Cruel And Unusual Death / Live-Action Films

This takes chest-pain to a whole new level.

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#

• In 5 Card Stud, the killer's first four victims are smothered in a flour barrel, garrotted with barbed wire, hanged by the bell rope in the church, and drowned in a horse trough.
• In 28 Weeks Later, infected Don kills his own wife in horrific fashion. First, he repeatedly punches her in the head, then rips out some of her throat with his teeth, before finally gouging out her eyes with his thumbs. Throughout the entire ordeal, she is strapped down, therefore she can only lie there and suffer. Adding insult to injury, her bloody body is later incinerated in a firebombing.
• In 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns, the third victim in the 'tiger murders' is Eaten Alive when his car is filled with flesh-eating tiger beetles.
• In 2001 Maniacs, one of the main characters gets bent over a table and run through from ass to mouth with a giant skewer, while the rest of the townspeople look on approvingly. Lin Shaye's character, Granny Boone then licks the gore off the end of the skewer that's sticking out of his mouth.

A

• During the course of titular character's Roaring Rampage of Revenge in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Phibes kills one of his victims by crushing his skull to paste with a vice hidden in a paper-mache mask.
• The Alien series uses this as its bread-and-butter, as multiple human protagonists are subject to disturbing and/or humiliating deaths.
  • In the original film, a (non-canon) deleted scene has Ripley discover the fates of Brett and Dallas — they're being converted into Facehugger eggs. Ripley can only stare in shock as she sees Brett almost fully-converted, and Dallas with half of his body now part of the egg (and pleading in a low voice to kill him) before she incinerates them both and lays waste to what exists of the xenomorph's nest before going to escape.
  • Of course, there's the notorious chestburster scene shown above. (The FX department used actual innards from a butcher shop to make this realistic, and the horror shown by the rest of the cast isn't just acting; they figured out what was about to happen but were not prepared for the reality of it. Both make for an incredibly horrific and brutal death.) Later parodied in Spaceballs with actor John Hurt groaning "Not Again!" as another chestburster does him in a second time.
  • The lone female colonist (besides Newt) that the Marines discover underneath the atmosphere processor in Aliens. She survives until just before the Marines arrive, gets captured and impregnated, and wakes up just as the Marines arrive and tell her that everything will be alright. She then graphically dies as the chestburster rips out of her and the Marines all stare at her, then incinerate the creature (and her body) in the moments afterward.
  • In the third film, Dillon sacrifices himself to stall the xenomorph long enough for Morse to pour the molten lead on top of it, via staying in the lead channel as Ripley climbs up and letting the creature maul him, all the while screaming for Morse to pour the ten tons of lead on top of him.
  • In Alien: Resurrection, the Newborn (the most humanlike of the xenomorphs) is killed by having Ripley use her acidic blood to open a hole in a nearby port, causing the room they're in to depressurize and start sucking the Newborn into space. Both Ripley and Call watch as the creature's insides spew out into space; it yells in pain as its intestines are sucked up through the hole, then stares pitifully before the rest of its body breaks apart and flies out soon afterwards.
  • Resurrection also has a scene where a guy about to suffer death by chestburster decides to use the opportunity to drag along the Corrupt Corporate Executive, pressing the latter's head to his chest so the Alien hatches through Wren's head.
  • Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. The maternity ward. Several pregnant women have Xenomorph embryos forced down their throats by the Predalien Queen. They then get to watch as one by one, each of them "birth" a slew of new Xenomorphs. Fatally.
• American History X: The infamous curb-stomping scene, in which Derek Vineyard, a neo-Nazi, forces the last of a group of black robbers to bite the curb before savagely stomping him in the head and killing him. This results in Derek going to prison.
• The Anaconda's killing method is downright horrific; Reptiles Are Abhorrent is certainly at play here. Dying at its hands according to one expert involves being constricted by the snake's coils so hard that eventually your bones break and your veins burst. That's if you're lucky. You might also survive, only to be Eaten Alive afterwards, to be slowly digested or spit out again.
• Most of the deaths in Apostle are hard to watch, but special mention goes to Jeremy's execution after he and his pregnant girlfriend are caught trying to flee the cult and he's framed for her murder by her father. He gets a slow death via drill to the skull while his head is held in a vice and his limbs are shackled down.
• Asylum (1972 Horror): Dr. Martin crushes Byron's mentally controlled robot underfoot, exposing real internal organs within its broken body — when he runs upstairs, Martin learns that the same has happened to Byron.
  Max: His body was... crushed!
• Austin Powers had some pretty gruesome and unpleasant deaths, such as Mook being squashed by steamroller while crying from pain, and another having his head bitten off by ill-tempered mutant seabass (Dr. Evil's minions couldn't get sharks with lasers on their head). And all of this is Played for Laughs.
• Avengers: Infinity War: When Proxima Midnight, one of the members of The Black Order, tries to slit Natasha Romanoff's throat. Wanda Maximoff uses her telekinetic powers to toss Proxima into an incoming Thresher, reducing her into a bloody blood bath. Even hardened assassin Natasha found this scene rather nauseating.

B

• The Banana Splits Movie has multiple characters going through pretty gruesome deaths, but special mention goes to Andy, who gets his limbs forcibly and painfully pulled out by the Splits.
• Dying by being electrocuted next to a generator set off by a taser in Batman Returns. Hard to feel entirely sorry for Max Shreck, though.
• One unlucky enemy soldier in The Beast is forced to lie down in front of a tank, and is then slowly run over feet-first.
• In The Beast of Hollow Mountain, the movie's villain, Enrique, is strangled to death by the titular dinosaur. Gypsy comments that it might be the first time for such a death.
• In Beerfest, Landfill One drowns in a gigantic vat of beer. Considering who the character is and that he dies while trying to drink his way out, it arguably crosses with Great Way to Go.
• The Black Cat: Bela Lugosi flaying Boris Karloff bit by bit. Given the era, it's done by Shadow Discretion Shot, but some critics of the time still found it grisly.
  "Do you know what I am going to do to you now? No? Did you ever see an animal skinned, Hjalmar? That's what I'm going to do to you — tear the skin from your body! Slowly! Bit... by... bit! ALIVE!"
• In Black Death, Knight Templar Ulric suffers a horrific fate, being torn limb-from-limb by horses.
• Blade had its fair share:
  • The aristocratic vampire when exposed to sunlight and ordinary vampires when injected with EDTA.
  • Pearl was slowly burned to death with an UV lamp.
• Blade Runner: Replicant Roy Batty shoves his thumbs into his creator, Tyrell's eyes and brain after he admits that he doesn't know how to extend his lifespan.
• ­The Blob (1988): Getting killed by the Blob is pretty horrible. You're basically digested alive, and the process isn't quick.
• Blood of the Tribades: A vampire priest who realized the blood of Bathor actually makes them sick (it's their holy sacrament) and said so is whipped to death with roses, bleeding out from the wounds the thorns caused.
• Blood Pi: Amber kills Courtney by shoving a pom pom handle down her throat so that she chokes to death on it.
• Nick's butchery at the hands of the troglodytes in Bone Tomahawk. First he is stripped naked and scalped. Then his scalp is shoved into his mouth and driven in with a bone spike to muffle his screams. Then he is held upside down and hacked in the groin with the titular bone tomahawk. Finally, the cannibals tear him in half like a wishbone, spilling his guts onto the cave floor.
• The death of Bonnie and Clyde is a bit tame by modern standards, but for the time (1967), the sight of the cops pouring boxes of bullets into Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway... in slow-motion, no less... was considered horrifying and nightmare-inducing. Strenuous objection came from the the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade for the details and especially for the slo-mo, which seemed to eroticize the couple's gruesome death. Film historians say one of the reasons such deaths are routine in media today is that this picture set a new standard.

