Cruel and Unusual Death

If he was a cut above the rest, he'd have picked rock.

"The Council decided to have you hung by your entrails and your corpse paraded through the city. But ultimately, the terms of your execution are up to me."

— The High Prophet of Truth, Halo 2

Some people die of old age, or gradually succumb to one of a number of illnesses. When death comes, the lucky among us will go out peacefully with dignity. Some of us might go out fighting the good fight, saving the lives of some unfortunate person whom our consciences cannot ignore and force us to help. They'll all die "good deaths" (and in some cases, heroic deaths).

This trope is not about those people.

Some deaths not only suck, they suck beyond the telling of it. These deaths are extremely painful, particularly gruesome, and morbidly embarrassing, so horrific that they leave the deceased absolutely no chance to retain any sort of dignity, forever. These deaths transcend from being merely "bad" into the realm of being "ugly."

This trope isn't about just any unpleasant death. Sure, it's bad to get shot in the head — your blood spills all over the floor and you may void your bladder or your bowels. But compared to... oh, being eaten alive from the inside out, getting shot is a walk in the park. It is worth noting that for the most part, creators reserve these events for use as villainous karmic deaths (where the level of horror involved with the death is often part of the karmic punishment) and to get rid of unpleasant people who are Hoist by Their Own Petards... especially the embarrassing type. If this is done to a sympathetic character, on the other hand, it is usually the point where the killer crosses the Moral Event Horizon, if he or she is not on the other side of it already. If someone kills people like this on a regular basis, chances are they're a Complete Monster.

There isn't necessarily a correlation between the visible gruesomeness of the death and the actual nature of the character's death, some deaths that fall under this trope happen offscreen, and it's the very idea of it that makes it horrific. Deaths with a high horrible factor with less visible content can just as easily fall into scary, though.

Deaths like this tend to fall into two categories: The first one is where the victim is a Hate Sink and/or rather sadistic villain who deserves it, who you really aren't going to feel sorry for (well, maybe a little...). The second one is where the killer fits that description, and the intent is to show the viewers how sadistic they are. Occasionally, the two situations happen in the same work of fiction, with the killer in the second type becoming a victim in the first, which is very much a Karmic Death. Both parties will often Face Death with Despair.

Compare There Is No Kill Like Overkill and Undignified Death. For when this happens in works aimed towards children, see Family-Unfriendly Death.

A No Recent Examples rule applies to Real Life examples of this trope. Real life examples shouldn't be added until 150 years after the death.

Warning: Many of the examples below contain some serious Nightmare Fuel and Nausea Fuel, with a liberal dosage of Squick. Read at your own risk.

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

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
  • All For Luz
  • Jurassic World (The Geeky Zoologist)
• Films — Live-Action
  • Saw
  • Scream
• Literature
  • Alex Rider
  • A Song of Ice and Fire
• Live-Action TV
  • A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon)
  • Chucky (a series spun off from the Child's Play film series)
  • The Walking Dead Television Universe
• Tabletop Games
• Video Games
  • Five Nights at Freddy's
• Visual Novels
  • Danganronpa
• Web Animation
  • DEATH BATTLE!
• Webcomics
  • Unsounded
• Websites
  • SCP Foundation
• Western Animation
• Real Life

Other examples:

Advertising

• The four animals showcased in this Tearjerking environmentalism PSA suffer manmade (and thankfully not too graphic) deaths that, to add extra heartbreak to it, are all too common in real life. More specifically:
  • A mother rhinoceros who gets her horns cut off by poachers.
  • A whale suffering a Death of a Thousand Cuts via whalers.
  • A pelican drowning in an oil spill.
  • A baby seal who is last seen about to be bludgeoned to death by hunters.
• Some of the deaths in Dumb Ways to Die include your head exploding in outer space, getting your private parts eaten by piranhas, being electrocuted until you're reduced to a skeleton, and having your eye bitten by a rattlesnake.
• One Partnership for a Drug Free America PSA uses a photo, captions, and the recording of a 911 call to tell the story of a couple who got lost in a blizzard while high on meth and wound up freezing to death before help could reach them.

