Losing Your Head

"Now tho' you'd have said that head was dead
(For its owner dead was he),
It stood on its neck, with a smile well-bred,
And bowed three times to me!"

— Pooh-Bah, The Mikado ("The Criminal Cried")

A beheading can be a messy and extremely painful thing to see, let alone experience. While it's been said that, theoretically (it's understandably hard to confirm), consciousness may continue for a few seconds after decapitation, ^note It has been shown that random brain activity can continue for many minutes, ending in a flurry of activity reminiscent of a brain seizure. in fiction, consciousness after decapitation can last much, much longer... or even indefinitely. The severed head generally possesses the ability to audibly speak despite their mouth no longer being connected to their lungs, and may or may not even be capable of independent movement, either by bouncing, rolling or levitating. Sometimes the body will still be functional and capable of moving on its own, resulting in the head trying to tell it to pick it up and reattach it.

This trope can be justified for robots, which may have a power source in their skull that keeps them going after it's been separated from their shoulders: they may not have their core processor in their head anyway. The Undead and other supernatural beings may also exhibit an ability to have a functioning head separate from their still-functioning body. Robots could also have their entire vocal system located in their head, but any biological creature should only be able to mouth words.

When multiple heads/brains/souls/CPUs/etc. are removed and then reinstalled in working order at the same time, this will almost always result in them being "returned" to the wrong bodies, giving a Visceral "Freaky Friday" Flip.

See: Alas, Poor Yorick, Brain in a Jar, Helping Hands, Your Head A-Splode, Cranial Processing Unit, Detachment Combat, Oracular Head. Related to Headless Horseman, Pulling Themselves Together, Appendage Assimilation, and Having a Heart. Contrast Decapitation Required, when it's the only way to kill them successfully. For decapitation in general, see Off with His Head!. Not to be confused with Talking Heads, which is a stylistic convention.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A TV advertisement for Gusto, a European snack food resembling shoestring potatoes, has a man's severed head lying on the floor, still talking, as his body stumbles around aimlessly.
• DSB Sikkerhed created a series of PSA animations called Hovedløselille to remind people of the importance of situational awareness while at train stations.
• A Maestro credit card ad features a headless woman shopping for new clothes, and as she pays for her stuff with her Maestro card, she leaves her head behind.
• A banner ad for Treximet, a prescription headache remedy, has a woman who says, "My migraines are so excruciating, I just want to take my head off."
• A Dentyne Frost Bites commercial has a man still alive after his head becomes frozen solid and snaps off.
• Gary The Robot suffers this cruel fate in an ad for Pillsbury Pizza Pops.
• In an advert for VO5 Extreme Style hair products a teenager removes his own head in order to style his hair. He then proceeds to flirt with a woman holding her head in her hands.
  • There are also a few sequels ads that also feature a few guys' disembodied heads and their headless bodies.
• An interesting case turned up in a commercial for Fruit Gushers that had a space theme. Toward the end of the commercial, some kid's head turns into a flying saucer. At the end of the commercial, we see the kid's Flying Saucer head fly away, leaving his headless body behind. Could also have some Fridge Horror if you consider the fact that the kid's head might not come back, leaving his body without a head.
• In a similar vein, the ad for Gushers Magic Pieces ended with a girl making a candy "disappear," only for her head to vanish in a puff of smoke. Her voice says, "Hey, where'd I go?" suggesting that the head has turned invisible or gone somewhere else. 'Cause, y'know, it's magic.
• A terrifying PSA circa 1971 from the Presidential Council on Fitness (?) posited a future where, due to physical inactivity, a man of the time was reduced to a head in a box, carted around by a humanoid robot. In the ad, the power goes off, leading the head to anxiously cry out "Hello? Is anyone there??"
• A commercial for Kids Foot Locker features two kids sitting at a cafeteria table. One of them is clearly interested in the jacket that the other is wearing, and starts bargaining to trade one of his own possessions for the other's jacket. The offering quickly escalates from simple things like sandwiches and pudding, to the boy offering his very own head for it. Sure enough, this is what gets his friend's attention, as he finally agrees to the trade. After the trade, a passing student quips "Nice jacket!" to which the now-headless boy hi-fives him, almost as if to say that it was worth it. View the ad here.
• Gary from Nintendo Week begins hosting one episode as a disembodied head, with his body stumbling into walls in the background. He promptly explains this is a nod to Face Raiders for the 3DS.
• A McDonald's commercial featuring the famous magician David Copperfield has this happen to his assistant via the Head Mover magic trick.
• There are at least two separate commercials from 1990 about Consolidated Auto Sales that feature Frank Sawark holding his own head on a platter.
• An ad for the Teacher's Training Agency starts off with a guy detaching his head when getting out of bed and then continues for most of the commercial with the headless bodies doing their jobs while the song "Heigh ho" plays in the background.
• Happens to a kid in this commercial for the Panasonic 3DO when his head flies off his body while his now headless body continues to play due to the graphics "blowing his mind".
• A commercial for a film themed event that happened from 2013 to 2014 in a french community center has a headless DJ that after finding and then dropping his head he tries to reattach it only for it to fall off again after sneezing.
• This commercial for Coca-Cola has a guy's headless body in a house that sitting in front of a television that is showing a tropical paradise which it then gets launched to by the Coca-Cola. It then reveals that his head is involved in a tropical paradise party that temporarily comes to a halt when his body arrives but then resumes with his disembodied head soon afterwards getting reattached to his body.
• There is a commercial for MTV's Panasonic Face of Beauty that features three girls separated from their heads that only reattach them after finishing on getting their headless bodies fully dressed up.
• A guy is seen holding his head while talking about a college in Brazil.
• There are two different Canadian PSAs that both involve a black kid detaching his head from his body to teach kid to eat healthy and exercise frequently.
• An ad for ECUST Sound Engineering features either an android or cyborg removing his head to work on at least one of his ears.
• Has this happen to a boy wearing earbuds in an ad for NRJ mobile after listening to music that causes his ears to first wiggle and then start to grow in size until they large enough that his head flies off his body.
• In this ad for Halloween fanta has a breakdancer's head come off as a result of his breakdancing.
• This commercial for a brand of condoms has a young couple have both their heads fall off when they can't find the advertised condom.
• On a rather Not Safe for Work PSA about AIDS education, a couple who has their heads ^note  which was shown that they have due to their head being seen in the beginning reflection either disappear or detach from their bodies and moved to somewhere offscreen while having sex using their headless bodies.
• In a Japanese commercial for an cooking school called Taiwa has a man with an egg for a head literally sneezes his head off resulting in his headless body frantically looking for presumably his head until it settles for a cabbage.
• Happens to Terry Crews in some of the Old Spice commercials he appears in such as this one.
• A 2002 Hong Kong commercial for E*Trade has it happen to a motorcycler when he takes off his helmet to which he immediately afterwards removes from his helmet and reattaches to his body.
• Similarily this Microsoft commercial also features someone with a helmet taking off their head when attempting to remove their helmet and reattaching their head to their body only this time it happens to a Go-Cart driver after crashing their Go-Cart against the wall.
• Generally any commercial with penanggalans in them tend to play this trope rather straight. Here is a relatively recent PSA that features a penanggalan.
• A commercial for a travel company called Best Day features an implied Offscreen Teleportation of a Mother's head from her body in a similar vein to the start of the above Coca Cola commercial due to the head ending up in a tropical location while their headless body stays behind at home.
  • There is another commercial for Best day that is similar only with a boy instead of a mother.
• In a commercial for RC Cola has the mother of a boy with 4 cups attached to his back take her head off to reveal she has an entire RC Cola bottle connected to her neck to prove he isn't adopted, She then puts ice cubes on the glasses removes the lid of the cola bottle "head" and pours it in the glasses attached to his back, and by the end of the commercial the entire family each drink cola from one of the cups on his back with the mom holding her disembodied head while she drinks and only the sound heard at the end is all of them going "Mmmm" and drinking.
• In this commercial for Miller Light a wannabe wrestler's friend imagine his head getting knocked off by Evander Holyfield followed by his still living disembodied head taunting his opponent.
• In one of the ads for the channel Vrak TV a kid named Tommy gets his head kicked off his body by a girl practicing for football.
• A commercial that appears to be about beds has one of the guys ending up with his head separated from his body by the monster under his bed.
• An aspirin commercial features a headless couple relaxing in bed, with the woman saying she has a headache... despite being headless.