C

• Cabin Fever had sweet-and-innocent Karen be one of the first to get infected with a deadly virus. While the others were killed very shortly after contracting the virus, Karen was quarantined from the others and actually suffered to the point that her face deteriorated. She was eventually given a mercy kill by Paul, her love interest, late in the movie after he found a dog munching on her... while she was still alive.
• Caligula — not surprising, given the title character was so mad and cruel he became an archetype — has a few, such as a man being stabbed in the stomach after being forced to drink much wine. The IMDB parental guide might help (one example, involving a baby's head being crushed, is even marked "UNRATED VERY BLOODY DISTURBING").
• Carrie: The original Stephen King novel has deaths that are graphic enough. But the various film adaptations are equally, if not even more gruesome:
  • The original 1976 movie saw most of the students die in one of three ways:
    • Several of the students are killed from the pressure of a fire hose, which Carrie telekinetically sprays into the gym.
    • The students who were not sprayed or survived that were horrifically electrocuted when the water makes contact with electrical wiring from the scoreboard.
    • Those students who somehow endured the electrocution were left to burn to death when the electrical wiring shorts out and causes a massive fire. Some of them are still conscious until the point where they are consumed by flames.
    • Chris and Billy are killed when their car is overturned and slams into a gas station, exploding shortly after impact.
    • Carrie crucifies her mother in the kitchen with several different cooking utilities. This is symbolically in the same position as the creepy St Sebastian figure in the prayer closet which Margaret used to torture her daughter.
  • The 1999 sequel culminates in a house party where several students are either impaled/beheaded by broken mirrors or CDs, set on fire via a liquor cabinet, crushed/burned by collapsing scaffolding, have the real glass of their bifocals hurled into their own eyes or have their manhood shot off by a spear gun. Granted, most of them deserved it, but one poor, undeserving victim gets impaled through the forehead by a fireplace poker for their troubles.
  • The 2002 TV adaptation shows most of the student prom goers from Thomas Ewen High School being electrocuted, enduring up to a full minute of electric shock at a dose powerful enough to kill several people before they finally pass out and some are even still semi-conscious when they burn to death in the gym. Thing was, most of the students were innocent and (unlike what Carrie saw in her view) did not laugh at the prank. Carrie's mother, Margaret, dies after her daughter literally stops her heart.
  • The 2013 movie once again features most of the students at Thomas Ewen High School being electrocuted. Tina endures a particularly horrifying shock, being whipped by electric cords and enduring a several minutes-long shock until she bursts into flames. Later, main tormenter Chris is thrown into a gas pump at a nearby convenience store before it bursts into flames, this coming after she was already badly hurt when the car she was riding in is flipped over by Carrie; the driver, Billy, is killed in the crash. Margaret endures being stabbed by several knives kept alive by her daughter before she finally dies.
• In The Case of the Bloody Iris, Sheila is scalded to death by a jet of hot steam from a boiler sabotaged by the killer.
• The Cell has a variant in the killer's mind-world where a horse is sliced into many sections — and is still alive.
• Cloverfield and the death of Marlena Diamond. After getting bitten by one of the sewer parasites, Marlena's condition slowly deteriorates until finally she's bleeding from the eyes and complaining that she "didn't feel so good". Her actual death occurs off screen and is only seen in silhouette so the exact details are left to the viewer's imagination, but anything that causes your abdomen to swell until it pops like a zit can't be a good thing.
• In Conan the Barbarian (1982), Thorgrimm, one of Thulsa Doom's two Dragons, is impaled through the chest by a spike about the size of your average birch tree in a nasty trap set up by Conan.
• What Li does to the Big Bad in Cradle 2 the Grave — shoving a mini-WMD down his throat then breaks the seal so the guy is vaporized from the inside out — isn't very pleasant either.
• Crimes of the Future (2022): Berst and Dani, two female assassins with cover as technicians, murder Dr. Nasatir with power drills to the head. Later they do the same thing to Lang.
• Crimson Tide: After an attack by a Russian submarine, the crew of the US submarine Alabama suffer major damage, including flooding to part of the ship. While the area is flooding with water, one crewman tries to repair a pipe only for it to explode under pressure and kill him by being smashed in the head with a metal cover, while another member of the crew pleads for them to get out. He is ordered to seal the section to prevent the ship from sinking, leaving two other members of the crew to drown.
• In Cube, Alderson (who serves no real purpose in the film other than serving as a Decoy Protagonist), enters a red-lit room from an adjacent one. When he takes a few steps, a loud sound is heard, and for a while, he just stands erect and in place. He then collapses into a loose pile of bloody chunks that fall to the floor. It is only then the audience sees a razor-wire trellis silently folding up and realise how he has been killed.

D

• In Dagon we have lots of these from people skinned alive to make ceremonial masks to hara-kiri with a pocket knife.
• Day Of The Dead has a few, complete with some extra Nausea Fuel:
  • A particular mention goes to Pvt. Torrez, who gets his head slowly ripped off by the zombie horde with his eyes gouged out, because those eye sockets just so happen to be a good holding point for zombies to get a good grip, no? Anyway, what makes this death so cruel and unusual in particular is how his vocal cords are slowly stretched until they snap... causing his screams to become more and more broken and high pitched. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
  • There's Captain Rhodes who gets disemboweled by said zombie horde. Actually, to be more specific, they start feasting on his intestines. Though he was an Asshole Victim facing it with dignity, it's still a pretty horrifying way of going out.
  • Also Rickles, who gets his head torn open. First he's laughing. Then screaming. Then doing both because he's just not sure anymore... and maybe having a ripped open head has something to do with it?
• Dead Birds: Clyde has his eyes and mouth sewn shut, a burlap sack placed over his head, is stuffed with straw, and is crucified in the field. He loses his head shortly after William and Annabelle discover him, though, effectively putting him out of his misery. Maybe.
• Death Proof is a bit far even by Tarantino's standards. Stuntman Mike kills his first victim by driving recklessly enough that she is essentially beaten to death by the car's interior — only he has a safety belt. He then proceeds to ram his own "death proof" car headlong at high speeds into an oncoming vehicle, ripping the leg of one of the passengers and grinding the face off another. Ugh.
• The titular vessel in Death Ship seems rather fond of dispatching people in the most horrific manner possible. Among them:
  • The ship's entertainer Jackie gets his foot seized by one of the ship's cables and is swung overboard by one of its cranes, which then cuts him loose, leaving him to drown.
  • Ms. Morgan's body begins rapidly decomposing after consuming a piece of hard candy, after which Ashland strangles her.
  • Lori is seemingly scalded to death in the shower before Ashland throws her overboard.
  • Nick plunges into a net holding hundreds of skeletons, where Ashland drowns him.
  • Lastly, Captain Ashland is crushed to death by the ship's steering gear.
• Deep Rising:
  • The monster of the movie kills its victims by swallowing them whole to be digested alive and slowly. As bad as this is, this does not beat what happens to Billy. He gets swallowed, but his comrades manage to "save him", only to watch with horror as he reveals himself to be half-digested but still alive. He lives long enough to call out to the characters and drops dead.
  • At the beginning of the movie when the monster first attacks the ship, one of the passengers hides in a restroom only to be sucked into a toilet by one of the creatures.
• A low-budget film called The Devils Bedroom is a nasty story about two brothers. Norm (Dick Jones) covets brother Jim's (John Lupton) oil-rich land.^note The title comes from the fact that a lot of oil fields were nicknamed "The Devil's ___". When Jim won't sell, Norm and his wife Della (Valerie Allen) conspire to have Jim committed to an insane asylum, but he escapes. The accidental deaths of Norm and Della are blamed on Jim because Jim is a Loner and everybody knows that Loners Are Freaks. (Because Jim has always declared he will never marry, there's Mistaken for Gay in it, too). The townspeople come after Jim with Torches and Pitchforks and the whole gruesome spectacle ends with Jim being set on fire and burning to death. Every bit of it on camera.
• The Nigerian crime boss in District 9 gets first impaled through the head with a metal bar, then said bar gets electrified, and his head asplodes. On the other hand, the mercenary Koobus Venter survives everything in the film, only to be ripped apart and eaten in the end by a pack of angry Prawns.
• Wanda's massacre of The Illuminati in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness includes slicing Captain Britian in half with her own shield, turning Mr. Fantastic into literal human spaghetti, and, probably most shocking, fusing Black Bolt's mouth shut and causing his head to burst apart from the inside out.
• In the film version of Doom, Duke, one of the most likeable and sympathetic characters in the film, gets the most brutal and horrible death out of the entire cast. In the middle of a firefight, an Imp grabs his feet and pulls him through the metal grate he was unlucky enough to be standing on, shredding him.
• Mr. Dietrichson (Nirdlinger)'s death by neck-breaking in Double Indemnity isn't shown on-screen, but the sounds are definitely nightmare and nausea-inducing.

E

• Eden Lake:
  • Steve. He's tied up with barbed wire and then stabbed in his arms, stomach, and mouth before being left to bleed to death. As if that wasn't enough, his corpse is set on fire right in front of his own fiancee.
  • Adam, the youngest character in the movie, has a small tire forced upon his head by Brett before being doused in gasoline and set on fire, which doesn't even kill him instantly.
• Enemy Mine has a PG-rated death involving a rock crusher.
• In Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain, the Shape shoves his hand up Gary's ass and rips out his intestines, and then uses the intenstines to strangle him.

