Off with His Head!

aka: Off With Her Head

Well, that's one way to deal with a headache.

"You don't kill a man by mucking around with rifles, arrows, rocks or other long-distance rubbish. You kill him by grabbing the biggest bloody sword you can find, running up nice and close to him, and chop the dumb bastard's head off!"

— Team Fortress 2

If you're dealing with any sword-oriented media, whether it be fantasy, medieval, kung fu, or something else, and it's more violent than a PG-13 rating, chances are, someone is going to get their head chopped off (and it may not even need the R rating if you're dealing with nonhuman enemies). One of the most common methods of execution back in the medieval era next to hanging, decapitation is usually one of the surest ways to ensure someone is Deader than Dead barring some very potent magic or divine intervention. Indeed, in Real Life, it is one of the very few ways that death can be instantly diagnosed (since it's impossible for humans to live without a head.)

Beheading is more often than not a Cruel and Unusual Death, particularly if the beheading is especially graphic or is botched in some way.

Any Ridiculously Human Robot (even one with a Cranial Processing Unit) or other decidedly inhuman being will probably be capable of surviving decapitation, and will do so at some point either for a joke or as a plot point. In less serious series, the body will even continue to walk around bumping into things like a chicken or a cockroach with its head cut off.

It is nearly always depicted as being surprisingly easy to cut through someone's whole neck and spinal column, even in one blow to a moving target. While Anne Boleyn did get beheaded with one stroke, most pre-guillotine beheadings took at least three strokes. Boleyn's executioner was — by request — a professional swordsman who would know how to cleanly behead someone. And that's when the target is helpfully restrained; in an actual Sword Fight it would have been even harder to pull off and would also have been serious overkill. A direct cut through the skull into the brain — or a strike to the neck that would at least sever critical blood vessels or the windpipe if it didn't cut through the spine — was usually more expedient.

This trope is named after the line Off with his head; — so much for Buckingham from Colley Cibber's adaptation of Richard III. The trope was also famously used by the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. See also Your Head A-Splode for a much gorier version of this trope and Boom, Headshot! when it comes to firearms.

May result in a Human Head on the Wall.

Also see Alas, Poor Yorick, Decapitation Presentation and Severed Head Sports. When cutting off the head is the only way to kill something, it's Decapitation Required. If the severed head is somehow still alive after the fact for any notable length of time, that's Losing Your Head.

Not to be confused with Demanding Their Head, which is when a character is specifically requesting someone's head be brought to them for a bounty.

Not to be confused with a Decapitation Strike, which is about decapitating a whole faction rather than just some person.

For punishments that involve cutting something other than a head off, see Amputative Sentencing.

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

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Examples:

Advertising

• A senile old king is delighted when told of a competition which required people to cut off and mail in the headlines of the advertised newspaper. His Establishing Character Moment shows he's got a complex about this trope.
  Courtier: Sire! Sire!
  King: (waking up) Mmm, what? Off with your head!
  Courtier: (panicking) But a messenger has arrived!
  King: Off with his head!
• The "Don't Lose your Head!" campaign for Fosters Beer in Australia, which showed people being decapitated mid-broadcast by animals, though the headless body still seems to be alive post-decapitation. These commercials caused quite a stir and calls for banning after they were shown on British TV, although most of the complaints were rejected.
  • One commercial shows a TV presenter crouching near a river and warning viewers about what may be lurking inside, right before his head is bitten off by a nearby pelican as the cameraman cracks up in laughter.
  • In another commercial, a presenter hosting a falconry show at the zoo makes a young female volunteer hold some meat intended for the eagle to take. But after being released, the eagle instead rips off her head as the audience gasps in shock, and the presenter promptly ends the show.
  • The third and final commercial shows a broadcast of a man bungee jumping over a river before his head is bitten off by some hungry crocodiles as the cameraman once again cracks up.
• An advert for Crunchy Nut set during The French Revolution has two aristocrats hiding out in the basement of a chocolate shop, only for one to loudly eat a bowl of Crunchy Nut with chocolate and they get found out. Both of them and the shop owner are then executed via guillotine.

Anime & Manga

• Justice does this to Afro's father just five minutes into Afro Samurai. Right in front of the young Afro, no less!
• In Akame ga Kill!, Kurome's People Puppet Natala finishes off the mortally wounded Chelsea this way before chopping the poor girl to pieces.
  • At the end of the series, the deposed emperor is guillotined.
• In Akudama Drive, this is how Cutthroat makes his first appearance after being freed from his execution. He severs a police officer's head off with a knife.
• In another Alice-related manga, Are You Alice?, the Queen himself (yes, him) states this a few times as an order. His job, executing "useless characters", also leads to this, with him using a giant scythe to do the job.
• Attack on Titan:
  • The second Titan that the Rogue Titan fights in Trost suffers this fate. Its head is punched clean off, and flies quite some distance away as well. Chapter 119 also features Gabi decapitating Eren with an anti-Titan rifle shot to Eren's neck, with only super-lucky timing and the difference in time moving in the Paths saving his life.
  • This is why going for the nape kills Titans -- it's where the heads and bodies of their "pilots" are located. Later on in the series, characters use this to rip people out of their Titans rather than killing them outright.
  • At the end of the manga, this is Eren's final fate (as he has become the Big Bad at this point after spending most of the manga as The Hero) when Mikasa enters his mouth during his battle with Armin in Colossal Titan form and separates his head from his spine.
• Baccano! has this happen to Czeslaw Meyer in the first episode via shotgun blast at point-blank range. Fortunately for him, after his assailant leaves, his head reforms a few minutes later.
• Guts of Berserk is powerful enough to shear off the head of a horse with one blow from his BFS, as evidenced during the rampage at the end of the first Black Swordsman story. He pulls off an extremely spectacular decapitation in his fight against General Boscone during the Golden Age Arc; taking a sword lent to him by Nosferatu Zodd, he uses it to chop off the heads of both Boscone and his horse in one mighty swing!
  • Also a standard method of execution in the series proper. At the beginning of the third arc (the one before the Golden Age arc), a young woman gets executed this way for heresy. Her head gets used by Guts to send a declaration of war to the Count, an Apostle who uses such accusations of heresy to provide him with people to eat.
  • During the Conviction Arc, Guts decapitates a demon-possessed horse that tries to rape Farnese and the possessed Great Goat Head, as well as one of Mozgus' disciples, the guy with the mancatcher and the Plague Doctor mask.
• In Blame! Chapter 27, Killy tears the head off a regenerating Silicon Creature with his bare hands.
• Bleach:
  • Early in the story Ichigo is advised to go for the head when fighting Hollows, since that's the most effective way of killing them.
  • The Fracción Avirama Redder asks Lieutenant Izuru Kira what his 'weird-looking' Zanpakutō, Wabisuke — which is shaped like a square hook — can cut through. Kira gives him a demonstration by placing the hooked bit under Redder's neck and — yoink! There goes Redder's head.
  • Cang Du is executed by Haschwalth in this way after his failure to defeat Hitsugaya — not even his Super-Toughness could save him. In the anime, the same thing then happens to BG9 for failing to defeat Sui-Feng (the manga simply cuts away as he begs for mercy).
• Case Closed uses the trope once in a while, and these times tend to be very memorable:
  • The murder of the first episode. Who would have thought of using the momentum of the roller coaster and a wire with hooks to make a gruesome decapitation?
  • Also happens to Chikako Ikeda in the Mountain Villa Bandaged Man Murder Case. And her killer not only beheads her but dismembers her corpse and carries her head around hidden in his clothes. For worse, in the manga, there is a panel where ''the reader sees how the killer decapitates his victim in one single hit''.
  • And it takes place again in Chapter 915 of the manga, to some Red Shirt from Nagano police. The way this takes place makes it even worse if that's even possible, thanks to a noose tied up to the guy's neck and with its other end tied to a vehicle that goes off a cliff, taking the pleading victim with it and cutting off his head in its way down. What the HELL?! Then it's subverted: the "victim" was the killer and had used the headless corpse of the first person he killed (whom he strangled to death and then decapitated) and some props to go Faking The Death and get to his other targets.
• Teresa from Claymore is beheaded by Priscilla the instant she Awakens.
  • This is a common trope in general for the series, as both monsters and Claymores are certain to die properly only as long as the head is cut, this is due to the near omnipresence of Healing Factor.
• In Episode 6 of Cutey Honey, Honey decapitates several Panther Claw Grunts with an axe while dressed as Marie Antoinette.
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: This is the primary way to kill demons, though it only works when the Demon Slayers' special swords are used. Otherwise the demon will remain alive, and the severed head will still somehow control its body, as seen when Nezuko revealed her Super-Strength by kicking a demon's head right off, but it kept on fighting. And several demons are able to resist even that, such as Upper-6 Daki and Gyutaro, who due to their unique status as Two Beings, One Body, need to be decapitated together simultaneously; or Upper-3 Akaza and Upper-1 Kokushibo, who are able to keep going through sheer determination and likely could have regenerated their severed heads if they hadn't lost their wills to fight for personal reasons.
• Devilman: In the original manga, the OVA, and Amon, after it is revealed on TV that Akira is actually Devilman, Miki searches for her little brother and sees him fall from the second floor; she approaches him and sees it's his headless body, and a member of the angry mob has his severed head. Later, when Akira arrives too late, he sees Miki has not only been killed but dismembered by the mob, and her head is on a pike as well (alongside her other limbs, each one on its own pike). Akira goes berserk and tears the mob to bloody pieces (in the manga, he set them all on fire). A few moments later, Akira is seen cradling her head in his arms, having crossed the Despair Event Horizon for real. In fact, it's said that this scene inspired the one in the X/1999 manga where Kamui does the same with Kotori's head.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In the original series, Goku kicked Drum's head off.
  • In the Namek Saga, Vegeta does this to Guldo after he tried to kill Gohan and Krillin, though it was only because he wanted to kill off the weakest member of the Ginyu Force (he didn't give a damn about them at that point). Guldo actually lives long enough to yell at Vegeta for what he did until he vaporized him.
  • In the Android Saga, when a motorist yells at Dr. Gero for blocking the road, Gero retaliates by grabbing him by the throat and strangling him so hard that his head pops off. Gero is later on the receiving end of this trope when Android 17 kicks his head off his shoulders and stomps on it.
  • During the battle against the Cell Jrs., Gohan decapitates two of them.
  • Two of the movies had decapitations, in the fourth Piccolo blasts Doradabo's head off and in the seventh Vegeta punches Android 15's head off.
• Durarara!!: This is the entire reason Celty Sturluson came to Ikebukuro in the first place. Being a dullahan, her head was never attached in the first place and she carried it around in her arms. However, after Shingen used Saika to sever its connection to her she woke up missing her head and has been searching for it for the past twenty years. The head is repeatedly given away or stolen by various parties, though is in the possession of Izaya Orihara for the majority of the show. Throughout the series, various men developed odd obsessions with it, such as Seiji and Seitarou's love for it, the artist's need to draw it and Izaya's wish to create a gang war over it. In conclusion, Shingen returns Celty's head to her, however, she attempts to leave to resume her duties as a dullahan. Fortunately, Shinra obtains Saika and once again severs Celty's head and it is given to Nebula.
  • Celty also threatens to do this to Izaya for making fun of Shinra.
• Many deaths in Elfen Lied caused by Diclonius, like in the cases of Kurama's secretary Kisaragi and Kouta's father. Their vectors can pick off a person's head like picking fruit off a tree or crush them like nothing.
• In Fate/Apocrypha, Celenike Yggdmillennia, in the full throes of a Yandere Villainous Breakdown, uses a Command Seal to try to force her Servant Astolfo to kill Sieg, who he's developed a bond with, in as sadistic a manner as possible just to break the poor guy. But before she can complete the order, Mordred uses Clarent to take her head.
  Mordred: Shut up.
• Raoh of Fist of the North Star can do this to someone by slapping them, as a particularly sadistic soldier of his learned the hard way after he made the mistake of abusing Raoh's female subjects in his absence.
• Tomio in the Fragments of Horror story "Red Turtleneck" has his head severed by his wicked fortune-teller mistress' enchanted hair. But before she adds it to her collection, she gives him the chance to keep himself alive by holding his head on, warning him that any slip that disconnects the head will kill him. She tests his strength, too, torturing him by inserting things into the new gap between head and neck, hoping to make him slip.
• In Chapter 51 of Future Diary, Yuno kills Akise this way.
• A lot of deaths in Gantz involve decapitation. Kurono and Izumi beheaded the oni boss, as well as the former beheading the shapeshifting oni. Katou also beheaded the Buddha boss. Anything else I miss?
• In Golgo 13 The Professional, Duke sticks a grenade into Silver's mouth causing his head to be blown off his body in the resulting explosion.
• Hunter × Hunter:
  • Killua defeats Rammot by ripping his head off while he's paralyzed with fear, fast enough that the rest of his body is still standing as Killua crushes his skull.
  • Kortopi has this done to him in Chapter 357 by Hisoka. On the toilet, of all things.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Dio Brando did this to himself to keep Jonathan's Ripple from finishing him off.
• In Lupin III: Dead or Alive, to show Ole he's serious about the situation, General Headhunter casually decapitates one of his own men with a sword.
• Turned upside-down by the finale of Macross Frontier: removing the Vajra Queen's head is presented as a nonlethal way of detaching Grace O'Connor from the main body. Due to Bizarre Alien Biology, Vajra don't actually have any vital organs in their heads (their nervous system is decentralized, so they lack a "brain" as an organ). The Queen is not harmed by the loss of her head any more than the loss of one of her other limbs, and flies away with the rest of the Vajra once peace is restored.
• In Mermaid Saga decapitation is the only way to kill a mermaid, a Lost Soul or an immortal person.
• The Mobile Suit Gundam metaseries plays with this trope quite a lot. Lots of Mobile Suits and Gundams alike lose their heads, but it's usually an inconvenience as most MS cockpits reside in the torso, where the head merely contains instruments such as cameras. However, there are rather brutal methods of humans getting beheaded.
  • No one can forget the original Mobile Suit Gundam, where Char Aznable shoots Kycillia Zabi in the face with a rocket launcher. The missile straight-up decapitates her with enough force to knock her body out of her chair. Then the warhead detonates with enough force to take out the entire bridge of her ship.
  • It also happens to Tolle Koenig in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, when Athrun Zala tosses the shield of his Aegis Gundam at Tolle's Skygrasper, and it hits his cockpit. Not only does Tolle get his head chopped off, he gets ''split in half'' even before the Skygrasper is blown to pieces. Thankfully, the death was very much instant, but... OUCH.
  • Still better than getting it taken off by a giant spinning tire like Uso's mom Mueller in Victory Gundam.
• Naruto:
  • In the manga, Zabuza decapitates Gato. The anime Bowdlerised it down to stabbing him in the chest with a kunai Zabuza held between his teeth and then kicking him off of a bridge.
  • Killer Bee and the Raikage together blow a Zetsu clone disguised as Kisame's head right off, which compliments them on its way down.
• One Piece:
  • During the Dressrosa arc, the first thing the Thunder Soldier (AKA Kyros) does the moment Sugar passes out and his body is restored is grab a sword, make a beeline for Doflamingo and cut his head off. Unfortunately, that was just a string clone.
  • During Act 3 of Wano, Kaido decapitates Orochi after he objects to his "New Onigashima" plan. Orochi survives, however, having lost just one of his "eight" heads. Shortly after, Orochi encounters the Akazaya Nine who cut off his heads before a fight even begins. He survives yet again but is down to one head afterward, which gets sliced off by Denjiro who arrives to save Hiyori from Orochi's attempted Taking You with Me gambit]].
• The Headhunter in PandoraHearts, invoked by name.
  The Queen of Hearts
  Made some tarts
  The Knave of Hearts
  Stole these tarts
  So the mad queen said
  "Off with his head!"
• In Parasyte Chapter 3, Migi cuts off the head of the opposing parasite's host in addition to cutting the body in half.
• Phoenix: Partway into volume 1, the Bowman, having pinned the Phoenix down with iron arrows, finishes her off by decapitating her. Long story short, it doesn't take.
• Princess Mononoke has two instances when Ashitaka decapitated people by shooting them in the head with arrows. His arm was possessed by a demon, so that could have something to do with it.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Mami Tomoe is killed in the penultimate timeline in episode 3 when the witch Charlotte devours her head.
  • Also, in that same timeline Sayaka Miki chops off the head of the witch Elsa Maria with her sword. And then she mutilates Elsa's corpse, as proof that poor Sayaka is this close to crossing the Despair Event Horizon.
  • In the spin-off series, Puella Magi Kazumi Magica, Mirai Wakaba meets this same fate after refusing to fight a witch that used to be Saki Asami, who Mirai loves.
• Happens in Re:Zero when Subaru returns to the massacred and frozen-over village as a giant monster emerges from the mansion and tells him to "Sleep, along with my daughter." before Subaru's head suddenly falls off of his neck. Subaru gets better (kind of) and we later learn that the monster is Puck, who will end the world and kill anyone who isn't Emilia if Emilia ever dies.
• The Rose of Versailles: as it's set before and during The French Revolution and has Marie-Antoinette as one of the main characters, this manga features the guillotine for both her execution and that of Louis XVI.
• In the manga of Samurai Deeper Kyo, Kyo beheaded Nobunaga in their fight in the forest.
• In Samurai Flamenco, a drug dealer takes some kind of pill before getting arrested and turns into a giant gorilla with a guillotine in his mid-section. He then uses it to decapitate at least one of the cops and nearly kills Samurai Flamenco the same way before being saved by his cop friend Goto.
• In the School Days anime finale, Makoto's head is taken by Kotonoha soon after he gets knifed to death by Sekai. Kotonoha decides to display the head to Sekai before killing her to avenge Makoto.
• In The Seven Deadly Sins, Hendrickson, after transforming into a Grey Demon-Human Hybrid, engages in battle with the Seven Deadly Sins (minus Escanor, who had yet to be found) and Liones' Holy Knights and summons an attack called Dark Snow, a shower of slow-moving orbs which cause instant death upon contact. When two knights remark that the attack, while impressive, is easy to avoid, Hendrickson appears above them in mid-air upside down and rips their heads clean off in a single move.
• In Soul Eater, Justin cuts off Tezca's head. This destroys his body, but Tezca moved his soul elsewhere and "lives" on. Rather fitting, since Justin is a guillotine.
• Space Runaway Ideon:
  • A girl named Asura is decapitated by a gunshot in the final movie, and the audience sees her head vaporize as the rest of her lifeless body is sent flying by the recoil. She was the youngest member (around 4- to 5-years-old) of the cast on top of that.
  • Also, while Kitty Kitten was fatally shot in the chest in the series itself, she was decapitated in the movies.
• Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie: While she and Guile are dropping in on Dee Jay at his club to let him know about Shadaloo and their scout robots, Chun-Li kicks the head off a nearby one, much to Dee Jay's bewilderment.
• Strider Hiryu: If not cut in half, this is the other common fate of anyone on the wrong end of the eponymous Hiryu's Cypher.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: Jenna's Smug Snake slave Miauler puts fabricated letters in Leon’s room as a Frame-Up for treason, on the orders of Frampton. Later, once Leon has absolved himself and is getting on his father Balcus' Cool Airship, he's asked what being arrested was about. Being the Reasonable Authority Figure that he is, Balcus tells his daughter Jenna to go up into the ship's cabin so she won't see him and promptly beheads Miauler.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: Otome Games Are Tough For Us, Too!: After Frampton tells the Saintess that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, and he can have her replaced, she has Frampton's vassals expose evidence of his treason, resulting in a Laughing Mad Julius beheading Frampton in a Public Execution, to try and win back the Saintess' lost favor.
• This is one of the very, VERY few ways to kill a sen-nin in The Twelve Kingdoms. Brutally proved by Governor Gekkei, who kills King Chuutatsu of Hou this way as punishment for his horrible reign and brings his head to his family. Then, he subjects Chuutatsu's wife Kekai and the kirin Hourin to the same fate, also as punishment for their own deeds (or inaction). "Royal Consort! Princess! Say goodbye to your King!", indeed.''
• Karura in Utawarerumono actually punches a mook's head off. That must have been messy.
• Villager A Wants to Save the Villainess No Matter What!: When on a Roaring Rampage of Rescue for his tortured girlfriend Anastasia from the Est Empire, Allen takes the head of their torturing prince because he hopes to use it as a bargaining chip to officially marry Anastasia, when the two are Star-Crossed Lovers. However, the King of Centralen is too much of a Psychopathic Manchild, and won't accept it, despite promising to, and tries to order Allen beheaded, sparking a Civil War.
• Vinland Saga: This is how Askeladd kills King Sweyn.
• The Voynich Hotel: The second of the Three Mothers, Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, met her fate via beheading. Rumor has it that her head is somewhere in Spain, christened "The Singing Witch Head."
• X/1999: This is how Daisuke Saiki dies in the manga version. It was so gruesome that the TV series censored it.
  • Earlier in the story, Kotori Monou is first stabbed in the chest by her Face Heel Turned brother Fuuma with a BFS, then her body is dismembered by cables turned into Razor Floss. Kamui is seen holding her head in his arms. Agaon, so gruesome that the TV series had to censor it — she "only" got stabbed.
  • While, barring a dream sequence involving Kotori, neither of these occurs in the film, Fuuma suffers this courtesy of Kamui at the very end.
• Xam'd: Lost Memories: Fuurichi commits suicide by cutting his own head off.

