Blood-Splattered Innocents

The Medic: Did all this blood come from your eyebrow and your head?
Captain Phillips: No, not all of it. That's not mine!

— Captain Phillips

Want a surefire way to Break the Cutie? Well, nothing causes mental trauma quite like being covered in the blood of another person. Not only that, but the image this creates is so arty that it can let you get away with putting lots of violence in your film and still have it called True Art.

Can be a Gory Discretion Shot, although not always — the most common way it will play out is that someone will have a gun to their head, ready to commit suicide. The innocent one begs them to stop, we hear a gunshot, and then see the blood hit the face.

See also Harmful to Minors. Compare with Blood Is the New Black, Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress, Covered in Gunge.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Another: Mr. Kubodera's death led to this. Although that's probably to be expected when you repeatedly stab yourself in the throat in front of all your students.
• Attack on Titan: In episode 25, a young girl is seen walking the streets covered in blood and tears after several women around her got crushed by stray rubble resulting from the ensuing chaos.
• Betrayal Knows My Name: In episode 4 Yuki gets some of Zess's blood on his face after Zess is stabbed by Uzuki. (A demon is controlling Uzuki).
• Black Butler: During the end of Jack the Ripper arc, Ciel and Sebastian are standing outside of Mary Kelly's building so they can catch The Ripper. Following a scream, Ciel flings the door open only to be hit with a splatter of blood on his face. Ciel's not necessarily innocent, per se (he has no qualms with killing 'bad guys'), but he was only 12 years old at the time, and it obviously affected him to the point of freezing up in terror for the whole next scene.
• Black Lagoon: the "vampire twins" get blood all over themselves. Of course, they enjoy it hugely...as long as it's not their own.
• Blade of the Immortal: part of Manji's backstory tells how he inadvertently caused his sister Machi to lose her touch with reality: she came across her brother killing her husband, and Manji didn't realize what he was to her until it was too late and she got smeared with his blood.
• Brave10: During the second attempt on her life by Tokugawa's ninjas at the beginning of the series, Isanami's face gets bloodied by a dying ninja for maximum traumatization.
• Claymore: Variation, where the cutie was already broken before the blood splattering. Her lack of reaction is violently contrast by the horrified reaction of the people around her.
• Code Geass:
  • Possibly subverted in episode 22: the sweet, innocent Euphemia, splattered with the blood of people she was forced to kill by Lelouch's malfunctioning Geass.
  • A more conventional example occurs in the flashbacks to Marianne's death, with Nunnaly as the blood-splattered innocent while Lelouch looks on in horror from atop the stairs.
  • The first time Lelouch uses his Geass to order a bunch of soldiers to kill themselves, he ends up with some blood on his face, as he looks in horror the people he killed, and realizes his life would change after that. Then he grins the evilest grin in the world, revealing the other side of his personality.
• Durarara!!: This seems to happen to Anri an awful lot.
• Elfen Lied:
  • Given that many of the characters are homicidal Tyke Bombs with the power to tear humans apart in various graphic ways, there are many examples of this trope.
  • Kouta was splattered with blood when Lucy (Kaede) rips his sister in half.
• Eureka Seven:
  • When "the children" are discovered by Eureka they're covered in the blood of their family that Eureka just killed.
  • In episode 37, blood was splattered all over the mother and child when Anemone slaughtered the anti-body Coralian.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Subverted in the first episode of 2nd Gig. Section 9 has been ordered to storm the Chinese Embassy which has been seized by terrorists, but under no circumstances must any hostages be harmed. There's an Oh, Crap! moment when a terrorist drags away a female hostage, then blood splatters on her co-worker. Turns out its the terrorist who's been shot.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team has a vivid flashback of Shiro surviving the Zeon massacre of his original home colony, dazed and smeared in the blood of those who didn't survive.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury has the notorious scene in which Suletta pulls a Big Damn Heroes by crushing a terrorist who had been about to shoot Miorine and her father, causing blood to splatter everywhere, including over Miorine's face.
• Subverted at the start of Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino when Triela gets her face and coat splattered with blood...from a man she'd killed with a point-blank shotgun blast, because she's been 'conditioned' into a government black ops soldier.
• Hellsing:
  • Variation; during a flashback, we see how Seras avoided being drenched in blood, because she was hidden in a closet, but winds up in a puddle of her own blood after being shot while stabbing a man in the eye.
  • In a flashback to how her uncle turned on her practically the moment her father died, we got an inverted case. Integra is shot, leading to an otherwise inactive Alucard being splashed with her blood.