F

• The infamous wood-chipper murder in Fargo. Possibly just an honourable mention, since the real murder was done via a comparably ordinary axe attack, but it's still quite a sight to see.
• Zigzagged in The Fly II, when a Red Shirt guard gets splashed with fly mutant acid, which quickly melts through his face and eyes. He survives initial contact by reflexively ripping chunks of his melting face off before it can eat completely through his head (and melting his hands in the process), but likely did not survive medical treatment, given the blood loss and brain damage (and the fact Martinfly stepped on him too).
• Freaky has a villain who basically runs on this. The opening scene has him using Improvised Weapons in grotesque ways, such as smashing a wine bottle he shoved down a victim's throat, breaking a tennis racket in half and shoving both ends into a poor sap's head and throwing a girl into a spear that was previously lodged into a a wall. He (once in a teenage girl's body) also later locks a mean girl in a cryotherapy chamber, where she is frozen alive fully conscious. The protagonist discovers her and opens the door, the corpse falls to the ground and shatters.
• Exaggerated in Final Destination, as most of the named characters will die.
  • Take Dennis for example, who ends up having a wrench fly into his eyes. Or Ian, who gets bisected by a cherry picker. The list goes on and on.
  • Probably the most drawn-out and humiliating example is the schoolteacher Valerie from the first film. First her computer monitor explodes causing glass shards to rip through her neck, then she panics and stumbles through the now burning house, then a bottle of vodka explodes next to her and knocks her prone. When she reaches up for a cloth to try and stem her bleeding, it causes a knife to fall off the counter and land squarely into her chest. When the main character finally arrives to help her out, the oven explodes and knocks a chair down onto the knife, driving it further into her chest and killing her. Then finally, just to make sure, the house explodes in a fireball.
• Fear Street mostly has the standard slasher film stabbings, but special mention goes to poor Kate, who gets her head rammed into the running blades of an electronic bread slicer while screaming and begging for her life.
• The titular vigilante in The Flying Man is easily strong enough to just snap criminals' necks, but seems to prefer dropping them from a great height. He also throws one under an oncoming train at one point.

G

• Galaxy of Terror: Characters get killed by what they most fear, so one character who's claustrophobic gets killed when she's struggling through a tight vent and is swarmed by tentacles which wrap around her head and crush it, while another character who's afraid of maggots actually gets stripped naked and raped to death by a giant one.
• There is one particularly nasty death in Ghost in the Machine which involves a middle-aged man microwaving some popcorn. The serial killer is somehow in the electrical circuit and starts a fire. When the man returns his face starts to bubble like the popcorn in the microwave. Then to make his death seem more pathetic he slips and hits his head on the kitchen bench. If you're after a night of good old fashioned Gorn, I would recommend this classic.
• The dance scene at the opening of Ghost Ship. That entire crowd all killed by one wire slicing through them all?! OUCH!!!
• Gladiator: Commodus has the protagonist's wife and little boy crucified after taking the imperial throne.
• The Godzilla series has provided quite a number of this trope — usually inflicted on its Kaiju.
  • The original Godzilla is killed by the Oxygen Destroyer, a weapon that does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, destroying all oxygen in its body, reducing it to bone. Daisuke Serizawa, who created the Oxygen Destroyer, didn't want to risk his invention being used for war. So when the sole Oxygen Destroyer prototype killed Godzilla, he made sure it killed him too.
  • The Heisei-era Godzilla gets this too in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah when his body goes into a nuclear meltdown, leading to the possibility that he will explode, destroying the world. The movie shows that his body actually is slowly, literally melting down from the heat building inside him. In the end, it's only thanks to a combination of the military bombarding the dying Godzilla with freezing rays and Godzilla Junior absorbing the leftover radiation that this apocalypse is averted. But we still see Godzilla's hide melting away as he is reduced to bone like his predecessor.
    • In the same film, Destoroyah has an unusual fate as well. When Godzilla begins melting down, Destoroyah tries to fly away only for the military to hit it with their freezing rays, resulting in it freezing, falling to the ground, and shattering. As if that weren't unusual enough, Word of God has it that the impact itself wasn't what killed Destoroyah; it was the sudden temperature change from being frozen stiff, then hitting the ground which had been superheated by Godzilla's aforementioned meltdown.
  • In Godzilla 2000, Orga gets obliterated by Godzilla's atomic breath... from the inside.
  • Godzilla gets this again in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!, where Admiral Tachibana uses a mini-sub to enter Godzilla through his mouth. While inside, he fires a drill missile into a wound King Ghidorah previously inflicted on him. This doesn't kill Godzilla. What does kill him is when Godzilla tries to use his atomic breath afterwards -– all it does is cause his breath to burst through the open wound, blowing him apart. Unbelievably, even that may not have killed him...
  • Godzilla (2014): Godzilla dispatching the MUTOS; the flying one gets impaled on a broken building, while the larger female dies when Godzilla forces her mouth open and fires his atomic breath down her throat before ripping her head off for good measure.
    • The Winged MUTO's death in the novelization is far worse. Godzilla basically bites off his wing and tears it off before running him into a building, impaling him. Also, if you look closely, you'll notice that one of his legs are falling off.
  • By now, you should understand that if Godzilla isn't on the receiving end of these, he's dishing them out, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is no exception. There, after going into Burning mode, he uses a series of nuclear pulses to dismember King Ghidorah. The first one destroys Ghidorah's wings. The second obliterates Ghidorah's left and right heads. The third obscures them all from view, only showing Ghidorah's remaining head… until the smoke clears, revealing Godzilla using his atomic breath to light up Ghidorah's last head like a cigar, burning it away completely. It was established at that point that King Ghidorah had a very quick Healing Factor, but at some point, you have to wonder if this wasn't a tad excessive.
• While he wasn't so much a designated final boy as he was an all-around Nice Guy, poor Jonah seemed to get it the worst of anybody in The Green Inferno. He was literally torn to pieces by a cannibalistic tribe and ate up. Very little is left to the imagination here.
• The Green Mile: Eduard Delacroix's botched execution. See details in Literature.
• The infamous Guinea Pig films are nothing but this trope. The second film was so graphic, it was accused of being an actual Snuff Film

H

• The Halloween series is full of these, such as being impaled on a light fixture, shredded by a tractor harrow,and having one's head exploded by a fuse box.
• Harakiri: Motome is forced to gut himself with a blunt stick of bamboo.
• The Hatchet trilogy is filled with these. A few of the many examples:
  • Hatchet
    • Jim gets his torso cut-in-half at a 45-degree angle through his right shoulder.
    • A few seconds later Victor catches a fleeing Shannon, puts his hands in her mouth and pulls the top of her head back. Only a few strands of skin and muscle keep it from falling off.
    • Jenna's lips and the front of her jaw are destroyed by a belt sander. She is then impaled on the wooden handle of a shovel after crawling around in agony for a bit. Said shovel was planted in the ground to decapitate Shawn a minute earlier.
    • Misty is killed off-screen and her head and torso are used as projectiles to hit Ben.
    • Marcus has his arms ripped out of their sockets then is swung by the ankles into the side of a mausoleum, cracking his head open & splattering blood & bits of brain onto a nearby tombstone (the kill is a nice call-back to Kane Hodder's Jason sleeping bag kill from Friday The 13th Pt.6).
  • Hatchet II
    • Cracker Jack's head pops off from being strangled with his own intestines.
    • Chad gets his faced bashed-in with a hatchet. What makes this cruel is that Victor delivers the blows using the TOP of the blade which is the dullest part.
    • Cletus gets his face shoved into a boat propeller. Despite his skull resembling a crater one of his eyes is still intact, hanging by the retina.
    • Uncle Bob is locked in Crowley's shack by the traitorous Rev. Zombie and torn apart. Marybeth is forced to watch from the outside as blood paints the walls.
    • Rev. Zombie is cut in two with 10 blows to his side by Victor's hatchet after (foolishly) deciding to try to choke him to death (his lower half folds like a chair). His exposed spine is used to pull him out of his skin before his torso is tossed into some nearby bushes.
  • Hatchet III
    • Dougherty gets pulled through a hole that isn't big enough to accommodate her. The results are not pretty nor is it done quickly.
    • One cop takes multiple hatchet blows to the back before getting gorilla-pressed and torn-in-half (this kill resembles one of Sub-Zero's fatalities from Mortal Kombat 3).
    • Deputy Schneiderman takes a flaming board to the back which cripples him. THEN he gets his left arm slowly ripped out of the socket followed by the right one. Finally, Victor shoves his face into the mud with his foot and since he doesn't have any arms to push himself up he drowns.
• Too many to list in Hellboy (2019), but Nimue slowly crushing two of her treacherous coven witches in on themselves with what looks like telekinesis deserves some special mention.
• The Hills Have Eyes 2: One of the scientists that went missing was found stuffed into a port-a-potty's toilet, with his body covered in cuts that were deliberately made shallow so the filth would get into bloodstream and ensure a painful death. The worst part was that he was found by the soldiers still alive, despite being in the port-a-potty for days. He dies of septic shock soon afterwards.
• The Hitcher: Nash's horrific death by being tied between a Mack truck and its trailer and then ripped in half by the completely psycho title character.
• Hostel
  • In the first film Josh was basically the designated final boy but he suffered a rather cruel death at the hands of his torturer who dreamed of being a surgeon. Both of his Achilles tendons were cut before he was finished off via throat slashing as he attempted to crawl away. His corpse would be later seen being operated on.
  • Virginal and naïve Lorna didn't fare much better in Hostel: Part II. After being captured by the society, we see her being sliced up with a scythe as she hung above a female client with a blood-bath fetish.
• The killer from Hush dies in slow, extraordinary agony (which, in the end, fits as he'd been a total, slimy sadist before this). The deaf-mute protagonist puts him through prolonged Sensory Abuse after he spent the film preying on her sensory handicaps; she sprays his eyes with hornet poisons, she blasts his eyes and ears with harsh alarms and lights, and when he tries to get the upper hand, she grabs a kitchen corkscrew and rips his throat out with it, giving him a good ten seconds to choke on his own blood before he finally expires.