Anime & Manga

• Subverted in 3×3 Eyes during the combat between Yakumo and Benares on the moon: true, Wu such as themselves can survive anything, even decapitation (which happened to Yakumo himself earlier on in the manga) but, as Benares pointed out, the sheer pain of having your head graphically torn from your neck is enough to reduce the victim in a comatose state.
• Astro Boy's head is apparently not that well attached, judging by the frequency of which it detaches, though it's stated that his electronic brain is in his chest and not his head, which is just for talking, hearing, and sight.
• Attack on Titan:
  • Titans can generally survive the removal of their heads (which they'll quickly regenerate), often being able to keep walking without it. Even on the occasions where decapitation kills them, it's not actually the loss of the head, but when the process of its removal also happens to cut away the nape of the neck.
  • Eren gets his head blown clean off by Gabi's anti-Titan rifle, but stays conscious long enough to enter the Paths once his head lands in Zeke's hand. He then becomes a mountain-sized skeletal Titan, but his true form inside is just his head. When Mikasa finally severs him from his Titan body, his remaining head instantly dies this time.
• Normally, humans and demons die when Guts of Berserk shears their heads off. The Count from the Guardians of Desire arc proves to be quite more resilient than that, which drives Guts to torture him further because he "doesn't know how to fucking die."
• In Black Lion, one of Ginnai's attacks involve him launching his cyborg head off his neck, which then fires his Eye Beams all over the place at his opponents while flying on rockets attached to his neck. It needs to be seen to be believed.
• In Claymore, cutting the head is normally the surest way to kill a Claymore or an Awakened being, except when it isn't. Two or three Awakened Being defied this norm.
  • Of them, Europa is the one who plays this trope the straightest as she's able to "play dead" by being decapitated while in Human form and then transform in her true Awakened form Decapitation has otherwise no effect on her.
  • The other two are Priscilla, who's not only resistant to decapitation but has the ability to regenerate From a Single Cell, and "Bloody" Agatha, who basically cheats as her human body is just an appendage while her true "necks" that connect her head to her true body are her hairs; when she was decapitated in battle she all but mocked her enemies.
• Dowman Sayman's The Collector and the Phantom Pain is a short story about Narumiya, a girl who finds her friend in pieces while on her way to school. Narumiya speaks to the girl's head and offers her help in recovering the scattered body parts, which fell inexplicably in the hands of other clingy school girls who refuse to give them away, and easily does so but secretly keeps her friend's breasts to herself, telling her that she was unable to find them. Narumiya's friend doesn't mind, however, saying that she feels them being taken care of very affectionately.
• May spends most of Coyote Ragtime Show as a disembodied head after Mister blows her up with an RPG.
• Played for Laughs in Doctor Slump. Arale is a little android girl whose head pops off quite easily. For example, this may cause momentary horror in an onlooker who thinks she's human.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In the original Dragon Ball manga, Sergeant Metallic has his head blown up by Goku's Kamehameha, but survives as he's a robot. Surely, it scares and surprises him. Shortly after, however, Metallic runs out of battery.
  • Dragon Ball Z:
    • After Vegeta decapitates Guldo, Guldo's head survives long enough to yell at Vegeta before getting vaporized altogether.
    • Similarly, Doctor Gero (a cyborg) is still able to rant after Android 17 decapitates him. 17 fixes this by stomping on Gero's head.
    • Happens to Android 16 (who, unlike other "androids", is 100% mechanical) after he gets blown to bits in the Cell arc. After his Final Speech, Cell steps on the head and destroys it. Which makes Gohan go BATSHIT on Cell.
    • When Majin Buu punches Babidi's head to mush, his body continues to move until Buu vaporizes it.
    • Majin Buu has his head blasted off during the fight against Kid Buu (having been removed from Kid Buu's system). It's easily reformed from his body, however, since he can regenerate from almost every wound.
  • In Dragon Ball Z: The Return of Cooler, Cooler was reduced to his head after Goku knocked him into the sun in Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge. He fuses with a machine called the Big Gete Star and makes robot copies of himself.
• A number of people have had odd things happen to their heads in Franken Fran. Fran herself has sewn her own head back on after decapitation.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Greed has Law take his head off with a huge sledgehammer as a demonstration of his powers. He then tells him to improve his aim after regenerating, due to him missing a part of his jaw.
  • Al gets his head taken off multiple times. Of course, this barely affects him. He can still speak, as it seems the sound comes from the blood seal that's in the armor's body, which seems to indicate his head is essentially decorative.
  • Same goes for Barry; he just snaps his head back on whenever it gets knocked off.
  • Slicer's blood seal is in the helmet, so while it's still not fatal it does incapacitate him. Of course, then his younger brother can just take over.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Batou is attacked by a Mini-Mecha who blows his head off. The pilot gets a shock when Batou's head starts talking back to him, as Batou has hacked his cyborg eyes and sent a false image. An unharmed Batou is actually standing right behind the pilot. Cue Boom, Headshot!.
• Happens to various individuals around the heroine repeatedly in Hellsing, falling somewhere between Gorn and Narm.
• Interviews with Monster Girls: The dullahan class of demi-humans have their heads detached from their bodies from birth, but their heads and bodies are synchronized even if they are miles away (for example, if the head eats, the body will eventually have to go to the bathroom, and if the body stubs its toe, the head will scream in pain), to the point that wormholes were being suspected in-universe.
• Inuyasha:
  • Naraku often sends disguised puppets to fight in his place. The first time that this is revealed, the puppet is beheaded, and appears to be dead. After the protagonists let down their guard, the puppet springs back to life, including the head which rolls upright again, and begins to speak.
  • The episode "3000 Leagues in Search of Father" also focuses around this. Demons have enough vigor to survive decapitation for a day or two, which leads to the son of a demon to find his father's body and place the head back on.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Phantom Blood: Dio Brando decapitates himself to avoid being killed by Jonathan's Hamon. He later steals Jonathan Joestar's body to replace his own.
  • Battle Tendency: Wamuu briefly survives getting his head blown off, but Hamon already spread to it, so he dies not too long afterward.
  • Stardust Crusaders: Vanilla Ice decapitates himself using his own Stand so he can offer his blood to Dio. Dio then uses his own blood to revive Ice, claiming "you don't need to die." Since Dio used his blood, Vanilla Ice becomes a vampire, making him unkillable until Polnareff exposes him to sunlight. Unfortunately for Ice, although he knew about the weakness, he didn't realize he was a vampire.
  • Golden Wind: Bruno Buccellati uses his zipper-ability to unzip rival gangster Zucchero's head clean off, which the other team members then hang from a fish hook in an attempt to interrogate him. When Zucchero refuses to comply, they resort to the Torture Dance, while Zucchero's head dangles helplessly by his eyelid and is Forced to Watch.
• In episode 18 of Kill la Kill, Satsuki decapitates Ragyo during their epic confrontation. However, since Ragyo is a Life Fiber hybrid, she has no trouble at all putting herself back together — or beating the crap out of Satsuki afterward.
• Kendaman from Kinnikuman uses his head as a weapon, which is easy considering it's more or less a wrecking ball attached to his arm.
• Living Dead!: Being a Flesh-Eating Zombie, Monako's parts fall off easily, especially her head as it can pop off her neck or tumble with enough force.
• Mazinger Z: Count Brocken is a Nazi ex-officer who was mortally wounded. Dr. Hell found him when he was dying, cut his head from his body and turned him into a cyborg. His head always follows him around, either floating on its own or resting on one of his hands. This was carried to Memetic Mutation levels in Shin Mazinger:
  "Brocken BALL! The game where everyone wins. Except Brocken."
• Midori Days did this with an android-version of a character. After she had been separated from her legs, her body later self destructed, but her head survived to jet into the professor who made her.
• Mobile Suit Gundam's Grand Finale has 2 of this. Char's Zeong has a cockpit as the mobile armor's head, and he eventually has to separate it from the body. The Gundam gets it head tore off during the battle, and the famous "Last Shooting" pose has it shoots a beam rifle into a colony to destroy an empty Zeong's head, without a head nor a left arm.◊
• Monster Musume: Lala, being a dullahan, has her head permanently detached from her body. Normally, she leaves her head on her neck, but sometimes it gets knocked off and she has to get it back. Body and head are both capable of acting independently, but the body lacks the head's senses and needs to get it back in order to use them. The head, however, is very conscious of whatever the body's feeling.
• Naruto:
  • Hidan is immortal, but one time it was cut off he couldn't move until Kakuzu used his threads to sew it back on. Later, Kakuzu isn't around to reattach it, and Shikamaru cuts his head off, but decides to be more thorough and blows up his body while throwing his head into a deep pit in the private land of the Nara clan and then buries it in an avalanche. While the head is screaming curses at him.
  • Later still, Kisame (not really) has this happen to him, and he is somehow able to get off a compliment on his opponents' abilities as his head flies through the air.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Invoked in class 3-A's Haunted House in the Mahora Festival, where Akira, the guide in the school themed haunted house, appeared to get decapitated and her head told Negi to run away. She's actually just lying on the ground with a cover that matches the floor tiles camouflaging the rest of her body, but Negi was too freaked out to notice.
  • In the backstory, Tertium did this to Secundum after Secundum "rewrote" Shiori's older sister, effectively erasing the poor girl out of existence.
• One Piece:
  • Buggy the Clown can separate any body part, but his move "Chop Chop Quick Escape" involves him popping his head off to stop people from punching his face.
  • There's also Trafalgar Law, who apparently can do similar things to other people. The first instance of him using tricks like that in the manga involves a justifiably weirded out marine juggling the talking head of one of his comrades.
  • Crocodile got his head sliced off by Doflamingo, but because he can use his Logia fruit's reformation power by reflex he attached it just a second later.
  • This only happened in the manga, but after being attacked by Dalton, Wapol's troupe of doctors were quick to patch him up... except for the fact that they hadn't reattached his head to his body, which they did off-panel.
  • After the Time Skip, Brook gets his head taken off by a Fish Man Pirate, but then reveals he's perfectly fine. Since learning to master the power of his Revive-Revive Fruit, Brook learned that it was the power of his soul keeping his body moving. Since he has no vital organs to risk, it's a simple matter to pop his head back on.
• Reiko the Zombie Shop's protagonist zombifies her own head after an unfortunate run-in with a serial killer. She gets a new body in the second volume.
• Rio -Rainbow Gate!- uses this as a Running Gag with Linda the Robot Girl.
• Played for Laughs in Rosario + Vampire by Ling-Ling, a zombie who can (and frequently does) freely detach and reattach her body parts, most especially her head.
• Kikuchiyo's introduction in Samurai 7 has him get decapitated by Kambei as part of a ploy act to distract a guy holding a baby hostage, with his head later berating him for stealing his rescue attempt. Later on, in an infiltration plan in which some of the samurai let themselves get captured, his head is delivered as a trophy, while his body enters enemy territory hidden within a pile of hay.
• Time Stop Hero: Vampires cannot be killed by decapitation or dismemberment. Their heads can still talk and they can eventually pull themselves back together. The only way to kill them is to expose them to sunlight or holy light, which will turn them to dust.
• Tomie, but then she is an Eldritch Abomination in human form.
• Transformers: ★Headmasters: Some Transformers can change into heads while others change into bodies to combine and become more powerful.
• Happens to Reiha in the Vampire Princess Miyu TV series. After Miyu and Larva kill her, her body picks up her head and then disappears, sweating to return later.
• Happened to Hell King Bass in Violinist of Hameln during a flashback. Better yet, all of his body except for the head was annihilated. Unfortunately, he is a near-immortal mazoku, who can continue to exist even in this state, and he was swift to obtain a pupped to haul his (literally) disembodied head around.
• You Are Being Summoned, Azazel: This constantly happens to Azazel, though he often has it coming.
• The duel between Mai and Marik in the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga. Mai's monster manages to decapitate Marik's monster, which are both tied by lifelines to their respective duelists. Guess what happens to Marik...

Card Games

• This trope appears in the diamond suit in John Littleboy's Bag of Bones playing cards, published in 2008.

Comic Books

• The Amazing Screw-On Head is built on this trope, as the titular character is a mechanical head who is able to attach himself to different bodies and is frequently left without a body.
• Invoked by the Monkey King in American Born Chinese, who continues speaking uninterrupted even after being beheaded.
• Arawn: Arawn cut off Owen's head many years ago, but he's still alive and talking to him. This is because Arawn, as the Lord of the Dead, can render any part of a person immortal.
• Bloodpool has Rubble (who is indeed made of rubble), who likes to take off his head and throw it. After his head is blown to bits during this attack, he still retains consciousness and channels his dialogue through a telepathic teammate.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Mayor is able to possess dead bodies after his own death, and eventually settles in a "patchwork" monster built by the Initiative with such an ability.
• M.F. Enterprises' Captain Marvel (unrelated to the Fawcett and Marvel characters who use that name) can detach all of his body parts, including his head.
• One arc of Daredevil has the hero break up a human trafficking ring with the twist that the lynchpin is a new villain named Coyote who has replicated the Spot's powers. Coyote uses special collars with his portal abilities to indefinitely separate peoples' bodies from their heads, keeping them on shelves in a room, the disorientation and horror of the situation making them compliant laborers for various illicit operations.
• In one Deadpool comic, Wolverine cuts Deadpool's head off and comments that even with regeneration, he may still die from it, unless his head get reattached soon afterwards. It does, and Deadpool himself comments that his mouth is dry and that he hadn't spoken for a while. Later comics feature Zombie-Deadpool a.k.a. "Headpool", reduced to nothing but a hungry head. Like other zombies, he's compelled to eat but doesn't need to (not like it matters).
• Death's Head (Marvel Comics): In their first encounter, Iron Man 2020 decapitates Death's Head in battle. Annoyed, Death's Head used his headless body to beat up Iron Man and work off his aggression.
• Doom Patrol:
  • Grant Morrison's run features a trio of bizarre government agents called the SeX-Men. One of them gets decapitated and is shown to still be able to survive without a body.
  • After being decapitated at the end of Morrison's run, Niles Caulder spent Rachel Pollack's run as a disembodied head due to intervention of the Teiresiae and the nannos. He has since appeared whole again.
  • Being a human brain in a robot body, Cliff Steele has occasionally survived having his head removed from his body and recovering by simply having his head attached to a new body (if reattaching to his old body isn't possible). This is in spite of the original 1960s series making it clear several times that Robotman can't survive having his head being separated from his body.
• Numerous characters in Fables do this. including the Wooden Soldiers, Bright Day and Frankenstein's Monster.
• Green Lantern:
  • Abin Sur, the man who gave Hal Jordan his ring, has an evil son. Sur Jr. gets his head chopped off. It's later revealed that his race (he's an alien) doesn't quite need their heads, and he regrows it (slowly) to return... only to get shredded after killing some kids. No luck there.
  • At the end of the Larfleeze ongoing, the robot L-Frank appears to get killed from having his head blasted off, but later appears still functioning while holding his detached head.
• Hellboy:
  • The short story "Heads" is based on this trope. These heads reappear in Hellboy's Animated Adaptation "Sword of the Storms".
  • In the story "King Vold", the King in question carries his severed head at arm's length.
• Lori Lovecraft: Horatio is a zombie who also a fanatical basketball fan. When his team wins the playoffs in Back to the Garden, the feedback of magical energy from Lori's battle with Elston Gunn is enough to knock his head off. Horatio doesn't notice and his head continues to cheer at the television while his body stumbles blindly around the workshop.
• Marvel Zombies:
  • A Variant cover features the Undead X-Men with Cyclops carrying his head in his hands continuing to fire optic blasts at Magneto.
  • Zombie Hawkeye is a disembodied head who talks. He's given a gynoid body at one point.
  • In the crossover sequel with Marvel Apes, the zombie Reed Richards is beheaded and still moves around by using his stretching powers to extend pieces of his neck stump into rudimentary legs.
• Mr. Gone of The Maxx was somehow beheaded by an out-of-shape woman wielding a knife-length tooth of one of his henchmonsters, but that didn't stop him from continuing to play mind games with the heroes. He eventually finds a chiropractor to reattach his head.
• The Mighty Thor:
  • Thanks to magical precautions, Loki can survive decapitation, and his body can pick up his head and reattach it. At the climax of one arc, an empowered Thor inflicts this on Loki by ripping his head off and magically keeping him alive, forced to watch the conclusion of Ragnarok.
  • Later, the Enchantress does this to Donald Blake after he is separated from Thor, Thor eventually leaving Blake's head where it can remain in a 'dream' of the life he would have lived if he had been real.
• Monica's Gang: The Stock Monsters in Bug-a-Booo/Turma do Penadinho include Cranicola/Skully, a disembodied skull who lies atop a stone (though he jumps from time to time) and sometimes misses his body.
• The titular protagonist of Mort the Dead Teenager has the ability to remove his head, though on most occasions it’s involuntary.
• In The Multiversity #2, Captain Carrot gets decapitated by the corrupted Nix Uotan. Being a Toon, however, this does not stop him from continuing to fight, although he is unable to eat his Power-Up Food in order to replenish his superpowers until his head is reattached with Red Racer's help.
• In Preacher, vampire sidekick Cassidy is beheaded, leading to his asking "Can ye sew?" He is fine afterwards... by Cassidy's standards, anyway. (Healing was difficult; scarves were employed.)
• DC Comics' R.E.B.E.L.S. volume two has Despero survive decapitation and subsequently grow a new body.
• In the RoboHunter reboot, Sam has been reduced to this, forcing his granddaughter to take over running the business.
• Page image Victor Manchas of Runaways (Rainbow Rowell) is a cyborg who does just fine as a head: after he is seemingly killed by Vision and his wife, his head is sent to his friends in a box by Tony Stark, where his friend Chase eventually manages to reawaken him. Having been created as a weapon by Ultron, Victor notably wants to remain a disembodied head: as he believes he can no longer hurt people in his state and is visibly traumatized when Doombot installs him onto a weaponized robot body. He instead prefers roombas and quadcopters as transportation. He eventually gets over it and grows a new body just by thinking about it.
• Orpheus from The Sandman (1989) is beheaded but unable to die due to a deal with Death he made while in the throes of grief.
• The villain Cyberface from Savage Dragon survived as a disembodied head. Justified, in one aspect, that his power was interact with machinery.
• In Sleepwalker, Rick Sheridan ends up trapped in Sleepwalker's body and becomes trapped in the Mindscape, where he faces several different demons, including one that knocked his/Sleepwalker's head off. Cobweb points out that since Rick is in the Mindscape, the normal laws of nature don't apply, and it's also implied that the whole thing was just an illusion dreamed up by Cobweb to convince Rick that Sleepwalker's race actually planned to invade Earth.
• Dimitri from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) is a cyborg head in a floating fishbowl.
• Mysterio projects an illusion of himself performing such an ability in various Spider-Man comics.
• DC Comics' Strange Adventures #136 has a robot having to get a new head after losing his old one.
• Superman: In the 1990s, this became Metallo's power — his head couldn't just operate without a body, it could seize control of any machinery and turn it into a body. In the absence of convenient machines, it scuttled around on spider-legs.
• Tales of the Jedi: In the Golden Age of the Sith, the Sith council has a Sith Lord who is a head in a container, kept alive with his Sith powers.
• Transformers:
  • The Transformers (Marvel): In one issus, Optimus Prime's head was held captive and his body under the Decepticons' remote control.
  • In The Transformers Megaseries, Scorponok has been reduced to a badly damaged but still-living head as a result of the injuries inflicted upon him by Ultra Magnus. Sunstreaker suffers the same fate, courtesy of Scorponok’s human minions the Machination. In the Devastation arc, Runamuck survives being decapitated by one of the Reapers, only for another Reaper to kill him by crushing his head with a boulder.
  • Optimus Prime: Wreck-Gar winds up losing his body when the positron core he stores inside explodes. He spent the rest of the series as a disembodied head being carried around by his consort, Rum-Maj. This resulted in many, many head-related puns.
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • Ultimate Vision: Vision cut Tarleton's head for killing Dima, and threw it to the horizon. That doesn't kill him, but left him in a highly uncomfortable position.
  • Ultimate Wolverine at one point gets decapitated, yet remains alive to converse with Nick Fury. Fury theorizes it's because his Healing Factor is actually a "survival factor" and his body is adapting to continue surviving instead of merely healing, with the skin of his head taking in oxygen to keep his brain alive.
• The Wicked + The Divine:
  • Baphomet decapitates The Morrigan. She was still able to talk and sing his praises. It was a fake anyway, so ultimately averted.
  • #33 reveals that three of the dead gods live on as disembodied heads.
• Wildguard has a character named Segmented Man who can segment his body parts. He demonstrates with his head.
• The Scarecrow demonstrates in the cover of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz #7.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (2006): D'grth's giant head continues talking after Diana decapitates him with her plane, and draggs him back to the other warriors gathered to put an end to D'grth's scheming.
  • Wonder Woman 600: In the Ivan Reis, Oclair Albert and Rod Reis collaboration, Diana defeats Medusa by cutting off her head, and while this seems to do in the snake woman's body her head and hair is still snarling and furious.
• X-Men villain Cameron Hodge survived beheading after a Deal with the Devil that had made him immortal. Most of his appearances since have said head attached to an enormous Spider Tank.