• Higurashi: When They Cry:
  • Happens so often (most notably during the Big Bad's Start of Darkness) that you start to wonder how they can afford to clean up the mess so often.
  • Subverted in the manga-only arc Onisarashi-hen. After appearing to play this trope straight three times in a row, Detective Oishi realizes that the Blood Splattered Innocent in question is a bit too blood splattered to really be innocent...
• I Am a Hero: Happens to Hiromi in an early chapter, when a suicidal zombie decapitates itself in front of her. This doesn't seem to trouble her very much, except as a result of the infection risk from having it near her eyes.
• Kyo Kara Maoh!: Yuuri when Saralegui gets shot with an arrow.
• Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force: Lily during her time as a lab experiment. Having test subjects undergo Body Horror and burst right in front of her, splattering her with their blood, really didn't help her mental state.
• Invoked in Naruto when Kabuto fought with Tsunade at the start of the big Sannin rumble. Kabuto cut open his hand and sprayed blood across Tsunade's face to send her into a Heroic BSoD- Tsunade at the time was still suffering from hemophobia stemming from an incident in her past where she was soaked in blood while trying and failing to save her lover Dan from dying from his wounds. She manages to get over it, though.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • If you think on it a certain way (i.e. an insane way), Shinji Ikari is one during the destruction of Unit 03. Even though he was doing the destroying. Sorta. He was in the Eva, meaning he felt EVERYTHING that happened; him ripping his friend to pieces, the blood spraying all over him, etc., etc., but he wasn't in control of his Eva. His dad was. And Gendo did this to teach Shinji to follow his orders. Have we mentioned that Gendo is a bastard?!
  • Kaworu's death scene in Rebuild of Evangelion had a variant. While he and Shinji were separated by a wall, the shot from Kaworu's side created this effect with Shinji visible through the glass wall covered in blood.
• PandoraHearts:
  • Vincent and the tragedy of Sabrie, though this was possibly not so innocent.
  • A straighter example is Oz in chapter 70.
• Peacemaker Kurogane: Often happens to poor Tetsunosuke.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion plays with this. Homura shoots herself in the head in front of Mami, who is horrified... but Homura quickly recovers, and she's the one who gets (her own) blood splashed on her face. She wasn't trying to kill herself—she had just finished an inconclusive battle with Mami and shot herself as a last-resort tactic to distract her which appears to work, but ultimately fails. She doesn't get around to cleaning up the mess until she runs into Madoka, apparently realizing a bloodied face might freak her out. Homura turns out to have been a Damsel in Distress for most of the movie, but takes a sudden Face–Heel Turn near the end, matching the subversive use of this trope.
• Red Garden: one of the cops investigating Lise's death gets killed just as he finds Lise, who's Back from the Dead, splattering her with blood in the process. Then it just keeps happening... Poor girl.
• Rurouni Kenshin: Kenshin met his First Love Tomoe when, during one of his fights as Battousai, he bisected an attacking ninja and she walked in on the scene while drunk, accidentally getting splattered by the man's blood.
  "You make the bloody rain fall."
• School-Live!: The first time Kurumi killed a zombie it was her upperclassman crush. She used a shovel in self-defense and shoved it through his throat. Kurumi ended up covered in blood.
• This occurs in Serial Experiments Lain when Lain confronts a suicidal drug-user in a club. Even worse it's Lain's doppleganger talking, but she reverts to being normal Lain while still covered in blood. That was her first great moment, and it sets the grim, disturbing mood of the rest of the series.
• SPY×FAMILY: Played for Black Comedy. Anya asks Yor about a "Take Your Child to Work Day" Plot. This induces an Imagine Spot of Anya shadowing her mother's job as a Professional Killer. It ends with Anya giving a Thousand-Yard Stare as she's drenched in High-Pressure Blood. Of course, the real Anya could see all of this.
  Anya: ...maybe I'll just ask Papa.
• ×××HOLiC: A slight variant occurs when a woman's wish on a monkey's paw inadvertently causes a man to fall in front of a train. The ensuing spray of blood splashes over the platform and onto her shoes.
• YuruYuri: Parodied in "Warm Slumber Party With Everyone". Chitose Ikeda ships her two friends Ayano and Kyouko, to the point where she gets explosive nosebleeds whenever she imagines them having a yuri moment. Chitose also turns into a lecherous "kiss monster" whenever she eats chocolate. After she gets into the brown stuff and gets frisky with the other girls, Kyouko and Ayano decide to distract her from her rampage by kissing for real. We then cut to two character who left to fetch some blankets. As soon as they walk in, a Scare Chord plays and we see gallons of Chitose's blood splattered all over the room and the other girls, who are so shocked they can only stand around in a catatonic state.