Arts

• Artemisia Gentileschi:
  • Gentileschi painted multiple versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes, a portrayal of the apocryphal Biblical story of Judith and the Assyrian general Holofernes (scholars distinguish the two most famous ones with the years they were done and the cities in which they were painted — Naples, 1612-13 and Florence, 1620-21). These paintings show Judith and her maidservant Abra beheading Holofernes with a sword. Another painting, Judith and Her Maidservant, shows the two women absconding with Holofernes' head in a basket.
  • Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist depicts the moment in the Biblical story where Salome is presented John's head on a platter.
• Gustav Klimt had a take on the apocryphal story of Judith beheading Holofernes. In Judith And The Head Of Holofernes, Judith is proud and beautiful while Holofernes's head is cut off by the painting's borders, almost an afterthought.

Comic Books

• 2000 AD:
  • The Ten-Seconders: Watchtower kills two of his fellow gods by decapitating them. Harris even notes that it's starting to become a signature move for him.
  • Anderson: Psi-Division: Anderson has run into an Artifact of Doom that had been used by a headhunting cult. It drove anyone who went near it completely insane and made them cut off people's heads while shouting "Blood for the Blood God!".
  • Judge Dredd: During the "Judgement Day" arc, Dredd decapitates Sabbat. Being immortal, he survives this. Dredd still manages to defeat him by impaling the head on the lodestone Sabbat had been using to control the dead.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comic "Wolves at the Gate, Part 4", this is how Dawn kills her mechanical double.
• Calico (2020): In issue #1, when Calico goes after a family who shot and killed a lioness in the Serengheti, the first thing he does is show the parents their teenage daughter's severed head (she also took part in the hunt).
• Diabolik: The State of Clerville carries out death sentences via guillotine (The Artifact from the early issues, when the story was supposed to be set in France). Every time Diabolik is arrested, the police needs only to file the paperwork to try and behead him, as when he was arrested the second time he was held long enough to be tried and sentenced to death - though actually carrying out the deed is easier said than done. This becomes an especially important plot point in two occasions:
  • The issue "Stop the Guillotine!" is centered around Diabolik having been arrested with Eva unable to rescue him... Only for an abolitionist lawyer to stop the execution on account of the many irregularities of the initial trial (while Diabolik was guilty of everything he had been accused the police could only prove that he had killed Walter Dorian in a different country and then impersonated him, and he was convicted for everything else purely on account of the sheer terror the confirmation such a criminal existed had caused in the jury and the people). The lawyer wasn't trying to get Diabolik free but rather to insure that death penalty was abolished in Clerville, as it was maintained only for Diabolik - as far as she was concerned, Diabolik deserved a life sentence, and if given the chance she'd insure just that. Eva managed to take advantage of the situation to free Diabolik, and the lawyer's appeal was rejected.
  • In "The Shadow of the Giustiziere" the titular villain, a terrorist convinced the police was actually working with Diabolik to cover their own incompetence, staged a number of bombings and threatened to continue until Diabolik was arrested and executed with the same guillotine that was supposed to be used the first time - and when the police faked the execution with a puppet and a properly rigged copy to stop the Giustiziere long enough to track them down they saw through it and staged another bombing. The executioner of Clerville's jail, fearing to behead someone who had been graced before he could be warned, had modified his machine so it would take two pulls of the rope to activate it, and the only ones to know were the executioner, who when given Diabolik to behead quickly pulled the rope twice just as Ginko realized there had been a switch, his two assistants, that Eva had duped into helping her with the switch, and the wife of one of the assistants, who had convinced her husband to accept a bribe from Eva and let her meet with Diabolik, allowing her to pull off the switch. Discovering why the Giustiziere had requested that specific machine allowed both Diabolik and the police to identify them.
• Dreadstar: Dreadstar Returns begins with Dreadstar defeating a tyrant named Plunndo Tram by decapitating him.
• Forgotten Realms: The villain of the second story arc is a Serial Killer mage who goes around decapitating dragons. He needs their heads for a Summoning Ritual which will bring forth the Tarrasque.
• Friday the 13th:
  • In Friday the 13th Special, Jason hits a soldier on top of his head (the sound effect being "FAM") so hard that his head goes through his body and comes out his ass (the written sound effect of that being "SWAQ!").
  • Two unlucky hunters at the end of Friday the 13th: Bloodbath find the frozen Jason in the woods, and one of them gets his head sliced off as he thaws out in front of them.
  • The fight between the two Jasons in Friday the 13th: Jason vs. Jason X ends with Uber Jason killing the regular Jason by ripping his head off. He then takes part of the loser's brain and stuffs it into his own to restore the memories of his mother.
• Killtopia: Happens frequently, such as Stiletto decapitating Megaton Prime in a previous Wreck-Fest.
• Justice Society of America: In Last Days of the Justice Society, Starman uses his cosmic rod in the battle of Ragnarok to decapitate Loki, whose horned head then stabs Starman in the back.
• Mega Man (Archie Comics): This is how Wood Man meets his defeat during his first clash with Rock.
• The Punisher: The Franken-Castle arc from Punisher 2009 shows Werewolf by Night tearing off a mook's head with his bare hands.
• Robin (1993): Villain Lynx ends up decapitated mostly due to the incompetence of her own gang. Neither Tim Drake nor Cassandra Cain are happy about it despite how much trouble she gave them with her ability to avoid prison time.
• Sachs & Violens: The girls in the Snuff Films are killed by being decapitated with an executioner's axe.
• Samurai Grandpa: In the first Flashback of the comic, which is stated to take place 50 years prior, a young Ojichan is beset by a man who tries to talk him out of fighting. Ojichan, however, decapitated him before he can finish his sentence.
• Secret Wars (2015): In the tie-in Mrs. Deadpool and the Howling Commandos Marcus gets his head chopped off by Dracula with one clean sword-swing.
• Simon Dark: Due to his strength Simon Dark uses his garrote wire to decapitate people. He does so rarely as he is opposed to killing humans, but he makes exceptions for those who have been killed by possessing entities and a rapist targeting the local high school.
• Sin City: In The Big Fat Kill, Miho ultimately "makes a PEZ dispenser out of" Jackie-Boy.
• Star Trek (IDW): In "Mirrored, Part 1", Mirror Spock decapitates Gorkon with Mirror Sulu's sword.
• Star Wars: Kanan: Lightsabers make short work of necks on two occasions:
  • After Coburn Sear sets himself on fire in an attempt to kill Caleb Caleb cuts his head off in what is mostly a mercy kill and which disturbs him greatly as it's the first time he'd killed someone who wasn't a droid and he had momements before felt the call of the Dark Side and wanted to kill Sear out of anger fueled revenge.
  • Depa Billaba decapitated Mixx when defending her life and that of her padawan Caleb when Palpatine issued Order 66 and her battalion tried to execute them. It took seeing his former friend's head flying to get Caleb to unfreeze from having their friends go from joking with them to trying to kill them.
• Superman:
  • In The Great Phantom Peril, villainess Faora Hu-Ul breaks into the Fortress of Solitude. As she is exploring Superman's base, Faora runs into a Superman robot, and quickly slaps its head off its body.
  • Superman/Supergirl: Maelstrom:
    • Malstrom intends to cut Superman's head off to please Darkseid.
    • While fighting one of Darkseid's gladiators, Malstrom uses her energy whip to detach his head from his shoulders.
  • Batman/Superman: World's Finest: After being brought back to life, Nezha immediately cuts his father's head off.
  • The Other Side of Doomsday: Supergirl gets mad as fighting T.O.Morrow's guardian robot and punches its head off its shoulders.
  • In Masters of the Universe crossover "From Eternia— With Death!", Skeletor threatens cut Superman's head off if he does not bow down to Skeletor.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage): This is the way Shredder was Killed Off for Real in the original comics.
• Thunderbolts: The Headsman enjoys lopping heads off with his tremendous axe very, very much. This all traces back to his childhood when his Aloof Big Brother Cody beheaded his beloved dog.
• Tim Drake: Robin: When Cam and her mother are murdered Cam is found decapitated with her head nearby.
• Twisted Dark: One example of this occurs in the story "Flamboyant". In it, Chris Ingledow's old manager, Tom, decides to utterly destroy Chris' career and status by unfurling a huge banner on a building that says "Chris Ingledow is worth over $150 million. I was his manager for 15 years and am penniless. All I wanted was a fair wage. Is he a role model?" while he sticks his head in a guillotine in front of Chris and a large number of people, wherein he brings the blade down and decapitates himself.
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • Ultimate Vision: Vision cut Tarleton's head for killing Dima, and threw it to the horizon.
  • The Ultimates:
    • Abomination was dismembered by Hulk, and the finally executed with a megaton punch through the head in The Ultimates 2.
    • Mastermind was decapitated by Valkyrie for trapping her in a fantasy world and attempting to rape her while she was catatonic in The Ultimates 3.
• Usagi Yojimbo: Occurs regularly, especially if a Zerg Rush is involved.
• Wolverine: Subverted in the first issue of Wolverine (1988). During the brawl with the pirates, one actually lands a neck cut with a sword, but it shatters on Wolverine's spine and he gets skewered promptly.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Diana ends her duel with Medusa by chopping off her head.
  • Wonder Woman (2006): Diana takes off D'grth's head with her jet when the demonic entity attacks Washington DC, this does not kill him or stop him talking however.
  • Wonder Woman (2011): Artemis kills Lennox by tearing off his head, which she then presents to his surviving demi-god siblings with a taunt.
• X-23: X-23 wordlessly beheads a pimp she catches beating a prostitute in her self-titled one-shot. As her claws are coated in adamantium, she has little trouble slicing through his neck in one blow.
• Get Jiro!: Jiro is introduced beheading a customer for his lack of sushi etiquette and asking for a california roll. This is apparently a regular occurrence.

Fairy Tales

• In "The Death of Koschei the Deathless", Baba Yaga tells Prince Ivan she will cut his head off if he fails to take good care of her mares.
• "How Jack Sought The Golden Apples": When the two older princes convince him that Jack tried to poison him, the king orders the executioner to cut off Jack's head. However, the executioner takes pity on Jack and lets him go.
• At the end of "Maid Maleen", the villainess attempts to get Maleen beheaded; instead, her treachery is discovered and her head is cut off.
• In "The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples", the mountain's old witch warns the prince she will cut his head off if he fails to take care of her mare properly.
• In Asbjørnsen and Moe's tale "The Old Dame and her Hen", the troll rips the older sisters' heads off because they turned him down, and he tears a goat's head off because the animal annoyed him.
• In "The Troll's Daughter", the titular character warns her suitor to be ready when her father calls his fish-self back, because if the troll catches him at the castle, he will cut his head off.

Fan Works

• 6 Times Ai Protected Her Groupmates and 1 Time They Protected Her: Ai, a zombie, removes her own head to scare off a pair of men harassing her and her friend Yugiri.
• Advice and Trust: In Chapter 7, Zeruel beheads Unit 00 with a single blow of its arm-whips.
• Always Visible: Interestingly shown in Galbraith's nightmare, where doctor Baselard blows off the head of Schaeymoure's wooden mannequin.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged naturally lampshades this by having Vegeta throw a dog bone to any heads that he decapitated.
  Android #15: Did you just throw a motherfucking dog-.
• Evangelion 303: When Unit 04 crashed, Jessika got decapitated in the explosion.
• Queen of All Oni: Hiruzen of the Shadowkhan was killed this way by Tarakudo in the past.
• Thousand Shinji: In this setting Asuka is a Khornate berserker. In battle, she hacks her enemies' heads off to offer them up to Khorne, God of War. Sometimes Shinji cuts an enemy's head off after defeating it to give it to Asuka as a present.
• From Unfamiliar:
  Louise: Alex, be a dear and remove Lord Mott's head from his shoulders.
• In Retro Chill, Rupert threatens Lenny with this if he starts freaking out about the ghost again.
• In The Immortal Game: This is how Twilight kills Big Bad Titan, after depowered him from mighty Physical God alicorn to a mere mortal.
  • This also happens in a flashback which features a knight named Valiant presents Astor Coruscare (Twilight's Famous Ancestor) with the head of one of the most powerful dragons to ever live as an engagement gift. Sadly, the battle happens offscreen.
• Fire Emblem Awakening: Invisible Ties: In Chapter 15, this is how Chrom slays Gangrel.
• The pirate captain in the Golden Age series has the pirate ringleader killed this way for disobeying orders. He then has the head thrown into the kids' cell.
• In the Pony POV Series, Silver Spoon's father was brainwashed by Discord into trying to do this to her. Discord's defeat saved her, but the experience still left the poor filly traumatized for awhile. In Dark World, where Discord won and that wasn't the case, she was killed this way though she was brought Back from the Dead by Queen Libra.
• Two Kim Possible fanfics (Midnight Savior and Nightmare) had Kim having nightmares of being beheaded by the Lorwardians. Both times have Kim waking up the moment the blade hits her neck.
• In Real Men Don't Make Sandwiches, Krillin observes that Vegeta seems to have made this into a habit. Doesn't stop the prince from literally knocking one poor jerk's head off during their ill-fated night out.
• Quicken: Emma beheads super-villain Cricket with a kukri after defeating her.
• In Dead Man Switch, Ron Stoppable gets beheaded in Lorwardia, which sets off a weapon to destroy the Lorwardian Star System as revenge for beheading Kim and forcing Earth to send them 15 teenage girls each year to be beheaded as a "tribute". But it turns out to be just Kim's nightmare.
• A non-sword example in A Mother's Love; having taken Connor from Holtz, Illyria kills the hunter by literally kicking his head off, with that single blow sending Holtz’s head flying out of sight as his body falls to the ground.
• Another non-sword example occurs in Smallville Glory, which sees Glory literally tear off Lana's head after Lana tried to control her with her own meteor power.
• In Rabbit of the Moon, Gascoigne beheads Bell with his axe the first time Bell encounters him. When Bell wakes up in the Hunter's Dream, he quickly clutches at his neck to see if his head is still attached.
• In To Belong, Cinderella was Charming's loyal maid who helped him escape after he kills his fiancee Belle and his brother John. Charming's sister Pocahontas has her killed for treason.
• The one-shot The Princess of Ev expands upon what happened in Ozma of Oz. It starts with Princess Langwidere's uncle chopping off her head at age seven and replacing it with a young maid's head. He kicks the maid down a well, however people can't die in Ev so she's still alive without her head. He continues chopping off other's heads and giving them to Langwidere. Eventually, she too gains a liking for stealing other people's heads.
• The Frozen (2013) fic In Pain And Blood ends with Elsa beheading her murderous son Aksel.
• In Chrysanthemums, the "traditional Unovan method of execution" is a public beheading. At least Opelucid City uses a blade made of a Haxorus' tusk.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Happens at least twice:
  • In Surprise Guest, How a Mukrezar dies, Killed Mid-Sentence:
    Mukrezar smirked "Just as I planned, you—" That was as far as he got before the Avatar’s two-handed sword cut off his words, along with his head.
  • From "Underworld Army Attack": How an Underworld dragon dies:
    Actions magically slowed, the dragon plummeted like a rock, unable to keep itself aloft. A moment before it struck the ground, the reaper blurred and leapt, swinging his scythe. The dragon's head separated from its neck before the giant body crashed, releasing a huge gout of hot blood. Rabixtrel landed on the corpse and screamed his triumph at the wavering soldiers.
• In the beginning of Golden Threads Tie Us, Severa eliminates a Risen by lopping his head off.
  Severa heard a slash beside her ear, sharp and distinct from the white noise of the rain. A feinted step to the left, then she pushed forward and drove the tip of her blade up into the Risen's exposed chest. She gasped for breath, heart pounding in her ears, and took a second of reprieve before whipping out a foot and sweeping the Risen off its feet, forcing her sword out of its torso and swinging at its neck.
  The severed head rolled to a stop, already covered in mud.
• Anachronism: In the past timeline, Gloria's Inteleon had its head torn off in a battle.
• The Nightmare House: Lynn Loud's nightmare involves accidentally punching her brother's head off.
• In Chapter 19 of Remnant Inferis: DOOM, the Doom Slayer kills Marlowe by using his hands to rip off his head (and much of his spinal column).
• In the Shazam! fanfiction Here There Be Monsters, Doctor Sivana intends to use his strength-augmenting disks to rip Captain Marvel's head from his shoulders.
• Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls: The Grand Fisher dies when Applejack, Sunset, and Rainbow Dash destroy his head with a Combination Attack. He's still standing after that so they think he's still alive, but he did indeed die.
  • According to Ember, this is the Lament's preferred way of killing.
• Queen of Shadows: This is how Kamisori kills Rosuto during the Battle of Tobe, using his razor-clawed hands in place of a sword.
• J-WITCH Series: In "The Shadow Eaters", Jade does this to Hak Foo. When Will comments on how hardcore this was, Jade counters that since Hak Foo is a Dark Chi Warrior, it doesn't matter, since that won't kill him.
• Ruby Pair: Zim and Tenn does this to Gabo Amebo after Minimoose has wiped out the rest of his gang. Being an amoeba, he survives it, but is left completely incapacitated.
• Re: My Hostage, Not Yours: During the climatic battle, Zim ultimately kills the Valkian Queen by ripping her head off with his bare hands.
• Horrortale: Dogaressa lops off a Royal Guard's head with her axe for insulting the competency of her deceased husband.
• Wernn, a gnome prisoner, gets decapitated by a guard’s axe during the jailbreak in Vow of Nudity.

Film — Animation

• Batman vs. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The fate of an unfortunate Arkham guard.
• Chicken Run: The fate of any chicken that no longer lays enough eggs is to have its head cut by an axe by Mrs. Tweedy. Poor Edwina meets this fate.
• Felidae: Poor Felicity is given this treatment by the killer.
• The Good Dinosaur: A particularly unfortunate and large bug gets hunted by Spot, who manages to rip its head off with his mouth.
• In Heavy Metal, Taarna's only genuine act of badassery is to decapitate three Mooks in a bar.
  • In one stroke. It's like a gory Three Stooges gag.
• Hercules has the titular hero try it on a hydra after being Eaten Alive, but of course more grow back as per the myth.
• Mulan shows that this happened to Fa Deng.
  Great Ancestor: (speaking to Mushu) You had your chance to protect the Fa family!
  Female Ancestor: Your misguidance led Fa Deng to disaster!
  Fa Deng: (carrying his head under his arm) Yeah. Thanks a lot.
• Sausage Party: The stoner loses control of Barry in his house and trips on a few things, which leads to an ornamental axe slicing his head off. Barry takes said head with him.
• In Turning Red, this almost happens to Tyler when Mei throws a dodgeball at him hard enough to create a sonic boom. Tyler screams, ducks and the ball instead gives him a Close-Call Haircut, hits a window and breaks a hole in it. If she had aimed a few inches lower, she would have decapitated him.

