centered around a morbidly obese, wheelchair-bound con artist who lives in complete squalor. His lack of cleanliness is so bad that maggots have infested his kitchen, and have spread to the point where they're starting to feed off of his bedsores. [[RedHerring Surprisingly, it's not his lack of hygiene that kills him.]] Instead, he drops dead from massive heart failure due to his junk food diet and lack of exercise.
75	* ''Series/AmericanGods2017'': As a zombie, Laura keeps coughing up big wet chunks of white stuff that turns out to be maggots.
76	* One episode of ''Series/GarthMarenghisDarkplace'' opens with Garth reading us an out-of-context snippet of his [[ShowWithinAShow novel]] ''Slasher''.
77	-->Mike stared in disbelief as his hands fell off. From them rose millions of tiny maggots. Maggots? Maggots. Maggots. [[OverlyLongGag Maggots. Maggots...]] all over the floor of the post office in Leytonstone.
78	* ''Series/MastersOfHorror'': In the otherwise psychological horror-themed episode "[[Recap/MastersOfHorrorS2E4SoundsLike Sounds Like]]", the main character's wife disappears halfway through the episode. At the end, the cops burst into his house when he goes fully mad, finding her rotting, maggot-eaten corpse in the bedroom.
79	* ''Series/RedDwarf'': In "[[Recap/RedDwarfSeasonVDemonsAndAngels Demons and Angels]]", Kryten modifies a teleporter to act as a duplicator, creating two copies of the original, which he tests upon a strawberry. However, the device unintentionally splits all the good and bad qualities, so whilst one strawberry tastes incredible, the other is rotten and crawling with maggots, a fact Lister doesn't discover until after he's taken a bite of it.
80	* Something like this is a cordon bleu delicacy for Klingons in ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''. Commander Riker spends time as an exchange officer on a Klingon ship and is presented with a dish of seething maggots; recognizing this is a test, he eats up without batting an eyelid.
81	* One round of "Newsflash" on ''Series/WhoseLineIsItAnyway'' (where random footage is green-screened behind an unknowing player that has to act like they are filming a news broadcast) was a loop of various writhing maggots, much to the groaning disgust of the audience.
82	[[/folder]]
83
84	[[folder:Sports]]
85	* In UsefulNotes/AustralianRulesFootball, the term "white maggot" was a common insult directed at umpires... until the umpires stopped wearing white uniforms. Just "maggot" is still sometimes heard, though.
86	[[/folder]]
87
88	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
89	* One of the absolute grossest {{golem}} variants in ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' is the simply named "Maggot Golem", which debuted in the ''TabletopGame/{{Ravenloft}}'' setting. Existing as a kind of cross between a {{golem}} and TheWormThatWalks, the core of a maggot golem is an enchanted mass of perpetually rotting meat, which attracts flies; these breed profusely, creating an enormous swarm of maggots that then twist themselves into a repugnant caricature of the humanoid form and attack anything they are directed to - or which happens to be made of meat, which they seek to absorb into their rotting central mass. Because of the magic, the meat "core" of the golem regenerates pretty much as fast as it's eaten, so as maggots age, they pupate, turn into flies, then lay their own eggs in the morass, creating a perpetual cycle that ensures the maggot golem will never die. Aside from just being plain disgusting, the most central features of the maggot golem tend to be a vile stench so overwhelming it can ''kill'', obfuscation from the protective swarm of mother flies, and causing even worse attacks against the SanityMeter than the standard [[FrankensteinsMonster flesh golem]].
90	* ''In TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' and ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'', maggots are strongly associated with Nurgle, the Chaos god of disease and decay, who delights in filth and corruption. One of the reasons is that Nurgle is actually a FriendToAllLivingThings- it's just that vermin, maggots, and bacteria are living things too.
91	[[/folder]]
92
93	[[folder:Toys]]
94	* ''Toys/FlushForce'' subverts this with Monstrous Maggot. Despite being a maggot living in a dump, he is very fussy, and a giant [[TerrifiedOfGerms germaphobe]], explicitly preferring his garbage to be "clean and tidy".
95	* ''Toys/TheGrosseryGang'', following in the footsteps of its successor, ''The Trash Pack'', uses maggots as decoration on the characters to signify their rot. Unlike ''The Trash Pack'', they are included in their models in the [[WebAnimation/TheGrosseryGang webseries]], as a separately-animated animation asset. Series 4 of the franchise later introduced Maj. Maggots, an evil living maggot that used a rotten chicken drumstick as his weapon.