Comic Books

• Squee in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is traumatized again and again by witnessing Johnny's gruesome killings, but one time in particular, Johnny pulls out a pedophile's brain and throws it at the wall beside Squee, splashing the blood all over him.
• You know, the flashback where Bruce Wayne's parents get shot by a mugger and his mother's necklace breaks and he ends up kneeling in their blood?
• In NYX, Kiden Nixon's dad was shot in front of her when she was a little girl, and the blood splattered on her face and clothes. She spent years doing drugs to blot out the memories.

Fan Works

• Used in an Atlantis fanfiction called 'Jump' where Pythagoras arrives at the house, covered in the blood of a friend of Hercules who has just committed suicide in front of him.
• Alternative Class Despair: Chiaki is unfortunate enough to be standing near the Impostor when he's Squashed Flat and gets a front-row seat to the blood spray.
• Danganronpa: Memento Mori: Chapter 5's execution ends with Daigo covered in blood after witnessing his love interest Ayane get crushed in front of him, just after he tried to prevent her death.
• How the police found Bridgette and Megan in Falling in Deeper.
• In Little Dragon Harry manages to get Fluffy to attack the troll and he and his friends are splattered with troll blood.
• A variation of this happens in Beneath The Sun's Surface, Celestia is tortured by a group of conspirator so brutally that her white fur ends up black-tainted by her own dry blood.
• Smurfette, Tapper, and Duncan McSmurf get splattered with blood that came from Jesus being beaten with scourges as they were watching the gruesome bloodbath in the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Smurfed Behind: The Passion Of The Smurfs". However, none of the three are seriously traumatized from the event.
• Legacy (DocSuess): Chapter 5 opens with Peter — having just experienced his Uncle Ben's death — covered in blood. Naturally, Tony doesn't notice the stain in his clothes or the panic-attack waiting to happen.
• 7-year-old Maria in the Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic The Promise is splashed with blood when her adult friend Rei saves her from Attempted Rape by killing a man in front of her. In his rage, Rei shoots him repeatedly. This traumatizes Maria to the point where she can't talk for several days.
• In My Huntsman Academia, Panchito "Pistoles" Rojo is haunted by the time his brother was callously murdered by having his head blown apart by a shotgun. Panchito, who was eight years old at the time, was splattered in his brother's blood and grey matter. After sitting there in Stunned Silence for a time, he would later swear bloody vengeance on the Human gang that did this and joined the White Fang to kill even more "Human assholes".
• In A Sky Of A Million Stars: In the first chapter, Katsuki is covered in Izuku's blood due to performing CPR on him in an attempt to save his life after he tries to commit suicide via jumping off the roof. He stays that way for several hours while waiting for news from the doctors while in the hospital, and it's only at the insistence of the nursing staff that he exchanges his middle school uniform for a clean pair of scrubs. The sight of him like that nearly caused Inko to collapse.
• In Alternate Tail Series, Kagura gets sprayed with Gajeel's blood after he devoured God Slayer Iron, which was poisonous for him, to defeat a powerful opponent.
• Mastermind: Strategist for Hire: Eri ends up covered in blood after hugging Izuku, who had slaughtered Overhaul and his gang singlehandedly shortly beforehand.
• The Puppet in Something Always Remains after its creator dies in a spring lock suit.
• In Ronpa and Friends, following Dale's execution, MonoBlub recovers a completely blood splattered Chip who has a Thousand-Yard Stare before completely LOSING it.
• ''Paradoxus: kid!Trisha witnesses Bloom and Stella’s death and, of course, gets all splattered by their blood. This causes her to develop a trauma; in her broken psyche, her hands will forever be stained with her mother’s blood. A symbol of her perceived weakness and her greatest failure.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien. When the Chest Burster erupts from Kane, it's Lambert who catches most of the blood splatter. She spends the rest of the movie skating on the edge of hysteria.
• Captain Phillips gets splattered with the blood of the pirates that captured him and he goes into shock.
• The last straw for Carrie is when a bucket of pig's blood is dumped on her by the Alpha Bitch and her Jerk Jock boyfriend at the prom after she had been made the prom queen. Carrie proceeds to snap and turn her telekinetic powers into a weapon of revenge and destruction.
• Dinosaur Hotel: Maddie gets splattered in Sam's blood when Sam is attacked and killed by the raptor.
• Dogma: A nameless innocent is splattered with blood during Loki's 'smiting'. As the only 'pure' person in the boardroom of executives, she is allowed to survive, although Loki does consider shooting her for not blessing him when he sneezed...
• Doomsday loves splattering random people with blood.