Comic Strips

• Horace Graevsyte in Non Sequitur has his head on a silver platter.
• Jeremy's head has popped off his body and went about its own way as a part of many visual gags in Zits. Connie's head also floats away like a balloon to depict her "airheaded-ness".
• A headless swamp monster doesn't scare Garfield more than his dish bowl being empty.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon):
  • After San was decapitated from Ghidorah during the events of the movie, the severed head retains San's mind and some degree of consciousness, although the head is immobile on the outside; except for its eyes appearing to track and follow Alan Jonah's men when they approach it, and except for episodes where the head moves its jaw or vocal chords around to accommodate the birth of the hybrid creature it's forming and gestating.
  • In Chapter 15, the Many-infested, reanimated Manda's head deliberately rips away from its main body in the style of The Thing (1982), to escape its fight with Godzilla and Scylla.
• In the Harry Potter fic ''Can't Have It Both Ways'', Nearly-Headless Nick stretched his head up by the hair so that Harry could cut it off properly with the Sword of Gryffindor. This resulted in the head shooting across the room while his body stumbled about blindly.
• In Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race, a Sniper Joe in episode 9 has its head cut off by Metal Man, but just picks it up and wanders off. He loses it again later on, with the same reaction.
• In the Dick Figures fanfic "Giving Pink Head", Red steals a katana sword ends up chopping off Pink's head with it, though she still survives. Later, Red steals said sword later on and cuts off Stacy's head with it. You can imagine how that ended up.
• In the Fan Film Deadpool: The Musical, after Deadpool demonstrates that he's "especially good at decapitating!", the severed head still sings his part: "Heads roll for Deadpool!"
• In Robb Returns, the still-alive head of a female wight inside a special cage that prevents it from decaying is used as proof that the Others are returning.
• I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC: Lance M. Donavan display this characteristics in "DC/Marvel Happy Hour".
• In Episode 10 of the Celebrity Deathmatch fic, Final Stand of Death, Melanie C finds herself in this while her body is being upgraded. Since it was done in the lab in the afterlife, so she doesn't die from it, though is place in a container until ready.
• The Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Alternate Universe Fic Sapphire Heartverse has this trope apply to Jonathan Joestar's head, as like in canon his body was taken by Dio who opted to magically keep Jonathan's head alive in a jar. As of the time the AU takes place, Jonathan has since learned how to move by bouncing and operating things using his mouth, and any food he eats goes to Dio's stomach, which is often Played for Laughs. In later entries of the AU, the cast has since been joined by the living severed heads of other, deceased characters that were magically resurrected, with the same rules applying as with Jonathan's head.
• Spice Girls / S Club 7 AU fic, Spice Fortress short, "Is There a Medic in The House", Geri the Hacker has this problem, which Victoria the Medic telling her she'll get to her.
• A strange version in The Loud House fanfiction The Nightmare House, where Lynn's nightmare involves accidentally beheading Lincoln, whose head then talks but it's implied he's still dead.

Films — Animation

• The first thing the Genie in Aladdin does after escaping the lamp is complain about the crick in his neck, which he fixes by popping his head off, spinning it around once, and slamming it back on.
  • He decapitates himself again while explaining the Genie rules- specifically the one where he can’t kill anybody.
• Rasputin in Anastasia loses his parts, head included, constantly as he's technically a zombie.
• The soldier ant Barbatus in Antz is decapitated during a battle. This does kill him, but he survives long enough to make a Final Speech to Z, which makes for a pretty bizarre death scene.
• The first Appleseed movie has a pair of gynoids with cutting whips that do quite a number on Hitomi's car and later on Briareos' Hand Cannon as well. Then, when a gynoid thinks it will be taken prisoner, it twirls the wire around its own head to slice up its cranial section. However, the lower jaw section apparently has enough functional circuitry to say the cryptic words "The Appleseed seal must not be unlocked" before it's destroyed by a Boom, Headshot! (implied to have been fired to stop anything further from being said).
• In The Book of Life, Luis' head gets temporarily separated from the rest of his skeletal body during his journey alongside Manolo. Cures his arthritis for the duration though.
• Boys Night Out: Linberg's reaction when the white-haired bombshell of a stripper makes her appearance at his table before he attaches his head back to his body.
• Corpse Bride: Paul the "Head Waiter" He can't move under his own power very efficiently, so he is carried on the backs of cockroaches.
• Olaf the Snowman from Frozen (2013) manages to flip this one on its head when his head constantly loses its body.
• Ard of Heavy Metal chops off his own head in order to show Den that he can't be killed (at least through normal means).
• In Mulan, the spirit of Fa Deng (the last ancestor Mushu tried acting as guardian to) is shown holding his severed head. In the closing scene, when the ancestors start celebrating Mulan's return, he throws it off and sends it crowd-surfing.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Jack Skellington, natch.
  "And since I am dead, I can take off my head/To recite Shakespearean quotations!"
• Chronologically, this is how Genma gets introduced in Ninja Scroll; his head gets chopped off. It's later shown that he can regenerate any wound ever, and someone put his head back on his neck and he sports a visible scar.
• This is referenced in Peter Pan in a scene where Smee mistakenly thinks that he decapitated Captain Hook while giving him a shave and tells Hook that he will find his head, not realizing that this would have killed him, or that there should have been more blood if it had happened. He had actually just covered Hook's head with a towel and somehow didn't notice that he had been shaving a seagull that landed on it and then flew away.
• Princess Mononoke: "Cut off a wolf's head and it still has the power to bite."
• Robots: Rodney Copperbottom's second meeting with The Load and Cloudcuckoolander Fender results in the latter temporarily losing his head. Much hilarity ensues:
  Fender: [Lug is holding his head] Why, I'd, I'd smack you if I had a hand.
  [His body comes bouncing off buildings]
  Fender: Wow, speak of the devil... here I come.
  [The body falls on the floor]
  Fender: Owww! Daddy!
• In The Steam Engines of Oz, the Tin Man decapitated his advisor Scarecrow for daring to question his plans to modernize Oz. The heroes find Scarecrow's head in the Emerald Palace and are shocked when it calmly starts conversing with them.
• In the animated adaptation of A Terrible Vengeance as the hero is fighting the Big Bad other cossacks are fighting Polish hussars and Tartars. When one Cossack is beheaded, his head starts attacking the head of a Tartar warrior.
• Suur Toll is an Estonian animated short based on the below-mentioned folktale of Tõll the Great.

Films — Live-Action

Examples by creator:

• Georges Méliès takes off his head a surprising number of times. An identical one almost always reappears on his shoulders immediately, however, allowing him to pull off all sorts of multi-head stunts: just take a look at his films The Four Troublesome Heads and The Melomaniac.

Examples by work:

