Spike TV's 1000 Ways to Die is all about this trope. It doesn't shy away from including graphic images of bizarre and gruesome deaths, from being wrapped in freshly-killed animal skins and left to be pecked to death by vultures, to being asphyxiated by cocoa powder, to jumping from a cliff into a lake and hitting the water at an angle that causes water to rush into the rectum, rupturing the large intestine.
The 100: Clarke taunts a wounded McCreary before stomping his head in and crushing his skull beneath her boot.
Agatha Raisin: The second Victim of the Week in "Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate" is murdered by being drowned in a large pot of boiling jam.
American Gods (2017): A man at the Vulcan plant dies by falling into a container of molten metal due to a faulty railing, with his corpse being turned into part of the bullets it churns out.
Fred in Angel. Illyria liquefied her organs and turned her into a shell.
Ash vs. Evil Dead: Most deaths at the hands of the Deadites and other evils are horrifying, but are either over quickly or played for Black Comedy. Not so the death of Heather in the first Season Finale, at the metaphorical hands of the cabin — first, an invisible force throws her around the room, and then tosses a couch onto her legs (one of which is already broken from a previous Deadite encounter). Then nails pulls themselves out of the walls and fling themselves into her face, followed by more impaling her feet from the floorboards. And finally, the invisible force drags her into a room lit by an eerie red glow; moments later, the dismembered remains of her body are expelled from the cabin in a gyser of blood.
Babylon 5: In the episode "And The Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place", Londo arranges for Refa to be ripped apart and beaten to death by a mob of angry Narns, the alien species Refa has committed a number of war time atrocities against. G'Kar tells them not to touch his head so he'll still be recognizable afterward, but the rest of his body is fair game and it's easy to imagine the kind of horrific damage inflicted. As a side note, Londo had already given Refa one half of a two-part poison and could've easily just had the other half slipped to him as a much simpler and cleaner way to take him out, but Refa had especially pissed him off.
Black Mirror: In "Playtest", the protagonist dies abruptly a second into the game test by his phone interfering with the experimental technology and causing a system crash as his consciousness was partially uploaded. He's put through immense (and completely undeserved) psychological torture on par with Mind Rape and dies alone, literally living out his worst nightmare, crying out "MOM!" as his brain is fried.
Hughie's girlfriend Robin is ran through by A-Train, instantly exploding like a bloody water balloon. Her only intact body parts are her arms, with the rest of her body being gorily strewn across the pavement.
Madelyn Stillwell is executed by an angry Homelander, who hits her with a faceful of his Eye Beams from a distance of about a foot and a half. When he's done with her, Stillwell's face looks more like a Halloween decoration than a human head.
A flashback in the 70s' shows Liberty (AKA Stormfront) brutally beating up a black man in front of his little sister. When she (and the audience) gets a good look at his face, it's flattened like a pancake. And he was still breathing, meaning it wasn't immediately fatal.
Stormfront is reduced to a charred, limbless, one-eyed quadroplegic by Ryan's Eye Beams. She's in so much agony, she commits suicide in the hospital by biting her tongue off.
Kimiko is seen tearing a Russian gangster's face off with her bare hands. She fatally impales several others with dildos. Pretty much, when Kimiko gets her hands on someone, it's not gonna end pretty for them.
Black Noir gets his guts ripped out by Homelander and is left to slowly die on the floor.
No-Doze is repeatedly punched in the head by his boss Tuco for saying something supportive of him out of turn, who then makes Walter perform CPR on him, even though it'd be a useless endeavor due to the types of injuries he sustained in the beating.
Subsequently, Gonzo has his arm torn off by a falling car and bleeds to death when looking for a place to bury No-Doze's body.
Jane slowly chokes to death on her own vomit from a heroin overdose while Walt watches, unwilling to intervene.
The Salamanca Cousins inflict this on several of their victims: whether it's being shot in the leg and then finished off as their victim crawls away, or being ambushed from behind and hacked to death with their chrome axe. Tortuga's death is particularly awful, as he is ambushed by the cousins after realizing that his boss tricked him into a vulnerable position for defecting to the police, is slowly beheaded with a machete, and has his head mounted onto the tortoise he was presented with as a gift and stuffed full of explosives to surprise the DEA agents inspecting it. Marco tries to inflict this on a gravely wounded Hank, but Hank manages to land a bullet in Marco's headbefore he could land the finishing blow.