• Played for Laughs in Dracula: Dead and Loving It, when the main character has to stake his fiancee's vampiric sister. The resulting blow causes a geyser of blood that coats him and everything in the room in copious amounts of blood. But wait, she's still not quite dead yet... Time for another whack.
  • Slightly subverted in that Van Helsing, who is in the same room at the time, comes out without a drop on him as he hid behind a pillar. As he puts it "Everything in life comes down to location, location, location..."
• Go: The two strippers get some of Victor Jr.'s blood on them after he gets shot in the arm, and are clearly rattled by this.
• In Kill Bill, the Bride introduces O-Ren through a Start of Darkness flashback to O-Ren's childhood done in anime style, where Boss Matsumoto and his men kill both of her parents as she hides under the bed. At one point, a sword blade goes through her mother and the bed courtesy of Matsumoto himself, and her mother's blood drips down onto her. And Luis Bacalov's beautiful score from "The Grand Duel" is playing throughout.
  • Not to mention the second "chapter" of the movie is entitled, The Blood Splattered Bride, a Shout-Out to a Lesbian Vampire film with the same name. In fact, she's splattered with blood for pretty much the majority of the movie.
    • She sure as hell ain't innocent for most of it, though.
• Used in Kingdom of Heaven, in which a horse is splattered with so much blood it panics, rears up, and throws its rider.
• Phil, the nervous navigator in Memphis Belle suffers a Heroic BSoD when an aircraft in front of them explodes, splattering blood and organs over the plexiglas nose...
  • Subverted when the windshield is shot through and the bullet hits a bottle of tomato soup sitting on the dashboard, causing the pilot to panic and start screaming about being shot until the co-pilot tastes it (presumably for it having a strange consistency), and declares it to be soup. Very Funny...
    • The co-pilot declares it to be soup after finding a broken thermos, which was formerly filled with soup.
• Played for (deadpan) laughs in Icelandic film Noi Albinoi, in which the protagonist accidentally tips an entire bucket of goose blood onto his father and grandmother.
• Nope: As a child actor in Gordy's Home, Ricky was right in front of Gordy as he was gunned down by arriving police officers, and the ape's blood splatters all over him, as if he wasn't already traumatized enough watching the chimp rip apart the other cast members.
• Pitch Black: Shazza gets a surprise face-full of blood when Zeke shoots one of the crash survivors, whom he takes to be Riddick about to attack her. "Crikey!"
• Probably the closest that the viewing audience has come to being the innocent in a film is a scene in Quarantine (2008) when the main character's camera man uses the lens of the In-Universe Camera to beat back an attacker, causing the screen to become covered in blood.
• Happens to Reba in the film and book versions of Red Dragon. Blood splatters across her face when Dolarhyde shoots himself with a shotgun in front of her. Or so she thinks. He ultimately couldn't bring himself to kill her, but he needed a way to spare her life and still fake his own death and escape, so he blew the face off someone he murdered earlier that night, which she couldn't see due to being fully blind.
• The titular character of La Reine Margot in the poster and the film. While this visually invokes Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress, the white gown isn't Margot's wedding dress.
• Poor, poor Repo! The Genetic Opera's Shilo Wallace. Her father and godmother, the only people she's ever met thanks to her dad being a lunatic, are both brutally murdered by the movie's resident Magnificent Bastard, and she walks away from the murder site covered in both of their blood.
• In Saw X a boy named Carlos is drenched in blood in the Bloodboard Trap, though John takes the most of it.
• Played for Black Comedy in Shoot 'Em Up. A woman gives birth in the middle of a shootout. The Anti-Hero then cuts the umbilical cord with a point-blank gunshot, splattering her face with blood. She's not happy.
• In Splice, this occurs to the front row of people at the press conference once Fred and Ginger, the two transgenic organisms created by Clive and Elsa for medical research, start fighting each other.
• Spontaneous is essentially "Blood-Splattered Innocents: The Movie", as the plot centers around a high school in which senior students begin inexplicably "popping" like massive balloons full of blood — drenching whichever poor classmates happen to be nearby. Despite the knowing absurdity of the premise, it's often Played for Drama.
• Jack Regan suffers this in the 1978 Sweeney movie when an armed robber evades capture by putting a sawn-off shotgun in his mouth. And it's not just blood either. Regan realistically freaks out and frantically scrubs his face clean.
• In You Might Be the Killer, Sam begins the movie covered in blood. He claims to have gotten covered in the blood of the killer's victims due to being nearby when they were killed, but Chuck finds this suspicious and lists it as evidence that Sam might be the killer.