Film — Live-Action

• 21st Century Serial Killer: When Aaron can't bring himself to kill a woman in a car, Charles drags her out of it, and then saws her head off.
• The Made of Plasticine factor is subverted in 30 Days of Night where the shortest decapitation is two strokes. Normally three and quite messy.
• Astinos, one of the 300, goes out this way during a lull in the battle, which causes his father to go berserk on the Persians until he has to be dragged away by his comrades. This is also how Leonidas finishes off the Uber-Immortal later on in the movie.
• Abandoned Mine: When she and Ethan reach the office at the bottom of the mine, Laurie grabs a rat and bites its head off.
• In Accident Man, Mike decapitates Atal Zim with a single stroke of Jane's katana after deciding he is not worth the far more elaborate demise he originally had planned.
• In Alice in Murderland, Tiffany is murdered by being decapitated.
• Alien:
  • Prometheus: The first alien corpse the humans discover on LV-223 suffered this, getting his head decapitated by a giant door.
  • Alien: Covenant: Rosenthal is killed this way by a Neomorph.
• Alien 2: On Earth: While the spelunkers prepare to climb out of a hole, one of the creatures explodes from Jill's face and grabs Phil by the neck with its tentacles. Phil is then dragged upside down as the creature slices at his neck repeatedly until his head and part of his spine fall off.
• In the Bond-knockoff Angel With The Iron Fists, the main villainess has a descending mechanism in her lair, which she uses to dispose of subordinates who fail her by suddenly dropping above them and chewing their entire heads off.
• In the Apocalypse film series, those who refuse to take the Mark of the Beast when inside the Day of Wonders virtual reality program is subjected to a virtual beheading, or in some cases another form of death like a lethal snake bite, which causes the victim to die in reality.
• In Art of the Dead, Donna is decapitated during the battle between Dylan and Gina in the garage.
• In Avengers: Endgame, Thor kills Thanos this way at the start of the film, remarking that he went for the head this time.
• In Bad Kids Go to Hell, Dr. Day is decapitated by the tomahawk on the sculpture of the Indian battling the serpent.
• Billy Club (2013): While Danny is driving through the woods on a buggy to try to escape from Billy. Billy appears in front of him and swings his spiked bat, cutting off Danny's head with the retractable knife blade in the bat's top.
• Black Rain: Sato beheads Charlie with his sword while riding his motorcycle.
• Blood Widow: At the party at Laurie and Hugh's house, the killer decapitates two party-goers simultaneously once the power comes back on. She also decapitates Robert Wilson in front of his wife.
• In Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman, the Machine Gun Woman cuts the heads off Longara's hitmen to prove that she has killed them. Santiago is horrified when he sees her take an axe to their corpses.
• Seems to be the standard means of killing vampires in Byzantium as those that are killed during the story are decapitated.
• Carved (2018): At the end of the film, we see the severed head of the daughter of the family on the front porch, her face carved into a jack-o-lantern.
• Clawed: The Shadow Of Death is strong enough to be able to lop people's heads off with a single swipe of its claws.
• The Colony (2013): The cannibal leader is killed by Sam chopping his head off. From the jaw upwards.
• Thulsa Doom does this to Conan's mom in Conan the Barbarian (1982) after the raid on his home village that opens the movie. Conan himself returns the favor in the end, using two cuts in a "V" using the remains of his father's sword.
• In the Australian short film Confessions of a Headhunter (2000), detectives are apparently questioning a mad axe murderer. Turns out he's loping the heads off statues of Evil Colonialists as a political protest. The movie was inspired by the real life beheading of the statue of Yagan, an Aboriginal warrior whose head was cut off in the 19th Century and sent to England as a museum exhibit.
• Conjoined: While making out with Courtney, Alisa kills her by decapitating her. We don't see the murder, but we DO see Courtney's decapitated head and headless body.
• In Curse of the Headless Horseman, the Headless Horseman is a gunfighter who somehow lost his head. Possibly in a botched hanging, but this (like so much else in the movie) is never really explained.
• In one scene in Dawning of the Dead, a guy uses a fire extinguisher to knock a zombie's head off its shoulders.
• Deadtime Stories: Volume 1: In ''Valley of the Shadow", the entire expedition winds up beheaded with their heads mounted on sticks as a warning to other intruders.
• The death of Simon Phoenix, the Big Bad of Demolition Man, combines this trope with Kill It with Ice.
  John Spartan: Heads up!
• In Demon Knight, Brayker uses a machete to decapitate the possessed Uncle willy. Beacuse this does not destroy his eyes, the head and body keep functioning even they are no longer connected.
• Destroyer (1988): Susan, and later David, finds a severed head in the prison photocopier.
• In Doctor in Distress (1963), Sir Lancelot remarks he wants Tommy's head on a platter when he calls Iris and hears his voice instead, seeing him as a romantic threat.
• Dog Soldiers: When Joe sees Terry in the barn slowly being eaten alive by a werewolf, the werewolf in question severs Terry's neck and throws the head at Joe.
• In Doll Factory, Sheriff Barclay has his head sliced off with barbed wire by the dolls.
• Don't Look: After the killer drowns Sherri Baby, we see him on a dock holding a severed head.
• Joanie Fontaine is decapitated by the axe-wielding Axe-Crazy Groton in the opening scenes of Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Later, Dr. Durea is accidentally decapitated by his own guillotine.
• At least one one Vietnamese soldier has his head cut off (and several others lose limbs) when Sammo Hung unleashes his Machete Mayhem in Eastern Condors.
• In The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, the first woman the monster kidnaps is decapitated so by Cagliostro's cult so that Cagliostro can use her head in constructing his female creature.
• In Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain, Steve is decapitated when he runs into a length of Razor Floss strung between two trees while running from the Shape.
• Feeding Frenzy: Mr. Plinkett is killed when his reanimated wife breaks free of her cage and pulls his head off.
• Final Destination:
  • In the first Final Destination film, one of the characters was killed this way by an incoming sharp object caused by the train.
  • This happens to Nora Carpenter in Final Destination 2. Thanks to getting her hair caught in a man's prosthetic hook box, she gets her head trapped between elevator doors, the ceiling, and the elevator floor, and it chokes and slices her head off.
• Flavia the Heretic: When he sees Abraham being hugged by Flavia, Ahmed charges toward them on his horse and beheads Abraham with a single swipe of his Sinister Scimitar.
• The titular weapon of the Flying Guillotine kung fu movies, including Master of the Flying Guillotine, was a basket that was thrown and dropped upon someone's head. As the name would suggest, once the basket landed on someone's head, the chain was pulled, the blades would go to work, and it was Off With His Head!
  • This inspired an episode of MythBusters where Kari, Grant, and Tory competed to see which of them could design and build a real flying guillotine that worked like the one in the film.
  • A similar flying guillotine-style weapon shows up in Seven Swords, used by one of Fire-Wind's Lieutenants. The same villain who uses the weapon can be seen carrying half a dozen severed heads with him.
  • There is a spin-off film, The Dragon Missile, from the very same director of Flying Guilltine, featuring a pair of curved, boomerang-like Dragon Blades that can remove heads or limbs after being flung.
• Both Hans and his father are executed by being guillotined in Frankenstein Created Woman. Later, Christina murders Anton, Karl and Johann by cutting their heads off.
• In Fresh Meat, a blast from Gigi's shotgun takes off Ritchie's head and it lands in Rina's lap, looking up at her.
• Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th series has decapitated 10 or more of his victims in the series.
  • One notable instance is the triple decapitation of the paintball players in Part VI.
  • Most notably in Part VIII where he punches off Julius's head.
  • His mother was also killed this way in the original.
  • In Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy gets his head chopped off using Jason's machete.
• The Funhouse Massacre: A couple of examples.
  • One of the killers rips a guy's head off with just his bare hands.
  • A woman gets her head sawed off at one point.
• In Ghosts of Mars, the possessed miners like throwing sharpened metal disks at their enemies. Bashira Kincaid is decapitated with one during the climax. Commander Braddock disappears at one point early in the film, and Lieutenant Ballard later finds her head being mounted on a pike. It's not clear if she was actually killed by decapitation or merely decapitated after being killed.
• Godzilla:
  • In the 1974 film Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Godzilla managed to defeat his robotic counterpart by twisting its head off and making it explode. Odd, considering that Mechagodzilla's head was able to spin with no problem.
  • But in the 1975 sequel, Terror of Mechagodzilla, not only does this not work but the rays its exposed core begins firing at Godzilla actually get stronger!
  • Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah: King Ghidorah's middle head gets blown off in his defeat. It gets replaced by a metal head.
  • Godzilla: Final Wars: This seems to be the only way to disable Gigan, and Godzilla weakens Monster X when the latter transforms into Keizer Ghidorah by ripping off two of his heads.
  • Godzilla (2014): This is the female MUTO's fate after Godzilla melts her neck from the inside out with his radioactive breath and the rest of her body falls away from her head.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Ghidorah's left head Kevin (the poor bastard) gets brutally decapitated, courtesy of Godzilla during the underwater battle in Mexico. It even happens to him again in Boston when Burning Godzilla's Nuclear Pulse disintegrates both the right and left heads to ash.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Two counts. First, Kong does this to one of the Warbats posthumously and drinks the blood out of its skull. Then, Kong ends the Ghidorah-controlled Mechagodzilla by tearing off the head with his bare hands — it seems Mike Dougherty wasn't entirely joking when he said decapitation is a Running Gag where Ghidorah's left head is concerned (in some form or another).
• Gremlins: Billy decapitates a gremlin with a sword and kicks the severed head in the fireplace, and it screams as it's on fire. In the Darker and Edgier original script, Billy would have returned home to see his mother's head rolling down the stairs.
• The So Bad, It's Good wrestling film Grunt: The Wrestling Movie has this happen to a wrestler named Skull Crusher Johnson when his head is trapped in the ring ropes during a move. This causes an issue within the company, as Johnson was the champion, and they don't know what to do with the title - after all, he wasn't pinned, he didn't submit, and he obviously never said "I quit!" Finally, after several years, they realize he hasn't defended the title at all since his decapitation and strip him of the belt, leading to the championship tournament that forms the rest of the film.
• In the Halloween films, this happens off-screen in the fourth to an officer in a police station, is pulled off with one swing of a kitchen knife in Halloween: Resurrection, and the most gruesome example the series has to offer is in Halloween II (2009), where Michael saws a man's head off with a piece of broken glass. It's also how Laurie takes out Michael in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, but it got undone in the next movie so the franchise could continue.
• Hannibal Rising (2007). Hannibal is being raised by his aunt, the Lady Murasaki-Lecter, whose samurai ancestor was into collecting the heads of his enemies. When she's insulted by a local butcher, Hannibal cuts off his head with her sword and presents it to her. His aunt is not pleased, but when Hannibal is arrested for the crime she impales the head on the railings outside police headquarters while Hannibal is being interrogated inside. The police naturally assume they have the wrong man and let Hannibal go.
• The Final Battle between Henry and Akan in Hardcore Henry ends with Henry ripping out his own eye socket and using it to decapitate Akan.
• Owen Wilson's character in The Haunting (1999) is stunningly decapitated by the giant flue in the fireplace.
• In The Hazing, Professor Kapps causes Roy to be decapitated by a detour sign.
• Hazmat: Jacob cuts Gary's head off, and then throws it in view of the camera so the others in the control room can see it.
• In Headless Horseman, Headless makes all of his kills by decapitation as he needs to deliver the heads to Hell to keep his end of the bargian.
• A third violence-related theme in Hellboy (2019), lots of folks get forcefully relieved of their heads.
• Pinhead from the Hellraiser series would usually tear people apart with chained hooks (hooked chains?) but in the fourth movie, Hellraiser: Bloodline, he shot a bladed chain at a guy's neck. After the blade punctured the neck, it unfolded and on the reverse move decapitated the poor s.o.b. Have a nice day.
• Hereditary has a disturbing example with Charlie, a little girl, getting her head ripped off by a telephone pole. Her severed head shows up a few more times later in the film.
• The Hong Kong film Heroic Trio has a villain who has a chain weapon that cuts people's heads off in an almost identical manner Master of the Flying Guillotine to the point where it is probably a Shout-Out.
• A Hidden Life: Franz and other prisoners are put to death by guillotine.
• This is the only way to kill an Immortal in the Highlander series, any other damage is healed.
• Hitchhiker Massacre: The killer chops Tom's girlfriend's head off and stores it in an organ container.
• Happens surgically in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), when Humma Kavula takes one of Zaphod Beeblebrox's heads as collateral before their trip to Magrathea.
• The Hobbit:
  • At the Battle of Azanulbizar, as relayed in a flashback; Azog the Pale Orc beheaded Thrór and held it up for all to see, before throwing the head at Thorin's feet.
  • In An Unexpected Journey, one of the gargantuan stony giants has its head knocked off by a boulder flung by another such giant.
  • In The Desolation of Smaug, Legolas kills an orc by beheading him with two blades when the orc is mid-air.
• In Hobo with a Shotgun, Drake decapitates his brother Lloyd using a barbed wire noose attached to Slick and Ivan's car.
• In The Hollow, the Headless Horseman dispatches his victims by decapitating them with a cavalry sabre.
• In Horrors of the Black Museum, the killer uses a portable guillotine to decapitate Joan in her bed.
• Vincent uses his twin knives to decapitate Dalton after he falls over in House of Wax (2005).
• In Hudson Hawk, a villain with two blades hidden up his sleeves attacks the titular Hawk, who retaliates by making the man cut off his head.
• In The Ice Pirates, Maida takes a swipe at an attacker, then asks, in a solicitous tone, "Feeling better?" The bad guy appears to be about to nod...and then collapses in two unequal pieces.
• In Idle Hands, The Offspring's Dexter Holland gets decapitated.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: the temple protecting the Holy Grail opens with a death trap that decapitates one mook just off-camera and several more off-screen. Indy notes the clue that "only the penitent man will pass" and realizes, at the last second, that a penitent man would kneel before God, allowing him to pass unscathed.
• In the Cut: Beheading victims is the killer’s MO.
• Jeepers Creepers: The Creeper beheads a police officer with an axe while the man is driving a car.
• Jeepers Creepers 2: The Creeper traps a student with his wings and beheads him, leaving his body to exaggeratedly move around and flail his arms in the air for a few seconds before collapsing. The creeper then consumes the head in order to grow himself a new one.
• In the movie Johnny Mnemonic, the assassin was told to come back with Johnny's head, as it contained a cybernetic brain implant which had important information in it.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic Park III: The Spinosaurus appears to bite Nash's head off the second after its foot instantly crushes him to death.
  • Jurassic World: After flipping over and immobilizing an Ankylosaur, rather than attack her exposed underside, the Indominus Rex wraps her jaws around her head and bites. It's offscreen, however.
• Jurassic Prey: When Sparks finds Beach's body, he finds his head's been bitten off.
  • The dinosaur also bites the head off Sparks and Cutler's partner.
• Kate: This is how the climactic duel between Renji and Kijima is decided.
• O-Ren Ishii does this to Boss Tanaka for insulting her heritage in Kill Bill Volume 1.
  • The Bride also deals out several decapitations during the big battle with the Crazy 88.
  • Variation in the end: The Bride doesn't cut O-Ren's whole head off... but she scalps her by cutting off the top of it.
• Killer Party: During Goat Night, Vivia fakes her own decapitation with a guillotine. During the April Fools Party, the killer uses it to kill Albert for real.
• Killer/saurus: In the opening scene, one of the scientists goes into the printing room to check on the dinosaur, and is promptly attacked. Afterwards, her severed head flies out of the room.
• Trevor Nunn bookends his film Lady Jane with decapitations.
• Double subverted and Played for Laughs in Les Visiteurs: an English knight who fought the French king and Godefroy seemingly gets his head cut off, but it turns out he actually ducked under the armor's breastplate. He peeks his head out with a confident smirk and gets his head cut off for real for his trouble.
• In De Lift, a security guard gets his head stuck between the closed doors of the titular elevator, and then is decapitated by the elevator itself.
• In Lizzie Borden's Revenge, Lizzie decapitates Janice with a single swing of her axe.
• The Longest Nite has a couple of examples, one onscreen and one off. Tony, the triad informant, murders one of his bosses and hid his head in a duffel bag in order to frame his immediate rival, Sam for muder; and in the final shootout Tony gets his head sheared off by a sliding glass sheet.
• Happens several times in The Lord of the Rings movies:
  • Aragorn does this to Lurtz, the Uruk-Hai badass who killed Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring.
    • One of the Nazgûl does this to a Hobbit watchman, though the scene cuts away before the head is sheared off.
  • The Two Towers: Uglúk chops off Snaga's head when he won't stop trying to eat Merry and Pippin, and Aragorn decapitates an Orc in the Warg attack.
  • The Return of the King has three examples:
    • Éowyn chops the head off the Witch-King's Fell-Beast before facing him in person. It takes at least two strokes before the thing's head is severed.
    • In the extended edition, the nasty-looking orc general who survived everything the Battle of the Pelennor Fields had to offer and was chasing Éowyn around gets his other arm sliced off, two axes in his chest, and his head chopped off by Gimli and Aragorn. Just to make sure he's Deader than Dead.
    • Also in the extended edition, Aragorn does this to the Mouth of Sauron.
• In The Mad Magician, Gallico murders Ormond by using 'The Lady and the Buzzsaw' illusion to decapitate him.
• One character is decapitated in Madman when she tries to fix her car, and the killer jumps on the open hood she's being under. Another character has his head chopped off with an axe offscreen.
• When Mad Dog Morgan is shot by the police, the Big Bad Hanging Judge Cobham orders the doctor to remove the outlaw's head.
• In Madhouse (1974), Paul discovers that Ellen has been decapitated when he shakes her shoulder and her head falls off.
• In Magadheera, the battle between the warrior Kala Bhairava and the traitor Ranadev Billa ends with Bhairava shoving his sword through his opponent's face, and ripping Ranadev's entire head off from the neck. In the final scene 400 years later, the same sword was retrieved, and Ranadev's skull is still stuck in its blade, having being embedded on the spot for four centuries.
• This is how the corrupt attorney Jordan Kalfus dies in Man on Fire. Creasy finds his decapitated corpse floating in his pool, with a katana lying nearby.
• Martial Arts of Shaolin ends with the heroine, Sima-Yan, killing the Big Bad Lord He by decapitation, avenging her father's murder by the villain.
• The Matrix Revolutions has Neo decapitating an Agent Smith-possessed bad guy with a jack handle.
• The decapitation from 300 above is spoofed in Meet the Spartans when Captain's son is decapitated, and his headless body gives a "peace out" gesture before it falls.
• In The Midnight Meat Train, the killer takes out one victim by hitting him so hard with a meat tenderizer that his head goes flying across the train car. For added Narm, the camera cuts to the point of view of the victim's head.
• In Mohawk, Oak removes Yancy's head and leaves it staked on a stick for Allsopp to find.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The knight Bors has his head bitten off by the Rabbit of Caerbannog.
• In Most Likely to Die, The Graduate murders Bella by slashing her throat, then ripping her head off with his hands.
• The Mummy Trilogy:
  • In The Mummy (1999), Rick O'Connell decapitates a mummy, and it falls "dead" after the head spins for a bit. Then he decapitates another, and it starts juggling with the head, only falling "dead" after Rick hits the head towards the camera.
  • In The Mummy Returns, the only way to kill an Anubis Warrior is by taking off its head.
• In Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971), Marot murders Cesar by beheading with an axe.
• Napoléon (1927) starts during the Reign of Terror phase of The French Revolution, so of course the guillotine gets put to used — and a few of the politicians who advocated/led said reign of terror suffer this fate themselves. This was, of course, the case in Real Life as well.
• The same as above for Napoleon (2023).
• All of the victims in Night School (1981) are murdered by having being decapitated with a kukri.
• Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight: Ms. Iza stays behind to take on one of the twins to try and get Daniel's cellphone. Some time later, her head is thrown out of the basement entrance under the front steps of the house.
• Lula is introduced in Now You See Me 2 using a Rube Goldberg Device to fake her own decapitation.
• The death of the reporter Keith Jennings from The Omen (1976), one of Hollywood's very first onscreen decapitations, when a sheet of glass is launched from a truck in front of him and shears the guy's head off in horrific fashion. It's still considered by horror buffs to be one of the best deaths ever filmed.
• One Night in October: After Emma kills her stalker, she walks out of the room holding his severed bloody skull with still-attached hair in one hand, and his spine in the other.
• In Patrick Still Lives, Sheryl is decapitated by her car's electric window.
• Peppermint: Just before the attack on Riley North's family, Diego Garcia is shown taking a kukri to lop off the head of a would-be thief. The actual decapitation isn't depicted, just a big splash of blood on a nearby statue after showing the start of Garcia's swing.
• In The Phantom Ofthe Opera 1998, the rat catcher's dwarf assistant is decapitated by one of the blade's from the rat-hunting machine.
• In Pig Hunt, the cult leader decapitates one of the rednecks with a single stroke from his kukri.
• The titular antagonistic species in the Predator series decapitate their victims to collect their skulls and sometimes do so in combat, the most infamous instance being the death of King Willie in Predator 2.
  • Royce kills the lead Predator in Predators by decapitating him with a machete.
• The Princess (2022): How the Princess kills Julius.
• Pumpkins: Early in the movie, a guy who's out camping with his girlfriend gets out to take a leak. When he returns to the tent, the girl discovers, to her horror, he has no head.
• Rampage (2018): Near the end, Ralph gets his head eaten by Lizzie.
• Near the end of Akira Kurosawa's Ran, Kurogane decapitates Lady Kaede. Much blood spatter ensues.
• Redwood Massacre Annihilation: The Redwood killer does in Tom by lopping his head off with a single swing of his blade.
  • At the end, Laura kills the Redwood killer by chopping his head off.
• Return of the Scarecrow: The scarecrow kills Claire in Jolene's story by ripping Clare's head off with its bare hands.
• In Ripper: Letter from Hell, Chantel is decapitated by a buzzsaw during the Lumber Mill Mayhem.
• Severance (2006): Two characters discuss decapitation as a possible death and how long the head can remain aware even after it's severed. Guess how one of them dies. No, go on, guess...
• In Showdown in Little Tokyo, Yakuza boss Yoshida does this to Angel with his katana in a ruthless Kick the Dog moment for warning Tanaka, his previous victim, about him behind his back.
• In Shredder Orpheus, when Orpheus fails the rigged game show, the Furies decapitate him with a chainsaw as punishment.
• In Slashers, Dr. Ripper cuts off Brenda's head using his oversized surgical shears.
• The Sleepaway Camp movies have this happen in every film.
  Angela: It seems every year I'm at camp someone loses their head.
  • The first film has it happen to Paul off-screen.
  • The second film has it happen to Sean.
  • The third film, this happens to Arab, when sticking her head out of the tent.
• Obviously, almost every single death in Sleepy Hollow (1999), due to the Headless Horseman's head fixation.
  • As well as Headless Horseman, which unleashes him on the modern-day south, including one incredibly badass kill that has him leaping over a car and taking the driver's head off on the way.
• In Sleepy Hollow High, the Headless Horseman kills all of his victims by decapitating them with a sword.
• In the climax of Speed Jack Traven pushes Howard Payne against a stop light while on top of a speeding subway train causing the fixture to knock his head off his body.
• Starship Troopers: The flying Hopper Bugs are able to swoop down and decapitate humans with their claws mid-flight. At least two unfortunate troopers meet their demise this way.
• Star Trek Beyond features a starship version when Krall's swarm attack slices through the neck of the Enterprise, separating the saucer from the stardrive section.
• This trope is not uncommon in Star Wars thanks to the iconic Laser Blade weapon, the lightsaber.
  • Anakin literally disarms Count Dooku in Episode III and takes his lightsaber, scissoring the twin blades between Dooku's neck. Anakin is hesitant to kill him, but when Palpatine urges him to, he snips Dooku's head off with the joined blades.
  • Mace Windu kills off Jango Fett in Episode II this way.
  • Luke's fight with the shadow form of Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.
  • Also in Revenge of the Sith Yoda beheads Commander Gree and a clone scout trooper sent to assassinate him, and Mace Windu attempts to do this to Darth Sidious but is prevented (ironically, considering what he did to Count Dooku) by Anakin.
  • Many, many droids get beheaded throughout the prequel movies since the Jedi don't have the same compunctions about destroying them versus killing a sentient being.
  • At least one of the Praetorian Guard gets beheaded by Kylo Ren after they attack him and Rey in The Last Jedi.
• The movie Street Trash has an exceptionally bizarre decapitation during the climax. The target's head is blown off by a fire extinguisher launched like a rocket, and survives just long enough to look up a woman's skirt and leer approvingly.
• Swamp Shark: While Deputy Cooper is spying on some kids making out, the shark leaps out of the water and bited his head off mid-jump.
• The martial arts movie Ten Tigers From Kwangtung notably ends with the main villain's head being kicked clean off his shoulders. Said villain is hanging from the ceiling by the legs, so when his head goes off it predictably comes with a waterfall of blood.
• Terminator:
  • Terminator Salvation: Marcus Wright rips the prototype T-800's head off to defeat it.
  • Terminator Genisys: Kyle ends up killing the T-800 sent to 1984 by shooting its head off with the .50 caliber rifle.
• Terror Birds: The titular birds kill a few people over the course of the movie by biting their heads off.
• The Theatre Bizarre: In "Sweets", the Evil Chefs cut off Greg's head before they butcher him for the cannibal feast.
• The Third Saturday In October Part V: Jack Harding kills PJ's father by simply yanking his head right off his body while still wearing his football helmet.
• In 13 Sins, a group of motorcyclists are decapitated (and lose limbs) to a Razor Floss steel cable stretched across the road.
• Timber Falls: During the final escape, Sheryl decapitates Ida with a sickle.
• Torture Garden: The evil cat in "Enoch" demands that the heads of the victims his servants kill for him have their heads removed. When Colin can no longer kill people because he is imprisoned, the cat visits him in his cell. When the constable next checks on him, Colin headless corpse is lying on his bunk.
• Lord DeVere is executed this way at the beginning of Tower of London.
• Transformers Film Series:
  • In Transformers (2007), Optimus Prime dispatches Bonecrusher by stabbing him through the neck and wrenching his head from his body.
  • Ramjet is killed this way in Reign of Starscream #5. Right after mocking the Autobot he was trying to kill for "not using his head", he's beheaded by Crosshairs.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen:
    • Optimus doesn't just chop the Fallen's head off, he tears it off. It's not a nice, clean cut either. He only rips his face off, and you can see the Fallen vomiting up his equivalent of blood as he dies. Beware the Nice Ones, indeed.
    • Optimus also rips Grindor's head in two.
    • Jetfire finishes off Mixmaster this way after bisecting him.
  • Optimus sure likes this, as evidenced in Dark of the Moon by Megatron's head, lying some distance from his body with an axe lodged in it.
  • In Age of Extinction, Bumblebee finishes off Stinger this way.
  • In The Last Knight, Optimus kills all five Infernocons in one fell swoop by decapitating them after they separate from Infernocus, asking them did they forget who he is when they dare charge at him. Onslaught is decapitated by Drift, who remarks "His fat head!" Mohawk finds his comrade's head before the same fate befalls him too when Bumblebee shoots him, and later Nitro Zeus as well.
• In The Tripper, the killer decapitates the old Mountain Man Wilson with a single stroke of his axe.
• Triassic World: When things start to go downhill, it's kicked off by a security guard trying to warn everyone before getting his head bitten off by a dinosaur.
• The Twilight Saga: The only way to dispose of vampires is to decapitate them and burn their bodies. While this happens sparingly in the books (Bella, the narrator, tends to black out or run away when faced with danger), the films have no such limitations. Every single film has at least one character getting decapitated, reaching its culmination in Alice's vision of the Cullen vs. Volturi battle in Breaking Dawn - Part 2, where dozens of vampires, including some of the good guys, are shown decapitated onscreen.
• The Undertaker: At the end of the movie, Roscoe is revealed to have decapitated Mandy when he holds up her severed head.
• Under the Bed: The monster kills one of the Evans boys by ripping his head off with its bare hands.
• Happens several times in the Underworld (2003) series.
  • The most well-known example is somewhat of a variation, as Selene doesn't quite locate Viktor's neck with her sword and instead cuts his head in half to kill him.
  • William in the sequel meets a similar fate to Victor, losing the top half of his head to Michael rather suddenly.
• Valentine: After Dorothy's party, Kate finds the head of Detective Vaughn floating in the fishpond.
• In Vampires vs. Zombies, decapitation is one certain way to kill a vampire. The General takes Tessa's head off with an axe, while Travis uses a saw to cut off the head of the Jeep driver.
• Vamps: Cisserus beheads and dismembers one of her victims fairly early in the film. Later she's killed by beheading herself.
• Warcraft (2016):
  • Large amounts of people and orcs are killed either by beheading or having the skull crushed. The probability of the latter rises exponentially whenever Orgrim is on screen.
  • To stop Medivh's golem from finishing Portal incantation, Lothar cuts its head off, although this doesn't kill the thing.
• The Windmill Massacre: The Miller kills Douglas by looping a rope around his neck and then attaching one end to one of the windmill's vanes and holding on to the other. As the vane turns, the rope tightens till his head pops off.
• In Wishcraft, the killer subjects Cody to a Sand Necktie and then knocks his head off with a bowling ball.
• Several people are quite headless by the end of The Wolfman (2010).
• Partly done to the Blank version of Oliver Chamberlian in The World's End.
• Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings:
  • Claire is decapitated by the hillbillies' wire noose.
  • Sara and Kenia are beheaded with razor wire the cannibals spread as a trap when they attempt to leave on a snowmobile.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine; the title character talks about wanting to decapitate his big brother, but only end up beheading "Weapon XI" (Deadpool, in this version an experimented up Wade Wilson).
  • In The Wolverine: Logan uses one of the Silver Samurai's own swords against him, slicing the head off with it. Unfortunately that doesn't stop it.
    • Yukio manages to snag Viper with a wire then ties it to an elevator, dragging her into it. A rigging coming down the shaft tags her in the head as she's being pulled up and...yeah.
  • Iceman by a Sentinel during the first battle of X-Men: Days of Future Past. Two Cosmic Retcons later, he's back alive.
  • Deadpool (2016): Wade takes a few heads with his katanas. One unlucky motorcycle mook loses his head to his own motorcycle's broken drive chain in the horrific crash in the opening fight. In the big final fight, Deadpool beheads one mook, then soccer-kicks the head into another mook's face. He uses it afterwards to dot the "i" of "Francis".
• Yakuza Apocalypse: After beating Kamiura in combat, Mad Dog grabs his head and twists it 360 degrees... twice, before finally ripping it off.