Arts

• Jael and Sisera by Artemisia Gentileschi depicts Jael about to drive a tent peg into the neck of the sleeping Sisera.

Asian Animation

• The Simple Samosa episode "Samosa Mama" almost has Mayor Royal Falooda punishing Samosa for a kidnapping he never did before Vada proves the judge wrong. The punishment? "You will not be fried, you will not be cooked... no, you will be served!", the idea being that since they're all food, Samosa is about to be eaten. Made worse by the fact that Samosa is just a kid, probably around 8- to 12-years-old. Made worse still since Cham Cham, who frames Samosa for the crime, hates the guy with a burning passion and is never shown reacting negatively to this.

Films — Animated

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire: When it senses danger, the Mother Crystal emits a strange energy that transmutes any foreign substance into crystal. Later, Milo slashes Rourke with a shard of crystallized glass, and the effect spreads through the bad guy's body, mutating him into a still living, agony-ridden crystal humanoid that's visibly cracking apart as he moves. And then he goes flying into his airship's propellers, causing him to explode in a burst of energy. Given that Rourke was about to wipe out the Atlanteans by stealing their life source after murdering their king, and that said source was sentient and pissed off, he was not getting the easy way out.
• One cut scene shows what happens to anyone who comes into contact with the mist of The Black Cauldron: one of the Horned King's henchmen, doesn't get stabbed to death by the Cauldron Born, but has his flesh melt instead slowly until he is reduced to a skeleton.
  • The Horned King himself gets a messy death; he's drawn into the Cauldron cursing and struggling, and the power quite literally rips him apart, tearing apart his skin, stripping him down to the bone, and finally vaporizing what remains. It's technically bloodless, but it's still one of the most chilling Disney villain deaths ever.
• A Bug's Life: As vile as he may have been, it's hard not to feel a bit of sympathy for Hopper given how gruesome his demise — being eaten alive by birds, and implied to have been ripped to shreds by the chicks in the nest beforehand — is, regardless of it not being fully shown. Even Flik and Atta, the former of whom set it up in the first place to stop him killing them, are both visibly disturbed when he is about to die.
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Red Death gets one. Toothless shoots a fireball directly into her mouth, causing her inner methane fuel to ignite and tear her apart from the inside, then due to previous fireballs being shot at her wings, she falls to the ground and her head explodes into flames
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney): Judge Frollo plummets off Notre Dame Cathedral into a pool of molten metal.
• The Incredibles:
  • Syndrome is run through a jet turbine. Feet first.
  • The same thing happened to teenage super-heroine Stratogale, though she went in head first.
• The Lion King (1994):
  • King Mufasa, when he is thrown into a gorge by his treacherous brother, Scar. If the fall didn't kill Mufasa, being trampled to death by a stampede of wildebeests did.
  • Scar, after he attempts to blame the hyenas for his crimes, is betrayed by his former "friends" and eaten alive.
  • Averted with Simba: He barely escapes death by dehydration and exhaustion (after fleeing for days from Pride Rock), and later Scar nearly throws the adult Simba into an enormous fire of dead trees and bushes.
• Mulan: Shan Yu is hit by a huge rocket that flies towards a pile of fireworks. Impressive Pyrotechnics ensue.
• Padak: The main character, a wild mackarel captured by a Korean seafood restaurant, is eventually served as Ikizukuri. Which means her flesh is cut up into sashimi and served up while she is still alive and aware she is being eaten. Adding insult to injury, the customer sticks a lit cigarette in her mouth as a joke before he tucks in.
• Paranorman: Has the "witch" of Blithe Hollow, who turns out to be an eleven year old girl named Agatha Prenderghast be executed by hanging in 1712. 300 years before the events of the film takes place. The hanging technique that breaks the victims' neck was not invented until the mid 1800s, meaning that the "witch" must have suffered for at least 20 minutes hanging or longer due to low body mass.
• The Transformers: The Movie brutally killed most of the old Autobots to promote the new toyline. Possibly most notably, we get a nice view of Prowl's innards burning, and a crippled Ironhide being callously shot point-blank by Megatron's Fusion Cannon in a manner highly reminiscent of an execution. One new character (Ultra Magnus) was supposed to be torn apart, but it was changed to something less traumatizing.^note He "only" gets shot to pieces. On the other hand, his death isn't permanent.
• Treasure Planet:
  • First Mate Mr. Arrow gets thrown overboard during a solar-storm by treacherous crewmate Scroop, right into the mouth of a Black Hole. Look up, "Spaghettification", and you'll understand why this warrants mention.
  • Scroop himself gets a similar but karmic fate later on when he tries to kill Jim, as he's ejected into the vacumn of space. And since this universe is one where space is somehow breathable, Scroop will instead slowly succumb to extreme cold and dehydration, if he isn't hit by floating debris first.
• We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story has a truly creepy example of Bloodless Carnage show up in the scene of Professor Screweyes' death by magical(?) crows. The confusion as to what the hell exactly is going on only adds to how disturbing it is.