Victor has his neck slashed open by Gus as part of a Blofeld Ploy to scare Walt and Jesse into compliance, then is restrained from helping himself as he bleeds to death in a mess of gore, and is dropped unceremoniously at Walt's shoes when he finally dies. His body is put into a barrel, which is then filled with hydrofluoric acid and taken to who-knows-where to chemically disincorporate, while Walt and Jesse spend the rest of their night mopping up Victor's blood.
Peter Schuler, upon realizing that the police are investigating his connection to Gus Fring, decides that it's Better to Die than Be Killed and decides to attempt suicide via the closest method available... by going into the nearest restroom and shocking himself to death with an AED. It works.
In "Villains", Willow, who has snapped as a result of Tara being killed, deals with Warren Meers, the guy who killed her, by crucifying him, sewing his lips together, using magic to slowly force a bullet (one which Warren had himself used to shoot Buffy) into his chest, and finally flaying and burning him alive. The utter cruelty of it all would cement Willow's status as the season's new Big Bad.
In the Eighth Season comics, he got better. Well, less dead.
Until the spell collapsed and he fell apart. At least the incineration (revealed to be timely teleportation) didn't leave such a mess.
In "The Pack" Principal Flutie was literally eaten alive by some troublemakers.
Spike once told Buffy that as soon as he was able to get at her, "they're going to be finding your body for weeks." One assumes he didn't intend to rip her apart after death.
Chernobyl shows in greatdetail what happens to the people who get exposed to far more radiation than healthy, including Walking Ghost Phase and other stages related to the Acute Radiation Syndrome. Made far worse by the fact all of this actually happened, and their depiction of ARS, while exaggerated a bit for drama, is still very close to the real thing.
This generally tends not to happen in Columbo, but there have nevertheless been some examples:
In "Any Old Port in a Storm", Adrian Carsini leaves his half-brother to slowly suffocate and thirst to death over several days in his [Adrian's] wine cellar.
Similarly, in "Try and Catch Me", Abigail Mitchell locks her nephew-in-law in her walk in safe, where he suffocates over an extended period of time.
Eric Mason has his best friend, who cuckolded him, torn apart by dogs in "How to Dial a Murder."
In "A Matter of Honor," Luis Montoya has his friend/employee gored to death by a bull.
Chess champion Emmett Clayton of "The Most Dangerous Match" tries to knock off his rival by shoving him down a garbage chute into a trash compactor, though it thankfully has an emergency turn off mechanism.
Again, the victim manages to survive, but in the episode "A Stitch in Crime," Dr. Barry Mayfield tries to kill his boss by sewing up his heart valve with dissolving suture, meaning it would burst after a few days. Columbo manages to back Mayfield into a corner where he has no choice but to redo the operation properly, meaning the poor old man has to undergo two open heart surgeries within about a week.
Community — in "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps", Annie ends her Halloween story having her defeating vampire Jeff revealing herself to be a werewolf. Her narrative is only made creepier by her perky, button-down demeanor:
And she ripped into his torso, like a gerbil shredding a Quaker Oats box, sending chunks of viscera and an aerosol mist of blood all over the skanky concubine. Then, she flossed her teeth with his tendons. And, because he was a vampire, he lived through all of it. He had to watch her swallow his last eyeball. She kept it attached to the optic nerve, so he could see down her throat, to his own partially digested flesh in her stomach.
Frank Breitkopf would inject his victims with Ketamine, leaving them paralysed but conscious, before he vivisected them. His trailer had a mirror on the ceiling, so they could see what was happening.
In the episode "52 Pickup" the unsub disemboweled young women, then forced them to clean up the mess with their intestines hanging out, before slitting their throats.
In CSI in Las Vegas, there was a rapist who joined a cooking show with a friend of his (another rapist). The show's producer was the rape victim's vengeful sister, who proceeded to stab the man multiple times with his own knife, before dismembering parts of the man and using those parts as cooking materials for a "mystery meat" challenge. His friend was murdered by the producer as well, albeit in a less violent manner — death by asphyxiation from an allergy to almonds.