Literature

• When seven year old Ellie finds Andrea's body in Daddy's Little Girl, she slips in the blood and falls onto Andrea's chest. She then runs home screaming, covered in her sister's blood.
• Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • Subverted with Yuki during her fight with Ryoko; she's busy protecting Kyon from Ryoko, and she gets hit with half a dozen steel spikes. Ryoko then impales her with two tentacles, ripping through her chest cavity and splattering Kyon's face with Yuki's blood. While this would be traumatic for most people, Kyon gets over it rather quickly afterwards and Yuki herself is easily able to heal her wounds.
  • In The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, though, this is played straighter. After Yuki turns herself and the world around her into normal humans, Kyon is sent back to fix everything. Just as he is about to, Ryoko stabs him in the back out of nowhere and pulls the knife out, splattering the normal and innocent Yuki with blood. In the movie adaptation, her expression is sad for the audience, but the whole situation would be a severe case of horror for Yuki, who's now a normal human girl.
• The Hunger Games: Katniss gets introduced to the reality of being a Tribute in the Games when a boy that she's having a shoving match with over a backpack suddenly coughs blood in her face — after being knifed in the back by another Tribute.
• In the Realms of the Unreal: The Story of the Vivian Girls has lots of this, with illustrations.
• The Road: This happens when the man shoots a marauder in order to protect his son, resulting in the child being splattered with blood.
• Shadow of the Hegemon: Petra is covered in the blood, bone, and brains of her would-be rescuers after her kidnapper, Achilles, reveals himself and shoots them. She refuses to move or speak until she is allowed to wash the blood off.
• In Sten by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch, first aid training had the recruits practice on a robot simulating a wounded fellow soldier. If the recruit wasn't quick enough, an "artery ruptured," spraying him with simulated blood.
  "The dye used in that blood won't wear off for two days. Maybe that'll help you think about how you'd feel if that dummy had really been your teammate."
• Warrior Cats: Lionblaze. Although most of the times he ends up splattered with blood, he's responsible, the times in Long Shadows when Tigerstar shows him visions of himself killing Heathertail in a series of violent fashions may count.
  • Generally averted with everyone else.