Mythology & Religion

• The Bible:
  • In the Book of Judges, an unnamed Levite man's concubine runs away from him and goes to her daddy. Her husband comes to drag her home, and they pass by the town of Gibeah on their way back, where they were offered a place to stay by an old man. Later, the men of the town come knocking on the door (deliberately mirroring the story of Lot and his daughters back in the Book of Genesis), seeking sexual favors from the Levite man. The host offers up his virgin daughter and his guest's concubine, at which the Levite hands over the concubine to protect his own ass. They take her as their new sex toy, and they brutally gang-rape her several times over, until she dies. Then they just leave her body on the doorstep. As if that wasn't bad enough, she doesn't even get a proper burial: instead, her husband hacks up her body and distributes the pieces to his friends to call them to war with the people of Gibeah.
  • Jezebel in the Books of Kings: thrown out a window, then run over by a chariot, and then eaten by dogs until only the palms of her hands are left.
  • The Four Gospels detail Jesus's infamous death by being nailed to a cross. Crucifixion was designed by the Romans to be as agonizing and humiliating of an execution as possible, puncturing the medial nerves of the wrists (commonly mis-depicted in scripture and other Christian media as the palms of the hands) and forcing the convicted to hang on top of a thin piece of wood in an uncomfortable position for an indefinite period of time, eventually dying from either exposure, suffocation, or bleeding (that's external and internal). All of this is depicted in vivid detail in the Gospels to highlight the weight of Jesus' self-sacrifice and the cruelty of both the Romans and the corrupt religious oligarchy that arranged for the execution.
  • Though the Gospel of Matthew said Judas hanged himself, it's stated in Acts that he dropped dead with his body bursting open and his guts spilling out. One theory to reconcile this theorizes he hanged himself, then the rope broke, with his fall leading to this.
• Several of the apostles according to tradition. Peter was crucified upside down (at his own request, since he didn't feel worthy of dying the same way Jesus did), Simon sawed in half (from the crotch up!), Bartholomew flayed alive, etc, all of which is a fixture of Catholic artwork depicting the martyrdom of the saints.
• Some Irish myths state that Cu Chulainn's spear, the Gae Bolg, would sprout long barbs on entering a human body. In the Tain Bo Cuailnge, he stabs Ferdiad, whose skin can't be pierced with any weapon, with it in the butt, and the barbs are so long, they impale Ferdiad throughout his limbs. The spear literally has to be cut out of him.

Music

• Death Metal is flooded with this trope. Done by the most evil people on innocents, though the token Asshole Victim shows up from time to time.
• The traditional Irish song "The Two Sisters" (covered by several musicians over the years, including Tom Waits, CLANNAD, and Bob Dylan) recounts the tale of a girl who is drowned by her own sister out of jealousy over a man both girls fancy. The song ends with a line that notes that the murderess is punished by being boiled in lead.
• Happens quite alot with GWAR.
• While not the official video,Child's Play has the lyric imply this, as the person killing her cut out her eyes, cut off her lips, and then cut off her foot, in addition to cutting her hair out of jealousy because the man she was infatuated with loved the victim. The official vid vaguely states what had happened but it is not clearly shown and the relationship between the two girls is unclear but it is safe to assume that they are sisters like "The Two Sisters" example or that they are very close friends.
• The album Benji by Sun Kil Moon is full of these, but the one instance that sticks out the most is in "Carissa" when Carissa burned to death after throwing out her trash and there just so happened to be a can full of pressurized gas inside the trash. Unfortunately, that isn't the only time it happens, since it happens again in "Truck Driver."