I

• Indiana Jones is filled to the brim with over-the-top and brutal deaths, usually as a prerequisite for its main villains.
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark features getting impaled with spikes, being minced up by an airplane propellor, having one's head collapse in on itself, getting their face melted off from their skull, and having one's head explode.
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom features having one's heart get ripped out while still alive before being lowered into a pit of lava, getting flattened by a rock-crushing machine, and being torn apart by crocodiles.
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features getting run over by a tank, being beheaded by spinning blades, and aging rapidly into dust.
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features being incinerated by the jet of a rocket sled, getting devoured by a swarm of ants, and having your eyes and brains burned out due to absorbing a ton of knowledge.
  • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny features having your airline severed while diving and plummeting off of an undersea cliff, getting handcuffed to an underwater sewer grate and being left to drown while screaming in terror, being impaled by Roman ballista bolts, (with one case involving the individual in question getting hit directly in the chest and being sent flying), and getting incinerated in a violent plane crash, leaving horribly charred and maimed corpses behind.
• The Big Bad in Iron Sky is killed by Renate sticking one of her Combat Stilettos through his forehead. He flails around a little, trying to get at the shoe, and falls dead. Oh, and this is after she tricks him into getting electrocuted by performing a Nazi salute under a broken light.
• In Island of Death, Christopher and Celia seem very fond of dispatching these. Among their methods of murder are crucifixion, hanging a man from an airplane, decapitation via bulldozer, a spear gun, drowning in the toilet, and using an aerosol spray to burn someone's face. Christopher eventually suffers one himself, being dissolved in a lye pit, though his is certainly well-deserved.
• It (2017) and It: Chapter Two are just brimming with this, in the form of various horrifying Pennywise-themed ends:
  • Georgie Denbrough gets his arm bitten clean off by Pennywise, is left bleeding out and screaming for help, before Pennywise drags him off into the sewer to finish him off.
  • Patrick Hockstetter finds It in the form of zombies in the sewer, before getting lost, and therefore cornered by Pennywise, who proceeds to devour him.
  • Betty Ripsom is implied to have had her entire bottom half ripped off by Pennywise.
  • It drives Henry Bowers to insanity, giving him back his father’s switchblade. Henry then proceeds to extend the switchblade deep into his father’s neck, killing him and letting him bleed out.
  • Adrian Mellon gets beaten to a bloody pulp by homophobic teens, before being thrown off of a bridge and into the river below. He is then dragged out of the river by Pennywise, who then rips off a massive chunk of flesh from his left armpit, and tearing out his heart.
  • Victoria, the little girl in the bleachers, gets her head bitten off by Pennywise.
  • Dean, a kid who reminds Bill of Georgie his late brother, gets cornered in a hall of mirrors, in front of Bill, who cannot help him and can only watch, while Pennywise smashes through the glass and bites Dean’s head so hard it explodes like a watermelon.
  • Eddie gets impaled by Pennywise’s massive spider arm and dies from blood loss.
  • Funnily enough, Pennywise! The losers together manage to win a battle of wills against him, empowered by Eddie’s death, using It’s weakness to belief, causing Pennywise to painfully melt from a massive clown spider thing into basically a helpless, shrivelled clown baby. Mike then tears Pennywise’s heart from his chest and crushes it, causing him to dissolve into ash.

J

• James Bond villains sometimes get this, as well as some other characters.
  • Dr. No is boiled alive in the cooling pool of his nuclear reactor.
  • In Goldfinger, Jill Masterson is murdered by being covered in gold-coloured paint. Goldfinger himself is killed by being sucked out the window of a private jet at cruising altitude.
  • In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a mook falls into a large snowblower and gets cut to pieces by it ("He had lots of guts!").
  • In Diamonds Are Forever, a fake Blofeld drowns in a pool of superheated mud. Then there's Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, who are killed at the end of the film by being respectively immolated and tossed off the side of a cruise ship with a time bomb.
  • In Live and Let Die, Mr. Big explodes after swallowing a compressed air pellet. The viciousness is completely undermined by the Narm.
  • Moonraker:
    • Hugo Drax gets Thrown Out the Airlock of his space station shortly after Bond shoots him with a poisoned dart.
    • A pair of mook scientists are killed when they knock over a sample of Drax's Deadly Gas after Bond leaves it balanced precariously in their lab.
  • Licence to Kill:
    • Killifer is mauled to death by a shark... after 007 pushes him into the water with the Briefcase Full of Money he tried to offer Bond in exchange for his life.
    • Dario has what is possibly the most graphic death in the entire franchise. While fighting Bond and Pam over a massive rock crusher being used to pulverize cocaine, he falls in feet first, screaming in agony and desperately crying out for his boss/mentor Sanchez to come for him (even though Sanchez had left beforehand), before the grinder finally finishes him off. Mind you, Dario is also one of the creepiest and most sadistic henchmen in the franchise, so a grisly death was hardly undeserved.
    • Milton Krest is is framed by Bond as a traitor to his boss Sanchez. He gets thrown into a decompression chamber and killed through Explosive Decompression. We even see his face distort before exploding. And he was killed for the wrong reasons too.
    • Bond set a gasoline-soaked Sanchez on fire... with Felix's lighter. He hobbled around for a couple of seconds, then the tanker truck wreck he had just survived blew up, killing him.
  • GoldenEye:
    • Xenia is pulled off by a helicopter shot down by Bond, and dies asphyxiated against a tree.
    • Janus falls dozens of metres down an antenna cradle... only to be, while already more dead than alive, crushed by it moments later.
    • Boris is doused in liquid nitrogen when several industrial-sized tanks of it rupture behind him.
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, a mook falls into a newspaper press, and the main villain is skewered by a drill missile.
  • In Die Another Day, villain Gustav Graves is electrocuted before getting sucked by an airplane jet. One of his Mooks is killed by a Frickin' Laser Beam burrowing into his head.
  • In Casino Royale (2006), a bomber takes too long to notice Bond attached his detonator to his belt... (worst part: Bond smiles after the guy blows up)
  • Quantum of Solace has Agent Strawberry Fields drowned in crude oil. Bond gets Dominic Greene back for this (and also attempting to create a drought for profit) by stranding him in the desert with a bottle of crude oil. Greene dies when he drinks the oil after thirst finally gets to him.
• While getting eaten by the shark in Jaws is already an unpleasant way to go. Quint’s death was definitely the most brutal as the shark tipped over his boat as he slid helplessly into the jaws of the beast which chomped down on his lower body and caused blood to spew from his mouth.
• The Jurassic Park franchise has these aplenty, given that most of them involve being devoured by prehistoric reptiles.
  • Jurassic Park:
    • Donald Gennaro, the slimy and cowardly lawyer from the first film, dies when the Tyrannousaurus knocks over the outhouse toilet he'd taken refuge in, bites him right off the seat he's cowering on, and shakes him around like a terrier with a rat. An offhand comment made by Dr. Sattler implies that the whole affair left him Half the Man He Used to Be. What it lacks in the sheer brutality of Zara's death, it more than makes up for in sheer humiliation value — he'll be the butt of every joke in the next life, that's for sure.
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park:
    • Eddie Carr is torn in half by two T. rexes. It's shorter than Zara's death, but it rivals hers in sheer horribleness and was the undisputed king of this trope in the franchise prior to it. It is, however, utterly tame when compared to his horrific death in the novel, where he is dragged through the forest by a pack of raptors while they fight over him, tearing him to pieces in the process.
    • Steven Spielberg said he deliberately gave one to Peter Stormare's character to compensate how he was only arrested in Fargo in spite of his cruel character deserving a painful death. Hence Dieter Stark is eaten by a mass of Compsognathus who rip him apart.
    • Peter Ludlow's death. His pure terror as he realizes he's trapped in the hold with the buck T. rex and his pitiful litany of "Wait, wait...!" just might make him one of the most Unintentionally Sympathetic villains ever. The scream he gives when Daddy cripples him for his baby to eat is painful to listen to, as well. Dodgson, the villain who gets this death in the novel version has it even worse: torn apart by several baby Tyrannosaurus, one of them tearing off and swallowing his cheek while he's still alive (though he was also the biggest monster in the franchise).
  • Jurassic Park III:
    • Nash's death. He's the last to dive into the suspended plane, and the Spinosaurus plucks him out by the leg, injuring it too badly for him to run away. He tries crawling away, but he doesn't get far; the Spinosaurus pins him down and rips in him two.
    • Udesky has his leg broken by raptors and is left in agony before getting his neck snapped.
  • Jurassic World:
    • Ellis, the Paddock 11 worker who gets eaten first. It goes by pretty quickly, but he's seen held in the jaws of the I. rex, still alive, while she rips his limbs off like chicken legs.
    • Nick, the Paddock 11 supervisor. The actual death isn't terribly disturbing (just violent), but certain things make his demise uncomfortable to watch. He's granted a pretty big Hope Spot by escaping from the paddock... only to have the Indominus rex go right for his hiding spot a few moments later. Not only does he cry before he dies, he has a good long moment to sit there and realize just how truly screwed he is before I. rex finally bites down.
    • Hamada. Picked up and thrown to the floor by the I. rex during the ACU's pitifully one-sided fight against her, he lands in the river, where he almost drowns. He surfaces, takes a huge gulp of life-giving air... and then I. rex steps on him, forcing him back underwater and crushing him. Brutal!
    • All of the Apatosaurus who get grotesquely maimed by the Indominus rex and left to bleed to death.
    • Simon Masrani, the owner of the titular park, dies along with a pair of ACU troopers, and boy howdy are their deaths brutal. Both ACU troopers are killed when the Pteranodons stab them with their beaks and Masrani, with a look of shock and horror on his face, loses control of his helicopter before crashing into the pterosaur aviary. The helicopter explodes and bursts into flames on impact, erasing any possibility that Masrani could have survived.
    • Zara's death stands out; first, she's picked up by a Pteranodon, then dropped, then snatched out of the air by another Pteranodon, who then drops her into the Mosasaurus tank. As she struggles to get to the surface, a third Pteranodon swoops in and tries to drown her before both are Eaten Alive by the Mosasaurus.
    • Echo the raptor dies when the I. rex flings her through a shop window and bashes her into a gas oven, where she is promptly engulfed in flames.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: J. A. Bayona is more of a horror director, and it showed.
    • Ken Wheatley is the first to be killed by the Indoraptor, which rips off his arm after Playing Possum, roars in his face to give him enough time to realize how screwed he is, and then eats him alive slowly. Any of the Indoraptor's victims likely count as well.
    • The death of Eli Mills may be even worse than Zara's. It's made worse by the buildup to it; as he approaches the Indominus DNA sample, compies and the Carnotaurus begin to approach him... and then Rexy snatches him up and begins tearing him to pieces as the other carnivores begin to join in.
  • Jurassic World Dominion:
    • Rainn Delancourt, the sleazy dinosaur poacher who kidnaps Maisie, gets his just desserts when he's set upon by a Lystrosaurus and a juvenile Carnotaurus with them pinning him down crucifix-style and gnawing away at each of his arms while a juvenile Baryonyx chomps down on his head.
    • Lewis Dodgson, who up to now has been one over-arching Karma Houdini in the films unlike his novel adaptation, finally gets a well-deserved fate meted out to him, namely, being cornered, spat upon, and devoured alive by a trio of Dilophosaurus.

