And I Must Scream / Marvel Universe

And I Must Scream in the Marvel Universe.

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Comic Books

• Alpha Flight: The Master of the World was a caveman dissected cell by cell by an alien Living Ship, with his mind trapped in the ship's computer for forty thousand years, conscious the whole time, before he got control of the ship and had a new body grown.
• Daredevil: The ultimate fate of Bullseye in Daredevil (Mark Waid) #27. After a demonically possessed Daredevil killed Bullseye in Shadowland, Lady Bullseye manages to resurrect him, but he's completely paralyzed, has lost all his senses except his eyesight, and needs to be placed in an iron lung. Bullseye comes up with a rather elaborate plot to torment Daredevil and ultimately kill him. He fails and in the process loses his sense of sight. One of the most vicious, psychotic, and frightening villains in the Marvel Universe is now, in the words of Daredevil, "a living brain in a flesh and bone coffin."
• Deadpool: Played for laughs with throwaway villain The White Man. The White Man has Mandarin tech that allows his cane to turn people into stone; a fate he is subjected to when Deadpool, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist fight him in the 70's. He is unfrozen in the present day (Deadpool loves to mock comic book time) where it's revealed he was conscious and fully aware of his surroundings the entire time. He attempts to freeze Cage and Iron Fist and dump them in the ocean, but Iron Fist's students kick him in the balls, freeze him in a pose holding his crotch, and accidentally knock him overboard. The heroes assume he's dead while the White Man sinks to the bottom of the ocean and sinks into mud. He's not only still conscious, it's implied he's also constantly feeling the pain of having been freshly kicked in the nuts. He is eventually rescued... one million years later, when an alien race picks him up on a long abandoned desolate Earth. By this point, the White Man has long since gone gibbering insane and the aliens throw him in a zoo, assuming humans are an unintelligent species.
• District X: During the House of M tie-in, two of Kaufman's henchmen are walking inside a warehouse belonging to one of Kaufman's deposed drug lord rivals Frankie Zapruder. One of the henchmen is talking about Zapruder. The other henchman says, "What a terrible way to end your life." To which the other henchman replies "Who said anything about him being dead?" Zapruder is being suspended on top of the warehouse by chains, and later gets horrific revenge on Kaufman in a method that is left to the reader's imagination.
• Doctor Strange: Doctor Strange isn't above inflicting this on his enemies. An amateur sorcerer sends his remote projection to blackmail Strange into giving up his chokehold on mystical knowledge, and Strange initially acquiesces. When the sorcerer projects himself again to reap his reward, his astral form is trapped in a small jar from which he can't escape. Strange places him among rows of identical jars and walks away from the sorcerer's panicked screaming.
  • A professional thief shoots Dr. Strange and ransacks his home. When Strange catches up with the thief, he punishes him by trapping his physical body inside his own mind.
  • In post-Secret Wars Marvel, magic has a serious cost. For Strange this takes the form of giant tumorous growths that plague his body like a cancer. In order to alleviate the worst of it, he passes off his own suffering onto an artificial being he keeps locked in his basement. Later, Strange is forced into a prolonged and desperate fight with The Empirikul, dimension-hopping and genetically enhanced super scientists who want to destroy all magic. When Strange is finally victorious, the Empirikul's leader wakes up blindfolded and chained in a basement as Strange reads the spell of substitution.
• Fantastic Four: In Fantastic Four Annual #19, all the Skrulls lose their shapeshifting ability... and are stuck in whatever form they have at that moment, even those squeezed inside really tiny cracks and crevices... One sleeper agent was in the shape of a lamp when the weapon was activated.
• Ghost Rider:
  • In an annual written by Warren Ellis, the Scarecrow (not the Batman villain) creates a haunted house sewn together with live human beings. Upon defeating him, Ghost Rider breaks every bone in the Scarecrow's body, then twists every bone in the Scarecrow's body so the bones will not heal properly, thus leaving the Scarecrow as a permanently paralyzed and disjointed mess. The Scarecrow later got better.
  • The Deacon is paralyzed in the last issue of Ghost Rider: Heaven's On Fire. Total paralysis. He'll never move again. And he's going to spend his days in prison with the All-New Orb. Surely, this is a fate worse than death. This was actually intended as the ultimate punishment - rather than killing him and having him join his master Zadkiel, having him suffer through a pathetic life.
• The Incredible Hulk: In Immortal Hulk #2, Bruce Banner gets attacked by a Mad Scientist who used his research to become immortal but ended up turning into a creature resembling a Ghoul from Fallout as a result. He used his son as a test subject but ended up accidentally killing him as a result, and buried him not knowing his corpse was radioactive and killing anyone who passed by it in the graveyard. To punish him the Hulk tears off his limbs and leaves him buried alive miles underground, unable to die.
  • As the series goes on, it turns out this is part of what happens to Gamma Mutates when they die. They wind up in the Below Place, if the One Below All deems them worth bringing back to life via the Green Door. If they lack the willpower to come back, they're stuck reliving the moment of their death over and over, as happens to Del Frye.
