”Tie them down in the desert heat and let the vultures pick their bones”
"Splendid! A moment frozen in time. It occurred to me that to leave you gentlemen here in this wretched heat, with nothing to drink, would be a cruel and merciless act. In three hours, your flesh will begin to blister. Two hours later, your tongues will swell. And all that time, you will be holding the liquid of life in your very own hand!"
— The General, Firewalker
This is when a villain leaves a character tied up, often to wooden stakes, out in the middle of a hostile climate with things like dangerous insects or a scorching sun. This most often occurs in settings like the Thirsty Desert or Hungry Jungle where the heat and the wildlife is particularly dangerous.
Unlike the Death Trap where the idiotic villain refuses to kill the hero quickly resulting in their escape, this trope usually brands the villain as a clear vengeful if not Sadist, denying the hero a quick death so they can die in a slower more painful way. The villain might set food or water nearby to psychologically torment them or even feed them the bare minimum to prolong their suffering
Expect to see a Vile Vulture or two flying overhead awaiting a meal, and maybe a skeleton of a previous victim bound nearby. An Ant Assault is also common, but the hero will inevitably escape eventually without any problem whatsoever, but it still adds suspense when the audience can temporarily buy that the hero actually needs food and water. When performed as an official punishment, it's especially prone to Failed Execution, No Sentence, since the death is left to external forces.
Of course being Bound and Gagged or confined in some form is necessary for this trope. If the victim is merely abandoned, it becomes Left for Dead. It becomes Sand Necktie if the victim is partially Buried Alive.
Sub-Trope of Locked Up and Left Behind. Compare Punishment Box and Creepy-Crawly Torture. Contrast Exposed to the Elements and Bottomless Bladder where the elements and bodily functions don’t matter.
As this is sometimes a Death Trope, beware unmarked spoilers!
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Digimon Adventure: In "The Crest of Sincerity", Cockatorimon captures most of the Digidestined and places them on netting under the harsh desert sun.
Comic Books
- Tomb Raider In the main comic series, a villain named Lady Jasmine captured Lara Croft, she tied her to metal stakes in the middle of the desert to interrogate her. After Lara refuses to give her the location of the gold mine, Lady Jasmine leaves her to die slowly under the hot sun and at the mercy of the local coyotes.
- Rulah, Jungle Goddess: Mava decides to get revenge on Rulah by leaving her bound under the hot African sun. She leaves food and water nearby to taunt her.
Mava: The sun is hot Rulah, but I give you plenty of food and water within easy reach.
Rulah: But I won’t be able to reach it, eh?
Mava: Exactly! Yet every day my people will bring fresh food and water here...until you starve or die of thirst!
Film — Animation
- Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron: After the titular horse resists every attempt by the Union forces to break him, the Colonel orders for Spirit to be chained outside with no food or water for three days. This is done with the goal of attempting to break Spirit again once his energy is exhausted. This appears to be a favorite tactic of the colonel's, given that he also orders the captured Little Creek tied to a post without food or drink.
Film — Live-Action
- The Apple Dumpling Gang: In the sequel The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, Amos and Theadore are both left tied to wagon wheels for three days by the Union Army, with the order for them to be given no food and only enough water to keep them alive, after they accidentally set fire to their camp.
- The Blair Witch Project: According to the backstory as provided in The Curse Of The Blair Witch, after Elly Kedward was found guilty of witchcraft, the townsfolk of Blair executed her by dragging her into the middle of the neighboring woods, tying her to a tree, and leaving her there. As this was the middle of winter, it was assumed that Elly died of exposure. Unfortunately, she came back as the Blair Witch.
- Beauty and the Beast (2017): Gaston ties Maurice to a tree to suffer from wolves and winter exposure after he refuses to give Gaston his blessing to marry Belle. LeFou, though guilt-ridden, goes along with it. When Maurice is saved by Agathe, he tries to accuse Gaston of attempted murder in front of the village, only stopped by the fact that Gaston is a Villain with Good Publicity.
- Firewalker: The general leaves Max and Leo staked out in the middle of the desert, and to further torment them, places a bottle of water in Max's hand. Fortunately Max is played by Chuck Norris, who's badass enough to break the bottle with the strength of his hand and cut the ropes with the glass shards, but not before Leo experiences some Creepy-Crawly Torture.
- The Hateful Eight: Major Warren allegedly murdered General Smithers's son by stripping him naked in the icy wasteland wilderness and forcing him at gunpoint to march till he collapsed.
- Interview with the Vampire: Creepy Child vampire Claudia (despite the Age Lift to eleven, she's still very young) and her recently turned caretaker, Madeleine, are both executed by being left to be exposed to the sun. Unlike the book, where she's Killed Offscreen while Louis is trapped in a coffin, she is seen being dragged screaming to the pit she and Madeline are placed in during the night; when the sun rises, they wake to see the sunrise and the two desperately cling to each other screaming before the sunlight kills them both. Louis, when released, immediately asks about her and finds their ash bodies clinging to each other, which crumble at his touch. He doesn't take it well.
- Paradise Road: Susan is left bound by the Japanese soldiers and surrounded by spikes to impale her if she moves. As the hours pass in the heat, the soldiers refuse to give her any food or water and don’t allow any of the other prisoners to help her.