In the episode "Where There's Smoke" of CSI: NY, the killer trapped his mother in an elevator and started a fire in the ceiling, essentially cooking her to death. He also managed to kill his former foster brother with a chemical that mixed with the hydrochloric acid in his stomach and burned him to death from the inside out.
Dead Like Me managed to make this nearly Once per Episode, as it's a show about 'Reapers' dealing with accidental deaths.
Laura Moser of Dexter was killed with an electric chain-saw in front of her two little children. Poor woman.
Anyone who is shot by a Dalek's Death Ray. They don't just kill you, oh no, that would be far too nice. Word of God says that they set it at one notch just below what's required to kill their targets, so that instead of instantly dying, their victims' organs are haphazardly rearranged and their nervous systems are burned out... which they can feel before they die. Why? Because as far as Daleks are concerned, anyone who isn't a Dalek deserves to die in agony for the crime of not being a Dalek.
Happens to Captain Jack Harkness a lot since Immortal Life Is Cheap, especially on his more adult spinoff Torchwood. A few examples include being buried alive by his brother to suffocate and come back to life repeatedly for 2000 years, being blown up and very painfully regenerating from the few remaining bits, and being encased alive in concrete. Good Thing You Can Heal, indeed.
The fourth series has the world governments incinerating people. The problem? Everyone is immortal and, as far as anyone knows, can still feel pain even as a charred corpse.
Farscape occasionally utilized its immense prosthetic budget to come up with graphic depictions of these. The one that comes most readily to mind was the rather horrible fate of a childhood friend of Aeryn's, who was going to shoot her while the ship around them was being destroyed... only for a nearby pipe to burst and sear the skin off her face, after which she shambled around for a few seconds before dying. Not for the squeamish.◊
The Reavers are known to rape people to death, eat their flesh and sew their skins to their clothing. And if their victims are very, very lucky, they'll do it ...In That Order. Now, think about what this might mean for those who are less than lucky...
The Hands of Blue are a pair of villans who ominously pursue the Tam siblings. What they did to the Feds who only talked to the Tams in "Ariel" definitely fits the trope. They use a weird ultra-sonic weapon that causes bleeding out through every orifice in your body. This is not a pleasant way to die.
Averted three times and played straight twice in The Flash (2014). Hunter Zolomon receives a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Barry, then gets turned into a temporal zombie. Grace Gibbons gets vaporized in a very unpleasant way. But Eobard Thawne and Savitar die from a simple gunshot, while Clifford De Voe is simply deleted.
The first episode of Frasier has Roz tell the story of Lupe Vélez, who wanted a lavish suicide and instead as she was trying to overdose she stumbled into the bathroom and goes head first into the toilet. (This was popularized by the book Hollywood Babylon but is generally disputed.)
Although it's never shown, the fate of a human who comes into contact with the blood of a Horror in GARO is one of these: 100 days after exposure, your muscles break down inside your body, your body emits a foul odor, and you suffer excruciating pain from which there is no respite. Also, anyone who is exposed to the blood of a Horror will be seen as a particularly delicious target by other Horrors, which can be a bit of a problem for anyone who doesn't happen to be associated with any Makai Knights.
Grimm: How spinnetods kill their victims. See "spiders" in the Real Life folder.
The Handmaid's Tale: The "particicution", in which a supposed rapist is beaten to death by the Handmaids (other versions specify that the man is actually a political dissident. The TV series leaves it to your imagination).
In From the Cold: Jenny kills Andrés by tying him up then having him be fatally gored by a bull.
In "Death Watch" (third season), Commander Holbarth, the murderer of Harm's academy classmate in "Skeleton Crew", fell into the water and was crushed to death between the hull of a destroyer and the dock.
In "Enemy Below" (seventh season), the Russian crew aboard the diesel submarine Al-Qaeda bought from Iran succumbs to radiation poisoning because the dirty nuke is unshielded.
Midnight Sun (2016): The killer rigs up very cruel methods to use, such as tying the first man on top of a helicopter's blade as it starts up, which rips him apart.