Literature

• Many know the trope name from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which the Queen of Hearts shouts "Off with his head!" and "Off with her head!" and "Off with their heads!" to order the execution of almost everyone at the croquet game. It isn't until the Tim Burton version that the Queen is actually seen to have gone through with it, though. Every other time, victims were pardoned behind her back by the King.
  The Gryphon: It's all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know.
• Animorphs: Visser Three's preferred method of execution, though he's a fan of torture as well.
• Anita Blake often requests this (if she can't do it herself) for crazy old/powerful vampires/shapeshifters to ensure they're Deader than Dead.
• Area 51:
  • A government official is assassinated through being shot in the head with a .50 caliber bullet. That alone destroys his head overall-then the assassin fires into his head again, to completely destroy it.
  • Al-Iblis has Saddam Hussein killed by one of his top military advisors, who shoots him repeatedly in the head until there's nothing left (changed to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the e-book, which updated things).
  • Airlia can only be killed with certainty by having their head severed or brain itself destroyed, so this happens multiple times.
• In Armageddon Force, this is how the main villain is dispatched; he gets punched so hard (the arm is cybernetic) that his head flies off.
• The Barbarian and the Sorceress: This is how Barnabus is killed.
• Bazil Broketail:
  • Nesessitas' final fate, courtesy of Puxdool the troll.
  • Bazil kills Gog Zagozt by decapitating him.
• This is the fate of Prince Baird at the end of the third Beka Cooper book for his role as the willing figurehead of the conspiracy against his brother King Roger. (For the record, Baird got off lightly. Everyone else was drawn and quartered.)
• In "Beyond the Black River", Zogar Sag has his enemies decapitated so their heads can be offered on an altar.
• "The Black Velvet Ribbon" ends with a man snipping the ribbon his wife always wears and her head tumbling to the floor, repeating the warning she gave him about the ribbon.
• Bloody Jack: Jacky has a date with Madame Guillotine in My Bonny Light Horseman.
• The Boundless: Near the end of the book, Brogan is caught by the now-escaped Goliath, who rips his head off his shoulders and sticks it on a tree.
• In the third book of the Christ Clone Trilogy, the main protagonist Decker Hawthorne gets his head lopped off by The Antichrist with a sword.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa:
  • Joslyn kills Ty'Tsana by beheading her with a single swordstroke.
  • Later, she also kills the Prince of Shadows this way as well, with Tasia's help.
  • The deathless king is also killed by Joslyn this way, again with help from Tasia.
• Ciaphas Cain: In Duty Calls, Ciaphas uses his chainsword to decapitate a psyker cultist who was trying to assassinate him.
• Cobalt Blue: The Fury of Russia loves doing this to those he's defeated... using his bare hands.
• Dark Shores: Basically, the surest way to kill a corrupted is to cut its head, as the life they have stolen from others allows them to heal even fatal injuries, like being spiked with arrows. Slicing the spine or crashing the skull also works in some cases.
• Daughter of the Sun: Orsina beheads Aelia's human form to banish her and make her regenerate another, which normally would take a very long time.
• Discworld:
  • In Thief of Time, it's revealed that yetis can survive this (or, presumably, other causes of death, but this is the specific method used to demonstrate the ability) by, basically, Save Scumming. Becomes a Chekhov's Gun when Lu-Tze, in desperate gambit, uses it to survive Mr White beheading him. This made the Auditors shifted their attention to Unity long enough for Lu-Tze to Save Scum back and kills Mr White with chocolate.
  • Referenced in Reaper Man, when the narration brings up the negotiations between Vetinari and Unseen University about whether or not the latter will pay taxes. The appropriate passage reads:
    The wizards argued that you couldn't put a tax on knowledge. Vetinari said that yes you could, and it was two hundred dollars per capita. If per capita was a problem, de capita could be arranged.
• The Dresden Files has this as the default punishment for breaking the laws of magic. Wardens typically carry a Cool Sword for this purpose, since even they are beholden to the law that Thou Shalt Not Kill Using Magic.
• In The Executioner, when The Mafia boss says, "Bring me his head", he often means it literally. Bolan has to decapitate a man while posing as a Black Ace, whilst in another novel to stop the notorious One-Man Army from killing them all The Dragon hands over the heads of his Mafia bosses by floating them across a lake to Bolan in a boat.
• Lady Midday from Experimental Film appears to laborers at exactly noon, and decapitates anyone who isn't perfectly respectful.
• Very common in Fengshen Yanyi, were defeated generals are beheaded so that their heads may be exposed for all to see. There are a few cases where the receiver though resist the attempt due to his supernatural powers, such as Ma Shan (he's actually a flaming lampwick), Yu Yuan (he's just that though), Hu Lei (can revive himself somehow), Yuan Hong (can regrow a new head istantly) and Daji herself (she's so beautiful she charms any executioner).
• Aulis of The First Dwarf King kills the Demon Lord by chopping off all three of the latter's heads at once.
• Forest Kingdom:
  • In Book 2 (Blood and Honor), the skeleton monster Bloody Bones is dispatched via decapitation with an anti-magic axe. Being a Transient Being, this won't kill him permanently, but it's enough to stop him for the time being.
  • In Book 4 (Beyond the Blue Moon), the crime boss St. Christophe is finished off this way.
• "The Fur Collar" ends with the heroine reaching out into the darkness and touching the fur collar of her friend's bathrobe...only to find that there's now nothing above it.
• Gaunt's Ghosts:
  • In First & Only, this is how the Inquisitor Heldane deals with the doctor who objects to his coming into the infirmary; it is told from the POV of the doctor, who sees his own boots and only then realizes that he lost his head.
  • In Traitor General, Uexkull kills the local commander this way when he fails to search for Gaunt and his men as a top priority.
• In Grey Knights, Justicar Tancred finishes off the fallen Saint Evisser reanimated by lopping his head off.
• Harry Potter:
  • Nearly Headless Nick is decapitated, but his head stays attached to his body by some remaining flesh and remains that way in his ghostly form.
  • There are also properly decapitated ghosts that can throw their heads around at will and have formed "The Headless Hunt" which refuses to allow Nick to join.
  • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Hagrid reveals that Karkus, the gurg of the giants who was sympathetic to the Order's cause, was decapitated and replaced by a usurper with Death Eater ties.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Neville chops off Nagini's head with the sword of Gryffindor. After pulling it out of the flaming Sorting Hat.
• In Isabel Allende's "The House Of Spirits", Clara's mother Nívea has her head cut off when she and her husband Severo perish in a crash car and a metal shard beheads her. Her head goes flying and isn't found until much, much later, when Clara is about to give birth to Blanca: she gets a vision of said head and goes searching for it with Esteban and some servants.
• James Bond:
  • The dying leader of SPECTRE in Nobody Lives for Ever organizes a literal headhunt for Bond, as the person who manages to kill him is required to bring his head to the leader on a silver charger to claim his prize of ten million Swiss francs.
  • A backstory detail in Never Send Flowers concerns of a Serial Killer who believed that an Egyptian Goddess spoke to him, and decapitated four women on her orders.
  • After being bested in a duel, the eponymous villain in The Man with the Red Tattoo commits Seppuku, and his friend finishes the ritual by decapitating him.
  • As Bond and fellow agent try to The Dragon out of a train window in Devil May Care, they suddenly enter a tunnel, and he ends up decapitated.
• Land of Oz:
  • In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, our heroes are beset by a pack of vicious wolves. The Tin Woodsman swings his axe and decapitates one wolf, then decapitates another with a single axe swing, then another, then another; every swing of his axe separated a wolf's head from its shoulders. By the time he was done, there was a great big pile of headless wolf bodies lying at his feet.
  • Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz has a unique non-fatal example. As she collects heads to swap with her own on certain days to suit her mood which comes with different personalities, and she attempts to force Dorothy to trade her head for one she doesn't mind letting go from her collection (which is a case of Blue-and-Orange Morality, as the Princess thinks it is a perfectly fair and equitable deal — even generous, and simply can't understand why Dorothy objects).
• In the Left Behind book series, this is done through guillotines (referred to as "loyalty enforcement facilitators") on the general populace to enforce the law of taking the "mark of loyalty" during the Tribulation.
• The Headless Horseman in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was a Hessian trooper who was decapitated by a cannonball, and they were unable to find his head.
• "Let's Get Together": When Lynn shoots Breckenridge, he hits the neck, causing The Mole's head to roll around on the floor.
• This is a favorite kind of death in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, especially as the Steel Ministry loves to dual-wield obsidian axes. There are the mass executions in The Final Empire, the first Steel Minister seen killed, and most brutally to the reader Elend Venture, possibly intentionally on his part at the climax of The Hero of Ages. Another memorable example is Elend killing his former best friend Jastes this way, the first person he ever kills.
• In Mockingjay, Finnick Odair is killed by having his head bitten off by giant white lizard mutts.
• An Outcast in Another World: This is how Rob kills his first two people. He looks away from the second one, but that doesn't help his mental state much.
• In The Paladin, Shoka and Taizu are good enough with a sword to decapitate with seeming ease.
• This is Mary Crane's ultimate fate in Psycho.
• A Poison Dark and Drowning: Queen Mab kills Whitechurch by cutting his head off with a sword.
• The Reluctant King: The city state of Xylar operates under an odd custom where after five years each of their kings is publicly beheaded. At that point, his head is thrown into the crowd, with whoever catches this then becoming their next king. However, they have to suffer the same fate once their own five years are up. Jorian however escaped.
• In Revolting Rhymes, the story of Cinderella has one of the ugly stepsisters replace the glass slipper with one of her own shoes, so it naturally fits. Horrified at the thought of marrying someone so ugly and obnoxious, the Prince cuts the ugly stepsister's head off in one blow, then does the same to the other sister when she offers to try on the shoe. Cinderella, horrified that her "Prince Charming" chops people's heads off at the slightest provocation, decides to wash her hands of the whole thing and gets the Fairy Godmother to set her up with a humble jam-maker instead.
• Merlin does this several times in the Safehold novels. Often with comments by observers on the fact that normal people aren't physically capable of cutting people's heads off with a single swing. Of course, Merlin is a PICA with a battle steel katana, not a normal person.
• The Saga of the Jomsvikings: After the Battle of Hjorunga Bay, seventy Jomsvikings who have failed to get away are taken prisoner by the Norwegians, and are set to be executed by beheading. One by one, ten Vikings get decapitated until their death-defiance impresses the captors sufficiently they pardon the rest.
• Robert Olen Butler's book Severance consists entirely of vignettes presenting the imagined last thoughts of decapitation victims throughout history (including a few non-humans and the occasional fictional character). Very weird, quite fascinating.
• A Shadow Bright and Burning: When On-Tez the Vulture Lady, one of the seven Ancients released into the world years ago, sends one of her ravens (a human Familiar) to London, one of its first attacks tears a man's head off.
• Shadow of the Conqueror:
  • After Dayless conquered Hamahra and executed the queen, her young daughter swore to subject him to a Cruel and Unusual Death for his treason. Dayless responded by lopping her head off.
  • After destroying Daybreak, Dayless's Archknight advisor turned on him and attacked. Knowing that some Archknights possess a powerful Healing Factor, Dayless went for the head.
  • A beggar tries to rob and murder Daylen in an alleyway, which ends with said beggar's severed head pinned to a wall with a dagger.
  • When Daylen and Lyrah catch two men in the act of Attempted Rape, she cuts both their heads off with blinding speed. This might have been a mercy, as Daylen castrated the last man he caught in such a situation.
  • Daylen's use of Imperious and Lyrah's massive Super-Strength means that any fight either of them is in is likely to involve a decapitation or two, alongside their targets being Half the Man He Used to Be.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Green Knight dares anyone to chop his head off with his own battle-axe. Sir Gawain chops off the Green Knight's head, only to have the Green Knight pick his own head up, and place it back upon his shoulders.
• Somewhat subverted in Snow Crash. While Hiro does actually manage to decapitate someone with his katana, he muses to himself how difficult it is to actually kill someone in this manner, and considers himself lucky that he managed it rather than getting his sword lodged in his victim's vertebrae.
• Last two sentences of Someone Is Bleeding by Richard Matheson read as follows:
  And when they took away the thing that Peggy was fondling in her lap she said they mustn’t. She said they had to let her keep his head because she loved the man.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • The first book, A Game of Thrones, has the rather shocking end of the road for Ned Stark, firmly planting the Anyone Can Die aspect of the series. Also, the fate of several lesser characters declared traitors by the crown, including some poor, innocent dwarfs.
  • Also in the first book, Gregor Clegane decapitates his own horse during the tourney scene.
  • The entire series grew from George R. R. Martin's vision of a man being beheaded whilst a young boy watched. He wrote the scene and found it expanding into a second chapter and then a third. Thus, the first book was born.
  • However, the only "clean" decapitations are done with Valyrian steel swords, or headsman's axes designed for this very purpose. Decapitations using other weapons are usually done in three or more strokes.
• So This is Ever After: Arek slew the Vile One this way, though it's harder than he expected with his sword having been pretty dull.
• Split Heirs: Gorgarians tend to use beheading as their go-to killing method.
• In Starfleet Corps of Engineers, Soloman's Bynar partner is decapitated by a flying Insectoid Alien's scythe-like appendage. Rather than return to Bynar to be paired with another of his kind, Soloman chooses to stay with the ship, trying to learn to be a singular being.
• Charles de Lint's novel Svaha has at least two scenes where characters (one of them the Big Bad) get decapitated in fairly gory detail.
• The Sunne in Splendour: The expansive novel takes place during The War of the Roses, so there's many beheadings, with more than one major character meeting his end this way. Early on, a young Francis Lovell witnesses an execution and becomes sick. He's consoled and then befriended by a young Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
• Swan's Braid & Other Tales of Terizan: In "Swan's Braid" Swan beheaded the bandits whom she tracked down with her band. Later she also wants to behead Councilor Saladaz after discovering he aided them. He is beheaded with two other Councilors for this later.
• Villains by Necessity: This turns out to be one of the only ways someone can be killed permanently as otherwise magical resurrection could be done. Sam kills Mizzamir in this manner near the end.
• Wolf Hall is about the reign of Henry VIII through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, so. The beheadings of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher occur in the first book. The second, Bring Up the Bodies, has the famed execution of Anne Boleyn carried out by a specialist from France to ensure she gets a Clean Cut. Her brother was not so lucky; at the block, it took three attempts by the executioner and the other four men accused of being her lovers in one.
• Vorkosigan Saga: In Barrayar, Cordelia has Bothari execute the pretender Vordarian this way. She tops it off by showing the severed head to his generals — in a shopping bag. The woman has style.
  Good God, woman, where have you been?
  Shopping.