K

• Kick-Ass: Big Daddy crushes a goon in a car compactor (while inside a car). Frank's goons kill a Russian gangster using a lumber microwave, which is big enough for a person.
• Almost every single death in King Kong (2005) is this, whether it's people being eaten by various creatures ranging from raptors to massive bugs, stepped on by stampeding sauropods, impaled via spear, and so on. Even the creatures of Skull Island are subject to this, whether it's a V. rex getting its head crushed by a boulder or its jaws split apart by Kong, or a raptor getting its head crushed flat under the foot of a sauropod.
• Jet Li kills the Big Bad in Kiss of the Dragon by sticking a needle into a specific point in the back of his neck. Said needle is part of the Dangerous Forbidden Technique that gives the movie its name, which paralyzes him as Jet Li explains that once he takes out the needle, all the blood in the Big Bad's body will go directly to his head causing him to die of a painful aneurysm as blood leaks from every orifice in his head. Jet Li then proceeds to take the needle out...

L

• The Last of the Mohicans: Col. Munro's heart is cut out by Magua.
  Magua: When the Grey Hair is dead, Magua will eat his heart. Before he dies, Magua will put his children under the knife, so the Grey Hair will know his seed is wiped out forever.
• In Last Train from Gun Hill, Morgan's father-in-law wants to kill his daughter's murders slowly, "the Indian way." Later, Morgan describes "the white man's way" as this to Rick, with his trial, his sentencing, the wait for his execution, and even his execution providing Rick plenty of time for mental and physical suffering.
• All over the place in Law Abiding Citizen. Considering the guy has 10 years to plan his revenge, and he is revealed to be a government-trained expert at killing people remotely, many of the deaths are pretty gruesome. He starts with giving the accomplice to his family's killer a very painful death by replacing the chemicals for the (normally painless) lethal injection. He then abducts the killer and graphically dismembers him, with a camera recording every second. The rest of the murders are quicker but still quite sudden and unusual. While in prison, he stabs his cellmate with a t-bone from a steak. The judge gets her head blown off with a mini-bomb in her cell phone. Most of the legal staff gets served with car bombs, exploding one after another (with the protagonist's assistant watching and preparing for her own car to go up). The protagonist's boss is killed by a remote-controlled drone.
• Pei Hong is executed by being beaten to death in Legend of the Black Scorpion. All the more cruel and unusual for the fact that he invented the method.

M

• M3GAN: M3GAN kills Celia by blasting her in the face with a stream of high-pressure pesticide. While the effects are not shown, it’s implied that much of her face was chemically burned off.
• In Man of Steel, when Kryptonians attack normal human beings, you can expect a lot of deaths that come close to this, but the one that passes firmly into this trope is the poor fighter pilot who is reduced to a thick red mist by his attacker.
• In Marked for Death John Hatcher finishes off the Big Bad by gouging out both of his eyeballs, throwing him through a wall, breaking his back over his knee, then tossing him down a multi-story elevator shaft... where he is impaled on a metal spike at the bottom. Steven Seagal has stated his was his favorite movie kill.
• In Men Behind the Sun, about the infamous Unit 731 from World War II era Japan, a nameless maruta is locked into an airtight chamber, and the air is pumped out. First his ears bleed... then his colon decides to make a break for freedom.
• In M.F.A., Noelle spikes Mason's drink with a date rape drug and then holds him down so he chokes on his own vomit, parodying what he did to Lindsey.
• A security guard in Mimic has his face boiled off by some sort of acidic spray from the Judas breed.
• Mindhunters: If being sprayed form the feet up with liquid nitrogen until you fall over or finding out the hard way that your smokes have laced with Hollywood Acid don't fit this trope, nothing does.
• The main character's sister in Mirrors died by having her jaws ripped open by the mirror demon — this results in a double dose of gore as we see both her reflection breaking its own jaws and the real person seemingly having her mouth torn in half by invisible hands.
• In The Missing (2003), farmhand Brake is tied up inside a pouch made of fresh cow hides and then hung on top of a bonfire. The heat causes the hide to shrink and break his bones, and eventually cooks him alive. On the book version, it was another character that suffered this fate, with the added bonus of having been repeatedly dragged on top of cacti beforehand so he wouldn't struggle too much. Apparently this was a form of ritualistic killing practiced by the villain, an evil indian witchdoctor.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series
  • It may have been on screen for just a brief one, maybe two seconds, but Jack Harmon's death in Mission: Impossible (1996) counts as he ended up getting impaled through the eye into a jagged piece of metal, after losing control of the elevator he was sitting on top of.
  • Mission: Impossible – Fallout has Agent Walker take a steel hook attached by cable to a crashed helicopter to the forehead. Then, if anyone in the audience doubted that he was well and truly gone, the weight of the helicopter pulls him off the cliff he was climbing, and he smashes into the rocks below ... Before he presumably rolls into the inferno of the helicopter wreckage beneath him.
• Mission to Mars: The opening scene has the poor pair of astronauts who get sucked into the sentient alien tornado… thing. While we’re spared seeing the first astronaut’s fate, we get to see the second one die in surprisingly graphic detail. He’s spun around so fast that his face is distorted and pulverized beyond recognition, before his is body is torn apart into several pieces, with visible blood and guts. Did we mention this is in a PG-rated movie distributed by Disney?.
• In The Mummy Trilogy:
  • As part of his punishment for murdering Pharaoh Seti I, Imhotep is buried alive in a sarcophagus filled with flesh-eating scarab beetles.
  • Toward the end of The Mummy (1999), Beni Gabor, a Dirty Coward who had spent the movie betraying everyone, faces a slow death by dehydration and starvation after being trapped in Hamunaptra's treasure chamber. That's bad enough, especially given that the single torch he has is going out. Cue the flesh-eating scarab beetles...
  • Some hired locals were sprayed with acid when they pry open a pass in the tomb and trigger a booby trap.
  • The Warden apparently gets eaten from inside by a single scarab. It only ends when he bashes his head against a wall trying to get it out.
  • Everybody unlucky enough to be in the vicinity of the chest (that held the Book of the Dead) when it is opened — they get their flesh sucked away by Imhotep.
  • Some of Imhotep's mooks get drowned in tar.
  • The priests who helped Imhotep in the prologue are mummified alive.
  • Anck-Su-Namun in the second movie abandons Imhotep, unwilling to risk her own life to save him. As she is fleeing, she stumbles and falls into a swarm of scorpions (and possibly the flesh-eating scarab beetles). The scorpions/beetles crawl all over and inside her, choking her dying screams.
• Mystery Men:
  • What happens to Captain Amazing is nothing less than horrifying. He's twisted to death by reality distortion. It's even pointed out in the film that the weapon that kills him is fueled by fear.
  • It's also how Casanova Frankenstein dies, while slowly falling and falling to pieces.
• Mystery Team: Robert getting hit with a cherry bomb in the face.