• Played for Black Comedy during an Imagine Spot in 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, when Joe Pesci's hitman character has a nightmare of the titular heads lined up and singing a parody of "Mr. Sandman."
• In The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the Sultan cuts off the Treasurer's head, which flies through the air, lands in one of the harem baths, and winks at one of the Sultan's wives. And then there are the King and Queen of the Moon, who have detachable heads, but that's not quite the same thing.
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Taking a rest after the storming of an Indian village, Aguirre notices two soldiers sitting somewhat apart discussing desertion. One of them says that he has counted the river bends they passed. He draws a map into the sand and is counting out the river bends to his companion as Perucho approaches quietly from behind with a machete. When the man is at 'nine', Perucho swipes his head off, and we get a shot of the head lying on the ground, counting 'ten'.
• Alien: This rule applies to androids in some capacity.
  • Alien: While not completely decapitated, Ash is able to operate with little more than a few wires keeping his head on his shoulders. Later, his head is successfully reactivated after it's been fully torn off from the body, save for a few connected wires.
  • Prometheus: David's head likewise remains fully operational after being torn off, although his body can do little more than twitch.
  • Alien³: Bishop from Aliens is torn in half in that film, but in Alien³, after his ship crashes only his head (and part of the chest) "survives". Ripley does have to plug his remains into various pieces of hardware in order to turn him back on/re-activate/bring back to life. She offers to keep him running in the hope of repair but he declines the offer and chooses to die/get turned off/de-re-activated.
• Alita: Battle Angel: In the climax, Hugo is fatally wounded by Zapan, and Alita carries him away in a nearby church. Thanks to Chiren's surgery skills, she separates Hugo's head from his body, maintaining it alive with her URM tech artificial heart, passing him off as dead to the Centurions. Hugo's head is then grafted onto a robotic body.
• In the 1982 film Android, the Mad Scientist who built the androids Max and Cassandra is graphically revealed to be an android too after his head is ripped off in a struggle and keeps speaking until it is thrown down a trash chute. He keeps repeating "I'm not an android" the entire time.
• The film poster of◊ Beetlejuice. In the movie, Barbara decapitates Adam to scare the living folks out of their house — unfortunately, the two of them are Invisible to Normals except Lydia.
• The evil robots at the beginning of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey play hoops with their heads.
• Happens in The Boxer's Omen during a black magic ritual gone wrong; a witch doctor's head, upon being possessed, ends up detaching itself and floats around, with its intestines a-dangling underneath lashing out like a series of whips. Yes, it's a weird movie.
• In The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a scientist keeps his fiancée's head alive in a pan until he can retrieve a new body for her.
• Child's Play:
  • Near the end of Child's Play (1988), Chucky gets his head, arm and leg blown off by Karen. Santos, against Norris' caution, brings the head into the living room... But then the rest of Chucky's body busts out of a duct to strangle Santos as the head commands it on.
  • Happens again in Curse of Chucky, but in a non-graphic manner (as though his body were just a normal doll). He is also able to get hold of the head and stick it back on.
• In Curse of the Headless Horseman, the eponymous horseman carries a head(possibly his) with him. At the end of the movie, the Horseman can be heard laughing, so presumably it is still capable of some form of communication.
• In Cyborg 2, Angelina Jolie's character has her head removed when being interrogated.
• At the end of Death Becomes Her, which flashes forward to the funeral of Ernest, Helen and Madeline trip and fall on the front steps as they leave. Because the serum not only prevented them from aging, but dying as well, and they were so badly disintegrated by this time, they end up breaking apart when they hit the bottom, their heads still functioning.
  Helen: Do you remember where you parked the car?
• In Demon Knight, Brayker is being strangled by Uncle Willy. but manages to decapitate him with a machete. However, because Willy is possessed, and demons can only be destroyed by the Key or by having their eyes destroyed, Willy's body continues to strangle him while the head controls it from the floor.
• Dollman: Sprug's entire body has been destroyed during various fights with Brick. His head now sits on a hoverboard that acts as a life support system and mobility device.
• A beheaded demon-possessed woman does a rather memorable dance while headless in Evil Dead 2.
• The villain in The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake is revealed to be the patchwork undead creation of a Jivaro witch doctor, who'd sought vengeance for the massacre of his tribe. He'd reanimated the body of a decapitated Jivaro after attaching the head of one of their Caucasian enemies, so the result could track down and murder the descendants of the massacre's instigator in the guise of a white scholar.
• The ending of Freddy vs. Jason. Where Jason comes out of Crystal lake with Freddy's head, and he smiles and winks at the camera.
• Ghostbusters II discusses this trope when detailing the fate of Vigo the Carpathian. Just before his head died, he uttered a prophetic statement that he would return.
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army has the eponymous Golden Army, Mecha-Mooks towering over the heroes, who can pull themselves together after being ripped apart. In the final scene where various destroyed Golden Army monsters starts self-repairing, one of their heads attaches itself to a wheel and then moves along the floor before getting picked up by a headless monster, who puts it back on its neck.
• Nakano clings to life after being beheaded by Kane in Highlander III: The Sorcerer long enough to trap him in the cave they are in.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Humma Kavula takes one of Zaphod Beeblebrox's heads as collateral while they retrieved the POV gun. He mounted it on a hula girl bobblehead and put a sign that read "Idiot". (No, he's not bitter about losing the election to Zaphod. Why'd you ask?)
• The Saturation Chamber in House on Haunted Hill (1999) has Mr. Price hallucinate many horrifying things. One of them is his wife holding his living head in his hands.
• In Idle Hands, Pnub is decapitated by a thrown circular saw blade, and as his head bounces down a flight of stairs, he looks up at the killer and says "Whoa, cool."
• "Evil" Gadget in Inspector Gadget (1999) once the real Gadget pulls a plug in the back of "Evil" Gadget's neck.
• The first Jaka Sembung. Ki Hitam is an immortal sorceror who can't be killed - Jaka Sembung relives him of his cranium in the final battle, only for him to continue walking around. His head, on the floor, lets out an audible smirk before leaping up to reconnect with the neck.
• After the femmebot in Jason X is decapitated by Jason, her head is retrieved by her creator and hooked up to the ship's computer.
• The first shark attack in Jaws 3-D is on a large grouper, the head of which is left floating in a cloud of blood. Its mouth is still moving.
• The Fireys in Labyrinth can come apart. To escape, Sarah throws their heads away from the clearing.
• In The Last Starfighter, the android Beta removes his own head to repair it.
• Little Monsters has this happen to a monster kid named Arnold due to Snik tearing his head off for not giving "Boy what he wants" and then promptly replacing his head with what appears to be a ball with a face.
• Daffy Duck in Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Lasers can be hazardous to your health.
• The Magic Serpent has the protagonist get decapitated when one of the ninjas throws a boomerang at him. He not only survives but can also control his headless body, talk as a severed head, and levitate his head around from one place to another.
• Mars Attacks!: Donald and Natalie's heads are severed, but survive on hanging wires and attached to her pet chihuahua respectively. For bonus points, Natalie's body is now inhabited by the chihuahua's head.
• In Monster High: The Movie, both the Headless Headmistress and Clawdeen (when Draculaura uses a spell to make her resemble the former) briefly have their heads separated from their body.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Godzilla reduces King Ghidorah to just his middle head. The head continues roaring and trying to bite Godzilla until he vaporises it.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: The company APEX acquired King Ghidorah's severed left head. Although the head rotted away until nothing was left but a skull, it turns out it is still conscious when it absorbs enough energy to awaken and take control of MechaGodzilla.
• My Favorite Martian has Martin literally fall apart during "Martian depression".
• The two friends in Nothing eventually wish away everything around each other in an argument until they're both down to just their heads... which they find they can't bring themselves to wish away because they still like each other after all. Awwwwww.
• One of Davy Jones' crewman in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest did this. Eventually his body ran off without him and the head crawled off on its own, using his Half-Human Hybrid abilities.
  "Follow my voice! Follow my voice! To the left. No, the other left. (body rams into a tree) ...No, that's a tree."
• Prince of Darkness: The woman who becomes The Chosen One of Satan has her head cut off. She picks up her head and puts it back on her neck, where it re-attaches itself.
• Re-Animator has his rival's head in a pan and tells him, "You're a no-body!" Many viewers have quipped about that scene where "the head gave head".
• Mombi and her Hall of Heads plus Gump in Return to Oz, which was adapted from Langwidere — see the literature section below.
• The live-action movie version of R. L. Stine's Mostly Ghostly: Who Let the Ghosts Out? has this happen to the ghost boy called Nicky when listening to a portal in the wall to an evil dimension. A hand comes out of the wall and grabs him by the hair. His sister grabs his ankles and pulls to stop him from getting dragged in. The hand tugs hard enough that his head comes off and his headless body aimlessly wanders away until his sister stops him. She tries to pull his head free from the hand with no avail, so she tells his body to help her pull him free from the hand. The hand lets go and his head falls on the floor. His sister reattaches his head to his body, only she apparently put his head on backwards, so he rotates his head back to normal.
• In the short film Robot Bastard, the Tin-Can Robot hero escapes the Big Bad by shoving his head in the space station's waste disposal unit and pulling the lever, severing his head and sending it down a chute into outer space. The body then self-destructs, destroying the station.
• Harris from Severance (2006) wonders what it is like to be beheaded. He gets his wish, and the last sight of his body stumbling around raises a smile.
• The movie version of Sin City has one of the protagonists imagining that a dead body is talking to him. At one point, the dead body loses a head. The main character later imagines the severed head trying to talk with him briefly.
• The Borg Queen, first introduced in Star Trek: First Contact, displays the ability again in Voyager.
• Star Wars:
  • Attack of the Clones: C-3PO gets his head knocked off and switched with that of a battle droid, resulting in a horrifyingly cringe-inducing Hurricane of Puns.
  • In Revenge of the Sith, General Grievous' bodyguard robots can continue fighting after decapitation due to having a backup brain and optical receptors in their chests.
• Inverted in Tank Girl, where Kesslee suffers a terrible facial injury from the Rippers, so has his own head cut off deliberately and his consciousness downloaded into a hologram-projecting computer, installed in his neck. No telling how he eats and breathes and perceives his surroundings thereafter, but it generates a 3-D image of his head that moves in synch with a voice synthesizer.
• They Saved Hitler's Brain: Hitler's head in a jar pretty much has to have inspired the folks at Futurama.
• Decapitating the monster in The Thing (1982) doesn't work — in one instance, the head pulls itself off to avoid being burned with the rest of the body, grows legs, and walks away.
• The Thing That Couldn't Die features the disembodied head of an evil hypnotist, cursed to a Fate Worse than Death back in the 1500s. It's dug up centuries later by a bunch of dim-witted ranchers and is able to manipulate anyone it makes eye contact with. Only after it has been reattached to its body can it be destroyed.
• In an old The Three Stooges short, a Mad Scientist is looking for a human head for his monster. In one scene Larry pokes his head through the underside of an open-leaf table. Moe enters, sees just Larry's head poking through the hole, and assumes the worst. Cue scream and faint.
• Tormented (1960): Although the deceased girlfriend was not beheaded or otherwise dismembered, she can send selected bits of herself to vex her unfaithful beau. Her detached head is quite sarcastic.
• Alsatia in Toys. She's a robot, and does wind up needing a fair amount of repair work as a result of her decapitation.
• Transformers Film Series:
  • In Transformers (2007), when Frenzy's head is severed with a sawzall, the head is capable of scuttling around on its trailing components, and also turning into Mikaela's cell phone.
  • Igor from Transformers: Dark of the Moon is stated in supplementary materials to have been built from the decapitated remains of another Decepticon, with Long Haul being the most likely culprit.
• The Filipino movie Ulong pugot: Naglalagot has a majority of the plot revolving around the protagonist trying to find his headless body.
• The third Martian in War God has his head hacked off by Guan Yu's Green Dragon Saber, but instead of killing him, the Martian's head just floats around while its headless owner runs behind him.
• An example near the end of Wolfen has a character's throat torn out by a wolf, resulting in his head ending up separate from his body. When it's obvious from the attempted mouthing of words and blinking that the head is still functional, a colleague shoots the car he's next to, putting him out of his misery.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine: In one of The Stingers, Deadpool's severed head wakes up before shushing to the audience and fading to black.

Gamebooks

• In Deathmoor, one of the monsters you can come across in the titular moor is a two-headed Cradoc, a reptilian beast with the head of a dragon and an ogre sharing the same body. After killing it, you'll need to sever one of its heads to finish it off for good, but choosing the wrong head ^note  the dragon's will have the severed stump coming to life on its own and attacking you from behind, killing you instantly. For reasons unexplained however, the third and most obvious option, severing both heads, isn't available.