Midsomer Murders: Day to day life in Midsomer is apparently so boring without a bit of homicide that murderers dedicate their brain cells to devising really bizarre ways of bumping people off. Specifically, victims have been:
Tied up and covered in truffle oil while a boar is set loose
Had their wheelchair hijacked via remote control and subsequently steered into the path of a milk float.note Although the victim in the wheelchair had been shot in the head beforehand.
Tumble-dried to death.
Pinned to the lawn with croquet hoops while wine bottles are catapulted at them.
Knocked out, had a hollowed-out TV with a hole in the top shoved over their head, and wine poured into the TV until they drown.
Broiled to death in an industrial sterilizer.
Had their head crushed with a giant wheel of cheese.
Knocked off their bike by a wire strung across the road and ran over by a tank.
In "The Sting of Death", the murderer commits a series of bee-themed murders. The first victim is stung to death by a swarm of bees; the second is coated in beeswax and turned into a human candle; and the third is almost embalmed alive in honey.
Narcos: DEA agent Kiki Camarena is tortured to death by the cartel over several days with, among other instruments, a power drill. A doctor is even brought in to keep him conscious and revive him with adrenaline shots when he's near death to prolong the ordeal. To make matters worse, this incident happened in real life and was possibly even more brutal than what was portrayed on screen.
The Outer Limits (1995): In "The Light Brigade", Major John Skokes, the cadet and the Chief Weapons Officer are exposed to a lethal dose of gamma radiation while climbing past the engine core of the Light Brigade. They begin to suffer the symptoms of radiation poisoning within minutes.
The Outpost: Garret is sentenced to death by drowning. That entails him being dunked underwater and held there. In reality, drowning like that has been described as agony by survivors. He survives, though a Blackblood later does not.
Paper Girls: The Old Watch likes to have people eaten by dinosaurs (or pterosaurs). Larry gets this in 1999.
The very first episode of Shōgun (2024) has one of Blackthorne's men boiled alive. After he's left almost unrecognizable several hours later, he bashes his own head against the pot to end his own misery.
Helen on Spooks was killed by first having her arm thrust into a deep fryer, after which her head was pushed into the hot grease. And then she was shot... an act which might qualify as a mercy killing. All of this happened on screen.
Stargate SG-1. The Goa'uld Marduk was so evil that his own priests conspired to kill him... by sticking him in a Sarcophagus with a nasty creature with poisonous saliva and lots of little sharp teeth. Did we mention that the Sarcophagus is capable of resurrecting the recently dead and would do its best to keep Marduk alive for a very long time (as in, centuries)?
Early episodes have phasers that can set people on fire, some indeterminate energy weapons that strip away the skin and flesh before disintegrating the skeleton while the faces of those who are so killed stand frozen with horrified expressions, and in "Conspiracy", a character's head exploding with a good deal of gore and an alien puppet thing where his chest internals ought to have been once his ribcage is opened up.
In "The Most Toys", Data's kidnapper owns a Varon-T disruptor, a weapon banned in Federation space because it tears the body apart from the inside out, resulting in a slow and excruciating death.
Another Star Trek example, this time Star Trek: Enterprise: Although it is never shown onscreen and is simply mentioned, what happened to the crew of a Klingon ship entering the Delphic Expanse could qualify. Although not necessarily involving death at first, it is stated by Ambassador Soval that that particular Klingon crew was "anatomically inverted, their organs splayed open, and they were still alive", but they no doubt died shortly after, and it almost certainly was very unpleasant.
Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye: In "Dirty Bomb", Terrell, one of the middlemen who received dirty-bomb-making materials for a terrorist. Curious, he opened the suitcase and got a fatal dose of radiation. Jack describes the process as his body melting, and he certainly looks completely miserable during the scenes before he dies.
The majority of the deaths in Supernatural. One of the most noticeable early examples is in the episode "Nightmare", where a man is decapitated by a window slamming shut.
A few other episodes with notably gross and unsettling deaths include "Malleus Maleficarum" (teeth fall out, chokes on blood), "Red Sky At Morning" (brutal bathtub drowning), "Bugs" (beetles burrow into brain), "The Magnificent Seven", and "Crossroad Blues", "Time Is On My Side", and "No Rest For The Wicked", all three for hellhounds ripping people apart, though "Time Is On My Side" also features a gross old man surgically removing the heart from his still-breathing victim. Classy. And then Season 5 happened, with two lovers eating each other to death in "My Bloody Valentine".