Live-Action TV

• During the final episode of 24: Live Another Day, Jack decapitates Cheng Zhi in revenge for Audrey's death.
• Happens many, many times in 1000 Ways to Die:
  • "D. U. Die": A drunken motorist suffering from a bought of car-sickness sticks his head out the window to puke...and is decapitated by a mailbox, to the horror of his equally drunken passenger.
  • "Road Killed": A hippie chick going to a hemp convention runs over a raccoon, and tries to use CPR on it. Tilting her head up to cough, she has her head ripped off by the bumper of an incoming vehicle.
  • "Tongue-Tied": Two teens driving separate cars lean out the window to kiss, only to get decapitated by a forklift in the road
  • "Golden Die-Angle": A Laotian drug lord chasing after thieves end up decapitated by the very barbed wire fence he used as a security measure
  • "Kung Pao Pow!!!": A greedy crematorium worker steals the gold teeth from a corpse said to be of a man who died from getting struck by lightning strike. He wasn't killed from lighting, the man was actually killed when a weather rocket launched in order to bring rain to drought-damaged land refuse to detonate, fell back to Earth, and struck him in the chest. When the corpse was put in the furnace, the rocket's warhead ignited and blew the hatch off with enough force to decapitate the worker.
  • "Odds Are You're Dead": A loan shark cuts the hydraulic line on a scissor lift, which collapses onto his neck and decapitates him
  • "Miss-Ur Head": A criminal in early 20th century France is executed by the guillotine, with a doctor in attendance to his execution to study the effects of a freshly lopped-off head to prove that consciousness is maintained briefly after beheading, thus making the guillotine an inhumane form of capital punishment. (See Real Life below)
  • "Withdrawn": A bank robber (obviously based on Brian Wells) wears a C4 bomb collar around his neck to convince the tellers and cops that he was being forced to commit the heist. When one freaked-out teller deactivates her car alarm to get away from the madness, she unknowingly activates the collar's remote blast cap (which was on the same frequency as her alarm remote), causing it to explode and take the robber's head clean off. Well, not exactly clean, but you get the picture...
• In American Horror Story: Freak Show, this is the postmortem fate of Ethel, Salty, the curator of the American Morbidity Museum, and several of Twisty's victims.
• Blackadder:
  • In the first episode of The Black Adder, Edmund decapitates someone trying to steal his horse at the Battle of Bosworth Field. When he and Baldrick examine the head he's just cut off: "Oooh dear, Richard the Third."
  • In the Blackadder II episode "Head", Edmund is made Lord Executioner, Baldrick becomes the man with the axe and hilarity ensues. We don't see the actual beheadings, although we do see one of the heads.
• The Boys (2019): A security guard's head is blasted off by the Eye Beams of a superpowered baby held by Billy Butcher. Notably, there's no clean cauterization of the wound as usually expected with beam wounds, and instead there's thick gore from both the neck stump and the separated head.
• Although the camera cuts away before we see the chainsaw hit flesh, Gordon Brittas is stated to have accidentally done this to a South American gangster in one episode of The Brittas Empire.
• Breaking Bad: The Twins kill Tortuga by chopping his head off with their trademarked axe. Then they stuff it full of explosives, mount it on a live tortoise, and send at the investigating DEA agents. Tortuga isn't the only one who ends up losing body parts... The two attempt to kill Hank in the same way as the coup de gras instead of just shooting him, but this proves to be their undoing, because it gives Hank just enough time to reload his gun and turn the tables on them.
• Buffyverse. The title characters of Buffy and Angel occasionally decapitate their enemies. It's one of the ways to kill a vampire along with stakes, fire and sunlight, and it's the second most often used method to kill demons after the Neck Snap.
  Adam: You fear the cross. The sun. Fire. And, oh yes... (Adam pulls a vampire's head off through sheer strength) I believe decapitation is a problem as well.
  • How Xander kills Toru.
  • How Glory deactivates the Buffybot until the Scoobies rebuild her.
• Carnival Row: The method of execution in the Burgue turns out to be beheading with a large mechanical guillotine. It's able to behead multiple condemned prisoners at once, as shown in the Season 2 opener.
• Cold Squad: In "Jane Klosky", the squad reopen the case of a nurse who was beaten to death with a strap and decapitated. When they discover another cold case of a nurse who was partially decapitated, they worry they might be dealing with an undiscovered Serial Killer. They're not, but only because someone else killed the killer before he could claim a third victim.
• The Collector: One woman made a Deal with the Devil the moment she was beheaded. Also happened to Morgan once. He got better.
• Creepshow: In "Public Television Of The Dead" Claudia beheads Bookberry after she's converted to a Deadite (though her head keeps talking afterward, due to being undead).
• The CSI-verse franchise had had a few episodes in which at least one Body of the Week dies via decapitation:
  • CSI:
    • "A la Cart": A go-kart racer loses his head on a road outside of Vegas. Near the end, the CSIs test their theory on a dummy, which is proven correct. As it turns out, the guy was racing a rival on a road at night. The rival passed a semi, causing the truck to swerve. One of the truck's tires burst and the rubber was flung backward at over 100 miles per hour... right at the head of the unfortunate victim, ripping it clean off.^note Worth noting, the "Big Rig Myths" episode original Mythbusters, originally aired June 6, 2007, performed a similar test. "A la Cart" first aired less than four months later.
    • "Blood Moon": At the end of a "vampire and werewolf" convention, one of the attendees masquerading as a vampire is beheaded the night after its festivities end.
    • "Jackpot": The CSIs looking in the death of a young man upon receiving his severed head. When his body is discovered in a forest in Jackpot, Nevada, it's discovered that he was buried up to his neck, his cheek was cut with a blade and was decapitated by predatory animals drawn to the scent of his blood.
    • "Last Victim Standing": A pro poker player found decapitated near the end of the episode.
    • "Way to Go": An actor who recreates battles from The American Civil War is found headless alongside railroad tracks.
  • CSI: Miami:
    • "High Octane": Young adults perform dangerous automobile stunts in a beach parking lot at the start of the episode. One driver is sitting on the roof of his car as he uses his feet to maneuver the steering wheel when an electrical wire (connected to a string of lights) cuts clean through his neck at 40 miles per hour. It turns out that a saboteur installed a device in his car that could remotely control the its hydraulics, then activated it as the car approached the wire.
  • CSI: NY:
    • "Corporate Warriors": One case investigates a businessman who was beheaded using a katana swung with such force that the severed head remained balanced on the neck (he was sitting on a park bench at the time).
    • "Hung Out to Dry": A sorority girl's headless body is found hanging from a ceiling fan. It's soon discovered that the killer's weapon of choice was a blowtorch.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • John Healy, an assassin hired by Wilson Fisk for a job, goes to a bowling alley to carry out a hit. After taking out the target's bodyguards, he pulls a gun on his target...only for it to jam (despite Turk Barrett assuring him it wouldn't). Healy is forced to take the target on in a battle of fisticuffs, and after breaking both of his target's arms, finishes the guy off by smashing his head to pieces with a ten-pound bowling ball.
  • Wilson Fisk kills Anatoly Ranskahov by beating him unconscious, then bashing his head in with a car door until it snaps clean off the neck. All because the guy interrupted Fisk's date with Vanessa.
  • When Stick is first introduced in his titular episode in Season 1, he cuts off a Yakuza gangster's hand, gets him to reveal where the Black Sky is headed, then decapitates him.
  • In the Season 2 finale, Matt pitches Nobu off the rooftop. Nobu survives, so Stick finishes him off by impaling him, then slicing his head off. As revealed in later shows, this means Nobu can't resurrect anymore.
• On the edu-tainment show, Deadliest Warrior, one of the hosts gives this as the signal when testing the makraka, a sickle-like weapon used by the Zande tribe of Central Africa on a ballistic gel torso dummy. It does its job.
• The Defenders (2017): Continuing from Iron Fist, decapitation is the only way to permanently kill a Hand member, especially when they lack the substance^note A mixture of human blood, chemicals, and dragon bone marrow they use to revive themselves (due to Alexandra having used up their remaining reserves to revive Elektra). Over the course of the show, three of the Hand's five Fingers meet their demise by decapitation:
  • First Stick decapitates Sowande diagonally when he tries to kidnap Danny using the distraction of Matt telling Luke and Jessica about Elektra.
  • One episode later, after capturing Danny (and killing Stick in the process) and delivering him to the Hand, Elektra abruptly kills Alexandra in this way while she's chewing out Murakami, Bakuto and Madame Gao.
    Elektra Natchios: His name is Matthew. [pulls her sai out of Alexandra's body, letting the body fall to the floor] And my name...is Elektra Natchios. You all work for me now. [as if on second thought, Elektra then turns and abruptly cuts Alexandra's head off with her remaining katana blade] Any questions?
  • In the finale, Colleen Wing, Misty Knight, and Claire Temple take on Bakuto, and unlike their duel in Iron Fist, Colleen successfully kills Bakuto for good by decapitating him, but not before Bakuto slices off Misty's right arm.
• The Doctor about to be beheaded as been used as a cliffhanger in at least three Doctor Who serials: "The Masque of Mandragora", "Four to Doomsday" and "The Visitation".
  • In "The Five Doctors", several Cybermen are decapitated by Deadly Discs flung by the Raston Warrior Robot.
• In Dracula (2020), Dracula beheads Mother Superior during his invasion of the convent.
• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has a particularly gruesome version of this. John Walker uses Captain America's shield to decapitate an unarmed Flag-Smasher in front of Sam, Bucky Karli and a number of horrified civilians.
• Father Brown: "The Resurrectionists" starts with a young man on a motorcycle being decapitated by a low hanging branch. However, this turns out to be a case of Faking the Dead.
• In From Dusk Till Dawn, this is how Carlos deals with some people that are trying to steal from him, followed by Decapitation Presentation.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Ned Stark has an enormous greatsword made of Valyrian steel called Ice that he uses for executions, and he does so in the first episode, taking a deserter's head off in a single stroke. Towards the end of the first series, he is beheaded with his own sword when Joffrey instructs Ilyn Payne to 'bring me his head'.
  • In Season 2, Theon Greyjoy, after proclaiming himself Lord of Winterfell, tries to execute Ser Rodrik Cassel using an ordinary sword and makes a complete mess of it, hacking and kicking madly until the head finally comes off. This contrasts with Ned's clean single stroke and Ned's own execution.
  • In Season 3, Robb Stark is forced to behead one of his bannermen, Rickard Karstark, for treason. Like his father and unlike Theon, he manages to do it in one swift stroke.
  • In Season 6, Gregor Clegane shows off his even more impressive strength as Robert Strong by casually tossing aside a Sparrow (religious follower, not the bird), and nearly effortlessly ripping his head off, with his bare hands. In the same season, his younger brother Sandor decapitates a Brotherhood marauder in one swing with a wood axe.
  • Robb Stark was beheaded posthumously.
  • Though Septa Mordane was not necessarily killed this way, her head is later displayed alongside Ned's and those of the rest of the Stark household.
  • It's unclear if Shaggydog was killed this way, but the Umbers make a Decapitation Presentation of his head nonetheless in Season 6.
  • Dany has Mossador executed by beheading, which is carried out by Daario.
  • This was how Rakharo died.
  • A few wights get seemingly dispatched by decapitation over the course of the show.
  • In the show's very first scene, Gared of the Night's Watch is beheaded by a White Walker while trying to run.
  • Oznak zo Pahl, the Meereenese nobleman sent to challenge Daenerys, is beheaded by Daario with his arakh.
  • Janos Slynt is executed this way by Jon.
  • It's implied that Brienne decapitates Stannis judging by the movement of her arms.
  • During the Battle of the Bastards, Tormund brings Jon back to his senses as they both see a horse with a decapitated rider gallop by their side.
  • Missandei is captured by Cersei, who has Gregor cut her head off when Dany refuses to surrender.
  • House of the Dragon:
    • The dubious honor of first person to be beheaded in the series goes to a nameless alleged murderer in the streets of King's Landing, by the hand of Daemon Targaryen using his sword, Dark Sister, during The Purge Daemon leads the City Watch into committing to secure the capital city for The Tourney the next day. Interestingly, Dark Sister is made of Valyrian steel just like the sword of Ned Stark, which was used for the first onscreen beheading in Game of Thrones.
• Goodbye My Princess: King Tömür is beheaded by Cheng Yin.
• Gotham Knights (2023): Detective Ford is beheaded by someone wielding a sword after a failed attempt to kill Turner and co. The second episode reveals that the Talon also beheaded everyone else in Ford's squad, and sent the heads to the GCPD in boxes.
• Happens quite a lot in Grimm. The Grimm are well-known (and feared) among the Wesen for this method of killing, as many Wesen are far tougher than humans. The Reapers, trained to hunt the Grimm, usually carry scythes in order to do the same to their hated enemies. It's also revealed that, prior to the Brothers Grimm becoming synonymous with others of their kind, Wesen hunters were known as "Decapitare", which is Latin for "decapitator", or more literally "he who decapitates". Some Wesen still use the older name.
• So many heads rolled in the miniseries Henry VIII (2003) that it practically became a Running Gag. The King plays a particularly nasty joke on Cromwell: the executioner has never taken off anyone's head before. The results are not pretty.
• The Highlander TV series, like the films, is also predicated on the fact that a beheading is the only way for Macleod to survive battles with other immortals. Therefore this happens in virtually every episode (although usually off-screen).
• In "The Wrong War" (also known as "The Frogs and the Lobsters") from Horatio Hornblower miniseries, Colonel le Marquis de Moncoutant has his personal guillotine. He gleefully uses it to behead half the village for treason, which was actually stuff like selling old bread. It bites him in the butt, though, because when Royalist forces collapse, the villagers execute him, equally gleefully.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • "...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding": Lampshaded by Lestat de Lioncourt when he informs Claudia about the fate of the aristocrat who originally owned the emerald necklace that he gives to her for her birthday (the incident may have occurred during The French Revolution).
    Lestat: This was given to me by a marquis who was beheaded by a mob ten years after he gave it to me.
  • "Like Angels Put in Hell by God": Lestat rips the head off of a train conductor and plays with it like it's a ventriloquist dummy.
  • In the Season 2 First Look Scene, a vampire in the background slices a man's head off and catches it like it was a football.
• Iron Fist (2017):
  • Decapitation is said to be the only way to permanently kill someone that's been resurrected by the Hand, meaning Nobu is dead for good.
  • Madame Gao personally kills one of her henchmen, King, by skewering him through the head with her Sword Cane, after Danny and Colleen overpower him and manages to get the Hand's chemist Radovan away from them. Then she cuts off his head and skewers it on a pole in the back of a truck, where Danny and Ward find it the next day, with a stick on it with the address of a location where Danny is to be challenged in a duel with several Hand assassins.
• Jessica Jones (2015): After Jessica finds that Kilgrave has killed Ruben by making him cut his throat in Jessica's bed, she tries to get herself thrown in prison in an attempt to protect the people she cares about. Her 'plan', as it is, involves cutting off Ruben's head, going to the precinct, and dropping the head in a grocery bag on Det. Oscar Clemons' desk. The plan falls apart because Kilgrave tracks Jessica there and makes the cops point their guns at each other, and after giving Jessica an ultimatum, he makes the cops dismiss the severed head as the world's greatest prank ever.
  Kilgrave: Manual decapitation? [laughs] You're full of surprises.
• Jonathan Creek: A sabotaged chainsaw leads to decapitation in "The Clue of the Savant's Thumb". This leads to an elaborate cover-up in which a body seems to vanish from a locked room.
• Luke Cage (2016): The Stylers' modus operandi in Season 2 is to cut off the heads of their enemy's associates then send the heads to the boss as messages.
  • In the first episode, Bushmaster kills Nigel Garrison, leader of the Brooklyn Yardies, then decapitates him posthumously and presents the head in a briefcase full of cash that he gives to Shades.
  • To officially declare his war on Mariah Dillard, Bushmaster arranges for the deaths of Mark Higgins (Atreus Plastics CEO who Mariah just blackmailed), Cockroach Hamilton (a gun buyer), and Ray-Ray Jackson (a bodyguard at Harlem's Paradise), and mounts their heads on pikes in the entrance of Mariah's new Shirley Chisholm complex, positioned so that they're prominently revealed during Mariah's ribbon-cutting ceremony.
  • Simultaneously with the severed heads, Bushmaster's men make several efforts to abduct Mariah's banker Piranha Jones. After Luke thwarts the first few attempts, they are able to capture Piranha, make him empty Mariah's bank accounts, then kill him. They then decapitate him and leave his head in a tank of, well, piranhas, which is how Luke and Misty find him.
• Beheading would appear to be the standard method of execution in Merlin (2008) (though Burn the Witch! is also pretty common). As of yet, they have not shown it on screen.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • In "Death's Shadow", the first Victim of the Week is decapitated by a single blow from an Indian sword.
  • In "Midsomer Rhapsody" a motorcyclist is decapitated by a length of piano wire strung across the road at neck height.
  • In "They Seek Him Here", the victims are beheaded with a prop guillotine on the set of a film adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
  • In "The Sword of Guillaume", the first two victims are beheaded with a medieval longsword.
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: In "Death Defying Feats", a magician's assistant is decapitated when the killer sabotages the prop guillotine being used in the act, turning it into a Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon.
• In Moonlight, decapitation is one of the two known ways to kill a vampire (the other being fire). Despite this, it only happens twice on the show, and only once intentionally. The other time, the vampire slipped, while running on a roller coaster track and got stuck, with his head perfectly positioned to be struck by a speeding coaster.
• Motive: In "Remains to be Seen", the Victim of the Week is decapitated with a katana.
• Mouse (2021): The serial killer known as the Head Hunter gets his nickname from his habit of beheading his victims.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000:
  • In "Manos: The Hands of Fate", Dr. Forrester invents the Chocolate Bunny Guillotine. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • In the Netflix revival, Jonah has a habit of yanking off Tom's dome head whenever he goes too far with something.
• The Myth: Xiao Chuan time-travels to the scene of an execution, and is just in time to witness a man being beheaded.
• Mythbusters, in both its original and its revival series, have tested several legends about this trope.
  • Cases where decapitation is an integral outcome of the myth...
    • Can hair gel detonate in an oxygen-rich environment (such as a jet's cockpit) and cause the pilot's head to explode? Busted. It might start a small fire, but hardly anything more dangerous than that will happen.
    • Can a ceiling fan running at full speed decapitate someone? Busted. Standard household wooden blades, industrial metal blades, and lawnmower blades were tested. The wooden blades would only result in a sore throat; the industrial and lawnmower blades were able to puncture the neck, but couldn't detach the head from the neck.
    • Taken from Lethal Weapon 2: Can a surfboard both penetrate through a windshield at 40 miles (64 km) per hour and immediately decapitate the driver of an oncoming vehicle in one fell swoop? Busted. Regardless of speed, all the surfboards used in this test simply deflected off the windshield.
    • If a tire on an eighteen-wheeler explodes, can the rubbery shrapnel decapitate a motorcyclist? Confirmed. If the tire tread it flying at least 40 miles (64 km) an hour, not only could it tear a motorcyclist's head off if connects, it could also decapitate anyone riding in a car with its windows rolled up.
    • Can a sheet of glass flying in a tornado decapitate someone? Confirmed quite easily, in fact, at speeds as low as 70 miles (119 km) per hour. Speaking of flying guillotines...
    • Could "flying guillotines" (tethered "hat" weapons that can decapitate someone and return the head back to its thrower in a bucket) have existed as viable weapons? Plausible. If they actually were used, they were likely to have been used in situations for a stealthy assassination; live-combat usage would have been impractical due to accuracy issues when thrown.
    • Is Delayed Causality (the possibility of a severed head temporarily staying in place before falling off) possible? Busted. Both a watermelon and a prop zombie head were used as targets for a rocket-propelled guillotine. Once the blade sliced through them, the upper halves of each fell to the floor almost immediately.
  • Where decapitation is a potential outcome, though not being an inherent part of the myth...
    • When testing if pirates fired anything they could find out of a cannon, a chain, if used in place of a cannonball cut straight through a pig carcass, which makes decapitation — and a likely messier death — a frightening possibility.
    • Keeping either a bowling ball or a hatchet on a car's backboard while slamming on the brakes could create a cannonball and a flying guillotine, respectively.
    • A scene from the film Headhunters suggests a man of normal build could survive getting T-boned from a big rig in the back seat of a squad car, provided he was sandwiched between two heavyset police officers as opposed to being alone. This was proven false; while the normal-sized passenger might have had some chance of survival, he was decapitated after being forced to share the back seat with the cops.
• In Episode 6 of MythQuest, Alex takes the place of Caradoc the Younger. He beheads Elveis as part of a bet and is later sentenced to be beheaded himself (for a different reason).
• The New Avengers: In "Trap", Soo Choy plans to behead Steed, Gambit, and Purdey as revenge for foiling his drug operation. He gets as far as getting Gambit's head on the chopping block.
• New Tricks: The Body of the Week in "Romans Ruined" was a decapitated corpse found in a sandpit. UCOS gets involved when the murder weapon (a Roman sword) and the head are discovered years later. In a nod to realism, it is noted that it took several blows to remove the head.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Promised Land", Krenn and Dlavan perform burial rites in which they behead David's corpse to release his spirit. Naturally, this comes off as wrong to the watching Rebecca, who doesn't understand their custom or language.
• The Outpost:
  • Galwood Outpost uses the guillotine. The Prime Order prefers hanging.
  • Yavalla is decapitated by Talon, but she still regenerates afterward.
• The Punisher (2017): When Billy Russo's men track Frank Castle to David's compound, Frank surprises them by decapitating one of Russo's men, then strapping a grenade to the head before throwing it as an explosive.
• Quite a few folks in Resurrection: Ertuğrul meet their fate through beheading, either as a form of execution or at the tail end of a military confrontation. Notable victims include Sahabettin Tugrul, Kurdoglu Bey, Petruchio Manzini, Kocabas Alp, Gumustekin Bey, Bogac Alp, Doruk Bey, Ural Bey, Sadettin Kopek, Tekfur Kritos, Lais, Uranos, and Dragos.
• The Rise of Phoenixes: Ning Yi cuts off Chang Zhong Xin's head.
• Salem: While Rose is gloating about her foresight to Mary, Mercy comes out of nowhere and decapitates her with a razor.
• In Scream: The TV Series, the first kill is of a boy named Tyler getting his head chopped off. We don't see the deed, but we do see the severed head get tossed into his girlfriend Nina's hot tub.
• The 1980 miniseries Shogun was noted as being the first American network production to actually show a head being cut off on screen. The VHS version of the mini-series is gorier and shows the blood spurting from the neck.
• Occurs at least every third episode in the Stars version of 'Spartacus. Usually done in a single sword stroke, with one notable exception near the end of the third season.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • In "Apocalypse Rising", an undercover Sisko punches out a Klingon warrior after he brags about beheading the Tellarite first officer of a Federation ship, before ripping the Benzite captain's breathing apparatus off so she'd slowly suffocate. Sisko knew the captain personally.
  • Discussed in "Nor the Battle to the Strong", when a group of hospital workers discusses how they'd prefer to die if Klingons (with whom the Federation is at war at the moment) break into the hospital. One suggests being clearly decapitated with a bat'leth, only for another to say that he heard that the head remains alive for some time after death, making it a pretty horrible way to go.
• Star Trek: Picard: In "Absolute Candor", Tenqem decides to continue his assault on Picard after being warned by Elnor that he'd be choosing to die, so Elnor cuts his head off.
• Supernatural:
  • Contrary to popular beliefs about sunlight and stakes, beheading is the most conventional method of killing vampires.
    • It's also the only confirmed way to kill arachne and gorgons.
  • In "Nightmare", one of the victims gets killed by a window-guillotine.
  • In "Fallen Idols", Sam kills Paris Hilton... er, we mean Leshii by chopping the head off with an iron axe specifically.
  • In "Caged Heat", Crowley kills the Alpha Shapeshifter this way... while it looks like him.
    Crowley: Guess I kinda lost my head.
  • In "Southern Comfort", one of the victims gets decapitated under a car.
  • In "Blade Runners", it's how Dean dispatches and kills Cuthbert Sinclair.
  • In "The Scorpion and the Frog", Shrike is murdered this way by Bart.
• Unsurprisingly as it's the same story, The Tudors has this frequently as well, the scene of many a moving last speech beforehand. Though in this one the nasty joke against Cromwell is not by the king but several councillors. Eventually a nearby guard rushes in to take off his head, after over half a dozen less than accurate attempts by the inebriated headsman.
• Two Sentence Horror Stories: In "Teeth" Olivia kills one of the werewolves by ripping his head off with her bare hands.
• The Ultra Series features this a fair bit in its earlier shows, back when Japanese censors weren't as concerned with how the heroes killed the monsters, most notably Ultraseven and Ultraman Ace. Here's a list of decapitations performed by various Ultramen throughout the series.
  • And here's a fun, totally kid-friendly video compilation of monsters losing their craniums.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): Lanfear casually creates a weave and cuts off a man's head using it to get the poor sap's horse.
• Wild Bill: In "Welcome to Boston", Bill investigates the death of a young woman, whose head was cut off somehow, then found in a field.
• The Tudors again in Wolf Hall. This time, only two beheadings are shown, that of Sir Thomas More in the fourth episode and Anne Boleyn's in the sixth and final one. In each case, the camera cuts away from the scene just as the executioner is about to strike. Both were orchestrated by the protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, but he also seems to be one of the only named characters who show any respect for Anne as she ascends the scaffold.