Literature

• According to 1066 and All That, Charles I was so little affected by his beheading that he continued to walk and talk for half an hour afterwards. This angered Cromwell.
• In Against a Dark Background, Feril ends up decapitated. The severed head is still able to talk and even move his also-severed arm, since Feril is an android.
• In Angels of Music, some of the characters attend a stage show at the Théâtre des Horreurs. At one point in the show, a representation of Saint Denis is decapitated and his headless body continues to blunder around, while his bodiless head preaches against immorality until another character kicks it off stage like a football.
• The Black Company:
  • This happens to The Dominator for a short time (less than an hour), up until his soul was imprisoned inside of a silver nail, and his head grounded and incinerated into ashes.
  • In the same battle that the Dominator was slain, The Limper's head was lost. And then found by the demon, Toad-Killer Dog, who extorts tribes of savages and their shamans to construct a wicker body for the wizard whose name currently grosely overstates his mobility (i.e. The Limper).
  • For a time period spanning half the series Soulcatcher, would travel with her disembodied head that she would carry in a black box. Her state of head-not-being-on-top-of-her-shoulders ended when Croaker sewed it back on.
• Book of the Dead (2021): Tyron is still a low-level necromancer, and doesn't have any idea of how to actually give a spirit control of a body; he only knows how to make puppets controlled by himself. So when Dove the summoner dies an untimely death, and Tyron wants to raise him, he doesn't keep the full body, just binds the spirit into its own skull, resulting in a (rather unhappy, but easily portable) talking head.
• Chronicles of Chaos: In The Orphans of Chaos, Orpheus appears as a headless man who carries about his head separately. On the other hand, he is dead and just coming from Hades (and they are about to make him Psychopomp).
• Different Seasons: In The Breathing Method, a woman who's about to give birth is decapitated in a car accident in front of the hospital. She remains alive and conscious for several minutes, from sheer willpower, until she gives birth to her son.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • In the Xtreme Sk8ters comic strip in the first book, one of the stick figures gets decapitated by a telephone wire. His head still manages to talk.
  • Greg's bizarre dream in Double Down involves himself kicking his own head, which is shouting, "Mustards on my turnips, please!"
• Discworld:
  • Vampires have to be staked as well as decapitated to kill — Otto loses his head in The Truth and merely has to put it back on the stump. They find it embarrassing to reattach their heads in public (he compares it to using the facilities in front of people).
  • Likewise, zombies on the Discworld can survive almost any dismemberment.
  • The ghost of Champot, first King of Lancre in Wyrd Sisters, carries his head under his arm in the standard ghost-of-Anne-Boleyn style. However, while he claims he was decapitated by his son, the Discworld Companion says he actually died of gout, and the reason for the head-under-the-arm thing is unknown.
• Durarara!!: Celty, quite literally. Her head wasn't attached to begin with, but losing it is what sent Celty to search for it in Ikebukuro.
• Ant heads remain alive for some time in the Empire of the Ants novels (only the first was translated to English), and this is at times a crucial plot point.
• In The Faerie Queene, Corflambo's decapitated head still manages to blaspheme and curse for a bit after his body is killed by Arthur.
• In Fengshen Yanyi, Shen Gongbao tries to bully Jiang Ziya into not helping Xiqi and carry out the selection of the new gods and tries to prove his superiority in the arts of the Immortals by cutting off his own head and make it float above his body, impressing Jiang Ziya into almost surrendering. Unfortunately for Gongbao, the Elder Immortal of the South Pole was nearby and sends his disciple in the form of a crane to steal Shen Gongbao's head and drop it into the North Sea, an act which will result in him dying for real. Jiang Ziya is merciful enough to beg for his old friend, who gets his head back (with the text mentioning that he accidentally put it on backwards and had to twist it by the ears).
• Goblins in the Castle: Cutting off the head of the goblin king put the final seal on the spell that put all the goblins into dormancy, but the head itself is still alive, and it's reanimated when his spirit returns to it. Reversing this and reattaching his head to his body, by means of a magic collar, restores his sanity and that of the other goblins by extension.
• In The Golgotha Series, Clay reanimated the severed head of Auggie's wife Gerta.
• Grey Knights: In Dark Adeptus, Thalassa remains able to talk after decapitation due to Chaos sorcery.
• Harry Potter
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets introduces the Headless Hunt, a Wild Hunt-esque troupe of Headless Horsemen who partake in Severed Head Sports like Horseback Head-Juggling, Head Polo, and Headless Bowling. A perennial source of frustration for Nearly Headless Nick is that he can't join because his head is still attached to his neck by one little strip of flesh.
  • One means of communicating via the Floo network is to have just your head travel through fireplaces to speak with whoever is on the other side. The feeling while doing so is described as having a hot muffler around one's head and neck.
• Averted in Michael Slade's Headhunter. When the POV of a just-decapitated woman is shown, she can only think, not speak or breathe, and remains conscious only briefly.
• There's a medical horror novel, Heads, in which the heads of people who'd agreed to donate their bodies for research are kept preserved and wired up as organic supercomputers. Nobody warned them that it'd be their heads that were made use of... or that they'd regain consciousness once integrated into the system.
• The Denizens of the House in Keys to the Kingdom have the ability to survive being decapitated, so of course one bad guy announces himself by flinging talking severed heads at the main character's feet.
• Known Space:
  • In Ringworld, Nessus, a Pierson's Puppeteer, is decapitated. Luckily, not only does his species have two heads, but neither of them are where Puppeteers keep their brain. It's at most an inconvenience until he can get a new head attached.
  • The short story "Procrustes" starts off with Beowulf Schaefer stepping out of an autodoc. It's later revealed that he was in it because he had been beheaded and was regrown from the removed head.
• A Land Fit for Heroes: The baddies in The Steel Remains cut off their victims' heads and do really terrible things to them, by way of an object lesson to anyone who tries to work against them.
• Land of Oz:
  • Princess Langwidere, a character in Ozma of Oz. She has 30 different heads that she can place on her neck. Her heads come in a variety of hair, eye, and skin colors. Princess Langwidere was the inspiration for Mombi in the adaptation (see Return to Oz), and given a chilling treatment in the Scissor Sisters song "Return to Oz". Mombi and Langwidere were separate characters in Baum's books, and the latter was merely a spoiled and careless Royal Brat instead of a villain.
  • In The Tin Woodman of Oz, the Tin Woodman returns to the (now empty) tinworker's house and finds his original, flesh-and-blood head. (For him, the trope was inverted: he lost the rest of his body.) They have a conversation and find they don't like each other.
  • In The Marvelous Land of Oz (which features Mombi), when Jack Pumpkinhead is riding in the flying Gump, he refuses to look over the side, fearing that his head might fall off. Prof. Wogglebug lampshades this with one of his insensitive puns, declaring: "In that event your head would no longer be a pumpkin, for it would become a squash."
  • Later on in the Oz books, Jack Pumpkinhead has his own pumpkin patch. Every time his head begins to spoil, he carves out a new head for himself.
• In The Master and Margarita, during Woland's magic show, Behemoth rips off Bengalsky's head. Bengalsky's severed head is conscious and horrified by the ordeal. They soon put his head back on with him being no worse for wear.
• In The Legend of Huma, Huma has to fight the immortal warlord Crynus. After running him through the neck and the stomach barely slows him down, Huma gets his hands on Crynus' battle axe and knocks off his head with one blow. Then Crynus's body stands up again and starts to stumble single-mindedly towards his severed head. He almost reaches it before the silver dragon arrives and disintegrates him with dragonfire.
• The Headless Horseman in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
• Urza in the Magic: The Gathering tie-in novels to the "Invasion" block. Planeswalkers being energy beings, this is understandable.
• The fate of Edward Page Mitchell's Absent-Minded Professor Prof. Dummkopf in the 1877 short story "The Man Without a Body", in the aftermath of what may be fiction's earliest Teleporter Accident. Unusually for this trope, Dummkopf is rendered mute by the loss of his vocal cords, and as a result, it takes several years before anyone notices that the loss of his lungs, heart, and other vital organs hasn't inconvenienced him in the slightest.
• In The Nekropolis Archives novel Dead Streets, main character Matthew Richter gets decapitated. Since he's already a zombie, it doesn't kill him, but it renders him unable to do anything but talk until his friends are able to get it reattached.
• The Mighty Night Dragon from, uh, Night Dragon. Upon being defeated (in a long, exhausting, difficult battle), the dragon then finally goes down... but not before its head detaches itself, grows legs, and continues fighting.
• Njal's Saga: Kari, intent on revenge for the death of his son in the Burning of Njal, pursues the Burners on their voyage to Rome and catches up with them in Wales. He spots Kol Thorsteinsson, one of the Burners, selling goods at a market; Kari strikes at him just as Kol is counting silver, and "Kol kept on counting the silver, and his head counted 'ten' as it flew from the trunk."
• Sacha and Wyan from The Prism Pentad. They were decapitated for not siding against Rajaat, and were turned into zombie heads by Kalak. They serves as mentors for King Tithian during the series. Oh, they also have a desire for human flesh and blood.
• In many of the Revelation Space Series novels, space suits are designed to deliberately decapitate and then freeze the user's head in the event of an emergency (such as a suit breach). Once the head is recovered, they can be reattached to the body or even have their whole body regrown from the neck down, though in at least one novel a character opts to have his head installed on a prosthetic body and is pretty much none the worse for wear.
• Discussed (in a way) in Saga of the Jomsvikings, when a captured Viking facing execution suggests he will hold up his knife if he still can after being beheaded.
• The Saga of the People of Laxardal: Audgisl Thorarinsson looks for an opportunity to kill Thorgils Holluson at the Althing and comes upon Thorgils as he is counting out the money he is to pay for the killing of Helgi. As Thorgils is counting 'ten', Audgisl strikes, and "everyone thought they could hear his head say 'eleven' as it flew off his body."
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: It turns out that if you don't need to breathe or bleed, you can cut your own head off and survive. Sofia still uses a False Immortality rune before testing it, just in case — which actually gets in the way, because the rune blocks her ability to heal, so she can't just stick her head back on.
• Early in Sandman Slim, Stark cuts off the head of Kasabian, the hardest-luck member of the circle that sent him to Hell. He did so with an enchanted knife that only kills when he orders it to, so Kasabian's head sits in his closet for most of the book, bitching about its state. Near the end, it dies outright, only to get sent back by Lucifer as part of a job deal. Between the first book and Kill the Dead, Stark gets it an animated table with articulated legs so that it can move by itself.
• In "The Scarlet Citadel", Tsotha-lanti tells Conan the Barbarian that "if you hack me in pieces, the bits of flesh and bone will reunite and haunt you to your doom!" The next moment, Conan cuts off his head. The head remained alive, and the body attempted to recover it. Fortunately, a friendly sorcerer took away the head, the body ran after him, and the king was rid of the need to find a solution.
• Robert Olen Butler's Severance is a short story collection in which each short story is told from the point of view of a beheading victim in their last minute or so of life.
• In a poem by Shel Silverstein, the protagonist complains about losing their head and about the fact that they can't look for it ("'cause my eyes are on it"), call to it ("'cause my ears are on it") or even think about it ("'cause my brain is in it") — "so I guess I'll sit down on this rock/and rest for just a minute." (Three guesses what the "rock" is.)
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Green Knight comes to Camelot, taunts the knights, and issues a challenge: he will allow any knight to deal him one blow and then he will return the following year to inflict the same. Gawain accepts the challenge and decapitates him. The Green Knight picks up his severed head and tells him to meet him at the Green Chapel at the appointed time.
• Skulduggery Pleasant's real skull was stolen by goblins. The one on his neck now is an entirely different one, which he won in a poker game. After the third book, the original skull becomes the MacGuffin.
• Averted in Charles de Lint's Svaha: A minor character who's just been beheaded by a Ninja sent by the Yakuza maintains consciousness only long enough to see his body collapse.
• In That Hideous Strength, the title of Head of the N.I.C.E. turns out to be horribly literal. The villains are taking orders from a guillotined criminal's head, which they've kept alive by supplying it with artificial blood. And yes, Lewis was well aware that it wouldn't really work — that's a plot point.
• In Too Many Curses, Decapitated Dan was a serial killer executed for strangling people, whose head and body were retrieved and de-fleshed by dark wizard Margle, then re-animated separately. Dan's talking skull rants insanely from atop the kitchen spice rack, whereas his body — no longer subordinated to his wicked mind — has become perfectly polite and helpful, cooking meals for Margle's kobold housekeeper and her friends among Margle's many transformed captives. "Mr. Bones" can't speak, but gestures or knocks to communicate.
• Use of Weapons: Special Circumstances operative Cheradenine Zakalwe crash-lands on a primitive planet and is sacrificed by the natives through decapitation. Fortunately, his colleagues zoom in just in time to snatch back his head, but not before he's had a horrified moment to realize exactly what just happened. Later, Zakalwe is in hospital waiting for a new body to be grown (they gave him the choice of remaining unconscious, but he'd rather watch television) when the artificially intelligent drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw (who doesn't like Zakalwe much and has a twisted sense of humor) sends him a present: a hat.
• In Veniss Underground, the genetically engineered assassin-class meerkats produced by Quin are capable of surviving for several days as just a head. Shadrach decapitates the meerkat Salvador in order to render him harmless and portable, and renames him "John the Baptist".
• At one point in the Voidskipper novel In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, Madeline Zargosty gets her head blown off in a firefight. Courtesy of several backup brains and other redundancies this proves to be only a minor inconvenience, allowing her to keep fighting effectively for an extended period afterwards. Later on, she gets her morph updated to have a detachable head as a normal feature instead of an emergency backup.
• Worzel Gummidge only has three heads — swede, mangel-wurzel, and turnip — "for different occasions".
• The heads in jars of Orson Scott Card's Wyrms. They are kept alive by bio-engineered alien worms, and are chemically conditioned to never lie. The king keeps them as advisors, and many of them openly hate him, and were his enemies in their former lives. They can't speak unless someone pumps the bellows that push air through their vocal cords.
• Xanth: In A Spell for Chameleon, Trent beheads the mortally wounded Herman at his request. Herman's severed head thanks him for a quick and clean death.
• The giant Bolloggs from Walter Moers' Zamonia novels are unique in Zamonia in that they can survive without their heads; once they reach a certain height they tend to discard their heads — and then go off on wanderings looking for the same heads they just discarded. (Bolloggs aren't very bright, especially not after losing their heards.) In The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, one of the many obstacles the titular character has to face is a huge, discarded Bollogg head.
• One of the historical stories from The Zombie Survival Guide had a tale told to a Jesuit Missionary in Feudal Japan. The story goes that Japan had a secret society whose function was to hunt down and eliminate zombies, and the finial initiation was for an acolyte to spend a full night sitting in a room full of moaning zombie heads that had been cut off and preserved in jars. The "editor" of these historical stories does note that this would be impossible because of the Fridge Logic about the zombies needing lungs to moan, thus either meaning the tale is false, exaggerated, or the moans are the product of the terror felt by the acolytes.
  • The book also contains several other cases of zombie heads kept in jars, either as part of ancient science experiments or as oddities in various courts.
• An old Urban Legend tells the story of a young girl that wears a ribbon around her neck and how she falls in love with a wonderful boy. At the end of the tale, the boy is forced to remove the ribbon from the girl's neck, at which point her head falls clean off her body, revealing her to be Dead All Along. The story has a long history, and has since been adapted many times, from Alexandre Dumas' The Woman with the Velvet Necklace, to Washington Irving's The Adventure of a German Student, to Alvin Schwartz' The Girl With the Green Ribbon.