Podcasts

• The Cool Kids Table game Creepy Town is a slasher movie, so naturally some of these occur.
  • Ethan is bisected by a chainsaw.
  • Spencer drowns in the floor.
  • Walter and Veronica get pulled into the wall.
  • Frank is dragged into the fog by the Devil.
  • Stacey is drowned by a giant Creepy Doll that looks like Dianne.
  • Will is torn in half by the monster in the form of Ethan.
• Pretending to Be People, as a horror series, is fond of these.
  • Victims of the Juice Box get crushed by a Descending Ceiling.
  • Those interrogated by the Glass Syndicate are hung by a meat hook above a colossal fish tank, tortured, and then fed to the colossal fish inside.
  • Clark Bishop's parents were magically merged into the wall of their family home. Ken Krinkelhoff is merged into a cabin wall in a similar manner, only to then be burned to death as the cabin was set on fire.
• All the deaths in Sequinox episode "Inferno" are bad, but the way that Sid is killed takes the cake for the worst one. She is crushed underneath Chell's body, who is being used as a make-shift weapon by Scorpius.

Radio

• The Price of Fear: Several deaths in the series could probably qualify as this but the stand-out one (and the one Vincent Price said he found most disturbing in real life) is in the episode "Blind Man's Bluff". When the blind man finally snaps after months of being bullied and taken advantage of by a lodger, he considers murder in itself not to be sufficient revenge, so after using gas from the stove to ensure the man is unconscious but not dead, he sews his eyes shut, throws him down a trapdoor into the cellar, and leaves him to die.
  • Other examples include Luigi in "An Eye For An Eye" (a giant octopus tears out one of his eyes and eats his head), and Freddie in "My Dear, Dear Saladin" (breaks his back in the cellar and is then eaten by the cat).

Roleplay

• In Moonrise, this happens to quite a few characters. Most notable is Shadestar of BrokenClan, who was brutally killed by a tiger via being torn open and viciously shredded, taking all of her remaining lives.
• Being a site based around the concept of Anyone Can Die, Survival of the Fittest occasionally falls into this trope when the Ax-Crazy characters get "creative". At times the scenes can turn into Narm either because it isn't possible in real life or just because it wasn't written well. Other times, though, it works. An example from v4 would be the majority of Sarah Atwell's kills, one of which involves rigging up a death trap where if the poor victim even moves, he gets shot in the head, which he decides not to take part.

Theatre

• Another Shakespearean example is Mark Antony's clumsy drawn-out suicide in Antony and Cleopatra.
• The stage musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (both the Broadway and West End productions) goes further with this trope than any previous incarnation of the story, particularly with Violet Beauregarde and Veruca Salt. Violet explodes after she turns into a blueberry and Veruca is sent down the nut chute with her father to an incinerator, leading to a Dwindling Party. Mr. Wonka doesn't care though. While he mentions that Violet could be put Not Quite Back to Normal, he pretty much implies Veruca's toast.
  Mr. Wonka: [regarding Veruca's demise] We mustn't mourn. That's not what Veruca wanted. And Veruca always got what she wanted, didn't she?
  • The 2017 Broadway version production goes further with this trope with both demises. Violet Beauregarde explodes offstage onto her dad and Veruca Salt gets dismembered and decapitated by squirrels. Wonka does mention Veruca could be put back together with a gluestick by the Oompa Loompas and Violet could be scooped out of the pulping pond before she ferments, but he still shows some apathy if they don't recover. This could be part of the reason of casting of adults in the roles of the four bratty children. Imagine these things happening to ACTUAL children.
• In Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, the title character is impaled (onstage) through the anus with a red-hot poker — see also the Real Life section. His (fictional) assassin, Lightborn, has a speech describing his expertise in Cruel And Unusual Death. Although the real Edward II probably didn't actually die this way, the legend no doubt arose because it was seen as a Karmic Death, given Edward's homosexuality. Marlowe (who was probably gay himself) writes Edward as a fairly sympathetic character, and the scene in the play is absolutely horrifying.
• William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus sees its main character slice the throats of his rival's sons, bleed them before letting them die, and bake them into a pie which he then serves back to their unknowing mother.
• Heracles' poisoned shirt from The Trachiniae seems to meld to him, eat away his skin, and just be very painful and terrifying in general. Instead of waiting for it to properly kill him he asks to be immolated asap.