N

• The Naked Gun:
  • Frank Drebin of Police Squad dreams of dying this way.
  Frank Drebin: A parachute not opening... that's a way to die. Getting caught in the gears of a combine... having your nuts bit off by a Laplander, that's the way I wanna go!
  • The first movie has two Rasputinian Deaths that count, a mind controlling doctor (swerves his car into a truck transporting gas, escapes the explosion with half his car only to roll into a truck carrying huge missiles, escapes that explosion as well, ending up on the last missile that rolls into a nearby fireworks factory...) and the main villain (plummets to his doom, then is run over by a steamroller and trampled by a marching band). Both Played for Laughs.
  • Then there's the second movie. The Dragon has a fire hose shoved in his mouth and is filled like a water balloon until he explodes. The Big Bad, on the other hand, almost pulls off a Karma Houdini, bouncing safely off an awning. And then is mauled to death by a lion that escaped from the zoo when Frank tried to catch the Dragon.
  • The third movie only has one, really. Rocco's mother dies when the "Applause" sign falls onto her head, leaving her staggering for a few seconds to a standing ovation.
• At one point in Never Too Young to Die the villains have kidnapped Danja and plan to burn her to death in an industrial oven. Lance saves her in time and she is unharmed even though the thermometer says it's over 500 degrees inside.
• In The Neighbor, John kills Cooper by suffocating him with a rotten rabbit carcass.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street series revel in this, taking full advantage of its dream world killzone to make some of the most ludicrous and creative deaths in cinema history, and then upping the ante by having the victim's actual body reacting to the death in a (usually) more realistic manner. Some particularly fun examples include:
  • Being pulled into your bed and winding up reduced to more blood than the average body can hold, which is splattered all over the ceiling in a friggin' geyser of blood. Or, according to later Word of God, pulled into a fountain of the blood of dozens of victims and held there until you drown in it.
  • Having your tendons torn out of your arms and legs and used as puppet strings, then being led up to a high point and dropped to your death.
  • Arms getting torn off, replaced by beetle legs, then being trapped inside a roach motel which is crushed by Freddy.
  • Getting reduced to a comic book paper human by one slash, whereupon your ink drips out of you entirely and you are immediately slashed into a whirlwind of paper strips.
  • Having a hearing aid dig itself into your ear, and then amplify sounds to such a level that they cause head-exploding pain.
• No Exit: Lars ends up with a nail from the nail-gun in the forehead. That doesn't kill him outright and might not even be lethal by itself, if not for him slipping on Ed's blood, hitting the ground with his forehead and driving the entire nail down his cranium.
• Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight II: Zosia kills Oliwier by shoving his face into a circuit board, and then pulling out his entrails.
• Nope:
  • Otis Sr. dies by way of a nickel falling into his eye from above and piercing through to part of his brain, leaving him delirious and bleeding heavily until he passes away while being driven to the hospital.
  • Gordy the chimp mauls several people on the set of his sitcom.
  • Jean Jacket devours several people, slowly crushing them as they are digested over the course of hours.
• The Northman:
  • According to the He-Witch, and evidenced by the mummified head he keeps, Heimir was tortured and mutilated by Fjölnir before being beheaded.
  • The Rus villagers who didn't make the cut for slavery are locked inside a church that's then set ablaze, leaving them all to burn alive.
  • An unlucky few of Fjölnir's men who ate the soup spiked with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Some kill themselves (one by stabbing himself in the throat) screaming in absolute terror at whatever it is they're seeing.

P

• Pan's Labyrinth has a man beaten with a bottle until his face is pulp, then shot. While his father watches. The murderer then shoots the victim and the father.
• In Pathology, Juliette and Ted murder the Fat Bastard by forcing him to inhale air at -75°F. Juliette then pounds on his chest and shatters his lungs.
• Several of these occur in Patrick Still Lives, most of them at the hands of the title character's Psychic Powers. Among them, Sheryl is decapitated by her car's electric window, Stella is is impaled in the crotch with a red-hot poker, Lyndon is fatally scalded in his swimming pool, Peter is gassed to death inside his car, Mr. Davis is impaled on and hung by a meat hook, Meg is mauled to death by dogs, and a male nurse is electrocuted.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Davy Jones kills Mercer by ramming his facial tentacles down Mercer's throat. And nose. And ears.
• The Pit and the Pendulum (1991): When Maria resists his Scarpia Ultimatum, Torquemada beats her and cuts out her tongue, before continuing his activities, attempting to subject her husband to the worst death he can think of with the eponymous pit and pendulum.
• The Predator's victims (and sometimes, the Predators themselves) generally die pretty brutal deaths in every film.
  • Being skinned, having one's spine and skull violently ripped from their bodies, and being blown to pieces with plasmacaster shots are but a few of the recurring signature means of which Predators kill their victims. Individual films often have more unique deaths that still remain horrific and gruesome.
  • Prey (2022) sees a Predator going up against a group of French trappers and brutally tearing them apart with various means that range from a much deadlier version of the razor-wired net seen in Predator 2 reducing a guy to a pile of gore, to the Predator throwing a bear trap at a different trapper's head and killing him with it.
• Several types of people in Push can kill in painful ways. Bleeders emit ear-splitting screams capable of shattering glass and tearing flesh. Do it long enough, and the target dies. A Stitch has Healing Hands... which can also reverse the effect for a very slow and painful death. Movers can throw people and objects with deadly force with Mind over Matter. At least a few characters get impaled with bamboo sticks by a Mover.

R

• Four people die in extremely gruesome ways in The Rake. Andrew is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice before having his throat torn by The Rake. Michelle is also Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, but then she has the flesh of her face torn off. While we don't see Graham's wife's death, the state of her corpse is VERY bad. Ben probably gets it the worst: He's possessed, stabs out his own eyes, slits his own throat, and then The Rake tears his way out of his corpse.
• In Resident Evil (2002), this happens to the leader of the commando team (One) in a laser-armed corridor. The lasers cut through their flesh like butter, and One ends up getting cut into small pieces when the Red Queen transforms the avoidable laser beam into an unavoidable laser grid.
• A simple gunshot wound may not be a particularly cruel and unusual way to go... but in the case of Mr. Orange from Reservoir Dogs we may need to make an exception. He begs to be taken to the hospital only to be left on the cold floor for hours, slowly bleeding from a gunshot wound to the stomach. It's made worse for him by Mr. White actually lampshading how painful it is, although that's also darkly funny.
• In RoboCop (1987):
  • Emil Antonowsky gets doused with toxic waste so caustic that it melts him into a semi-human shambling blob with bits of organ and bone showing. And then he gets hit by a car.
  • Earlier in that movie, we have Alex Murphy's own horrific death before being rebuilt as the titular cyborg, which was a vicious two-minute long torture session at the hands of Clarence Boddicker and his men involving lots and lots and lots of bullets.