Just go to IMDB and pick a random episode. Chances are high that there's gonna be at least one ridiculously gory death. More recent ones are a man with the edge of a convertible's windshield jammed six inches into his face; another one where a ghost fired a nail gun at a victim and hung him up there like his eye sockets were coat hooks; a character who ate himself, a girl who literally scratched her brains out, etc etc etc. The list goes on and on.
In Teen Wolf, it is a hunter policy to cut defeated werewolves in half so that they can't heal their injuries.
The Tudors, the producers seems to take pleasure in showing the all myriad ways that Renaissance England had for torturing and killing people. Needless to say, extremelyTruth in Television. One example will suffice, from the judge handing down a sentence of death: that the accused be "drawn on a hurdle through the city of London to Tyburn. There to be hanged, till you are half dead. After that cut down yet alive, your bowels out of your body and burned before you, your privy parts cut off, your head cut off, your body to be divided in four parts and your head and your body to be set at such places as the King shall assign."
The sitcom Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps had a horror episode in which all the characters got killed in variously nasty ways, all of which were played for laughs, but still horrific. One of the most was Kelly the barmaid, who was attacked by a whirlwind of crisp packets that covered her entire body while she staggered blindly around giving muffled screams, before suffocating to death.
Many instances in the Ultra Series, however, the most horrific death in the entire franchise probably happens to Barabas from Ultraman Ace. First, he is impaled, next his eyes are gouged out, then he gets his hand severed, and finally, he gets decapitated.
In The Vampire Diaries, Anna gets tortured by a sonic ear-bleeder device, injected with poison, and is lying on the floor feebly begging for her life when she is staked and burned.
Victoria: Some Chartists convicted of treason were sentenced to being hanged, drawn and quartered, the particularly gruesome punishment for this crime. Victoria commutes this into transportation to Australia, viewing it as barbaric.
Eugene Victor Tooms from "Squeeze" is a genetic mutant who kills people by ripping out their livers with his bare hands while they're conscious. Even hard-boiled policemen and tough FBI agents are freaked out by these murders.
"Darkness Falls": People get killed by swarming bugs who web them up and suck out all the liquids in their body while the victims are still conscious.
"2Shy": Incanto needs human fat to sustain his biological functions. Lauren and about fifty other women thought they were going to kiss with a potential love interest. Instead, Virgil Incanto filled their mouth with a yellow jelly-like substance which dissolved the fat in their bodies so he could suck it out. The victims' body then turned into slime-like substance and after that melted into liquid. One Detective who investigates the case dies this way as well.
"The Walk": Subverted. One victim tries to commit a horrible suicide — he tries to drown himself in a boiling water, but he survives it despite all odds. The asshole of the week won't let him die because he wants him to suffer.
In "Sanguinarium", people get killed in gruesome ways. One man is killed while they perform a liposuction on him and fat being sucked through a tube turns into blood. A lady got hundreds of straight pins inserted into her stomach; she threw them up and died of blood loss. The last was saved at the last moment, but the demonic doctor got surgical instruments inside of her!
In "Kitsunegari", a man dies from ingesting blue paint. He was forced to do it against his will by a Psychic-Assisted Suicide. Said psychic was his vengeful and manipulative wife.
The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake: Like most natural disaster movies, many people die from falling debris, are crushed when tall buildings collapse and so forth, with some dying after several days of being trapped in rubble. Fitting the trope are a couple of examples:
Office of Emergency Management executive director Chad Spaulding (Joe Spano), who while trying to escape the U.S. Geological Service safety bunker beneath city hall is trapped when the safety doors seal shut, the sprinklers go off and the wiring shorts out; he is electrocuted, after which his body is crushed beneath tons of office furniture, which come crashing down as the ceiling collapses.
Main protagonist Claire Winslow's mother, Anita Parker (Bonnie Bartlett), who is within the grasp of being rescued from a disabled elevator car when another aftershock snaps the cables. The car goes crashing to the bottom of the shaft presumably far below, and is presumably killed. Trope-making in that Anita was within a few inches of being saved, only to plunge to her death, and likely not suffer her fatal injuries, much less lose consciousness, until crashing at the very bottom of the shaft.
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