Live-Action TV

• Angel:
  • Lindsey in "Blind Date". He's hardly innocent, but he does look appropriately traumatized when the man next to him is shot and it is one of the rare occasions he's trying to do the right thing.
  • And Fred coughs blood over Wesley before collapsing in "A Hole in the World".
  • In "Inside Out", Connor's face is splattered with the blood of an innocent girl, who he allowed to be killed. Briefly before death, she appeared as his mother, adding insult to injury.
  • Joss Whedon appears to be a fan of this—in "Hell Bound", a medium trying to reach Spike spits blood all over Fred's face before dying.
• Arrow. A variation when Sara Lance is shot and falls off a rooftop in front of her sister Laurel. Team Arrow enter the Arrowcave to find Sara on a slab and a suit-wearing Laurel covered in blood because she had to drag the body down there.
• Better Call Saul: In "Bagman" Jimmy is saved from death at the hands of a cartel gang member when Mike shoots the gang member in the neck. His blood spatters onto Jimmy's shirt, to his evident horror.
• Borgia: Pope Alexander VI is covered in blood when Cesare stabs a man right in front of him with The Lance of Longinus. While the Borgia pope can hardly be called "innocent", it does seem to badly unsettle him and affect how he sees his family.
• Of all The Boys it's Naïve Newcomer Hughie Campbell who seems to be splattered with gore the most, starting with the Plot-Triggering Death of his girlfriend after a superhero runs into her at Super-Speed, turning her into Ludicrous Gibs. Other examples include Hughie blowing up a man who had Semtex shoved up his behind, having someone's head exploding all over him, and being covered in whale guts after Billy Butcher rams said whale with a speedboat causing Hughie to have a major Heroic BSoD. It's even lampshaded when Frenchie goes to cut the Tracking Chip out of Starlight—sure enough, Hughie gets splattered again.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Seeing Red". "Your shirt..." To explain: When Tara is fatally struck by a stray bullet, her only concern is for Willow's ruined, blood-splattered shirt.
• In the opening of the Criminal Minds episode "Coda", an autistic boy is seen in profile, walking to the bus stop to catch his ride, just as he does at exactly the same time every day. It's only when the camera pans around to the front of him that it's revealed one side of his face is splattered with blood; one of his parents had just been critically wounded in their home and the other, kidnapped.
  • J.J. got splattered with someone else's blood in a season five episode.
• A very angsty and emotional CSI ep had Grissom covered in Warrick's blood for a couple of scenes after Warrick died. Grissom had held him to his chest and it got all over.
• Dexter: Dexter and his brother watch their mother and her drug-dealing buddies chopped to pieces with a chainsaw. Then they're left there for days. Neither of them grows up to be well-balanced individuals.
  • The first time Dexter gets a flash of the repressed memory of his mother's murder at a similarly gruesome crime scene, it causes him to lose his cool and fall right into a pool of blood, leaving him covered in it. While adult Dexter is certainly not an innocent, the image works as a visual reference to the event that left him psychologically damaged.
• Dollhouse:
  • An early episode had a flashback of Alpha's first rampage, during which we see Echo in the house showers drenched in the blood of the slaughtered people around her. Of course, being a doll, she is fairly oblivious to the fact that she should be traumatised (and barely even aware that there is anything wrong with the dead).
  • The same episode opens with Topher, usually a self-contained smart-ass, covered in blood and stammering like a little kid about the killings he's just witnessed. Topher gets this again in 2.11 when, not two minutes after kissing Bennett for the first time, he ends up with her brains all over his face.
• An episode of Forensic Files had a child arrive at preschool in his pajamas covered in blood. His grandparents had been murdered and he ran the two miles to the school.
• Gotham: Lee Thompkins ends her first married day splattered with blood of her fiance, who's gunned down by her ex, Jim Gordon, just as her fiance was about to stab her with a knife, driven insane by a virus. Which is carried in blood.
• D.L.'s murder in Heroes resulted in Niki being sprayed with his blood.
• House of the Dragon: In the third episode of Season 1 with The Grand Hunt, Rhaenyra Targaryen ends up covered with the blood of the boar she and Ser Criston stabbed to death when it attacked Rhaenyra.
• I Am Not Okay With This when Syd accidentally makes Brad's head explode over all of the other students at the prom.
• The Last Kingdom: When Brida takes Eoferwic with the intent to capture Stiorra, she keeps captive the women of the castle in the courtyard. Stiorra is in hiding, and Brida wants to lure her out by killing off more and more captives. One of these killings results in blood splattering on Stiorra's face, who is observing everything from a basement.
• Lost: An extra named Doug is shot by mercenaries and has his blood sprayed on Sawyer (who, it's worth noting, is in no sense of the word innocent).
  • They also do this in Season 1 when Arzt is blown up by dynamite. Hurley, Locke, Jack, and Kate are covered with pieces of him, leading Hurley to exclaim "You've got a piece of... Arzt... on you."
• Mad Men: There's an episode where Smitty the copywriter is riding a lawnmower around the office. Later Lois the secretary, one of the ne'er-do-wells of the office, takes a turn and accidentally runs over the foot of one of the British executives who have bought the company. Wacky hijinks suddenly turn into buckets of blood all over the other executives and copywriters. Someone's still scrubbing blood off the walls hours later, and poor Guy loses his foot and is considered to have lost his whole career because of it.
• B.J. goes through this before even arriving at the 4077th M*A*S*H in "Welcome to Korea", when he, Hawkeye, and Radar stop to help a group of soldiers on the side of the road.
• NCIS: When Kate is shot, Tony is sprayed with her blood. One of the saddest shots of the series.
• Orphan Black: In episode 4, Helena leaves a little boy basically covered in blood after breaking into his house to clean her wounds.
• Played for laughs in Red Dwarf episode "Justice", when Lister's pus-filled head burst. We just hear a splattering noise, and then the Cat enters, covered in blood and pus, and looking traumatised.
• Sanctuary: Happens to a nosy reporter in an episode. Interestingly, her cameraman seems more traumatized by it than she is.
• State of Play: Della moves from the "protect the story" angle to the "we need to help the police" side of the argument when the detective she'd gotten to know as a source was shot by a sniper in front of her.
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - but only because a character was acting in a film that had a fatal gun accident.
• Supernatural
  • Played for squicky laughs in the episode, "Mystery Spot". Sam is going slightly mental from watching Dean die over and over again and is hacking apart the Mystery Spot with an axe while Dean and the tied-up owner wait. Dean goes over to try and get Sam to calm down, they have an off-screen argument and then Dean's blood splatters all over the owner.
  • Used more seriously in "Bloodlust". Dean kills a vampire brutally (by holding it down and cutting its head off with a circular saw, off-screen) and when he looks back up at his brother, who's staring at him, his face is splattered in blood.
  • In the Alternate Universe episode "It's a Terrible Life", Sam Wesson gets a bloody introduction to the finer points of monster-hunting.
  • A neighbor of Bobby's who's expressed romantic interest changes her mind when Bobby shoves a demon into her wood chipper, spraying her with Ludicrous Gibs.
• Titans (2018). A variation when Beast Boy makes his first kill as a tiger, and goes on a Heroic BSoD after reverting to his human form covered in his victim's blood.
• Sookie in just about every single episode of True Blood. To her credit, she usually gets over it pretty quickly, perhaps simply because it usually happens right at the end of each episode.