S

• Saving Private Ryan:
  • Of all the characters who die in the film, poor Pvt. Mellish probably gets the worst one. Forced into close combat with a German Mook, he pulls a knife only for the German to take it out of his hand and pin him down. The German overpowers him and slowly sinks the knife into his chest, mockingly telling him to stop resisting and let him get it over with. The guy who tries to set the sticky-bomb on the tank only for it to blow up before he can finish also is a good candidate.
  • Another very disturbing death occurs during the D-Day invasion sequence at the beginning of the movie when the audience sees a soldier lying on the beach with his innards spilled out on the ground, screaming for his mother. Extra gut-wrenching horror points because things like that really do happen in war.
  • Technician Irwin Wade gets shot in the torso, and the wound is bad enough that he can feel his own liver. The worst part is that he's a medic, so he knows all too well that he's totally screwed. He eventually asks his comrades to give him an overdose of morphine to spare him further agony.
• Saw has enough to have a page of its own.
• The shower scene in Scarface (1983), when they hack up Tony's friend Angel with a chainsaw... and they make Tony watch. Most of the "action" is off-screen, but the seeing the sprays of blood and watching Angel's face start shaking violently lets you know exactly what's going on. Even Tony was absolutely horrified at what he was seeing.
• Beth in The Scarecrow 2013 gets run through feet-first by a cultivator in an attempt to kill the Scarecrow when it grabs onto her legs. The killing attempt in question proves to be futile, as the Scarecrow has a Healing Factor.
• The Scream franchise has enough to have its own page.
• Se7en built its house on this trope. Imagine force-feeding a guy to death. The thing with the woman raped with a bladed strap-on is so bad we don't even see the body.
• David's death in Shaun of the Dead. Zombies break the window he's standing against and start pulling him out and eating him, while his friends grab onto his legs to pull him back in. Needless to say, he ends up in way more pieces than he began. Yes, he was a total douche, but holy shit was that horrific.
• Sick Nurses is rife with these, sometimes reaching Crosses the Line Twice and Refuge in Audacity status. Vengeful spirit Tawaan comes up with some spectacularly gruesome methods of murder:
  • Ae has her own handbag sewn onto her head and neck in such a way that, when fellow nurse Nook tries to help by undoing the stitches, it causes her head to fall off.
  • Orn has all of her limbs brutally removed with a surgical saw... while she's still alive. What makes it worse is that her twin sister, Am, is the one who has been supernaturally forced to do it, and Orn herself has been possessed into helping with the mutilation.
  • Then there's Jo, who suffers the most well-known death in the film (thanks in part to the trailer), played with an equal amount of horror and very, very Black Comedy. First, Tawaan compels her to violently force-feed herself a handful of razor blades, removing her lower jaw. Then her damaged tongue falls to the floor, which Jo's abused kitten proceeds to devour. To top it all off, Tawaan knocks over a jar containing a preserved foetus, which lodges itself in Jo's throat, cutting off her air supply.
• It's to be expected given the franchise, but The Movie version of Silent Hill has quite a few of these:
  • A random Cult member found early in the film has apparently been crucified and left to die in the titular town's Hellish Otherworld.
  • When another, younger member of the Cult named Anna is caught outside the church during an Otherworld transition (hurling rocks and insults at Dahlia Gillespie), Pyramid Head materializes next to her. The monster easily rips her skin off with its bare hands.
  • Collin, a janitor at Midwich Elementary School, was punished offscreen for violating Alessa. We just see the aftermath, but it appears to have involved barbed wire and and an IV drip bag to keep him alive for awhile.
  • Unlucky police officer Cybil Bennett is captured by the cult and roasted alive over an open flame. It's not a quick or clean way to go, with the camera remaining fixed on her right up to the point where she mercifully catches fire.
  • Finally, the last surviving Cultists are personally killed by Alessa once she gains access to the church. An unnamed member is crushed to death by coils of living barbed wire, and the Cult's leader Christabella is subject to a Groin Attack with the same weapon, after which she's torn apart from the inside while Dark Alessa dances in the resultant rain of blood.
• The Sleepaway Camp series has a number of Karmic Death examples, and some outright monstrous ends to people.
  • The deep fryer death in the first movie.
  • The outhouse drowning in Unhappy Campers.
  • A reporter in Teenage Wasteland with a closet drug addiction asks Angela for acid and is given literal acid.
• In Smokin' Aces, Jeeves Tremor (played by Kevin Durand) falls ass-first onto his own chainsaw.
• Species features Sil killing a train operator with a strangling arm out of her cocoon, a woman in a club by ripping her spine, and her first prospect by making her prehensile tongue go through his head. A more elaborate case is the poor woman Sil kidnaps and uses as a death decoy - Sil cuts off her thumb, douses her with gasoline and puts the woman in a car to crash and burst into flames.
• Lots of these occur in Starship Troopers. Death by Bug is not pretty, and it generally involves lots of disembowelment and dismemberment. Or acid attacks. Or having one's brain sucked out.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there are issues with the transporter that kill two crewmen. We don't actually see what happens to the crewmen, but we get this description from Star Fleet command:
  What we got didn't live long. Fortunately.
  • In Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg Queen is killed by Data dragging her into a cloud of plasma coolant engulfing main engineering, liquifying her organic components as she screams in agony. Even that is not enough, however. After Picard uses the ventilation system to clear out the gas, her robotic brain is still helplessly writhing on the floor. Picard snaps her in two to finally kill her, at which point it's a mercy.
  • In Star Trek: Insurrection, there's the infamous death of Admiral Dougherty, where a Son'a face-stretcher device... well, it's described elsewhere on this wiki as "being suffocated/strangled with your own face"...
  • Star Trek Into Darkness has Khan smushing Admiral Marcus's head with his bare hands. Slowly.
• Star Wars
  • Return of the Jedi: In the belly of the Sarlacc, you will find a new definition of suffering, being "slowly digested over a thousand years".
  • In Revenge of the Sith, General Grievous ends up getting shot multiple times by Obi-Wan with a Blaster, which burns up all his remaining organic bits and causes him to explode into a pile of metal scraps.
  • In The Last Jedi, Supreme Leader Snoke gets skewered by a lightsaber which is then pulled through his torso with the Force, completely bisecting him, and removing one of his hands. In the same scene, a nameless Praetorian guard is pushed into some sort of electrical field that essentially turns their body into CONFETTI.
• Studio 666 is jokey like any Foo Fighters music video, but takes the first part of Horror Comedy seriously. To wit, there's decapitation with garden shears, head smashed\burned by barbecue grill, two people bisected by chainsaw during intercourse, a cymbal slicing a man's head from the mouth, a head crushed by the wheel of a van the victim was hotwiring, and the person inside the van getting his eye skewered, followed by stabbing by a person he backed over.
• The most horrific death from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is that of Mrs. Lovett, who Sweeney throws into her own oven to be burned alive.
• Sweetwater: Sarah kills a perverted store owner by shooting him through the rectum.

T

• When Bryan finally catches up to the kidnapper who took his daughter in Taken, he straps him up to a homemade electric chair which is rigged to shock him whenever he flips the light switch in the room on. After he tortures his daughter's location out of him, Bryan flips the switch to on and then leaves the room as the man screams. The uncensored version took it even further by having the conductor be iron spikes driven into the kidnapper's legs.
• Though it was a dream sequence, Sarah Connor's vision of death by nuclear annihilation in Terminator 2: Judgment Day is pretty bad. Director James Cameron said several experts commented that what was depicted was Truth in Television, something he'd really rather not have known.
• Terrifier: Art the Clown, the movie's main antagonist, has a penchant for exceptionally brutal murders with a variety of weapons. In his most graphic on-screen kill, he ties Dawn upside-down, strips her naked, and saws her in half, starting from the bottom.
  Damien Leone: Even if he pulls out a kitchen knife, you'll never see him simply stab someone in the stomach and walk away. He's gonna use that knife in the most hideous manner.
• Terrifier 2 is as bad as the above, if not worse. The worst death is Allie, as Art cuts her eye in half, scalps her with scissors, breaks off one of her arms and tears her other hand in half, and partially flays her back. Then he pours bleach and salt into her wounds and tears off half her face. When her mother finds her, Art is cutting chunks out of her legs, and she's still alive.
• Thir13en Ghosts:
  • A man is sliced in half front-to-back by a glass partition springing up in the creepy house. Another victim is crushed between two panes.
  • Some of the ghosts have this as part of their backstory. The Torso was a mobster who was chopped to pieces and wrapped in plastic foil to be dumped, the Torn Prince died in a car accident that, if his ghost's appearance is anything to go by, flayed off most of the skin on his right side, and the Hammer was a blacksmith that appears to have been lynched by having railroad spikes driven into his skin.
• In This Is the End, James Franco gets Eaten Alive by Danny McBride and his gang of cannibals.
• Total Recall (1990): Corrupt Corporate Executive Vilos Cohaagen gets tossed out onto the surface of Mars without a pressure suit. The results are... creatively gruesome.
  • Oh that poor, poor human shield. Not only he's shot by accident, but Quaid proceeds to grab him to receive some sustained hails of bullets.
• The Towering Inferno: Most of those killed are consumed by fire. One particularly gruesome scene is where several people try to escape in an elevator, but the elevator stops at the 81st floor (where the entire floor is heavily involved in fire) and a fireball shoots in the car. A firefighter watches in horror as the people scream before finally being consumed by the flames and dying; one of the victims screams for several seconds before he finally succumbs.
• In Tower of London, Richard has his brother George drowned in a vat of Malmsey.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen:
  • Bumblebee grabs Ravage (a cyber-puma-ish-thing) by the tail — and then uses a motion akin to wringing out a washcloth to unceremoniously yank some kind of Transformer equivalent of a skeleton out.
  • "GIVE ME YOUR FACE!" Probably the most vicious thing an Optimus Prime has ever done in the history of the franchise.
• Troll 2 for all its poor production values still manages a disturbing death scene when a young woman is forced(?) to drink a potion that turns her into vegetable goop from the inside out.