• The Infinity Gauntlet: Thanos turns his granddaughter Nebula - who had been severely injured, but saved by one of Thanos' own henchmen, who got killed by his master for this kindness - into a floating near-corpse who is an intermediate state between life and death, not being allowed the luxury of death despite being twisted, broken and mutilated. She got better.
• The Infinity War: Magus ended as this. Due to reality-altering energies being unleashed as he held the incomplete Gauntlet, he ended up as an intangible, invisible, inaudible apparition. He can see others but not interact with them. Scream, but never be heard. ...Until Genis-Vell with his cosmic senses comes along, and a Timey-Wimey Ball gets involved.
• Iron Man: This is the sad fate of Justin Hammer. After being harassed by Hammer messing with his hormones, Tony discovers and heads to a satellite where the villain, stricken with a terminal illness, is living out his last days. A series of missteps by Hammer's men causes him to fall into his pool and Tony uses a special cryo-capsule to freeze the water he's in before the two are sucked out into space. However, by the time S.H.I.E.L.D. could get up to pick up Hammer's men, Hammer himself had drifted off too far into space, his disease stabilized by the zero-gravity of space but never able to escape.
• New Mutants: How do you deal with a sadistic person who can control people with her voice? Simple. Use dark magic to completely remove her mouth, reducing her to a broken, weeping mess. Do not mess with Doug Ramsey. Seriously.
• Ruins: The Gamma Bomb that was supposed to turn Bruce Banner into the Hulk instead turned him into a huge mass of gigantic tumors and horrific maiming all over the body, which Rick Jones claims is still being kept alive in a CIA facility.
• Runaways:
  • After meeting Gert's time-traveling parents in the distant past and revealing to them what happens to them and their daughter, Nico casts a spell on them that renders them unable to speak about or act upon the knowledge they learned from the kids and then sends them back to the time they left from. She even highlights it with the quote:
    "On the outside they will be their normal selves but on the inside, they will never stop screaming."
  • Later, Molly is attacked by a super villain who is getting revenge for something her parents did to him. It apparently was some sort of attack with their psychic powers, which left him completely paralyzed (unable to even blink) and lasted until they died. In other words, he spent seventeen years in a hospital, unable to move, and at the complete mercy of the hospital staff.
• Spider-Man:
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #230, Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut!, this happened to the Juggernaut when Spider-Man buried him in tons of concrete.
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #430–431, after trying to possess the Silver Surfer, the Carnage Symbiote is tossed back onto the original host and is then encased in an unbreakable shell of energy much like the Surfer's own shell of silver that still lives and thinks, but cannot move, in order to arrest the rapid encroachment of stomach cancer into his body without the symbiote. It's stated he's stuck like that for all eternity, but he got better later.
  • In Spider-Man: Reign, this is the fate of the Kingpin, who is kept alive via an intravenous drip for ten years and paraded out once a year in front of the mayor who eats a steak in front of him.
• Ultimate Marvel: This is eventually revealed to be Thanos' Evil Plan, on a galactic scale: he wants to make death something only he is allowed to experience, leaving the rest of the universe in an And I Must Scream state.
• X-Men:
  • In Uncanny X-Men, Doctor Doom once turned Storm into an organic chrome statue. She could not move but could still think. This turned into a case of Unstoppable Rage because she is severely claustrophobic, and being unable to move made her completely insane. And her mutant powers were still working, so the claustrophobia manifested as a deadly storm overhead. Which expanded until it was a hurricane covering roughly half the planet. (By that point, even after Storm was freed, it was too large for her to control.)
  • In Fatal Attractions (Marvel Comics), when Magneto pulls the adamantium out of Wolverine's skeleton and through the pores of his skin, its stated that the pain was so excruciating that even if Wolverine could scream out in pain, he couldn't.
  • Joss Whedon concluded his run on Astonishing X-Men by permanently fusing Kitty Pryde with a gigantic bullet made of alien metal, after she phased it through the Earth in a Heroic Sacrifice. The first issue of S.W.O.R.D. (2009) reveals that, over a year later, she's still alive and conscious, and getting further and further from home at apparently superluminal speeds. Although eventually she did get back to Earth thanks to the actions of Magneto. She still can't scream. She Got Better.
  • In Young X-Men, Greymalkin has this as his origin story. He was buried alive by his abusive father roughly 200 years ago. The trauma caused his mutant powers to appear, and it just so happens that said powers are superstrength and invincibility in total darkness. The poor guy was buried alive, immobile, for 200 years until he was freed. Beast comments that it's amazing he kept his sanity.
• What If?: In vol. 2 #13, Charles Xavier rather than Cain Marko finds the Crimson Gem of Cyttorak and becomes the Juggernaut, corrupting him into a mutant-supremacist supervillain. The issue ends with him Thrown Out the Airlock and helplessly floating through space. As the Juggernaut, Xavier's immortal, indestructible body doesn't need air, food or water so he can survive this situation indefinitely. The ending narration is an Ironic Echo of the Juggernaught's catchphrase, implying that he will float through space forever, fully conscious but powerless to do anything.
  ''He is the Juggernaut. He is possibly immortal. Definitely indestructible. And above all, unstoppable. Nothing can stop the Juggernaut. And nothing ever will."