Music

• The music video for Praxis' "Animal Behavior" depicts Rammellzee (the guy wearing a robot samurai armor) beheading Buckethead.
• "Beheaded" by The Offspring is about the singer decapitating people and keeping their heads.
• The oldest and most frequent method of execution used to climax Alice Cooper's concerts is the guillotine.
  • Seen used in the concert film "Good To See You Again, Alice Cooper" with magician James Randi working it and holding up Alice's severed head (in reality, a prop head).
  • Alice also appeared on The Gong Show with this, singing "I Think I'm Going Out Of My Head". Instead of gonging him, Chuck Barris activated the guillotine on him.
• A specialty for GWAR
• In Michael Jackson's video for "Remember the Time", when Pyro fails to entertain the Queen, she orders him to be beheaded with a Throat-Slitting Gesture.
  Announcer: (winces and rubs his throat) Phew, that's cold, whoof!
• "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead: "Off with his head, man".
• The third segment to "A Complicated Song" by "Weird Al" Yankovic involves Al losing his head after he stands up on a roller coaster ride.
• Sir Marmaduke is beheaded by his wife in To Keep My Love Alive.
• Cormorant recounts the Cruel and Unusual Death off Maximilien Robespierre in "Uneasy Lies the Head".
• Edmund Kemper in Macabre's song about him would pick up hitchhiking Co-Ed's and cut off their heads.

Music Videos

• Decapitation (Played for Laughs, but rather bloody) was featured in Beastie Boys' "Body Movin'"
• One of the endings in The Cardigans' "My Favourite Game" features lead singer being decapitated by top of the convertible's windshield, complete with absolutely mannequin-looking head.
• Skinless's video for "Skull Session" features the band themselves suffering this fate at the hands of an enraged neighbor named Hippie Jim, who loads them one by one into a homemade guillotine and drops the blade on them. Weep not for them, they were Asshole Victims through and through, refusing to listen to Jim's complaints about their endless, overloud rehearsals (lead vocalist Sherwood Webber even went out of his way to flip Jim off and scream back at him on one occasion). There's also the part where their headless bodies and severed heads alike reanimate and start another practice session, causing Jim to load himself into the guillotine and drop the blade one last time.
• A woman in a Bad Guy Bar gets her head yanked off and passed to another person in the video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Eat It", which parodies the video for Michael Jackson's "Beat It".
• In "Angel and the Ghost" by Leaves' Eyes, the female speaker is beheaded for refusing a duke's advances. In the spoken-word bridge of the song, her ghost promises to haunt him at night and lay her head before his feet.

Myths & Religion

• This is a common way to kill vampires in general, right next to staking them in the heart. Some Western folklore sources recommend staking, beheading and putting garlic in the head's mouth, carving out the heart and burying it at a crossroads, then burning the body.
• Severed heads were a pretty common trope in Celtic Mythology, since they identified it as the location of the soul. The most famous is probably Bran the Blessed, whose still-living head is buried somewhere in the South-East of England to guard the British Isles against invaders.
• Older Than Feudalism: Perseus killed Medusa this way, using a magic sword or sickle to hack through the bronze scales on her neck, with the added bonus that her powers still worked on anyone he showed it to.
• There's an entire category of Christian Saints — the cephalophores — who are usually depicted as holding their severed heads.
  • Saint Denis, patron saint of France, was decapitated by the Romans only to pick up his head and walk off with it, cheerfully singing praises to the Lord until he reached the nearest village and dropped dead there. Predictably, he's depicted in art and media as a headless man who carries his own mitred head in his hand.
  • The most intriguing figure though is probably Saint Cuthbert, who, while never decapitated himself, is frequently depicted holding the severed head of Saint Oswald. Mystifying when you consider that Oswald had been dead for decades before Cuthbert arrived on the scene.
  • The concept of cephalophore (Greek kephalos = head, phorein = to bear), a headless statue with the head on its arms, comes from the image of a beheaded saint.
• Biblical examples:
  • David beheaded Goliath with the giant's own sword.
  • John the Baptist was beheaded while in prison at the request of Herod's wife.
  • Sheba son of Bicri had his head thrown over a town wall in 2 Samuel 20.
  • Saul and Ishbosheth were both beheaded after they were killed (2 Samuel).
  • Judith decapitated the Assyrian warlord Holofernes in the apocryphal Book of Judith.
• There is a truly creepy Chinese story of a beheaded general whose body did not die. His family took it home and it communicated with them via writing. It even begot a son on the 'widow'. ICK!

Pinballs

• This is how the trolls are defeated in Big Guns, as their heads serve as dropdown targets.
• In Sega Pinball's GoldenEye, failing the "Xenia Encounter" has the villainess crush a Naval Captain until his head pops off.
• On the backglass of Gottlieb's Haunted House, one of the windows shows a ghost holding his head under his left arm. Another dapper-looking ghost in the Attic has his head under his right arm.
• After defeating the peeping tom in Creature from the Black Lagoon's Video Mode, quickly jamming on the flipper buttons will result in an uppercut that decapitates the pervert, leaving an up-close-and-personal view of the top of his spine.

Podcasts

• In the Cool Kids Table game Small Magic, this is how Maggie defeats the cockatrice.
  • In Bloody Mooney, Mooney tears the head of one of the government agents clean off.
• Dealing as it does with The French Revolution, Revolutions deals a lot — like a lot with deaths by guillotine — or as Mike Duncan put it "zip, thud, the end."
• In Trials & Trebuchets, Laud the Slaad kills Ferdinand in this way.

Pro Wrestling

• In Chikara, Oleg The Usurper's finishing move is a forearm clothesline to a kneeling opponent called Off With His Head. Mostly subverted since it usually just knocks wrestlers out, but played straight in one instance when Oleg used it to send Dragon Dragon's head flying.

Roleplay

• In Darwin's Soldiers, Alfred beheads a Dragonstorm war machine with a sledgehammer.
• In The Gamer's Alliance, Ismail gets decapitated by Dreadlord Leraje after their fierce duel during the Battle of Vanna.
• Troy McCann, Daniel Brent and Guy Rapide in Survival of the Fittest V3 die by being decapitated. A close-range gunshot to the back of the head beheads Uriel Hunter in V1. Hayley Kelly in V4 also seems to love this method, dispatching Steve Barnes and James Mulzet this way.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica fanzine Mythic Perspectives #9, article "Draugadrottin, The Norse Necromancer". A draug (Norse zombie) can be killed by decapitating it with a single blow. Some legends say that only a sword taken from the draug's own grave can perform this task.
• BattleTech: Some 'Mechs (most notably the Axman, Hatchetman, and Wolfhound) feature a defensive variant: a full-head ejection system, where instead of a traditional ejector seat, the 'Mech's entire head rockets off to serve as an escape pod for the MechWarrior, as well as anyone riding in the 'Mech's rumble seat. . . without a full-head ejection system, any passengers in the 'Mech's cockpit are left to their own devices if the MechWarrior has to punch out. The system is an enormous boon when fighting in environments not conducive to human life; there's little difference between letting your 'Mech explode around you and ejecting with a conventional ejection system if, say, you're fighting on a moon with zero atmospheric pressure.
• Vorpal weapons from Dungeons & Dragons have this as their primary power, activating upon rolling a natural 20 on a D20 and then confirming the Critical Hit. Downplayed in 5^th Edition, where creatures with Legendary Actions take lots of extra damage but are protected from decapitation by what's effectively Plot Armor.
• Games Workshop games:
  • Worshipers, Daemons and Champions of Khorne from Warhammer, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000 go for the skull yelling "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!", cutting the heads from worthy opponents as offerings for their bloodthirsty god.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • During the Horus Heresy, Fulgrim presented Horus with the polished skull of Ferrus Manus after the Drop Site Massacre. Later, he chopped the head off one of his commanders, Eidolon, when he felt the Astartes was being too mouthy, but had it sewn back on when he realized Eidolon was still a useful commander to have around.
    • The Horus Heresy Book One — Betrayal tells some stories of warriors who went this route. Captain Lercon Hurn of the XVI Legion's 3rd Company pulled the Panarch of Somon's head off with his bare hands after killing his guards with said hands and Horus sent the Emperor the gold-plated skull of Vatale Gerron Terentius with the message "So perish all traitors."
    • Ghazkhull Thraka suffered this during the Psychic Awakening storyline, courtesy of a Mutual Kill between him and Ragnar Blackmane. Thanks to his orky physiology and a couple staples courtesy of Mad Dok Grotsnik, he got better.
    • Alicia Dominica, leader of the Brides of the Emperor, put an end to the Age of Apostasy with her beheading of the crazed High Lord Goge Vandire. The group originally known as Daughters of the Emperor would later become the Adepta Sororitas, the main military force for the Adeptus Ministorum and considered one of the most elite forces utilized by the Imperium.
• In New World of Darkness, both vampires and werewolves are capable of regenerating lost body parts... except the head. Lopping off the head ends their hunt for good.
• Pathfinder: Galt, as a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of The French Revolution, has magical guillotines called final blades that trap the souls of those they kill, preventing resurrection.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade, a stake through the heart only induces torpor, a deep coma-like sleep. In that condition, it's pretty trivial to decapitate the vampire, which is a guaranteed Final Death solution.

Theatre

• In Richard III Richard says the line verbatim when ordering the execution of Hastings.
• Frankenstein (2014) features a story that focuses on Victor's bond with his friend Henri, who gets beheaded by guillotine after confessing to a crime that Victor was actually guilty of. He goes proudly, singing to Victor that he will live on "In Your Dreams". This is Frankenstein, so you can guess what happens next.
• Gilbert and Sullivan:
  • Subverted in The Mikado, wherein the Lord High Executioner only accepted the post to keep his own head and cannot bring himself to kill anyone else. He claims to have beheaded Nanki-Poo, but produces him alive when it transpires that Nanki-Poo was the heir apparent, and Ko-Ko now faces the Mikado's wrath.
  • At the start of The Yeomen of the Guard, Colonel Fairfax, imprisoned in the Tower of London, is scheduled for beheading. His escape is the plot.
• In the musical Celebration, "Saturnalia" ends with the execution of the Mock-King by decapitation. Mr. Rich is startled, perhaps because the puppet's head looks like his own.
• While it is not directly shown on stage, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard both discuss their respective beheadings in Six: The Musical. Fittingly enough, Anne Boleyn even has a song titled "Don't Lose Ur Head".

Theme Parks

• One of the ghosts inhabiting The Haunted Mansion is a decapitated knight. He has a small role in the video game, giving Zeke a Soul Gem.
• Allegedly, the test dummies sent down the infamous looping water slide at Action Park came out this way.
• At Universal Studios:
  • One of the rooms in The People Under the Stairs haunted house of Halloween Horror Nights featured a scareactor getting their head chopped off.
  • An attacking T-800 in Terminator 2 3-D: Battle Across Time loses its head when the good T-800 tosses a Hunter Killer drone at it.