U

• In Under Siege, Casey Ryback kills the baddie by gouging one of his eyes, stabbing a knife into the top of his head, and ramming the still-living body into a computer screen, to die of electrocution.
• Everyone in Unfriended dies horrifically, and in nearly every case, they deserved it:
  • The one innocent is Laura Barns, whose suicide following a torrent of online harassment sets the film's plot into motion.
  • Val Rommel, who harassed Laura and told her to kill herself, is last seen alive sitting stone-faced and still in the laundry room of her house. While the exact way in which she dies is not shown, paramedics who arrive shortly after she keels over rule her death a suicide. An open bottle of bleach is also seen, suggesting she drank from it.
  • Ken Smith tries to kick Laura's account out of their Skype call. When he notices a camera feed coming from in his room, he goes to investigate. It's never shown what he sees, but whatever it is scares him into silence... shortly before he kills himself with his blender.
  • Adam Sewell had sex with his best friend's girlfriend behind his back. Said best friend threatens to break up with her and storm out after they are given messages over their printers that they are scared to show him. The girl in question, Blaire Lily, reveals the message to be a threat against Adam if she showed it. Adam shoots himself immediately afterward, his own message threatening Blaire.
  • Jess Felton desecrated Laura's grave. When Blaire tries to get help, she ends up choking to death on a hot hair straightener.
  • Mitch Roussel stabs himself through the eye when Blaire reveals he uploaded the video that lead to Barns' suicide.
  • And finally, Blaire Lily herself is outed as the one who taped the video to begin with. She starts to receive the same harassment Laura suffered moments before her vengeful spirit kills her.
• Unfriended: Dark Web: Just like in the previous film, everyone dies. Unlike the last movie, they didn't deserve it.
  • Lexx Putri is shoved off of the roof of her apartment building after a group of malicious hackers show how they tracked down her personal information.
  • AJ Jeffcock is fatally "SWATed": the hackers make a 911 call using manipulated clips from his Youtube radio show to make it seem as though he was threatening a mass shooting, then when the police storm his house, play a sound clip of a shotgun loading over his speakers to trick the police into shooting him.
  • Serena Lange is forced into a Sadistic Choice of whose life she wants spared: her fiancee Nari Jemisin, who was waiting at the subway for a ride to the police station; or her mother, who is on life support in the hospital. Serena Took a Third Option and refused to choose. She is rewarded by watching her mother's life support shut down and Nari shoved into the path of an oncoming train before an assassin kills her in her own home.
  • Damon Horton threatens the tormentors with damning evidence tying them to a whole slew of crimes they committed. Unfortunately, the hackers are one step ahead: the laptop his friend found with said incriminating evidence was bait that the hackers used to implicate their victims for their own crimes. Shortly afterwards, an assassin kills him in his room and stages his death to look like a suicide while another hacker writes a confession to implicate him and his friends.
  • Amaya DeSoto is tricked into entering a conspicuous building by the hackers using her boyfriend's speech-to-sign language app. She is last seen being accosted by an assassin.
  • Finally, Matias O'Brien, who found the laptop that the film centered around, is Forced to Watch as his friends and girlfriend are murdered one-by-one. By the end, he has crossed over the Despair Event Horizon and is left unable to do naught but await his own demise by way vehicular manslaughter.

V

• Barry Convex in Videodrome. It is impossible to describe what happens to him if you haven't seen the movie, but he's shot and then explodes into tumours is a good summation
• Viva Villa!: Pancho Villa really really does not like traitorous General Pascal. So when he captures Pascal, he has him covered in honey and eaten alive by ants.
• Volhynia: Dismemberment by horses, flaying, burning alive, disembowelment, crucifixion, eyes gouged out, pregnant woman stabbed in the belly... And it all actually happened.

W

• In the 2009 Horror film Walled In, an architect tries to preserve his apartment building using Human Sacrifice, which involves trapping tenants, including at least one child, in a confined space that is quickly filled with cement
• Watchmen has several:
  • Rorschach kills another inmate by dumping boiling oil on his head.
  • A serial killer butchers a little girl and feeds her to his dogs, and...
  • ...Rorschach chops his head into soup with his own meat cleaver.
  • The Comedian roasts numerous Vietcong soldiers alive with a flamethrower.
  • An inmate gets tied to prison cell door and has his arms cut off with an angle grinder.
  • The guy who cut his arms off gets killed a minute later by having his head smashed into a toilet hard enough to shatter the toilet, then is electrocuted.
  • Dr. Manhattan explodes numerous gangsters, Vietcong soldiers, and Rorschach.
• In the movie What a Way to Go!, four different men (played by Dick Van Dyke, Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, and Gene Kelly) each suffer this type of death after becoming romantically entangled with Shirley MacLaine's character. (In order: Literally works himself to death, kicked by a bull so hard he almost achieves orbit, gets painted to death by his own brush-wielding robotic art-display, and trampled by a horde of his own groupies.)
• Practically every death in When Evil Calls. Examples include a girl whose arm is ground off in a garbage disposal, a girl whose head catches fire, a girl who is eaten alive by one of her classmates: the list goes on.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the elimination of Judge Doom in a vat of Dip is horrible. Actually, anyone who gets it via the Dip is going out ugly.
• The sacrificial victim in the original The Wicker Man (1973), burned alive in the titular wicker figure. Ouch.
• Most of the deaths in the Wishmaster movies, where the term Jerkass Genie doesn't even begin to cover it.

X

• For a series that is mostly PG-13, the X-Men Film Series is loaded with these. Examples include:
  • X-Men has Senator Kelly literally dissolve into a puddle of water after being exposed to Magneto's mutant making machine.
  • X2: X-Men United:
    • Magneto forcefully rips the iron out of a corrupt security guard's blood so he can fashion his escapee from prison. Note that he is also smiling as he does this.
    • To get around her Healing Factor, Logan uses an injector to fill Lady Deathstrike with liquified Adamantium. She's pumped full of it to the point that some of the metal leaks out of her mouth, eyes, and nose, which then hardens, killing her.
  • X-Men: The Last Stand has Charles being literally disintegrated by Jean/Pheonix. You can even seen the flesh on his knuckles slowly fly off as he's being killed.
  • X-Men: First Class has Magneto shove a coin very slowly through Sebastian Shaw's head as the latter is completely helpless to do anything about it. Plus Charles, the one holding Shaw back, is feeling everything Shaw is.
  • The Wolverine has victims who get killed Viper (at one point, she lashes her tongue at a random Yakuza member and his skin immediately starts to have boils and dissolving as his eyes turn white) while in the unrated cut, Wolverine feeds a Ninja into a chipper shredder Fargo-style.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past might take the cake, though thanks to the Sentinels and how the gleefully kill off any mutant by simply adapting to whatever their power is and flying it back in their face. Hell, half of that film's Nightmare Fuel page is devoted to it!
  • Parodied, like many things, in Deadpool. At one moment when Wade gets his hands on Smith, he pushes the camera away so that the audience doesn't see what kind of torture he's inflicting on the guy. But we do hear Smith's screams and they ain't pretty.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse has many examples involving the the titular antagonist and his four horsemen. From the beginning in which we see his henchmen kill people by ways of melting their skin off, setting them on fire and even mashing them into balls of flesh and bone to swallowing people into the ground and that's not even going into the wide spread destruction that he delivers onto Cairo.

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Right about now Sugar Wiki may be helpful.