Web Animation

• Battle for Dream Island: Death may be cheap here, but certain deaths are still rather unsettling and strange nonetheless:
  • In BFDIA 4, Book is cooked alive in an oven, in a vat of Dream Sauce.
  • In BFDIA 5c, Spongy is impaled by spikes, but that isn't what kills him. It's the weight of his fellow contestants using him as a landing pad that kills him, as it causes the spikes to sink deeper into his body. Shortly afterwards, Needle is incinerated by Yellow Face, who believes that they can revive them both when with the HPRC... little do they know that it's been destroyed.
  • In BFDIA 9, Yellow Face is trapped in the Eiffel Tower, as it slowly sinks into acid, burning him alive slowly. In addition, Coiny - who had been launched into space in a cash register a few episodes prior, suffocates after being trapped in there for a few months.
  • This one is debatable and it happens off-screen, but still probably horrific and painful. In the stinger IDBF 1, Coiny attempts deep fried breaths, which involves him inhaling boiling oil. The end result is him screaming in pain after every breath, Fries begging him to stop, and Leafy - who was ready to toss a knife at them - looking on in sheer horror before slinking back into the bushes.
  • In BFB 1, Foldy is shredded by propellor blades that are attached to a basket.
  • In BFB 2,
    • Shortly after Free Food frees Lollipop from her jawbreaker, Marker starts licking her as Stapy smashes his "jaws" on her head. The next time we see them, Stapy is holding Lollipop's headless body, implying that they ate her alive.
    • Leafy tries to re-inflate Balloony after he was deflated in the prior episode. However, she goes overboard and ends up popping him.
  • BFB 7 has candidates killing each other in quick succession - Foldy is ripped in half by Woody, and while Bell doesn't kill Woody when she takes the Liar Ball from him, she herself gets stabbed in the face by Naily, who in turn is stabbed in the face by Needle.
  • In BFB 8, 8 Ball is lodged between the Moon and the Ground (It Makes Sense in Context) after his elimination. Then Donut (who has been merged with Four) turns the gravity back on, resulting in him being crushed and turned to dust.
  • In BFB 16, Two fills Bottle with lava to demonstrate his powers. This causes her to shatter. In general, Bottle has a tendency to shatter, though she never gets the chance to let it register.
  • In TPOT 2, Remote and Naily melt in battery acid. Shortly after she is revived, Remote is melted again when Rocky barfs on her
  • TPOT 4 ends with all the team's funny plants dying, some of them in unusual ways - Just Not's plant is given cursed water, causing it to shatter. Are You Okay's plant is destroyed by shockwaves emitted by a giant David yelling "Aw Seriously?". Three other teams (The S!, Team8s, and Teardrop) have their respective plants die after they are struck by a quasar's gamma-ray burst.
  • In TPOT 7, Donut is crushed between two halves of a balance beam by the rest of his team, so that they can use his cherry filling (aka his innards) to glue them together.
  • In TPOT 9, Pillow violently slams Nickel's face on a bed headboard, and then rips Book apart to use are body armour.
  • Also in TPOT 9, Needle gets crushed when a crevice she was trying to climb through closes while she is still in it (the crevice was caused by a giant, zombified Snowball striking Tree, who was rooted into the ground). Further, Donut is pulled underwater by zombies and ripped in half when his teammates try to save him.
  • Black Hole has a tendency to cause this, albeit accidentally. The first notable instance of this happening is Pen in BFB 3 (Hit by a fork and sent spinning into Black Hole) and the second notable instance is Tree in TPOT 7 (accidentally decapitated by Black Hole, who was trying to save him from being chopped up by Fanny and Pillow). Both instances are notable because of their extended nature, with both Pen and Tree respectively screaming painfully.
  • Four also has a tendency to do this intentionally, by mutilating them. This consists of him converting contestants into formless scribbles.