Films

• At the end of the Fantastic Four (2005) movie, the villain Victor van Doom is fully transformed into living metal. His body is heated up and then rapidly cooled, resulting in a crystallisation process that leaves him unable to move, and everyone to believe he is dead. Unfortunately for him, he is still fully conscious.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man 2, Rhodey is trapped inside the War Machine armor with no control over it, no way out and he is forced to try and kill his best friend. The look he gives Tony when Natasha finally reboots the armor remotely says it all.
  • Doctor Strange (2016):
    • Through the Eye of Agamatto, Strange sets a time loop on the moment where he arrives to bargain with Dormammu. It repeats over and over, no matter how many times Strange is killed — he even says "you are my prisoner". Strange, by the end, is willing to endure an eternity of torture in Dormammu's hands for the sake of the Earth. Eventually, Dormammu gets tired of being trapped and agrees to withdraw from Earth.
    • This scene is actually pay-off to a severe warning Karl gives Strange about using the Eye earlier in the film. He mentions that using it irresponsibly can lead to the user reliving the same moment over and over without end or being removed from existence outright. We'll take the latter, thanks.
    • One of the conditions of Strange's bargain is that Dormammu leaves Earth for good, and takes Kaecilius and his Zealots with him to the dark dimension. Strange tells them they're getting eternal life as they wanted, and they're not gonna like it.
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp:
    • Janet van Dyne shrunk between molecules to disarm a bomb headed for Washington, DC. However, in doing so she got stuck in the Quantum Realm, alone, for thirty years, with her husband and daughter convinced she was dead.
    • In The Stinger, Scott is sent into the Quantum Realm in order to get healing particles for Ghost. However, before Hank, Hope and Janet can pull him back out, they're turned to dust by Thanos' finger snap, leaving Scott alone and stuck in the Quantum Realm as he screams for help over the radio. But unlike with Janet, the only people who even know where he is and how to bring him back are gone, and Scott not coming home means he's chalked up as another of Thanos' victims, meaning no-one will look for him.
    • Avengers: Endgame reveals that, luckily, the wait was only five hours for Scott...but five years have passed in the real world and he was only freed because of a rat stepping on the right sequence of buttons. It's still pretty chilling that it was only through sheer random chance that he wasn't stuck for any longer.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness:
    • In 616-Wanda's mind, 838-Wanda appears stuck under rubble of her childhood home (i.e. perpetually trapped in one of the most traumatic memories of her life) as 616-Wanda dreamwalks in her body, trapped and unable to do anything.
    • Wanda removes the mouth of Earth-838's Black Bolt in a manner similar to the interrogation scene from The Matrix. Once he makes this horrifying realization, he lets out what would be a blood-curdling scream... if his explosive voice hadn't immediately caused his skull to pop.
• X-Men Film Series
  • X2: X-Men United: Stryker's mind control serum makes the victim obedient, but their real self is still in there, fully aware and incapable of controlling their own body. Look at the sheer horror on Deathstryke's face when the serum controlling her briefly wears off. Particularly when she looks at her hands and remembers the pain of being bonded with adamantium, likely because she was being controlled during that process as well. Scott similarly tells Jean he couldn't stop himself from trying to kill her.
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Wade Wilson's fate. He turned from a nice-looking, fast-talking, somewhat funny guy to a pale, disfigured person. He has no hair and his mouth was sewn shut. He got all the powers of the mutants Weapon X captured, but he was completely under their control with no free will.
  • X-Men: First Class: The death of Sebastian Shaw. He's held immobile while a coin is pushed slowly through his skull. Xavier, who's psychically linked to Shaw in order to hold him immobile, does the screaming instead.
  • Deadpool (2016): In the final attempt to activate Wade's powers, Ajax sticks him in a decompression chamber designed to keep him suffering on the edge of suffocation, then leaves him there for a weekend. After it succeeds, Ajax decides to leave him in there even longer, just because he likes Wade suffering.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Apocalypse seals the street vendor into a wall when the guy threatens Ororo, so just his eyes (which are still moving) are visible.