Live-Action TV

• The comedy/documentary 50 Outrageous Animal Facts includes a clip of a CGI cockroach that loses its head. Its decapitated body taps the ground in front of it a few times, finds a tiny rock, sticks the rock where its head used to be, and scuttles off. Truth in Television, as roaches can live for days after decapitation.
• S.T.A.N. in Aaron Stone since he's a robot.
• The Amazing Stories episode "Go to the Head of the Class" has Sadist Teacher B.O. Beanes, after accidentally being killed by the hiccups spell, coming back to life with his head separate from his body because the picture used in the resurrection spell got torn in two.
• In All That, Coach Kreeton receives an antique cannon as a birthday present, sticks his head inside and loses his head when it fires.
• Angel:
  • Angel figures out that an overzealous cop is a zombie when he decapitates the cop and the cop keeps on talking for awhile.
  • Lorne gets his head sent to Cordelia on a platter in another episode. His people can survive this, however; as he explains, his species of demon only die if their body is mutilated too.
• Spoofed in The Black Adder. After Edmund has beheaded Richard III, his ghost comes to haunt him, with his head flying playfully around the room.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Nightmares II: In The Shadow Wood, while traveling through the titular forest, one of the obstacles the hero faces is a headless knight... whose own head is used as the head of the mace he wields.
• In an second season (yes, there was one) episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Mark Lenard, Sarek from Star Trek: The Original Series, played an ambassador from a planet where a symbiotic relationship existed between his kind, a living head, and a type of organism that resembled a headless body. He even points out to Buck that on his world, Buck would be considered a freak since Buck could not remove his head.
• The Headless Horseman does this to Piper, Paige, and Phoebe in Charmed episode "The Legend of Sleepy Halliwell", with the sisters only surviving as they were decapitated in the Magic School that protects the residents from suffering permanent damage.
• Rick Twittler ends up having his head and body separated at the end of the Danger Force episode "A Henry Among Us".
• One episode of Dark Angel from season 2 featured an experimental assassin from Manticore whose head and body could operate independently. Max encounters the head and spends the majority of the episode trying to find and stop the body from assassinating a minister. Turns out it was All Just a Dream.
• Deadtime Stories has the episode "Little Magic Shop of Horrors" where a kid called Bo ends up with his head painlessly flying off his body... as a result of performing a bike flip about an hour or two after his best friend Peter's magic trick was performed.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Rose": The Doctor rips off the head of Mickey's Auton duplicate. In response:
    Auton!Mickey: Don't think that's going to stop me.
  • The Face of Boe qualifies. Given who he is (Captain Jack Harkness), one wonders what happened to all the other bits and how the head part wound up so large.
  • This seems to be a general trade mark of Russell T Davies-written episodes of the show. As well as the above, there are the Toclafane (severed heads in floating heavily-armed metal spheres), Max Capricorn in "Voyage of the Damned", and also, if you include disembodied faces, Lady Cassandra and poor Ursula.
  • "The Pandorica Opens" demonstrates Cybermen can survive decapitation, then reattach their heads.
  • The Headless Monks sometimes do this, keeping living heads around post-decapitation. Since the Monks behead you while you're alive, both the head and the body remain... active. The bodies seem to fall under the control of the other Monks (or possibly the papal mainframe) immediately after beheading. The heads apparently keep the same personality and are left to rot (or be preserved in boxes, if you're rich).
  • "The Husbands of River Song" has two characters losing their heads to the independently-functioning robot body of the tyrannical cyborg King Hydroflax when the Doctor and River Song make off with the monarch's head, which apparently underwent this trope many years ago. The heads remain alive as the body uses them to get information about the heroes' whereabouts; it can even store and switch between them. Later, another villain convinces the body not to take his head by offering to get him the Doctor's...
• In the "Look at the Princess" trilogy of Farscape, John and his alien princess bride are turned into fully conscious statues so they can observe the workings of the Senate until it is time for them to begin their reign. The jealous prince tries punching him (ineffectively) but his Scarran associate decides to just chop John's head off in an attempt to render him unable to rule. The head is still able to talk (via magic headsets) until it is successfully reattached.
• Gods Of Honor sees Nezha challenged by the evil sorceror Shen Gong-bao to be decapitated, with their flying heads engaging on an impromptu Cranium Chase in the heavens while their headless bodies remain on the ground.
• Happens in the Good Luck Charlie episode "Gabe Turns 12-½" when Bob Duncan goes to the fridge to get some cake in a platter only to find P.J.'s very much alive head instead, which then asks where his body is at (which is never directly explained). Bob then realizes his son's unable to stop him so he eats a cupcake in front of his face. Of course, since it's an end credits gag, this never really happened.
• Happens at the end of one of the Halloween Episodes of Home Improvement called A Night To Dismember, where Tim and Jill Taylor have their disembodied heads in a basket and their bodies are implied to be somewhere else offscreen after their son decapitates them for his film.
• In the Journey to the West (1996) two-parter, Tang Sanzang and disciples faces off against the Tiger, Deer and Goat Demons, with their second challenge being surviving decapitation. Wukong answers the Deer Demon's challenge, and as magical beings both of them can survive losing their heads and continue moving around unscathed... until Wukong sneakily turns one of his clones into a dog and steals the Deer Demon's head. With the head out of range, the demon quickly dies.
  Deer Demon: Reattach head. Reattach head. I said reattach head! What's going on?
  Sun Wukong: [whispering to Bajie] His head's not coming back. I just turned a copy of myself into a dog and stole it.
  Deer Demon: Reattach... aaaargh!!!! [transforms into a headless deer carcass]
• Happens in Kyojuu Tokusou Juspion to Gilza after Juspion beheads her, to which she not only survives but also manages to immediately summon her head back, which is capable of speech even when still detached.
• 790, a robot, is beheaded in the pilot of Lexx, and tries to obtain a new body several times over the course of the series but never manages to keep one for long. Whereas Kai is dismembered or decapitated (sometimes both, such as his fight with Thodin) fairly regularly but since he's already dead it amounts to little more than a momentary inconvenience before he puts himself back together.
• In the Lost Girl episode "Where There's a Will, There's a Fae" shows this as one of the clear ways of telling apart a dullahan from a human, that and the fact that they are also able to shrug off most injuries like they were nothing.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000:
  • Tom Servo's gumball machine head falls off a few times. This happened quite often during shooting, as the Hilarious Outtakes show, and sometimes they decided to Throw It In!.
  • On an episode where the movie involved a ghostly disembodied head, both bots remove their heads and speak in ghostly voices in an attempt to scare Joel. Unimpressed, he takes their inert bodies away and leaves them alone with the lights off.
• In MythQuest's sixth episode, a mysterious knight offers to play "the beheading game". His head is chopped off, then he gets up and retrieves his head and sword.
• The "Job Interview" sketch from No Soap, Radio has a disembodied head waddling around a desk as the president of a hat company.
• In Once Upon a Time the victims of the Queen of Hearts experience this. Jefferson a.k.a. The Mad Hatter is unfortunate enough to be a demonstration. He recovers, but it does leave a nasty scar.
• Power Rangers:
  • Bones, the first Monster of the Week on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers can detach his skull and have it fly around to attack his enemies.
  • And in Power Rangers in Space, Ecliptor could separate his head from his body, and the head would fly around and fire Eye Beams while the body continued to attack with his usual sword.
  • Mack of Power Rangers Operation Overdrive discovered that he was a robot when he woke up to see his headless body lying on a slab nearby.
• A duo known as "The Floating Heads" appear to startle LeVar Burton in an installment of Reading Rainbow.
• Red Dwarf. Kryten has multiple spare heads on a shelf that argue with one another.
• JD in Scrubs has three odd daydreams of Head and Body Doctor where he imagines life as a floating head with his body doing something else. [1]
• Happens to Data a few times in Star Trek: The Next Generation; as an android, he can survive his head being removed and can still talk in that event. Some examples:
  • In the Time Travel episode "Time's Arrow", his head doesn't remain active while disconnected from his body, but it does survive under San Francisco for five hundred years, and when reconnected to his body (which was blown back through the time portal into the 24th century, thus not taking The Slow Path), it works fine.
  • In "Disaster", Data offers to use himself to absorb an electric current, allowing Riker to pass, which will cripple him, but should leave him repairable later on. Riker points out to him that even if he's willing to sacrifice Data (which he isn't), it would be pointless, as Riker wouldn't be able to fix the Warp Core without him as he's not an engineer. Instead, they disconnect Data's head and toss his headless body into the current, diverting it, but allowing Riker to take Data's head along so he can talk him through the necessary repairs.
  • In the Expanded Universe novel Imzadi, a decapitated Data is still in control of his body.
• Supernatural:
  • In "Slash Fiction", Bobby discovers that a Leviathan can survive even after you cut its head off (the head actually managing to somehow return to its body), so he puts the head in a box and tells a friend to chuck it off a bridge. "Don't open it, even if it starts talking. Especially if it starts talking."
  • In "Baby", the Monster of the Week can survive decapitation and is extremely pissed off about it.
• Reversed in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, in which Cromartie's body seeks out his head which does not appear to have any activity.
• Ultra Series
  • The Ultraseven monster Gabura was able to survive as a floating head after Seven chopped it off with his Eye Slugger, catching the hero by surprise. Fortunately for Seven, it turned out that the spaceship of the aliens commanding Gabura needed to be destroyed to kill the monster permanently.
  • Ultraman Taro had Mukadender, who could detach its head from its body at will to fight as two combatants. The catch is that damage to Mukadendar’s head is still felt by its body and vice versa (same goes with actions such as being thrown into the air).
  • Sakuna Oni from Ultraman Tiga pulled the same trick on Tiga that Gabura did to Seven as the only thing that can truly slay Sakuna Oni is the sword of the samurai who originally defeated it.
• Rhonda Shear did this in wraparounds on USA Up All Night.
• Orpheus spends most of the Xena: Warrior Princess episode Girls Just Wanna Have Fun without his body.
• In "Leonard Betts" of The X-Files, Betts is able to regenerate his severed body parts. His head stayed alive after decapitation, and if Scully hadn't performed a high-tech mummification process, the head might have grown its own new body.
• You Don't Know Jack: A headless "Troy Stevens" returns from backstage following a Jack Attack round in one episode (his Green Screened head still on the big monitor as it is during this round).
• The Young Ones, Vyvyan sticks his head out the train window and another train cuts it off. His head lies in the tracks calling out to his body, which stumbles around looking for him.
  • And then kicks it further along the track after the head insults it.
  • Another time, two head-carrying ghosts wander through the lads' flat and accidentally drop their heads, forcing the bodies to stumble around picking up round objects ("No, that's a grapefruit!") in search of them. Later, the ghostly heads are seen arguing about whose body is whose, and even forehead-butting one another over possession of the one with a nicer bottom.

Music

• The Arrogant Worms's "Johnny Came Home Headless", about a tall and forgetful man who walked into doorways so often that one time apparently knocked his head off — and his body didn't notice.
• Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At". Although the song doesn't imply it, a lot of people seem to make fan videos associating with this trope.
• Warren Zevon's "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" is about a Norwegen mercenary who gets double-crossed by a comrade who blows his head off. Roland's headless corpse then tracks the traitor all the way across Africa for revenge and ends up blowing his entire body away.
• In the final verse of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "A Complicated Song", he sings about how he stood up while riding a roller coaster and got his head knocked off. He thinks it is "a major inconvenience".
  • "Everything You Know Is Wrong" also has the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders.
• Dismember has the cover art of Pieces, showing the band members themselves like this.

Music Videos

• Michael Jackson 's "Ghosts", Michael turns into a skeleton and proceeds to dance, removing his head in the process.
• Happens to "Weird Al" Yankovic again in the "Right Round" part of the official music video of the medley song "Polka Face" where he spins his head around 360 degrees until it unscrews off of his body.
• In Slipknot's "Wait and Bleed" music video, Clown has to put his head on because the doll-maker didn't finish him.
• Happens to a Creepy Doll and Chibi in The Birthday Massacre's video for Blue
• Missy Elliott does it to herself in the video to "One Minute Man."
• In Insane Clown Posse's "Headless Boogie", Violent J jumps into a graveyard and witnesses headless bodies dancing. He gets his own head chopped off and joins in.
• In the music video for Regina Spektor's song "Laughing with", which is full of surprising impossibilities, the singer at one point reaches as if to remove the mask she's wearing, but instead leaves it in the air as she removes her head from behind it for a moment, which doesn't faze either the head or the body.
• Gorillaz's "DARE" features a giant head of Shaun Ryder kept on life support in Noodle's room; he starts singing when Noodle activates some of the machinery. The video also spoofs some special effect mistakes often found in old horror movies, by showing some of the parts on his head shifting positions throughout the video.
• “Good Intentions” by Toad the Wet Sprocket features Courteney Cox doing this in cut-out animation form.
• Big Boi ends up with his disembodied head being held by a girl while his headless body is seen dancing to his own music in the background in the music video for "Shutterbugg".
• In the music video for "Break Down The Doors" by Erick Morillo ft. Audio Bullys, at two points in the song the first is when singers are seen in a room with 3 girls' heads mounted on the wall in the background followed immediately afterwards with all 3 girls' headless bodies dancing to the beat, and then later Erick's disembodied head is seen on a plate in a room with 2 girls that look alike with his body nowhere to be seen.
• Pate No.1's "Always" has the lead singer take off her head and place it on a nearby table as her headless body strips down to her undergarments before her very eyes not long before said body takes a shower.
• RACKETT's "Prey" showed a woman eating RACKETT's body parts throughout the song. At the end, the woman opened a serving dish, revealing RACKETT's severed (and still-alive) head. As RACKETT's body crawled around looking for her head, the woman cut off one of RACKETT's ears, put it on a cake and ate it.
• In Dizzee Rascal's "Couple Of Stacks", after Dizzee popped up under a sleeping woman's bed (and terrified her), he suddenly walked into her room through the doorway and chopped off her head. The woman's body crawled around while looking for her head.
• Several scenes in Blue, The Misfit's "Alive" show headless women dancing.
• In Lisa Crawley's "Elizabeth", Lisa's headless body plays an electric keyboard while a scientist keeps her head alive on a tray.
• In a Canadian show called Ants In Your Pants that features music videos, this happen in one by the name of "I Didn't Need That" by Eric Nagler & Friends to Eric when his head levitates from from his body and then rolls away.
• Ghost Revue's "Lost My Head" is played by the band members' headless bodies. The lead singer goes out to find the band members' heads and puts them all in a bag before he returns to the band and they reattach each other's heads.
• Most of the song Cafe by Pappa Boy has Hadar Golan's head on a platter on a dresser separated from her headless body that appears frequently throughout the song getting various things for her head until the near end where she reattaches her head to her body.
• In Jain's "Come", Jain is seen holding her head in a few shots.
• Happens in the song Run Away by Scalawag to Teo himself not long after his body appears to gain a mind of it's own.
• Wednesday Addams decapitates MC Hammer with a guillotine in the beginning of the music video for Addams Groove which he not only appears to survive but is also able to sing as his head bounces around for a bit.
• In Sleater-Kinney's song High In The Grass this trope happens in a rather exaggerated manner due to it occuring to every person that appears in the song at least once.
• Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" features two CGI appliance deliverymen who stand around gawking at music videos. One of them leans on a refrigerator and doesn't notice the fridge door swing open, and in a short time he's encased in a block of ice. The other guy decides the way to remedy this is to put his co-worker's decapitated head in the microwave. It seems to work as the next scene shows him restored and comfortably watching his TV at home.