Video Games

• In 2Dark, Smith's wife, Helen, is decapitated in the opening sequence.
• The aliens in Alien Hominid can bite the heads clean off of FBI agents, Soviet soldiers, and Area 51 guards. Doing so nearby other enemies makes them freak out for a second (or for the later of the three, momentarily stunned).
• The Aliens vs. Predator games, of course, feature plenty of decapitations as trophies and/or delicious snacks. Special mention to the Predator Speargun in AVP2 that removes human heads and pins them to the wall. You can then collect the heads to recover the spear and trophy.
• Happens frequently when using the knife on card guards, in American McGee's Alice. The Queen does this to Cheshire late in the game.
• In version 3, the Ao Oni kills Takuro by biting off their head. This also effectively demonstrates to Hiroshi and the others that contrary to their suspicions, the monster is very real.
• The backstory of Dieu Mort, the Arcana of Death in Arcana Heart, was that he was an executioner so obsessed with chopping off heads that he eventually chopped off his own head out of madness and curiosity.
• Back Stab allows you to perform a special move on unwary enemies, where timing your attacks right will have you knocking them to their knees before you lop off their craniums via cutlass.
• The old 1980s fighting game Barbarian featured a spinning jumping backslash move that if launched with the correct timing and distance to the enemy could instantly decapitate them.
• In Bloodborne, Gehrman does this to you with a Sinister Scythe if you choose to give up instead of fight him. Funnily enough, considering the setting and the fact it doesn't technically kill you for real, it's the happiest ending the game has for your character.
• In Bloody Battle, a weapon called the Battle Axe can be used to chop people's heads off very easily, requiring 2-4 strikes if the attacked does not have armor.
• Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain features Vorador, the most powerful character in the game, dying via decapitation. His head is later seen as a trophy in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 (which features decapitations as a possible finishing move that Raziel can perform). Also in Blood Omen, Kain dispatches Moebius. In Blood Omen 2, Kain will perform several decapitating stealth kills.
• In some scenes in Brain Dead 13 when Lance's head gets cut off or knocked off or bitten off. Of course, this becomes Pulling Himself Together by his head rejoining itself to his body thanks to the power of resurrection.
• In the Japanese Playstation versions of Breath of Fire IV, Fou-lu decapitates the acting emperor Soniel with the very sword Soniel had just tried to run him through with. It's not graphically depicted, though, but shown in silhouette.
  • Unfortunately, this scene was a victim of Bowdlerisation in the non-Japanese Playstation versions as well as the Windows port.
  • In the manga adaptation of Breath of Fire IV, this is actually a particularly important moment for Fou-lu: instead of using the sword he was stabbed with, he generates an energy sword and lops Soniel's head clean off while still having a sword that eats souls sticking out of his midsection.
• Brütal Legend: — "DECAPITATIOOOOOOOOONNNNN!"
• Age of Chivalry, later Chivalry: Medieval Warfare allows the player to do (and suffer) this with a sufficiently powerful or accurate blow to the head.
• Clive Barker's Undying: The only way to destroy the undead Covenants, and it has to be done with a certain weapon at that. This is also one of only two ways to make a skeleton stay down for good, the other being Revive Kills Zombie.
• Clockwork Aquario: If Gush the robot takes enough damage, his head will come off, showing the spring attacking it to his body. You can still control him as usual, thankfully.
• Implied a few times in Cuphead: The opening theme song at the beginning of the game implies that "the Devil will take [Cuphead's and Mugman's] heads" if they can't get the Soul Contracts for him by the midnight deadline (and that song isn't kidding if you lose to the Devil's second phase and onwards in the final battle!); and Baroness von Bon Bon makes her throat-slitting gesture with her finger as her head jumps up a bit as a threat to the boys at the beginning of her battle. Also, earlier promos and previous trailers had the Devil threaten to decapitate the boys when he set out to claim their souls after winning the game (Word of God even says that they have their immortal souls inside their cups-for-heads as their lifeblood, which may be the reason why the Devil wants their heads so badly). The shadows on the wall show him making a cutthroat motion on their throats to illustrate the point of this threat.
• In Dark Souls II, you can decapitate Duke's Dear Freja should you sliced enough time on either of her head or both.
• One of the more common ways to kill a zombie in the Dead Rising series.
• In Dead Space, one of The Many Deaths of You comes at the tentacles of the Separator: it tears Issac's head off and steals his body. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well the other way; unlike with traditional zombies, decapitating a necromorph only makes it mad. Double Subverted because the Infector form creates necromorphs by jabbing its proboscis into the victim's head; preemptively cutting off the head of every corpse you encounter is sometimes worth the effort.
• Death end re;Quest starts with this, with Shina being stabbed by a giant monster, then her head was chomped off.
• Diablo III's Demon Hunter can do this to demons with the Bola Shot ability. It was also apparently a common method of execution in Khanduras during the Darkening of Tristram, as evidenced in the Halls of Agony where you come across the decapitated ghost of Queen Asylla, who was executed by guillotine on orders from the maddened King Leoric.
  • Malthael does this to two of the Horadrim at the start of Reaper of Souls.
• Good aim and proper use of the game's physics mechanics and controls allow the player to decapitate enemies in the third-person adventure game Die by the Sword.
• Against humanoid enemies this is a possible finishing move with edged weapons in Dragon Age: Origins. It comes spectacularly close to Rasputinian Death if the character has a Dual Wielding build: you run the guy through with one blade, then lop his head off with the other.
  • This is also how the Warden executes Loghain Mac Tir, should you decide to kill him (if Alistair doesn't do it first).
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • This features in some of the in-universe books.
    • In 2920, Hearth Fire Emperor Reman Cyrodiil III has his mistress beheaded for treason (she was innocent). Here it actually takes two strokes, with the first hitting the back of her head.
    • In Hallgerd's Tale the title character beheads the man cuckolding him (during the act of cuckolding, we should note).
  • In Oblivion, the invading Daedra seem to really enjoy doing this captured mortals. For added measure, they then place the heads on pikes. Notably, they did this to St. Jiub the Eradicator when they sacked Kvatch. All that is left of him when you find his "corpse" in Kvatch is a severed head with a large chunk of his skull missing and a look of sheer terror on his dead face in the remains of a ruined house. (Oddly, despite being a Dunmer, it was modeled with human-like ears.)
  • Skyrim:
    • Happens at the very start of the game, with your head on the chopping block seconds away from execution. (A Villainous Rescue saves you, thankfully.) One unnamed Stormcloak gets a discount hair-cut via axe right before you.
    • Another instance occurs when you first enter the city of Solitude, for a man who aided Ulfric Stormcloak's escape after he killed the High King of Skyrim.
    • This is possible with the appropriate perks in the One-handed and Two-handed skill trees. And, unfortunately, enemies can do it to you too with a lucky swing. With a high success rate to boot.
• The fastest way to defeat zombies and Horrors in Eternal Darkness is by beheading them. In particular, it is the safest way to deal with Ulyaoth-aligned zombies to prevent them from Taking You With Them.
• Exit Limbo: Opening allows you to kill the Infected by knocking them down and then pulling their craniums off, if their health is low enough.
• Fable: Headshots have a good chance to decapitate the enemy in the process of killing them, sometimes leaving the head spinning in the air as the body falls. This can even be inflicted by arrows and lightning.
• While Your Head Asplode is common from killing headshots with ranged weaponry in Fallout 3, Off With His Head is possible with them as well as the more typical melee weapons. A head shot with a Railway Rifle will often result in the target's head being ripped off their body and nailed to the wall behind them.
• Fear & Hunger: Chopping off an enemy's head is usually the most effective way to take them out. This is countered by the fact that the enemy is naturally guarded and harder to hit; the player is encouraged to disable an enemy's legs first, which will make the head more vulnerable.
• Fear & Hunger: Termina: As before, the player can chop off an enemy's head to kill them. Provided you have one, you can also use a bonesaw to take the heads of enemies you have already killed. The heads can be offered to a ritual circle in exchange for soul stones.
• Eldigan is executed this way in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. In the Oosawa manga adaptation, King Chagall then sends his severed head to Eldigan's friends Sigurd and Quan and his sister Raquesis to taunt them.
• In Fredbear and Friends, Thomas deals with one of the animatronics by knocking it over as it enters the security booth and dropping the automatic door on its neck.
• In Ghost of Tsushima, Khotun Khan prefers this method of killing his victims, as his Establishing Character Moment has him set a revered samurai on fire before beheading him with his massive polearm. He also does this to Taka, Yuna's brother, while Jin is Forced to Watch. It is only fitting, therefore, that Khotun goes down the same way: he is swiftly decapitated himself in the final battle, courtesy of Jin.
• God Hand has the God Reel move Head Slicer.
• Kratos is fond of ripping people's heads off in the God of War series. Among his kills in this fashion are Medusa from I, Euryale from God of War II, Helios from God of War III, Mimir from God of War (PS4) and Hrólf Kraki from God of War Ragnarök (though with Mimir at least he cuts his head off so quickly he barely has time to feel a scratch).
• The attract screen of the Japanese arcade version of Golden Axe features a scene of Ax-Battler lopping off an enemy's head, with some blood splashing onto the screen.
• Katanas in Grand Theft Auto games that have them are capable of decapitating, even if the swing animation seems to be a one-handed swat. Hilarity Ensues in San Andreas where there's an Asian gangster on a boat that challenges you to a duel if you then immediately manage to slice his head off with one swing.
• Hungry Lamu: Lamu takes the heads off his victims whilst noticeably leaving the rest of their bodies accounted for.
• Ajna in Indivisible, hungry for revenge for her village, swears to do this to Ravannavar after their first meeting. She makes good on her promise when they next meet, decapitating him in a cutscene. It doesn't help.
• Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy all feature rather vigorous decapitations as one of your rewards for skilled lightsaber use — it will quickly and very definitively eliminate a threat in a single blow. A powerful head-height swing is without question the best way to take care of large groups of weaker enemies, as well as see multiple decapitations in one swing. Decapitation and the occasional arm severing are the only 'default' dismemberment options in the game, but it's possible to enable a much more robust and incredibly gratifying 'realistic saber combat' mode. With that particular mode enabled, expect to see a lot more heads (and other body parts) popping off like wine corks.
• Kabuki Z have you defeating the Undead Samurai boss via removing his cranium. With the "Stage Complete" announcement over the bloody stump of his neck.
• The Last of Us: Bill uses his kukri to decapitate at least two infected. Joel can do this to enemies when equipped with a machete or axe, but only on the infected. This is likely due to the Cordyceps fungus softening the tissue of the host, making it much easier to cut their heads off.
• A staple side effect of hitting zombies with a cutting or bludgeoning melee weapon (except for the Frying Pan of Doom) in Left 4 Dead 2.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: After taking enough damage, Blind the Thief's head flies off and he grows a new one. He survives two decapitations before being felled for good.
• In Luck be a Landlord, one of the items you can obtain is a Guillotine. It will automatically destroy any Billionaire symbols, giving you quite a handsome payout. The implication given the nature of the item is clear.
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2: This is the fate that befalls Kraven the Hunter, who gets his head bit off by Venom.
• The Matrix: Path of Neo has a few decapitation moves though, oddly, no heads actually fall off, they fall down dead anyway.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: This is Talion's signature execution. It makes sense, seeing as how it's one of the only ways to ensure that an orc is 100% dead. Your character can come back to life, AND SO CAN THEY — except from headshots.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The series features a fair number of these in the Fatalities of certain characters. Perhaps the most notorious is Sub-Zero's Spine Rip fatality from the first game, where he pulls off an opponent's head, along with their entire spine dangling beneath it — it was so gruesome it ultimately resulted in the creation of the ESRB.
  • The ending of Mortal Kombat X has Raiden present Shinnok's severed head to new Netherrealm rulers Liu Kang and Kitana. The intro to Mortal Kombat 11 shows how that happened: after repeatedly subjecting the fallen Elder God to Electric Torture, Raiden manifests a blade made of electricity from his fist and uses it to decapitate Shinnok.
    Raiden: ...There are fates worse than death.
• Native Mount & Blade does not allow for this, but the easily-found "Dismemberment and Decapitation" mod is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Land a clean hit and watch as your opponent's head fly off with hilarious disregard for physics.
• NetHack has the vorpal blade, which has a 5% chance per hit of doing a One-Hit Kill via decapitation against any monster with a head.
• No More Heroes
  • Travis Touchdown finishes off Mooks with either a vertical or a horizontal Finishing Move; the horizontal one decapitates them. Some of the bosses get their heads cut off in post-battle cutscenes, as well.
  • Particularly impressive is Skelter Helter's death — his head is chopped off, flies straight up into the air, and lands right back where it had been removed from. And then in the next cutscene, he talks to you, then rips his own head off... What?!
• Outlast: Chris Walker is big and strong enough to rip a grown man's head off his body. Barehanded. If he catches you, he will grab you by the neck and rip your body out from underneath it in one fell swoop. Unlike death caused by most other inmates, it's quick and efficient, reflecting his military background and his non-malicious intentions: he's just trying to contain the Walrider as best he can.
• In Persona 5, Fusions are now done by putting the Personas in bags and executing them via guillotines to fuse a new one. In the event of a Fusion Accident when the guillotines jam, Caroline and Justine pull out chainsaws instead. After realising who they really are, they order Joker to prepare the guillotines to execute them as a Fusion, which creates their true form as Lavenza.
• Plants vs. Zombies: Zombies are decapitated when you bring their health down to zero, just before they drop dead.
• Postal 2, the sequel to Postal, allows the player to do this using either thrown knives or a certain silenced pistol.
  • In the expansion? Vanilla Postal 2 has decapitation by shovel with some interesting options of what to do with the head afterward. You can also use a shotgun for Your Head A-Splode.
• Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE] only consumes the head of Hunters and Leader Hunters, as opposed to eating the whole body for human(-sized target)s. He also decapitates the Supreme Hunter with the Blade.
• Prayer of the Faithless: In the Judged ending, Mia presents Aeyr's severed head to the public in order to prove that she ended his threat to Asala and to show that despite being pushed around earlier, she's capable of being a ruthless leader.
• Some creatures in the Resident Evil series could kill you this way. Eg. Hunters, Ivies (plant monsters), chainsaw-wielding enemies such as Dr. Salvador, Scythe Zealots, Garradors, and the advanced Plagas. Typically a decapitation attack doesn't account for how much health you have.
  • One particular instance distinguishes itself: not using the antidote on the Jack Baker during his last encounter in Resident Evil 7 will result in him grabbing you by the head and killing you: the last thing you see is your newly decapitated body in his other hand.
• Road Redemption has a sword weapon, which is weak against helmeted riders but removes the head of unprotected ones, giving a "decapitation bonus" that awards twice the resources granted for a normal take-down.
• Raimund's death animation goes like this in RosenkreuzStilette: Upon receiving the final blow, he loses his Grollschwert and Grassense, and his Grassense cuts his head off before they disappear off the screen completely, after which the rest of his body starts exploding after his head disappears off the screen as well.
• Invoked in many of the later Samurai Shodown games. One fatality (Basara Kubikiri's) involves the opponent being dragged down to hell in a portal, flayed, and their head thrown back to the battlefield with a satisfying thud.
• Silent Debuggers: The Player Character shoots off the head of Charles Smith, who was no longer human, in response to his plan to turn mankind into monsters.
• In Space Quest I, the Acid Pool in the Kerona caverns will melt Roger's head clean off if he so much as sniffs it.
• Solom Jhee ends up suffering an anticlimactic death because of this trope in Suikoden II.
• In Target Terror, enemies' heads pop off and bounce towards you (as opposed to Your Head Asplode) when shot repeatedly.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The "WAR Update" gave the Demoman a new weapon called the Eyelander, a haunted claymore that whispers "Heads..." Kills with the Eyelander grant the Demoman a stacking boost to speed and health and an enemy Demoman can take that boost for himself if he takes the Demoman's head. There can be only one!
  • Updates after that have included a large number of swords as Demoman melee weapons; while they decapitate, they don't give him boosts on kills except for the Eyelander reskins Nessie's Nine-Iron and the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Headtaker.
  • The Horseless Headless Horsemann himself also counts, decapitating any unfortunate players that gets in his way, regardless of which one he designates as "it". ^note This is because, mechanics-wise, he is a reskinned and scaled up Demoknight refitted into a boss.
  • The Pyromania Update added the Hitman's Heatmaker as an alternative for the Sniper's Primary Weapon, which decapitates on a successful headshot kill.
• Exeggerated with Tecmo Knight, but every. single. enemy. killed onscreen have their heads severed, with adequately bloody effects. There's even a special Finishing Move that allows you to grab and wring their craniums off their necks. Their severed heads will then turn into power-ups like health or extra lives (or maybe gems for points) for you to collect.
• Time Killers lets you cut off an opponent's head at any point. A round can end in decapitation literally a half-second after it begins, and the loser's portrait shows them without their heads.
  • Its Spiritual Successor, BloodStorm, required a character-specific move, and each had a smaller hit radius, but the heads could still roll at any time.
• In Touch The Dead, some of the zombies will actually rip off their own heads and throw them at you.
• Unfortunate Spacemen: One death animation involves a characters' head coming clean off their shoulders.
• Unreal Tournament includes the ripper, a gun that shoots ricocheting buzzsaw blades. A neckshot with the ripper will indeed cleanly remove a head for a One-Hit Kill. Including your own head should you get caught by the ricochet. Sadly, it did not return for later games in the franchise.
• In Weaponlord when one character's health hits zero it's possible for their opponent to take their head off with an attack. Continuing to attack the severed head in mid-air can lead to the head bursting open and the brain falling out.
• WET features two major decapitations in-story. The first decapitation happens to Trevor Ackers upon Rubi's arrival with him in the hospital after taking him out of Hong Kong, beheaded by Tarantula on orders from who Rubi (and he) initially believes is the man's own father, William Ackers, but who turns out to be an Asian-based drug lord by the name of Rupert Pelham with aspirations of operating globally. The second decapitation is delivered by Rubi herself upon Pelham as her final vengeance at the very end of the game.
• Happens fairly regularly in The Witcher when you use Group Style against humanoids. And appropriately so, since said sword art involves lots and lots of high-velocity horizontal slashes.
• Wulverblade: Sometimes, killing an enemy will sever their head.
• Xak III: The Eternal Recurrence Princess Elmina gets decapitated after witnessing her father die in with their carcasses being punted like a football afterwards.
• Zombie Madness: The death animation in the game is of the Player Character's severed head falling to the ground.

Visual Novels

• Case 03: True Cannibal Boy: The original Cannibal Boy has a reputation for cleanly cutting off their victims' heads and eating the body. They inflict this fate on Sally, resulting in Marty reviving Sally's head as a zombie. The Hillpolly library notes that the second Cannibal Boy did the same thing, only they used their teeth to separate the head and body.
• This is how Seiko dies in Corpse Party: Book of Shadows. Ayumi's sister Hinoe also dies this way after pulling a Big Damn Heroes to save Ayumi and Naomi.
• Beheading is one of the more well-known forms of punishment in Lady In Mystery. However, the most well-known example in the game comes during the end of Yurin's route, where she beheads several people that she deems responsible for the death of her lover...including herself.
• In Long Live the Queen, this happens to the people Elodie chooses to execute. She gets to say this trope word by word when she orders the execution of an Ixion diplomat.
• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, beheading is indicated to be the favored method of execution in the Kingdom of Khura'in — and due to the Defense Culpability Act, the same fate will befall a defense attorney (especially Phoenix!) if they fail to prove the innocence of the accused. In the final trial, once she takes over as prosecutor and discards any pretense of benevolence, Queen Ga'ran proves particularly fond of threatening to behead her enemies.
• This was the fate of Ishida in Policenauts.
• Jean Jack Gibson was killed like this in Snatcher.
• Spirit Hunter: NG:
  • Kubitarou's modus operandi is collecting heads. She doesn't discriminate and collects them from toys, plushies, animals, and humans. Maruhashi is decapitated by Kubitarou and their body is found with toys stuffed into their open neck. Depending on the ending, this fate can also befall Seiji or Kaoru; Seiji is possessed and then decapitated by Kubitarou, while Kaoru is beheaded while talking to Akira over the phone.
  • The Killer Peach's victims are all decapitated by the katana in her possession. This is her way of getting revenge for them cutting her own head off while she was a human and investigating their corruption.
• Umineko: When They Cry: Screw you, Furudo Erika. As "the great detective" in a complicated murder mystery, she cheerfully lopped off the heads of multiple people. Why? To make sure they were dead, of course!
  "I dashed all over the mansion, visited all the 'crime' scenes, and...completely severed their heads. All five people I killed......were very much alive and faithfully playing dead until the moment I killed them."

Web Animation

• Chadam:
  • A Pallid manages to kill someone by ripping their head off — with their bare hands, no less.
  • Simkin kills a Pallid by chopping off their head, when he and Chadam go to save Palco.
• Dreamscape: In "A Curse or a Blessing", Vampire Lord kills an insect monster by slashing its head off. Later on, Seleenara slashes Boru's head off after he gets it stuck in a hole in the wall. He quickly regenerates from it.
• In Episode 3 of Dr. Havoc's Diary, this happens to one Mook during a fight with Brock.
  Random Henchman: Oh yeah, he's dead.
• DSBT InsaniT:
  • Kerry does this to Sand Snake by throwing Shovel at his neck like a boomerang.
  • This happens rather frequently with the Darkness Clones in 'VRcade', but since they function like an Asteroids Monster, they can keep going even without a head.
• In Ducktalez 4, Buzzkill was decapitated by a roller coaster cart launched by Huey.
• Klay World's characters usually die this way. In the movie, Dr. Brown is killed this way.
• On The Edge: "Scythe" Sakamoto from the episode You lose 4 fingers if you sleep with a Yakuza leader's girl... loved to chop people's heads off with his sickles.
• Plan 3: The Fate lord tells Stephen that his second trial to lift his curse of bad luck is to take the head of his best friend, although when Stephen is more than happy to do such an easy task and is about to off Hosuh, the Fate lord panics and stops him, stating that his demand had been a joke. Stephen isn’t amused and the Fate lord clearly didn’t think Stephen would actually be ready to do it.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • A repeated problem for Lopez, though inverted. He spends the latter half of The Blood Gulch Chronicles reduced to a head. Not that this stops him from building O'Malley a robot army or firing a turret gun. ("He's very determined," according to Simmons) Sarge rebuilds him after Season 5, but when Lopez shows up in Season 11, he's revealed to have somehow lost the rest of his body again. He manages to get a new body by the end, and Season 12 shows that he's somehow able to control it if dismembered again.
  • The rematch between the buff Insurrectionist and Agent Maine in Season 10 ends with Maine taking the man's head off with one punch.
• RWBY:
  • This is how the Giant Nevermore meets its end in during the Beacon Academy initiation, courtesy of a plan by Ruby involving a Fastball Special and the use of Weiss's runes to run up a mountain before finishing it with Crescent Rose.
  • Later in Volume 9 when Team RWBY are trapped in the Ever After, they meet the Red Prince who is shown to enjoy doing this for amusement. Team RWBY see this firsthand when he is shown displeased with Penny's weapon since it is green and has the two toy soldiers that claimed to bring it themselves beheaded as a result. He later attempts to do this to Team RWBY themselves before being talked out of this by the Curious Cat.
• Happens frequently in SMG4 to certain characters.

Webcomics

• In AsteroidQuest, it is a testament to the durability of neumono that this is not immediately fatal for them. They do still require immediate medical attention to survive it, however, and Rokoa is killed this way by her mother during a false memory sequence.
• Axe Cop will chop your head off!
  • Verbally inverted in a guest comic: "Sometimes, I chop their whole bodies off leaving just the heads."
• Bound Adventures: Duchess Isobel's nephew eventually decides to stage a coup and overthrow his aunt. As it turns out, he succeeds, and Isobel is beheaded.
• Happens to Candi Levens, twice, both times on a block, and with a single ax stroke. (Though the first time was an illusion.) Also happens to all three of her sisters, although Erin was already dead beforehand. Marina meets an identical fate to Candi. Miriam, however, gets the guillotine. Thankfully, all three die only in the epilogue.
• Dominic Deegan.
  • Luna's mother, Croona Travoria just after saying "...YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!". Amazing how a quick sword swing can change that.
  • In the "Oracle Hunter" storyline, Quilt winds up losing his head to the villainess of the chapter.
  • In the "March on Maltak" arc: After calling out the Doma clan orc leader for the deaths of her father and mother, and for forcing Stonewater to either claim her as a mate or kill her, Melsheena Dernaks faces down him down, and calls him a pathetic weakling. As Melsheena walks away, the Doma chief tries to stab her in the back. He never gets the chance, and Melsheena literally knocks the chief's block off. With Stonewater's hammer.
  • In the "War In Hell" storyline, a demon responsible for turning Stonewater's friends against him has his head torn off by Lord Karnak... and Lord Karnak tends to make it a habit with other demons, and a few demon lords, and more notably, Tox'xel.
  • Warlord Damaske, Siegfried's father, met this awful demise at the hands of the Royal Seer, who was working for Tox'xel. Not surprising that Lord Damaske did this as kills.
  • In a humorous manner, Runcible Spoon is known to take his own head off willingly and non-fatally.
• In Erma, Erma likes to rip the heads off all her dolls. She also did this to herself while dancing, although the crowd was less than enthused by it.
• In Erstwhile, the bride orders this for Maid Maleen. And gets it herself.
• Since Freefall averts Cranial Processing Unit, robots can be decapitated non-fatally. This is eventually◊ taken to the Logical Extreme.
• Girl Genius:
  • Tinka ends up decapitated by Vrin and her Geisterdamen, but given she's a clank, this could theoretically be fixed in time.
  • When Vole is sent to get the leader of the Knights of Jove war-stompers who were the first group to attack Mechanicsburg, he comes back with just Selnikov's head.
  • Otilia's body ends up horrifically damaged and decapitated, but she was in another body at the time.
• In Goblins, when Big Ears kills Saral Caine, he stabs (!) him in the chest with an axe, then cuts off his head.
• In Godslave, this is how the Blacksmiths deal with the tree-bird — one of them transforms his arm into a giant machete and decapitates the thing.
• Homestuck:
  • This was how the Black King, the White King, the Draconian Dignitary (by Dave), the Aimless Renegade, and the Hegemonic Brute (twice) were killed.
  • Dirk pulled this off on himself as part of a brilliant example of the very rare Thanatos Speed Gambit.
    • Also, three mooks (well technically two mooks, due to time-related shenanigans) were beheaded by Spades Slick in the Midnight Crew intermission. And Hearts Boxcars did it to another mook as well, specifically he ''ate'' the mook's head..
  • One of the final updates has a triple decapitation happen to Spades Slick, Jack English, and Dirk again.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: The master swordswoman Meti wrote in her Big Book of War that decapitation by more than one blow was severely impolite. Her two students eventually ended up learning that lesson in completely opposite ways: When Incubus moved on Maya, he had two of his men hold her down and made over nine attempts at severing her head, failing completely and simply leaving her with half a windpipe and severe throat scarring. Maya returned the favour after the Discordance by cleanly decapitating Incubus with a single strike of the Maybe Sword, but as the latter had become a Dimension Lord with mastery of Head of John, his headless body simply trashed her half-dead and Incubus reattached his head.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Miko punches off a hobgoblin's head. It strikes the next hobgoblin with enough force to kill it. So that's how unarmed people use the Cleave ability.
  • Roy decapitating the zombie dragon on which Xykon rides. You could say that he has great cleave-age.
  • Belkar killing the leader of the "beetle men".
• In The Sanity Circus, Sammy kicks Steven's head off in one clean go.
  Sammy: That's one less frowny face!
• In Trevor (2020), Dr. Stern gets a good portion of his cranium sliced off by Trevor.
• In Unsounded, Stockyard is gruesomely decapitated by a razor-wire noose. This is also an Ironic Death, as he is fixated on noose imagery — his father was hung, he ties his hair into the shape of nooses, and he plasters noose iconography all over his brothel. He had also killed someone in a similar manner (with a wire garrote) shortly before.
• Zomgan: In the first episode, Mirae On casually beheads the Zomgan guards and then goes on to behead some more Zomgans later on, mainly by using his organs he took out from his body and a bone he summoned from the ground. A rather noticable case is when he summons a miniature brain and proceeds to play baseball with it, blowing off some Zomgans' heads as a result.