  • Pie is a blueberry pie, and blueberries are explosive in the BFDI-verse. This causes him to explode on a regular basis.
  • Similar to Pie, Bomby is a character who blows up on a regular basis, either then when her fuse is lit or when she hits the ground.
  • Other characters like Ice Cube and Firey have a tendency to experience this, and they scream in agony whenever it happens. Firey gets extinguished whenever he comes in contact with water, while Ice Cube has a tendency to melt or shatter. In TPOT 4, Puffball takes Ice Cube to where Death P.A.C.T. Again's funny plant is and sticks her body in the ground, telling the team that their plant is absorbing water from Ice Cube's body, and that she will die slowly and painfully as she melts away into nothingness. In two separate episodes, Winner repeatedly kills Ice Cube - the first time to dilute a puddle of acid that was making the Recovery Centre unusable, and the second time to freeze the surface of the Goiky Canal to help his team win a challenge.
• Bloody Bunny: The fate of Bye-Bye Kitten: Bloody Bunny rips her eye out, stabs her through the hand, smashes her head on the dining table they're at, and finally drags her off to the kitchen's oven to cook her alive. The impact would be somewhat lessened by the fact that, like most of the characters, she's a sentient doll - but she's still full of blood and possibly guts.
• Dick Figures has Lord Tourettes getting shot in the chest, taking a meat cleaver to the head, hit by an anchor, and eaten alive by sharks while drowning in "Captain Red Rum & The Pina Colada Armada".
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Forgotten Events: In "The Perfect Plan", Ennard gets one of the officers and incinerates him.
• gen:LOCK is a process to upload the human consciousness into an electronic brain to operate a giant robot called a Holon as if it were your own body. But since the process is in its early testing phases, it takes a very specific mental signature and brain chemistry to be gen:LOCK compatible. Anyone incompatible who tries to interface, in Dr. Weller's words, "might as well put [their] brain in a microwave." A Union spy disguised as one of the gen:LOCK candidates tries to upload into a Holon and steal it. When he proves incompatible, he's left screaming in agony as blood runs down from his eyes and nose until he finally dies.
• Three Words: Happy Tree Friends. You'd be hard-pressed to find an episode where someone doesn't die or at least get hurt in a violent, gory way — the first episode alone has Giggles get split in half by a tree stump and Cuddles fly into a Turbine Blender. Buckets of blood and organs will be spilled almost every episode.
• King Womp's death in the Klay World movie, where he gets an axe in the back, falls on top of a communication structure, is electrocuted, and explodes.
• Lobo (Webseries): Most of the deaths are quite gory and graphic. For example, Lobo squishes Sunny Jim's face so flat it was used as a CD.
• The whole point of Madness Combat. Happens more in later episodes
• MeatCanyon: Swiper in "Swiper no Swipey" gets his back crushed by Boots, and both he and Dora tear apart his tongue and left arm, resulting in a slow and agonizing death. Also, his corpse is thrown into an acid barrel with a Synchro-Vox face on it.
• Every single death in Murder Drones is this, but a special mention goes to Grant, where based off of the dialogue, V ripped out his entrails and force-fed him them while his family watched before killing all of them. Let us let you know that this is only from the pilot, and that the following 3 episodes only increase the gore of the deaths as they go along.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • Season 1 has a case Played for Laughs that later gets a Retcon to be a false memory: Tex ripped Pvt. Jimmy's skull out of his head and beat him to death with it (all while he screamed "This doesn't seem physically possible!"). Though Private Jimmy's actual death, as shown in Season 14, is somehow even more horrific — namely, he was forcibly lobotomized against his will so as to become an Empty Shell for the Alpha A.I. to inhabit.