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology:
  • Orpheus, according to Roman writer Ovid: his severed head continued to sing for a while after his murder.
  • One of the Lernaean Hydra's heads was immortal. After Heracles chopped it off, he buried it under a boulder.
• The Christian martyrology has Saint Denis (Bishop of Paris, executed by pagan Romans during the Imperial prosecutions) and Saint Solange (Mysterious Waif murdered by a nobelman who tried to abduct her). Both were beheaded, then their dead bodies just took their heads in their hands and walked away, praising the Lord until they reached the nearest towns and dropped dead there. In fact, Saint Denis is always represented in media with his severed head in his own hands◊.
• The Welsh have Saint Winefride, who was decapitated by a jealous suitor when she announced her intention to become a nun. Her head is said to have rolled down a hill, with a healing spring bursting forth where it stopped. If that's not enough, Winefride's uncle, Saint Beuno, then picked up the head and attached it to the body, bringing her back to life.
  • Then the suitor melted, thus showing why you should never annoy saints.
• Saint Quitteria was beheaded and thrown in the ocean. She is often depicted walking back out of the ocean with her head under her arm.
• It's probably not a coincidence that many of cephalophoric saints (like the three aforementioned) come from Celtic or formerly Celtic lands like Gaul and Britain: Celtic myths have several examples of gods, heroes or giants whose heads continue to talk, drink or recite poems after having been severed.
• As for Hinduism and Buddhism, there's the deity Chhinnamasta who severed her own head with her own sword just to feed her two attendants with her blood. Now that's hardcore.
• Brazilian folklore has the headless mule, which has fire coming out of the stump - though it's described as "coming out of its nose"... and that it has a bridle tied to its mouth. A few versions reduce the Fridge Logic by saying the fire covers its head, not replaces it.
• The Arabian Nights story of King Yunan and Duban the Sage. Duban the Sage comes to the king's court when the king is very ill, and manages to save the king's life. However, an Evil Chancellor convinces the king to distrust the sage, and the sage is put to death. His head is able to speak after being cut off, reprimanding the king and eventually leading to the king's death also.
• Mimir in Norse Mythology, as the wisest god. He was beheaded in the Aesir-Vanir War, but Odin used magic to preserve and revive the head, and it serves as his advisor.
• From Egyptian Mythology, the sorcerer Naneferkaptah had to face a serpent both immune to magic and who had this ability as the Final Boss guarding the Book of Thoth. When standard freezing spells didn't work, Nefrekeptah went for the direct approach and cut off the serpent's head, and threw it far into the river. However, the head came back almost instantly and blocked his path again. Nefrekeptah again cut off its head, threw it into the river, and this time put sand on the neck before the head could come back. The head couldn't reattach, and though the serpent couldn't die, it just lay there, helpless.
• In Japanese folklore there are monsters called Nukekubi; they seem like normal humans during the day, but in the night their head detaches from their bodies and starts to float around and search for a human victim to devour.
  • Similar monsters are recorded in a number of East Asian countries, with perhaps the best-known being the Malaysian penanggalan.
• Baba Deep Singh. The legend says that his head was cut completely or almost completely off and still was able to fight.
• In the medieval Dutch ballad "Het lied van heer Halewijn" (the song of lord Halewijn), the evil Halewijn's head keeps talking after the heroine chops it off, asking her to blow on his horn to summon his friends, and to rub salve on his neck (the heroine refuses). Possibly justified because Halewijn is hinted not to be quite human.
• Störtebeker, the legendary pirate of Hamburg. When he finally met his fate, he asked that all his mateys, which he could walk on by after his beheading, would be pardoned. His wish was granted, and when the executor saw that he really did it, he played unfair and tripped him.
• Estonian folklore tells the story of Tõll, a giant who came to the aid of the Estonian people in a time of conflict, transporting soldiers en masse on giant wheels. During the subsequent battle, Tõll was decapitated and placed his own head on his sword. He then walked to his grave, promising to rise again in the event of another war against Estonia.

Pinballs

• Bone Busters has Ol' One-Eye, a disembodied skull who throws quips and jokes at the player.
• Similarly, there's Skull the Bone Head in No Fear: Dangerous Sports, who's strictly for the snark.

Pro Wrestling

• Dragon Dragon has survived despite losing his head in Chikara, due to him being a giant stuffed animal, that can somehow move and compete in matches.

Recorded and Stand-Up Comedy

• This was the subject of one of Robert Schimmel's bits on Robert Schimmel Comes Clean:
  "I saw a plane crash on TV. The reporter says, 'Yeah, the plane crashed over here, decapitated this guy. He's apparently dead.' Good guess. No, the head's alive by itself. 'Psst! Over here, behind the bush!' What would you say if you saw something like that? 'Hey, are you okay?' 'I can't feel my legs!' 'Don't look down.' Well, what if your head lived for a minute after? It'd be weird to see some torso hopping around. 'Shit, lookit that!....Hey, that's MY shirt. Oh, fuck, my head's off. This is bad.'"

Roleplay

• Mei from AJCO can remove her head (among other limbs) and stitch it back on at will, due to being a zombie. She mostly does it to freak people out.

Tabletop Games

• The Deadlands incarnation of Joaquin Murrieta died. He came back. Then, he got beheaded. Now, his (understandably insane) body's looking for his head, and is more than happy to "borrow" yours until he finds it. The best part? Undead Joachin Murrieta can only be stopped if you destroy his head. Happy hunting!
  • In Deadlands in general, this is what happens when you decapitate a Harrowed. The head is unfazed by the loss of the body and stays fully conscious, but helpless because of not having any arms or legs. A Harrowed can recover from this condition if someone kindly sews the head back on and feeds them some meat.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Trolls; anything cut off them, including heads, can live and will either reattach itself or regenerate. One of the Mystara supplements described trollish games, some of which involve using the head of one of the participants as a living football. Which tries to bite the feet that kick it.
  • Unsurprisingly, the Ravenloft setting plays with this trope. Jacqueline Montarri is a headless NPC villain who steals the heads of women to wear, and has an enormous collection of decapitated and still conscious female heads in her basement. (This is a curse, which she can only undo by finding her real head, which she has been looking for ever since she was executed by beheading centuries ago. To be blunt, as she will tell you, horrid fates like this will often befall those who cheat and murder members of the Vistani.)
  • Lebendtod, a zombie-like undead template, can remove their heads and limbs at will.
• Exalted has an odd version of this from the dangerously powerful Charcoal March of Spiders supernatural martial art. The user delivers a punch so ludicrously hard that the head not only explodes, but the person whose head did explode has several seconds thereafter to think and react because they, and reality itself, haven't caught up to the fact just yet.
• In GURPS 3rd Edition, one of the supplements full of fantasy magic spells had a spell called Decapitate, which did exactly what its name says. Not only that, both the head and body were still alive, and since the head was still magically able to speak, if it knew any spells, it could still cast them! Of course, without the head, the body could not eat or drink, and would eventually die of dehydration or starvation. But this was not a problem either! Another spell allowed you to turn everything BUT the head into stone... and THEN you could decapitate him.
• The Orks of Warhammer 40,000 are so tough that their severed heads can survive for up to an hour, more than enough time for a Mad Dok to easily attach it to a new body or just staple it back on.

Theater

• In Pippin, Pippin has a poignant conversation with the head of a fallen Visigoth soldier. In a later scene, after Pippin has been crowned king, a headless man comes up to him and asks for his head to be reattached.
• In a Ravenloft skit performed at GenCon 1999, "One Piece at a Time", a lady surgeon attempts to bring her fiancée back to life after he dies in a tragic accident. The title says it all, but early scenes correspond to this trope. Sean Reynolds, playing the fiancée with his head stuck through a hole in a covered table, couldn't see the page of lines lying beside him. "I can't even hold a script!"

Theme Parks

• In the safety video for The Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios, Scratchy ends up decapitating himself while trying to lift the lap bar.

Toys

• There are a couple non-canon moments of this in BIONICLE, usually for Rule of Funny:
  • Very early storyboards for a planned promo animation of Tahu reassembling himself on the Ta-Wahi beach show him attaching his fallen-off head first.
  • In the game BIONICLE: Heroes, it's a recurring theme, and every boss you defeat (apart from the final boss) is left as just a head at the end of the fight. Rule of Funny applies. There's also an Idle Animation where your character starts playing keepie uppie with its head.
  • A gag video released online had Hahli Mahri's head popping off due to a rough submarine ride. It falls on her foot, causing much pain.

Video Games

• This happens to Mutoid Man of Smash TV as the next step after getting his arms blown off (causing a bunch of heads to fly out), as well as his re-skin, The Host, who is fought at the end. In both cases, another head will be inside of the main body once that part's gone.
• Skeleton Warriors (PlayStation tie-in to the cartoon) have Prince Lightstar trolling Aracula after the boss fight, where in the following cutscene the defeated Aracula pulls himself together from a pile of bones, but Lightstar managed to snatch his skull away. Cue Aracula comically fumbling around to look for his cranium until Lightstar throws it down a corridor, and the headless Aracula running after it before hitting a wall.
• Spiritual Assassin Taromaru have two skeletal demons who has the ability to throw their heads as a ranged attack, before flying back to their necks. There's also a Karakuri puppet who, upon having her body destroyed, detaches her head and sends it floating around to continue the fight.
• Super Cyborg have a giant insect boss, the Flying Jarmai, who can continue fighting after you destroyed it's body, torso, abdomen, until it's a severed head sitting on the ground who then tries attacking you with it's Overly-Long Tongue.
• Mimir, of God of War (PS4). When Kratos and Atreus first meet him, he has been trapped in a tree for over a century by Odin. Since Mimir was Odin's advisor and ambassador to all nine realms, he has a wealth of knowledge about everything in them, and offers to share said knowledge with the pair in exchange for cutting off his head, and having the Witch in the Woods resurrect it. He spends the rest of the game dangling from Kratos' belt, acting as Mr. Exposition and occasionaly The Conscience.
• In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Samus has to deal with the Quads, four-legged sentry robots that are built so that their bodies and heads can function independently of each other - if the body is destroyed, the head simply detaches and continues shooting, zipping back and forth via levitation. This trait also applies to their massive boss counterpart, Quadraxis.
• Jenova was decapitated in the events leading to Final Fantasy VII. Sephiroth, realizing the jig is up (and unable to take the entire body with him), removed his "mother's" head on his way out of the Nibelheim mako reactor. However, he was waylaid by pre-amnesiac Cloud Strife and thrown from the connecting bridge, sinking into the pool of mako. The headless body of Jenova continues to live on - albeit in cryogenic suspension - waiting to be "reunited" with its missing parts.
• In Primal, the Wraith can apparently survive being decapitated. A group of severed heads in Raum's torture chamber (all of whom hate each other) eventually take time out from arguing to help the PCs. One, however, calls the guards, simply to antagonize the rest.

  Other severed heads are scattered almost randomly throughout the upper mansion, giving comments, advice, and encouragement. One somehow knows Scree's name.