Live-Action TV

• Jessica Jones (2015): If you become a victim of Kilgrave, you want to do what he wants you to do, whether or not it's what you want to do. When his victims talk about their ordeal afterward, many, Jessica herself included, mention how they were hating inside their minds all the while.
  • In an example not directly related to (though still caused by) Kilgrave's mind control, an ambulance driver who picked up Kilgrave was forced to give him both of his kidneys, and as a result suffered a severe stroke that gave him extensive brain damage. When Jessica finds him, he is stuck in a wheelchair and being cared for by his somewhat creepy mother. He manages to get enough control over himself to ask Jessica to put him out of his misery.
• Legion:
  • In "Chapter 26", Charles Xavier is horrified to discover through his telepathy that the consciousness of the king that Amahl Farouk had deposed is trapped inside the mind of Farouk's caged pet monkey! That means at least some of the monkey's shrieks are the former monarch's anguished cries to be freed from the animal's head.
    Ex-king: Please. Please, you have to help me. I was a king. A king, you hear. I was a kiiiiiing!
  • The next day, Charles is approached by Habiba, who is constantly tormented by the yelling of the people who are imprisoned within her own psyche.
    Habiba: Can you make them stop screaming? They're all inside of me. I can't sleep.
    Charles: Who?
    Habiba: Every tyrant has his supporters.
    (Charles reads her mind)
    Ex-king's subjects: Help us! Release us! He was our king!
• WandaVision:
  • Everybody who was in the town of Westview when Wanda Maximoff created the Hex was subjected to her reality-warping magic, and had their personality overwritten to become "characters" in her sitcom fantasy. Underneath, they are fully aware that they are Wanda's puppets and are absolutely miserable and terrified, as Norm reveals in episode five upon being briefly freed from the brainwashing. Monica, who was brainwashed upon entering Westview only to be ejected and freed from it later, adds that they're also all feeling Wanda's overwhelming grief at Vision's death thanks to her psychic influence. When the Hex is undone in the finale and Westview is brought back to normal, every one of them is pissed off at Wanda for what she did to them.
  • This is also how Wanda punishes the Big Bad Agatha Harkness after defeating and depowering her, forcing her to become "Agnes the Nosy Neighbor", the character she disguised herself as while in the Hex, for real. Given what Agatha saw Wanda do to the rest of Westview, she is horrified by her fate.

Western Animation

• In Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, Doctor Doom uses his new cosmic powers which he stole from the Silver Surfer to inflict this on Ben Grimm by slowing his metabolism down to the point where he can't move or speak, but is still aware and becomes in Doom's words a "living statue" for the rest of his life. Fortunately, Crystal reverses it when she finds him.
• Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Justin Hammer inflicts this on Mr. Fix after he's defeated for the first time as Titanium Man. Using a nanovirus, which he'd implanted in Fix beforehand to force him to become Hammer's lackey, Justin kills Mr. Fix. Right after his physical body dies however, Hammer has his consciousness installed onto a microchip that he then installs in his supercomputer. This causes Fix to be "reborn" as an AI in Justin's computer, allowing Justin to use Fix as his slave forever, all while Fix is conscious and trapped as, what he later calls, "a digital freak". Unfortunately for Hammer, Mr. Fix, even trapped as an AI, wasn't nearly as helpless as he thought he'd be. Fighting his programming, Mr. Fix covertly orchestrates Hammer's eventual downfall by revealing his criminal activities to the world.
• Episode 4 of What If…? (2021) focuses on an alternate Doctor Strange who lost his girlfriend Christine Palmer instead of the use of his hands. All the same events of Doctor Strange (2016) happen, but afterwards, he begins delving into time travel with the hope of saving Christine. Sadly, every attempt results in her dying another way since her death, as the Ancient One explains, is an "Absolute Point"; a pivotal moment in the timeline that must happen and is impossible to alter, since doing so would cause a Reality-Breaking Paradox. Strange, however, refuses to listen to every warning he's given. He spends centuries (after freezing his own time with the Eye of Agamotto containing the Time Stone) absorbing the power of various interdimensional terrors to achieve the level of magic needed to change Christine's fate. And when he finally does, it triggers the paradox he was explicitly warned would happen, since with Christine alive, Strange no longer had any reason to pursue the mystic arts and become Sorcerer Supreme. The resulting Time Crash erases his entire universe from existence, and Christine along with it. The only thing left is a tiny crystal bubble, inside of which is the now-immortal Strange, who realized the consequences far too late and is all alone with the knowledge that it's all his fault. Forever.
  • Somewhat mitigated at the end of the season finale in Episode 9 when Uatu charges him with keeping watch over the miniature pocket dimension containing the pitched battle for the Infinity Stones between Killmonger and the Vision body possessed by the A.I. consciousness of Arnim Zola after it killed Infinity Ultron. He's not alone in the technical sense but still doesn't have anything to really do other than that.

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