- Red Sun. After she kills a member of their tribe, the Commanches stake Christina out in the sun with a strip of wet rawhide around her neck which will slowly strangle her as it dries in the heat.
- In The Scorpion King, Mathayus (along with the petty thief he met earlier, Aprid) are left buried up to their necks in sand, and are about to be Eaten Alive by swarms of fire ants. Aprid easily escapes the attempt, while Mathayus is almost left helpless before making a pact with the thief.
- Shoot The Sun Down: In this little-known 1978 western, a group of unrelated characters meet up on a trip across the desert to find some gold when they encounter an AWOL soldier named Mr. Rainbow. Afraid that Rainbow is after the gold as well, some of the others tie him spread-eagle to stakes in the desert, and leave him there, expecting vultures to make quick work of him.
Literature
- Books of the Raksura: When Moon is exposed as a shapeshifter at the beginning of the series, his own former friends chain him out in the woods to either die of exposure or be eaten by beasts. He escapes, but their deliberate cruelty stays with him for a long time.
- Dune: Liet-Kynes is executed this way by the Harkonnens because of his loyalty to the Atreides; they leave him to die in the desert with no water or stillsuit. However, what ultimately kills him is not heat exposure or thirst, but the somewhat more merciful explosion of a "spice blow" right underneath him.
- The Forest of Doom: This Gamebook has you find a barbarian prisoner tied to a number of stakes, spread-eagled to the floor of a clearing without trees and directly under the sun, and you're given the option to help him or leave. Choose to help him though and the barbarian attacks you on the spot (it's unknown if he's behaving like an Ungrateful Bastard or is delirious from the heat).
- Horatio Hornblower: In The Happy Return (Beat to Quarters in the US), the preferred execution method of Hornblower's mad ally, El Supremo is to tie people to stakes to die of thirst. He considers it an elegantly simple method of execution. Hornblower is appropriately disgusted but can't object as he has orders to support El Supremo's rebellion against the Spanish in South America. Problems arise when his crew find and try to release one of the victims.
- Interview with the Vampire has Creepy Child Claudia killed by exposure to the sun as punishment for attempting to kill Lestat. Louis admits she was always doomed, because she was turned at age five and vampires turned at young ages were always killed off due to their immaturity.
- Star Trek: Vulcan's Soul: The preferred method of capital punishment among the Watraii—the Vulcan subspecies that the trilogy revolves around—is to strip the condemned of their traditional Cool Mask and stake them out in the open to be electrocuted by one of the planet's frequent thunderstorms.
- The Stormlight Archive: An especially nasty method of capital punishment in Alethkar is to tie the person outside before a Highstorm, a magical storm strong enough to throw boulders. Kaladin suffers this to Make An Example of Him in The Way of Kings but survives thanks to his Healing Factor as a nascent Knight Radiant, drawing superstitious reverence for the feat.
- Tales of the Bounty Hunters: When Jabba learns that Dengar is plotting against him, he decides that Dengar needs a slow death, so he instructs Boba Fett to let Dengar feel "the teeth of Tatooine". Which turns out to mean being tied to a rock and left in the sun with a sandstorm approaching, to be flayed alive by flying sand and rock shards.
- The Sunlit Man: The Cinder King's regime executes dissidents by sun exposure, as the planet's magical sunlight is hot enough to melt stone. This has the side benefit of turning their remains into precious Power Crystals.
- The Wheel of Time: The Seanchan Empire strictly forbids spilling noble blood, so nobles are instead executed by tying them into a silk sack and hanging them off the Tower of Ravens until the sack rots away.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: The episode "The Caretaker" opens this way with The Doctor and Clara Oswald chained to stone pillars in the middle of an alien Thirsty Desert, as part of a montage showing how Clara balances her life with The Doctor and her social life. Apparently she got a great tan out of it.
Clara: Are we going to starve to death out here?
The Doctor: Of course we won’t starve. The sand piranhas will get us long before then. - Robin Hood, Robin and the Merry Men are all captured and chained to posts in the middle of the wilderness to die this way. This leads to an especially cruel Hope Spot when they see Maid Marian riding towards them and believe she's come to rescue them, only to see Guy of Gisborne following along behind her and realise she's been captured too.
Tabletop Games
- Vampire: The Masquerade: If a vampire commits a particularly grievous offense against the Masquerade, they can be condemned to "watch the sunrise", i.e. being tied up and left outside in the early hours of the morning. Any amount of direct sunlight so much as touching the vampire's body causes it to disintegrate in a particularly gruesome and painful manner.
Western Animation
- DuckTales 1987: In an episode where Donald Duck is possessed by an ancient spirit of Ancient Egypt called the Garbled One, he has Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, and Louie tied to stakes out under the hot Egyptian sun.
Real Life
- Some forms of crucifixion were intentionally made to avoid asphyxiation. The prisoners were tied inside of nailed and they were even given a place to sit on the cross, all so that they could die of hunger and thirst publicity, assuming local animals like crows didn’t get to them first.
- The Pillory also served this function to some extent, though it was typically more focused on public humiliation.