96	* ''Toys/TheTrashPack'', being based in a garbage dump and having mutated insects as part of the line, includes a few maggot characters. These include Manky Maggot, Squashed Maggot, and Mucky Maggot. Mucky Maggot, in particular, is so big, that he has adult flies covering his body. Some non-maggot Trashies use maggots as "decorations" to increase their gross factor as well.
97	[[/folder]]
98
99	[[folder:Video Games]]
100	* ''VideoGame/CarnEvil'': Among the many nauseating horrors in the Freak Show level are maggots with humanlike faces.
101	* Maggots in ''VideoGame/DarkestDungeon'' are very weak but come in fours and have an attack that can hit anyone, can stun, has a high critical rate so the hero will receive critical damage and stress, and worse, inflicts diseases.
102	* In ''VideoGame/HollowKnight'', maggots are weak, harmless creatures who are hated by every other bug and are forced to do menial labor (and, in some cases, are consumed as food). Namely, one maggot [[TheDogBitesBack had enough of it]] and [[spoiler:steals an armor of the Mighty Hegemol, one of the Five Great Knights, and, now known as [[WarmupBoss the False Knight]], uses it to protect itself and its maggot family, smashing anyone on sight.]]
103	[[/folder]]
104
105	[[folder:Webcomics]]
106	* One ''Webcomic/{{Achewood}}'' strip has Cornelius about to make breakfast when he notices what looks like shredded coconut in the skillet. It turns out to be maggots that fell off the corpse of a rat in a trap.
107	* ''Webcomic/AwfulHospital'':
108	** One of Fern's allies is Maggie, a maggot wizard that is encountered in one of Fern's own corpses. She is able to conjure swarms of flies as her spells.
109	** A later ally introduced is Magdolene, made to be an AnthropomorphicPersonification of Biodebridement Therapy, also known as maggot therapy. Instead of being a single maggot, her body is made up of a swarm of maggots wrapped around a skull with flies for hair.
110	[[/folder]]
111
112	[[folder:Web Original]]
113	* ''Website/{{Neopets}}'' has a variety of foods that are either maggot-infested or straight up maggots. A majority of this food falls into the "Gross Foods" category. Oddly enough, the "Fly and Maggot Pizza" is considered a standard Pizza category food, while the "Maggot Pizza" is labeled under "Gross Foods" instead.
114	* Website/{{Reddit}} had a story on [=r/TodayIFuckedUp=] about someone who copulated with a coconut for around a week, before discovering the coconut was filled with maggots, due to him not washing it out.
115	[[/folder]]
116
117	[[folder:Western Animation]]
118	* A villain of Ben's introduced in ''WesternAnimation/Ben102016'' is a mad scientist that invented a "Maggo-O-Net". It attracts massive swarms of maggots [[TheWormThatWalks to form a giant monster]] that's incredibly destructive and hard to stop.
119	* ''WesternAnimation/FreakyStories'':
120	** One of the hosts of the show is Maurice the maggot. He's constantly dripping slime and is ridiculously gassy.
121	** One episode features a new girl taking a shine to the biggest loser in the school, happily trading her candy bars for his disgusting lunches. Eventually, he starts giving her random scraps of garbage instead, which she still accepts for the candy bars. In reality, she has been harvesting the trash to use as a breeding ground for maggots, [[spoiler:the main ingredient for her experimental candy bars]].
122	* One MonsterOfTheWeek in ''WesternAnimation/MartinMystery'' is the [[ThingsThatGoBumpInTheNight Boogeyman]] who uses portals made of swamp slime and maggots to teleport between Earth and his home dimension to kidnap children.
123	* ''WesternAnimation/{{Metalocalypse}}'' ''loves'' this trope, as whenever a corpse that wasn't freshly killed is shown, it ''will'' be infested with maggots; with "Dethrazz" having the worst example, with Dr. Rockso seeing a dead guy with a ''literal mouthful of them''.
124	[[/folder]]
125
126	[[folder:Real Life]]
127	* Averted by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggot_therapy maggot therapy]]. Certain types of blowfly larvae are used in medicine to clean out dead tissues within a non-healing wound. The larvae are inserted into a wound, eat the tissues, then secrete liquid which disinfect the wound. Yes, it sounds horrific, but the therapy can be done much faster than regular surgery because, through myiasis, the larvae reproduce fast and can work out the wound in a day or two. The therapy is ancient and was first recognized as a tried-and-true method during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI.
128	[[/folder]]

Context Main / MessyMaggots