  • Parodied in Season 14's "The Brick Gulch Chronicles", where Donut dissolves into nothingness while screaming in supposed agony due to getting dropped into a beaker of hydrochloric acid... but still somehow makes an Unexplained Recovery less than five minutes later and is perfectly fine.
  • The Big Bad of Season 15, Mark Temple, killed off at least 10 Freelancer agents by luring them in his basement, locking them in their armor, and leaving them to slowly die of starvation and thirst. The longest record for surviving this nightmarish fate was 8 days and 11 hours.
    • Season 15 also has poor Biff getting Impaled with Extreme Prejudice through the heart with Blue Team's flag due to the actions of both Tex and Carolina in Episode 13.
    • And while it's successfully Played for Laughs, the same season also has Surge getting accidentally dropped by Sarge into a volcanic vent and being utterly incinerated as consequence in Episode 20.
  • The Shisno Paradox has poor Huggins — a "sentient lens flare" — get shoved into a black hole by Genkins. What makes it even worse is that this is supposedly how her parents had already been killed off.
• RWBY: Cinder doesn't just like to kill her victims, she likes to do it ways that enforce her superiority, resulting in sadistic murders. At the end of Volume 3, she uses Emerald to trick Pyrrha into inadvertently destroying Penny. Later, she shoots an incendiary arrow through Pyrrha's heart, burning her to death from the inside out while she gasps for breath; once dead, Cinder then burns her body to ash. The graphic death is a Traumatic Superpower Awakening for Ruby's innate abilities.
• Smile HD: Many. Twilight gets her head kicked off, Rarity has her skull crushed, Applejack gets vaporized by an energy beam, Rainbow Dash gets pounded in the stomach so hard that her intestines spew through her mouth, and Fluttershy is obliberated by Pinkie's energy bomb with graphic detail.
• Something About: In "Something About Kirby Super Star", King Dedede dies by having his innards sucked out through his mouth and eye sockets, courtesy of Kirbo. His spirit later makes his way back to his body, bringing him back to life — fittingly, he starts screaming the moment he revives.
• SMG4:
  • In The Anime Arc, Francis gets all of his bodily fluids slowly sucked out by his own machine, the Ink Zuccer, plus, even if that didn’t kill him, the explosion that would later happen certainly would have.
  • Zero is an expert at giving these, from sapping out your life force until you’re left as just an eyeless, desaturated, cracked husk, or possessing you and horribly mutilating your body with every single stage of the possession until your girlfriend eventually needs to Mercy Kill you via a slice to the chest.
  • Once the Box Club Leader gets to the God Box in Revelations, he dives in immediately, but the power is too much for him to handle and he gets incinerated.
• The Walten Files has no shortage of these:
  • Brian Stells had both of his eyes gouged out and either one or both of his arms torn off after being caught by Bon, judging by both his original design◊ and his post-Bunnyfarm redesign◊.
  • Rosemary Walten was dismembered by Bon before being stuffed into the Sha animatronic.
  • Ashley Parks was caught and stuffed into the Billy animatronic by Bon (along with her eyes being gouged out), with her screams of agony all but confirming it was not a pleasant experience.
  • Susan Woodings seemingly had survived her skin being stretched over the Banny animatronic's exoskeleton (with her eyes implied to have also been gouged out), only to end up starving to death, unable to get out of the Bon's Burgers restaurant.
  • Charles had his lips ripped off before being stuffed into the Boozoo animatronic (seemingly whilst still alive, going by the shot of Boozoo's bloody and empty head breathing in Bunnyfarm).
• Wolf Song: The Movie: Pretty much every death scene counts due to the sheer brutality of it. Most common is characters having their throats torn out (it’s a film with wolves battling one another, and that tends to be how they most commonly kill their targets so there is Truth in Television with that), but others are either stabbed or slashed with swords, get tortured and succumb (Alador), get disemboweled and one unfortunate extra is even beheaded.