Music Videos

• In the music video for We Are Scientists "It's A Hit". This is an example it being used as a nondiscretion shot, as we clearly see the fatal punch land, and then cut to the Littlest Cancer Patient sprayed with his hero's blood.
• Pearl Jam: In the music video for "Jeremy", after the title character shoots himself in front of his class, the camera pans across a tableau of his classmates recoiling in shock as his blood gets all over them.
• Played for Laughs in the music video for Starbomb's "Smash!", acknowledging how often the Mario Brothers get confused.
  Fox: Hey, Mario, stop crying! Just man up and fight instead!
  Luigi: I'm Luigi! All these blood stains make my overalls look red!

Theatre

• Referenced in the song Recess from Lizard Boy. During the song, Trevor tells the story of how he got his lizard skin. Long story short: dragon got killed by his kindergarten, baby him got covered in blood, now he has scales.

Theme Parks

• Many of the gory houses at the Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights event include hidden water sprayers to simulate blood splattering on the guests. HHN Orlando's The People Under the Stairs in 1992 actually splattered guests with thick, red fake blood.

Video Games

• Helena in Dead or Alive 2, this occurred when her mother took a bullet meant for her.
• Cloud plays the part of the blood-splattered innocent in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, though in his case he wasn't actually within range when Zack was shot and ended up with blood on his face because he was embraced by his friend before he died. The image was still just as striking, though.
• One of the most striking images in Xenogears is that of a young Fei, his face splattered with the blood of the mother that protected him.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots:
  • All the backstories of the Beauties, but Crying Wolf's especially. She was found carrying the corpse of her baby brother, whom she had accidentally killed, through the wild of Africa.
  • Taken to extremes with Laughing Octopus who was forced to bathe in the blood of her own family, who she was forced to kill herself by a cult of crazies, all while being forced to laugh while she did it.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, if you choose to execute Loghain, the moment he gets decapitated is the moment his daughter gets treated to an authentic Dragon Age blood shower. Honestly, it's a bit Narmy, particularly since everyone else somehow stays completely clean.
• Coach Oleander's backstory in Psychonauts has him watching his father (a butcher) chop up his beloved pet bunnies for food.
• Horribly subverted in The King of Fighters. We see a little Leona splattered in someone's blood in a flashback to her past. It's her father's blood. And she's the one who killed him when under Goenitz's More than Mind Control, as well as everyone in their village.
• In The Walking Dead (Telltale), Lilly gets covered in her father's blood after his head is smashed in with a salt lick.
• In BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth is covered in blood after stabbing Daisy Fitzroy.
• In Mogeko Castle, Yonaka gets splattered with blood when Nega-Mogeko gets shot right in front of her.
• In the 41st Case of Criminal Case: Grimsborough, Grimsborough University quarterback Chad Baker becomes splattered in blood when his girlfriend, Madison Springer, was killed with an exploding tiara while she was being crowned Prom Queen.
  • In the 51st case, Chief King, the man David Jones looks up to, is revealed to have shot socialite Adam Bentley, and, when it's discovered, commits suicide. Jones is left dumbstruck, with blood splattered all over his face and shirt. After this happens, Jones turns much more sour, darker, is unable to sleep and grows stubble.
• Waylon Park in Outlast. He's not really innocent as he was the one to contact Miles Upshur and kick-start Outlast 1. However, he was forcefully committed by his superiors and forced to undergo the Morphogenic Engine Project. By the end of the game, he's covered in his, other people's and Blaire's blood.
• Purgatory (RPG Maker): During the first part of the game, heroine Enri falls into a room full of blood and is covered in it in her sprite. This marks her slow transformation from a shy innocent to an axe-weilding badass.
• Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys: Leeza gets a face full of blood after Gruda mortally impales Eldeel from behind, a sight that causes her to scream.