Web Original

• The Onion: "White House Jester Beheaded For Making Fun Of Soaring National Debt".
• Lyle Krinkor from The Pirates Covered in Fur beheads Pryllic after he fails to beat Michum and Tully in combat.
• SF Debris did a review of the Game of Thrones pilot. This trope was a basis for his in-universe Drinking Game: One shot for every head off and for every naked girl. Well, he ended up totally wasted and started to read his script from a previous show, mumbling about the philosophy in The Matrix.
• In the final chapter of T.O.T., Maximus Slade is (finally) killed when Rachel chops off his head with a machete.

Web Videos

• Party Crashers: When Sophist receives a prompt to draw himself peeing on Vernias in their first Gartic Phone video, he draws himself hitting Vernias with such an excessive stream of urine that it ends up decapitating him◊.
• In the final episode of There Will Be Brawl, Ganondorf infamously meets his end this way thanks to Kirby, who used Meta-Knight's sword to lop his head off after the big reveal on who the murderous butchers (Ness and Lucas) were.
• 3kliksphilip’s second Odgrub video includes a nearly TWO MINUTE LONG segment of Odgrub running around decapitating the random innocent citizens of Skyrim.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: In "Season's Beatings", a rat that Roger tested his Gargle Blaster eggnog on goes berserk and beheads another rat.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Implied and parodied in the Animated Adaptation of Emperor Joker, when the Joker sends Batman to the guillotine, and when the blade drops, we hear it slice through his neck and the sound of his head plopping on the floor. It quickly turns into Losing Your Head for a brief moment when the Joker restores him to life again.
• DuckTales (2017): After its petrification thanks to Scrooge using the Medusa Gauntlet, Pixiu's head breaks off from its body.
• Family Guy: A cutaway gag featuring Foghorn Leghorn at a KFC commenting to Col Sanders on how good it smells in there, only to be beheaded by Sanders.
  Foghorn Leghorn's severed head: Heh heh, look at that boy! Running all around like a chicken with his head cu— Wait a minute...
• Final Space: In "The Dead Speak", this is how the Lord Commander, after achieving his One-Winged Angel form, kills Bolo after first turning his hand into a blade and impaling him.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Jack, a destructive prankster, had tricked Grim into giving up his scythe. Grim was forced to grant him eternal life in order to get it back and cut off Jack's head out of fury. Jack, now forced to wear a pumpkin as a head, decided to get his revenge by stealing back the scythe and using it on Grim, which would actually kill him.
  Billy: Don't be an idiot. Grim's head is removable. Observe. (pulls Grim's head off)
  Jack: Ah, but any head cut off by the Grim Reaper's scythe stays off. Forever.
  Billy: (fearful) That's a different story.
• In episode 1 of Invincible (2021) Omni-Man strikes Immortal with his hand in the throat, which causes his head to fly off.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony: Rescue at Midnight Castle: Tirac threatens to do this to Spike if Scorpan doesn't get him a fourth pony for his chariot.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Subverted. In "Just for Sidekicks", Spike leaves the Mane Six's pets with the Cutie Mark Crusaders and has second thoughts when he hears Scootaloo screaming that Tank, Rainbow Dash's tortoise, lost his head. Tank turns out to be fine as he was hiding in his shell.
• Regular Show: In "Stick Hockey", Benson retired from playing the titular game after his apprentice Dave (another gumball machine like himself) was beheaded by their opponent in the finals of a tournament. Dave used his last few seconds of consciousness to lament that Benson told him they would have fun, and the same opponent threatened to do the same to Mordecai and Rigby in the present.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Sleepy Time", in Squidward's dream, the king threatens to behead Squidward if he doesn't play his clarinet well.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • "Cloak of Darkness": Ventress decapitates the first clone trooper to see her boarding the Tranquility, before he can warn the others on the ship of her presence.
  • "Monster": Ventress takes out two of the candidates for transformation by throwing their own scythes into their necks, seemingly just to toy with them.
  • "A Friend in Need": Ahsoka takes out four Death Watch members at once this way.
  • "Shades of Reason": Darth Maul executes Pre Vizsla in this fashion after the latter loses their duel for authority.
  • "Sacrifice": In Yoda's vision, Anakin kills Count Dooku the same way he will in Revenge of the Sith, by scissoring his and Dooku's lightsabers at the man's neck before decapitating him.
  • "Shattered": Maul, in perhaps the most brutal combat scene in the entire series, shows that lightsabers are completely unnecessary when you have sharp metal plates and the Force for removing clone trooper heads.
• Star Wars Rebels: In "Call to Action", Grand Moff Tarkin has the Inquisitor execute incompetent officers Aresko and Grint this way for their failures. Simultaneously, thanks to the Inquisitor's double-bladed lightsaber.
• In either homage to the comic book example, the Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) gets this treatment after the turtles storm his headquarters. He lives, because it's a robot suit.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) also homages the comics by having Leonardo decapitate the Super Shredder in the Season 4 finale "Owari".
• Todd McFarlane's Spawn: After mafia boss Tony Twist's efforts to have the cyborg assassin Overkill kill Spawn end in failure, he sends one of his flunkies, Castellano, to Rome and persuade "the man" that Twist himself will rebuild and rearm Overkill. The next he sees of Castellano is his battered head in a box, with a note from Rome that only underscores just how unhappy they are.
• Happens to Tom at the end of the Tom and Jerry short "The Two Mouseketeers."
  Nibbles/Tuffy: Pauvre, pauvre pussycat...
• In the Van Beuren Studios Tom and Jerry short "Swiss Trick", Tom briefly gets his head knocked off as a gag. He quickly puts it back on.
• ToonMarty: Happens to Hollie in one episode.
• Transformers: Prime: In "Crossfire", Megatron decapitates Airachnid's Insecticon, and it's implied that Airachnid might have done this to Breakdown (his head is found lying well away from his body with an expression of terror on his face).
• Lady Shiva slices Ocean Master's head off with a sword in Young Justice: Outsiders in order to stop him from killing the Justice League's families (an act which for obvious reasons is considered by the Light to be the "nuclear option").

Real Life

• Decapitation was a common form of capital punishment in many pre-modern polities, though it was often one of many forms of execution, and could vary in terms of why and how it was applied, as well as to whom and when. In Germanic and Scandinavian countries, decapitation was reserved for capital crimes such as murder; commoners were traditionally beheaded with an axe while noblemen with a sword. In England and France however, decapitation was solely reserved for the nobility who have committed serious crimes, with the latter almost exclusively using the sword and the former going for the axe. Following the French Revolution, a few European countries followed France in reserving it for capital crimes, though it had been superseded by hanging in places like Great Britain. Those that continued using it into the twentieth century generally switched over to the guillotine, which had existed in some form or another before the nineteenth century. Today, the only countries which still have decapitation on the books are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen, though only Saudi Arabia still carries them out.
  • Decapitation has been carried out on corpses in cases where judgment has been rendered after death:
    • Oliver Cromwell, who had been dead some years before the restoration of Charles II, was sentenced to a ritual execution after being tried as a regicide. After having his corpse dragged to its place of execution, his head was then struck off and mounted on a spike atop Westminster Hall, where it stood for about two decades until it was blown down in a storm.
    • The remains of Pope Formosus were exhumed and put on trial in the "Cadaver Synod". Some sources say the cadaver was decapitated.
  • During the The French Revolution, beheading by guillotine became the only legal method of capital punishment in France, with the only exceptions were crimes against the state and military offences (which were punished by firing squad). Consisting of little more than a heavy, angled blade mounted on a frame, the guillotine was so efficient that spectators were said to be disappointed at the brevity of the show — as Mike Duncan succinctly put it, "just zip, thud, the end". Gruesome though it may be, the point of the guillotine was to make the act of executing the condemned as quick and painless as possible. By making decapitation the only legally accepted method of capital punishment, it was not only more humane, but also more equitable as well, ensuring that all criminals received the same punishment for crimes of similar severity.^note Prior the Penal Code of 1791, sentencing could depend on the type of crime and one's status in society and often involved varying levels of torture beforehand. Hanging was the most common form of punishment for most crimes, but one could also be burned alive for sodomy or witchcraft (if not strangled beforehand), broken on the wheel for brigandage or murder, immersed in boiling liquid for counterfeiting, or dismembered for high treason or parricide. Decapitation (by sword) was solely reserved to the nobility, being seen as a more dignified (and less painful) way to die, especially as the executioner was generally of esteemed birth.
    • Contrary to popular belief, Joseph Guillotin did not invent the guillotine nor was he a victim of it. In fact, he was actually opposed to capital punishment on principle, and only proposed as an alternative should proposals to abolish the death penalty fail to be realized.^note There is a further irony in that this one proposal has largely overshadowed his work as a doctor and chair of the Health Committee, one of the first attempts at public health initiatives in France. The real ironies of the guillotine were that Robespierre died of it (of course) and that Louis XVI had a hand in developing the standard design (specifically, it was he who suggested that the blade be angled, so as not to bounce off the neck of the condemned).
  • The last execution by beheading in France was Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian man convicted of the kidnapping, torture and murder of Elisabeth Bousquet. He was guillotined on September 10, 1977, the final time any Western nation executed someone via this method. The death penalty was then abolished in France in 1981.
  • The last beheading in West Germany occurred in 1949 when a convicted robber-murderer Berthold Wehmeyer was executed by guillotine. He was also the last person to be executed in West Germany. The last time a guillotine was used in these countries was in 1961 in East Germany.
  • The last beheading in Scandinavia happened 1910 when Swedish murderer Johan Ander was guillotined in Långholmen prison, Stockholm.
  • Beheading was the de jure execution method in the Grand Duchy of Finland until 1917, although the last execution in Finland happened in 1828 [after that, all death sentences were commuted to internal exiles in Siberia]. The method was changed in 1917 into firing squad.
  • The last beheading in Denmark took place in 1892. The last beheading before that had been in 1882, and the death penalty was largely on the vane in the country. Indeed, Jens Nielsen, the prisoner sentenced to death, had had two prior death penalties converted to life in prison, but he didn't want to rot in prison, so he kept attacking the prison guards. After the third incident, his deathwish was finally carried out. When the death penalty was re-introduced following World War II, the sentences were carried out by firing squad.
  • Although decapitation was often the preferred means of departure for condemned members of the British nobility, it could get pretty messy at times. In 1405 the Archbishop of York was executed for rebelling against King Henry IV; the headsman deliberately used five blows to sever the churchman's head to mimic the five wounds of Christ. In 1685 the Duke of Monmouth suffered an even more Nightmare Fuel-lish fate; the terrified and incompetent executioner, Jack Ketch, took over seven unsuccessful blows to try and remove the head; he had to finish off the job with a knife. One account states that at one point the executioner threw down his axe and offered a large sum of money to anyone in the crowd willing to take over the job. Another account says that the watching crowd was so horrified (and the half-dead Duke was so annoyed) that the headsman had to be escorted out with armed guards at the ready as the mob was threatening to beat him to death.
  • Obviously, Henry VIII of England, who had two of his six wives executed in this fashion. His kids did their fair share as well — Edward VI actually had two of his uncles beheaded; Mary I and Elizabeth I both had one of their cousins beheaded for claiming the throne — Lady Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots, respectively. Given it was a major spectacle for the nobility, the fact that it took two or three strikes to get the job done was likely rather embarrassing to the headsman. (He was generous enough to call for a swordsman to come from France to do it for Anne Boleyn at her own request; also, contrary to popular belief, nobles were executed away from the public; not only was it considered harsh for them to be jeered at, many monarchs who had sentenced them did not want the bad publicity it would often cause.)
  • A particularly horrific case was that of the 67-year-old Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury and a Blessed of the Catholic Church; condemned by Henry VIII (in what historians consider a spiteful act to get back at her son, Cardinal Reginald Pole, who'd been disparaging and encouraging resistance to Henry's rule), who refused to admit any guilt and would not kneel at the headsman's block — one account says that she leapt from the block after the first clumsy blow and ran, pursued by the executioner, being struck eleven times before she died.
  • When the German medieval pirate Klaus Störtebeker was to be beheaded, he was granted the wish that those of his men would be pardoned, if he managed to walk past them after being decapitated. And according to the legend, he managed to walk past eleven of them (and may have continued, but the executioner tripped him).
  • Nazi Germany guillotined almost as many people as the French Revolution did. Beheading was the usual sentence for felonies rather than political crimes, though certain members of resistance groups, such as Hans and Sophie Scholl of the nonviolent White Rose resistance group, were executed this way when they weren't hanged or shot. For extra cruelty points, the Nazis would often execute their victims face up, so that they would be forced to watch the blade descend.
  • During the religious persecutions of the fanatical Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, two Sikh boys under 10 years old were condemned to be bricked up alive inside a wall for refusing to convert to Islam. The boys' executioners entombed them up to their shoulders and then beheaded them, presumably out of pity.
• Medieval martyrologies cite decapitation as a standard method of execution carried out by the Romans towards captured early Christians. Examples: Saint John the Baptist (who was actually beheaded on orders of Herod rather than the Romans themselves), Saint Paul of Tarsus, Saint Agnes of Rome, Saint Philomena, etc. Supposedly, since Paul actually held Roman citizenship, he couldn't be crucified by the Roman authorities: beheading was seen as quick mercy for condemned Romans compared to a slow, painful, degrading death by crucifixion.
  • Two rather special cases are Saint Denis and Saint Solange. Both died by beheading (Denis, for being the Christian bishop of Paris in Roman times; Mysterious Waif Solange, for fighting back against a would-be rapist who was trying to kidnap her and make her his mistress)... but according to their legends, their "lifeless" bodies calmly took their own heads in their hands and walked towards the nearest towns, only dropping truly dead in front of the local villagers.
• Often an unintended consequence of a botched judicial long drop hanging. If the drop is made too long or the convict has weak neck muscles or vertebrae, the result will be decapitation instead of Neck Snap. An example of this occurred in the 1930s with the hanging of Eva Dugan, whose head popped off and rolled to a stop at the spectators' feet. This is one of the reasons why, in the United States, hanging has been replaced by electric chair, lethal injection or gas chambers.
• Vic Morrow (Jennifer Jason Leigh's dad) and two child actors named My-ca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen were killed when a stunt helicopter crashed near them during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1982. Morrow was filming a scene where his character tried to save the children who were trapped in an area about to be bombed in The Vietnam War. He and one of the kids were decapitated by the chopper's rotor blades while the other was crushed under the weight... and their deaths were caught on film.
  • For the morbidly curious, the footage found its way into one those atrocious Death Scenes mondo videos and is now available on the internet. The clip itself actually isn't graphical at all; the crash happens so suddenly and fast that nothing can be seen; Vic and the two children are there one moment, the chopper comes down, and in the next moment they've disappeared beneath the wreckage.
• Similarly to Vic Morrow, film director Boris Sagal (father of actress Katey Sagal) died via being decapitated by the tail rotor blades of a stunt helicopter.
• Seppuku was traditionally concluded by the samurai's second, or kaishakunin, chopping off the samurai's head to finish him off after the initial self-disembowelment. This was so their suffering would be brief and to prevent the shame of showing pain.
• In the 1974 US Grand Prix, Austrian Helmuth Koinigg crashed into an Armco barrier. The lower beam wasn't properly secured and buckled as the vehicle struck it. The car passed underneath the top portion... which was very firmly bolted on. Yikes.
• Another Formula One death happened this way. Tom Pryce struck a track marshal who had foolishly run onto the race course to extinguish a minor fire on the other side of the track. Pryce hit the man at full racing speed, the impact ripping him in two. The fire extinguisher the marshal had been carrying entered the cockpit of Pryce's car and struck his helmet, ripping it up and out of the car. The helmet's strap partially decapitated Pryce and his now driverless car careened down the track before hitting another car and coming to a stop. There is footage of the incident on YouTube and various other video sites.
• Man in Virginia uses cable to decapitate himself.
• The occupants of a Piper Cherokee lost their heads when their plane collided with an airliner over the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos.
• Famously, this didn't completely work for Mike the Headless Chicken. On September 10, 1945, Mike was taken to the chopping block to be butchered. Thanks to a botched axe swing, didn't die after his head was severed. He kept on walking around headless as if nothing had happened for a year and a half, though the loss of his head meant that he could not survive without assistance.
• A possible consequence coming from flying kites with strings that are made of thread covered in liquid glue and pulverized glass. This is intended to cut rival kites' strings in flying competitions, but these 'covered' threads (known as "hilo curado" in Chile and "cendol" in Brazil) are dangerous enough to slit throats and straight up decapitate people.
• Sushi chefs usually cut off the heads of freshly caught fish before preparing it. The fish are generally already dead, and the beheading is largely because fish heads aren't much good as sushi: their meat is not conducive to eating in 1-2 bites as required for sushi eating. (The heads don't go to waste; they usually end up in fish stock either at the restaurant or after being sold to another, though if the head is big enough—e.g. tuna—the sushi place might harvest the head meat for rolls or gunkanmaki before doing that.)
• American patriot Henry Laurens was so afraid of being buried alive that upon his death in 1792, he arranged for his remains to be subjected to a post-mortem decapitation just in case, and then burnt for good measure. His ashes were then buried on his estate.
• In accordance with his will, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham had his body preserved for posterity after his death in 1832. Following his dissection (For Science!), his body was reduced to a skeleton and his head was detached and mummified so as to retain the features that he had in life, though not with great success — the preservers elected to use a wax head on the body instead. Nevertheless, his real head was left in the display unit alongside his body... until one too many frat house thefts led to it being locked away in a more secure location.
• Pirate queen Ching Shih had a pretty straightforward punishment for anyone who did anything dishonorable or excessively cruel while in her employ — have their head chopped off, and the body thrown into the ocean.
• The macuahuitl, a pre-colonial Mesoamerican weapon, was so incredibly sharp and heavy that according to the Spaniards' reports, skilled wielders lopped off the necks of horses to demonstrate that they could do the same to humans even through metal armor. Downplayed, however, as said Mesoamericans were not yet familiar with steel, namely how insanely tough it is in proportion to its mass, which were a match for the macuahuitl. When not wearing that steel armor, on the other hand, the Spaniards' heads were easily chopped off and placed on public display on a tzompantli for intimidation.
• In 2016, 10-year-old Caleb Schwab was decapitated on Verrückt at Schlitterbahn Water park in Kansas City. Due to uneven weight distribution, when the raft went airborne, it hit the netting and Caleb was decapitated by a metal support beam (Internally as confirmed by his brother, Nate, who was waiting for him at the bottom, but still a HORRIBLE thing to see.) His father, Kansas state assemblyman Scott Schwab, sought criminal charges against the park. While the case was ultimately dismissed, the park's reputation was badly damaged, as attendance declined following the incident.
• Due to unhealed deep bite marks matching Tyrannosaurus found on some Triceratops frills, which wouldn't have had much meat, it is theorized that the former may have decapitated the latter postmortem by grabbing on their frills in order to get enough leverage to rip their heads off and get at their nutrient-rich neck meat.

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...A little off the top, please.