Web Original

• The Backrooms contains many of these:
  • The ways that the Dentists kill off their victims is by ripping out their teeth and gums and then either strangling them, stabbing them, or just using blunt force.
  • Like their name suggests, Bone Thieves kill victims who meet their gaze by vanishing every bone in their body, before proceeding to eat the boneless corpse.
  • Skin-Givers kill victims they encounter by placing extra layers of skin on them until they pass out from heat exhaustion, to which they then tear off the new layers of skin and eat the victim’s flesh.
  • Mother appears to trap people in Level 1.5 and separate their souls and flesh, which is described as extremely painful.
  • Tiletraps will attack “losers” of the Tile Game, to which they inject them with enzymes which paralyse them but keep them conscious, to which more Tiletraps will swarm and burrow through the victim, they will also try their best to keep their victim alive throughout the process.
  • Inhaling Entity 169's spores will eventually cause the victim's entire respiratory system to explode out from their body, often rupturing their ribcage in the process.
  • Falling into The Void is a more subtle take, as you're trapped in nothingness until you expire. Depending on who you ask, The Void will sustain your life granting you a cruel twist on immortality.
• It seems to be a point of pride among Protectors of the Plot Continuum to do the most unpleasant and appropriate things to their victims, though the oldies have recently been insisting that the point of the business is more "have fun writing" than "try to outdo everyone" (and they're right). The Sues still suffer an impressive range of nasty deaths, from being eaten by Flesh-Eating Slugs to being given to the Discworld elves.

Web Videos

• Critical Role:
  • While the first campaign contains many violent deaths, usually at the hands of the party's goliath barbarian, and lovingly narrated by DM Matthew Mercer, perhaps the most satisfying brutal occurs in episode 68 to Dr. Anna Ripley, after she kills Percy. Each member of Vox Machina contributes in their own way: Vax removes her prosthetic hand by cutting it off her arm, Scanlan carves the de Rolo crest into her forehead, Grog cuts her across the stomach, Keyleth takes it further by ripping her in half with a grasping vine, and Vex finishes her off with an arrow through her heart and her mouth.
  • The second campaign is no slouch in this regard either. Lorenzo — the leader of the slaver guild who has been abducting and systematically torturing people for years, kidnapped Fjord, Yasha and Jester, and gruesomely murdered Mollymauk — is killed when Caleb launches a Fire Bolt at the back of his head. Liam then lovingly describes the Fire Bolt burrowing through his skull, torching his brain, melting his eyeballs, and spewing flames out of his eyes and mouth. Being an Oni, Lorenzo survives this process for far longer than a human would have, and even makes it half-way up the stairs before he finally dies. Even Keg, who has been on a revenge quest against Lorenzo and would love to see him dead, is disturbed by this display.
• In the fifth episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, Duck Guy gets his organs removed and eaten alive.
• In Jerma Rumble — Live Action! the Magician enters the ring, and he seems to be another goofy, one-off character. And then he starts pulling the other wrestlers' organs out of his hat. ...Yeah.
• In Ten Little Roosters, the two Gavin Frees are killed by being chewed apart by mousetraps. Lindsay Jones is also torn to shreds by a puma in a later episode, Miles Luna dies of exhaustion after being forced to run on a treadmill for several hours without rest, and Barbara Dunkleman is murdered by getting shoved into an exact replica suit of a Creeper from Minecraft and be forced to explode. However, there's a subverted case with Ryan Haywood, as he's able to escape from being Buried Alive.
• Harvesters in Vita Carnis are giant Meat Moss tumors with 500-foot long barbed roots sticking out of the ground, coated with a paralytic venom that exsanguinates prey by acting as an anticoagulant and leaving them to bleed out. It gets much worse in the "Species Anomaly Report", with Found Footage revealing that they in fact liquefy their prey while they're still alive, with the agonized screams of a mother and her young child accompanying this information.

Other

• This infamous ident for Irish TV network Virgin Media Television (formerly TV3) contains a music video which turns into a full-blown fight. Arguably the worst death out of all of them shown is one of the members getting a cymbal thrown at him, SLICING HIS ENTIRE HEAD OPEN!

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