Visual Novels

• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, you're quickly shown the newcomer Athena Cykes as a kid getting splattered with large amount of blood in a Flash Back as she witnessed her mother's death and at same time confronted the murderer, and later we get a Jump Scare memory from Simon Blackquill depicting her smiling creepily while covered in blood. Little wonder why the series suddenly got an "M" ESRB rating all of a sudden.

Webcomics

• In one story arc in Better Days, the police discover that one of the people in Fisk's neighborhood is a terrorist. When they corner and shoot him, he was in the process of having sex with someone. Cue a panel of a very traumatized heyna-lady, covered in bloodsplatters.
• Ariel, in Drowtales gets covered in blood after she's forced to kill Miir'kin Vel'Vlozress quite gruesomely as part a Sadistic Choice, the other choice being to kill her cousin and one of her few allies. She's clearly in shock for several pages after this.
• In Grrl Power, Sydney/Halo ends up covered in gore, after Cora rescues her from a kidnap attempt... By shooting the gang leader with alien ordinance that turns him into Ludicrous Gibs.
• In He Is a Good Boy, when Crange's tree (which, like Crange himself, inexplicably has organs) is cut down by a lumberjack, there's one panel where Crange is covered in a blanket of blood.
• In Homestuck, Tavros gets absolutely covered in Vriska's blood when she dies. Temporarily, anyway.
• An aversion is played for laughs in Keychain of Creation—we never actually see Misho covered in blood, as the comic cuts straight from the cause of splattering to Marena finishing washing him.
• Played for dark comedy in this Perry Bible Fellowship comic.
• Played for laughs in this Sluggy Freelance strip.
• Neko: The Cat: Michiko, a 10 year-old girl, has blood splattered all over her white nightgown after having to kill her father when she discovers he's the monster in the woods.
• Mikaila Adelier of Unsounded is splattered with her father's blood as he attempts to defend her he failed..
• In The Water Phoenix King, this is subverted for laughs as everyone who wasn't there thinks Anthem is this, instead of a combination of the adrenaline having worn off and her Emotionless Girl shell (itself partly attributable to prior PTSD) finally cracking.
• Zomgan: After Mirae On blows Craven into bits via his veins, the resulting explosion covers Gyuho in Craven's dark-colored blood. Gyuho looks on in shock and confusion as wonders who Mirae is and how he was able to defeat Craven and several other Zomgans.

Web Original

• The Onion article "Blood...Blood Everywhere."
• Occurs constantly on Happy Tree Friends, especially whenever Flippy comes out of Ax-Crazy rage mode.

Western Animation

• Happens to Butters in South Park, during an eighth season episode called "You Got F'd in the A." In a flashback, Butters loses control of one of his shoes while tap-dancing, causing an accident in which eight people are killed. Their blood splatters all over him as he looks on in horror. The incident is effectively repeated at the end of the episode, when Butters, having finally overcome the trauma, agrees to tap-dance in a competition... only to lose his shoe again, killing the opposing team and their coach.
• In the Fifth Season of Samurai Jack, Young Jack watches his father dispatch some assassins, getting a spray of blood across his eyes.
• Superman: Doomsday. Lois Lane watches aghast as Doomsday pounds on Superman, some of his blood splattering across her face. It's at this point that she and Jimmy Olsen fully begin to realize that Superman could be in grave danger.

Real Life

• Jackie Kennedy in her pink suit, November 22, 1963. She had the opportunity to change it, but refused, telling Lady Bird Johnson: "I want them to see what they have done to Jack." The suit has never actually been cleaned and is in possession of the National Archives in a secure location until 2103 at the behest of Caroline Kennedy. She didn't want it to go on display during her children's lifetimes and when the agreement expires, the family will renegotiate a deal to put it in the Smithsonian.
• One of the most vivid images from the US war in Iraq is of a blood-splattered little girl crying as a US soldier walks past her—her parents were killed moments earlier. That's their blood.
• Obviously happened during the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre on December 14, 2012. In particular, one student covered himself in his fellow students' blood to fool the shooter into thinking he was dead.

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