• In Animamundi Dark Alchemist: The hero's little sister was beheaded, but still survived. Granted, by the game's universe rules, it was part of a "Test" - only witches can survive beheading.
• In Chrono Cross one skeleton character, which you have to assemble, starts off as a talking skull.
• In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, when you fight Nemesis in the Treatment Room. Douse him with a remarkable strong acid two times and his head will come off. But rather than die like the zombies, he continues attacking, albeit blind.
• Killer7 has Susie, a severed head you tend to meet in very enclosed spaces (the first one being a washing machine). She always has a ring in her mouth when you find her. She's also a ghost. She's also completely loopy.
• The Monkey Island franchise is fond of this trope.
  • In The Secret of Monkey Island, your guide through the Bloody Bowels of Hell is the preserved head of a navigator with an unerring sense of direction — the rest of his body was eaten by the Monkey Island cannibals. Big Bad LeChuck's undead first mate Bob is a skeletal ghost whose skull is constantly tipping off his spine — he misses the Wedding Finale when he drops it into the sea of lava in which their Ghost Ship is anchored.
  • Murray the Mighty Demonic Skull in The Curse of Monkey Island. Justified in that he was actually dead and re-animated by spooky voodoo magic well before he became a disembodied skull. Originally intended to be a One-Scene Wonder who only appeared in the prologue, his appearance in the demo proved so popular with fans that the devs hurried to ensure he popped up a few more times in Curse (he's the only character other than Guybrush, Elaine (technically), and LeChuck to appear in every chapter), made a cameo in Escape from Monkey Island, and even popped up again in one episode of Tales of Monkey Island.
    Murray: I'm a powerful demonic force! I'm the harbinger of your doom! And the forces of darkness will applaud me as I stride through the gates of Hell, carrying your head on a pike!
    Guybrush: "Stride"?
    Murray: ...Alright then, roll! Roll through the gates of hell. Must you take the fun out of everything?
• A head in a jar is a "work of art" that you can purchase in the console version of The Sims.
• Boomer in Ballz throws his head as a special attack.
• Tekken 6 has Alisa Boskonovitch who can remove her head and have it explode in front of her opponent. Of course, a new one emerges shortly after.
• Kangaxx from Baldur's Gate II, when you first meet him was just a skull. Helps he's a lich who had been disassembled and this game was based on Dungeons & Dragons.
• Bladed Fury has a headless demon as a boss, with it's cranium held in one hand. The lack of a noggin' doesn't stop it from attacking you however, the head will breath energy bolts on you while the hand raises and lowers to position where it's targeting.
• Kratos in the God of War games not only is able to tear off the head of the Gorgons, but proceed to use their (apparently still living) heads as weapons, petrifying enemies with their eye-beams. In the third game he does the same for the god Helios, using him as a Lantern.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The Recapitator (skeleton enemies) in Wario Land: Shake It! have their sole attack being to detach and throw their head at Wario like a boomerang, catching it afterwards. They also come back to life when killed like the Dry Bones in the main Mario games, and can only permanently be killed by destroying their body while their head is in mid air. Or, if you're feeling saucy, destroy the head and leave the body hanging for awhile before it collapses into a heap.
  • Broque Monsieur of the Mario & Luigi games is shown in Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team to be able to flip his head in the air◊ in order to, of all things, change his facial expression.
• PS1 RPG Shadow Madness had a disembodied telekinetic head by the name of Xero von Moon. He was kept alive (and presumably afloat and able to speak) by a thin metal ring at his neck, and fought primarily with kinetic bolts (though he could resort to a headbutt).
• In the first episode of Xenosaga, the functionally immortal Dragon Albedo is left in charge of a young hostage. So he rips off his own head, throws it at her feet, then spends a while like that mocking her fear (and making creepily suggestive puns in French) before stomping it into paste. Just to pass the time.
• Morte, a floating skull and the resident Deadpan Snarker of Planescape: Torment. Morte didn't lose his head; it's right here. He also didn't lose his body, it's where he left it.
• Fear & Hunger: Nas'hrah lost his body a long time ago. He's still perfectly capable of advanced magic even as a floating head, and is notably the only party member that can never die for good.
• Serious Sam has beheaded rocketeers, beheaded bombers, beheaded firecrackers and beheaded kamikazes. Former three carry their head with one hand while the latter doesn't have a head at all. Despite not having a head, the Beheaded Kamikazes can still scream. The scream of a kamikaze is one of the most recognizable (and feared) sounds in the game.
• Played with regarding the beings known as the Headless from the Ultima series. They are indeed quite headless and uninhibited by being such, but they are not some undead creature that originally suffered decapitation; they also have no place on their torso where a head would normally go, with only an empty patch of skin between their shoulders. It's a mystery even in-universe as to how they get around and make such dangerous enemies without any evident sensory organs.
• Dr. Nefarious in robot mode gets his head knocked off by Qwark in one of the vid-comic sections in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Horrible punning ensues.
• When Captain Slag is defeated in Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction his severed head talks to his first mate Rusty Pete for a full minute before losing power. In the DLC Quest For Booty Rusty Pete continues to carry around Slag's head and use it as a ventriloquist dummy, until he finds a new body for Slag, and after Ratchet destroys that body his head is shown still alive in the epilogue.
• Although very loosely, Dynamite Headdy surely counts as the main character throws his head around and switches it with power-ups. Not to mention it explodes when he dies and it gets replaced with a game over sign.
• In Left 4 Dead 2, if you play a custom mutation called "Plague of the Dead" (which is the part of Rayman1103's Mutation Mod), theres a bug, if you decapitate a zombie with a melee weapon, sometimes there's a chance where the zombie still attack you while headless, hit it again will make him dead.
• The main character of Never Dead, a game about an immortal gunslinger fighting a demonic invasion. Even if dismembered, he can put himself back together again. He loses his head (both figuratively and literally) in the first trailer. "My story was just getting interesting too!"
• Ninja Commando have this happening when you fight Lu Bu. As soon as you kill him, his head detaches, floats a little bit, gloats at you and transforms into a Chinese dragon with a new health bar - cue next stage of a Sequential Boss fight.
• In Vampire Savior, Jedah has a move called Spregio that has him doing this to himself and blasting the opponent with the resulting rush of blood!
• This is the entire plot and gameplay gimmick of Dead Head Fred.
• Decap Attack is an NES platformer where you are Chuck D. Head, a mummy with a detachable head which you repeatedly fling at enemies to defeat them in various levels. Your head returns to you moments after being thrown.
• Some enemies in Unreal will feel for their head for moment after decapitation.
• Several enemies from Dead Space can remove Isaac's head, one will take over his body after his death. Instant decapitation results in Isaac feeling for his missing head for a second.
• In Avernum 3, you can get a talking skull, which will shout random phrases at random times. One hilarious one goes: "Aragorn! Boromir! Come quick... Oh, never mind."
• Runescape's "A Clockwork Syringe" quest features a severed zombie pirate head, which the Player Character has to torture for information.
• The original Kung Fu Master has the Black Magician: any mid/high attack would result in his head falling off, and him teleporting back to reappear complete and unharmed.
• In Chariot: Adventures Through the Sky, Final Boss Lar loses his entire body halfway through the Boss Fight, but he's got no problem keeping up with the Bullet Hell as a disemboweled head.
• In the extremely bizarre Samurai Zombie Nation, you control the detached (and giant) head of the samurai Namakubi as you use Eye Beams and acid spit on zombies. Really.
• Yet another Shoot 'Em Up example: Tripod Sardine from G-Darius. Once it takes enough damage, its head gets blown off. It still survives, though.
  • A straighter example would be the Final Boss of Darius Force, Galst Vic (a Terminator-esque robot). When his first form is defeated, you have to escape the exploding base... and then his head comes to attack you! Strangely enough, his head can grow◊ and shrink◊ in size.
• The player character in The Incredible Crash Dummies can lose his head, resulting in reversed controls until you find a spare head.
• In Disney's Villains' Revenge, Alice (of Alice in Wonderland fame) actually gets beheaded and you have to travel a maze to find her head.
• The boss Echizen in Death Crimson OX has a head that I can only describe as an egg with a pair of giant red lips. Part one of the boss fight is fighting his kung-fu kicking body as his head continuously inflates. Part two involves his head floating off of his body, then splitting into six individual floating heads that then proceed to ram into you and shoot lasers at you.
• While inversions are also more common, in The Binding of Isaac, Pestilence and sometimes Gapers and Mr. Maws continue moving after losing their head.
• A scene from the Team Fortress 2 promotional video Meet the Medic shows the head of the BLU Spy, which the RED Medic keeps in his fridge, being sustained by some eldritch and surely illegal medical technique involving dry-cell batteries.
• Skullgirls has Ms. Fortune, an undead catgirl who was chopped up into pieces by the mob after stealing and swallowing a gem that made her body undying. Her fighting style revolves around extending, detaching, and reattaching her limbs — most notably her head, which functions not only as a weapon but is capable of propelling itself around and attacking independently of her body.
• Jet Headstrong had this power on Defenders of Dynatron City.
• In Lollipop Chainsaw, after Nick is bitten by a zombie Juliet decides to save him by chopping off his head and preserving it with a magic ritual of some sort. He's not exactly happy about the situation but Juliet thinks that it is just awesome that her boyfriend is now a talking head.
  Nick: How am I still talking... without a FUCKING THORAX?!
• In the "Test Your Luck" game in Mortal Kombat 9, one of the results causes both fighters to fight the next match headless. The worst thing about this is, neither player can use X-Ray moves; exactly how bad it is otherwise depends on what fighter you're using. (For many, it's not much else, but for a few, it can be very hindering. It's the most debilitating for Kung-Lao, seeing as half his moves and almost all his Fatalities require his hat.)
  • In Mortal Kombat X, this is the fate of Shinnok at the hands of Dark Raiden, because he is an Elder God and cannot die. In one of the stages of Mortal Kombat 11, his severed and still living head is on display.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • From the series' backstory comes Pelinal Whitestrake, the legendary 1st Era hero of mankind/racist berserker. Believed to have been a Shezarrine, physical incarnations of the spirit of the "dead" creator god Lorkhan (known to the Imperials as "Shezarr"), Pelinal came to St. Alessia to serve as her divine champion in the war against the Ayleids. When Alessia and her army was too struck with fear to attack the White-Gold Tower occupied by Ayleid leader Umaril the Unfeathered, Pelinal charged in himself and defeated (though could not kill) Umaril before he himself was slain. His body was cut into eight pieces by the Ayleids to mock the Eight Divines. His head was left behind and discovered by Morihaus, with whom he had one final conversation that is now lost to history.
  • A Good Bad Bug in Skyrim sometimes causes enemies beheaded mid-sentence to continue a taunt after decapitation. The game doesn't stop the sound file when the enemy dies, resulting in a disembodied voice for a second or so.
• The Skelterwild Dream Eater in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] has a tendency to do this whenever it receives a hit strong enough to make it stagger. This is by no means a good thing (unless it's your friend), as it causes the head and body to attack in tandem by using ice breath and by ramming respectively.
• In Grim Fandango, Salvador Limones gets reduced to a talking skull. Sure, he was Dead to Begin With, but the rest of the skeleton, which you have to find later, is not animated, implying that the head is still the part that holds one's consciousness, even after death. Even as a skull, Sal manages to perform a Heroic Sacrifice by spitting Sproutella into the face of a character who betrayed him, thus rendering both of them Deader than Dead.
• The Evil King/Witch Doctor in Wonder Boy/Adventure Island loses his head each time you defeat him, only to have it replaced by an uglier mug.
• Sekibanki of Touhou Project, a Rokurokubi with some Dullahan motifs mixed in. She has the ability to make her head fly off independently from her body. ZUN mentioned in his music notes for her theme music that he wasn't sure if the Rokurokubi was the Youkai that could stretch their neck or if it was the youkai that could detach their head (a possible Shout-Out to Lafcadio Hearn who mentioned in his book that people misidentify the Nukekubi for a Rokurokubi), so he gave her both powers.
• One rather disturbing scene in the anime of Umineko: When They Cry features Maria's head on a platter. Laughing psychotically and daring Rosa to eat her.
• Some zombies in Doom³ have lost their heads, leaving only the lower jaw and below still attached. The game code even refers to them as "neckstump". The lack of head or brain does not hinder them in the slightest, which makes sense, and they can even make the same grunts and moans as zombies with heads. This only affects civilian zombies, however - Z-secs, zombified security forces and marines that wield weapons and behave like actual humans in a firefight, are unaffected.
• Played for Laughs in LEGO Island. The island's inhabitants, being made of LEGOs, can easily survive decapitation:
  • The opening cinematic has the ambulance have a tow truck crash into it, and the patient's head gets knocked off into the road. The ambulance driver just picks up the head, chucks it into the back of the ambulance, and gets back behind the wheel.
  • An encounter in the residential area has a character get his head knocked off by a passing truck. The head starts directing the body to try and pick it up.
    "Hey, I'm over here! To my left! Er, your left! Er, our left!" (body walks towards head) "Right." (body goes right) "Not 'go right,' 'correct'!" (body kicks head) "It's not a soccer game! Use your brain! Oh, I guess ... that's over here." (body kicks head again) "Ow! Just bend down slowly and—" (body kicks head high into the air and it lands on the neck) "He shoots, he scores! OW!"
• In Ogre Battle, you can recruit Pumpkins (men with pumpkins for heads) into your army, who attack by tearing off their own heads, kicking them into the air, whereupon they grow to huge size and land on an enemy, halving their HP (or killing undead units outright) unless they miss. If you upgrade them to a Hallowe'en, they can do it twice a fight!
• In Office Zombie, you can cut the Zombie's head off with a couple of items. When you throw it back, he'll stick it back on his neck and be good as new.
• Vengarl of Forossa from Dark Souls II was a brutish, bloodthirsty mercenary until he got decapitated in a fierce battle... and woke up as a disembodied undead head. Ironically, he learned to enjoy his newfound peace, spending his time watching the forest, thinking and occasionally talking with random travellers. His only concern is that his headless body still is rampaging somewhere else.
  • The Earthen Peak area is populated mostly by headless, magically animated mannequins. The boss of said area, Mytha the Baneful Queen, tore off their heads for 'daring to gaze upon her'. Mytha herself is a half-woman-half-snake, also beheaded, who carries her head in her left hand and uses it as a sorcery catalyst, and occasionally as a magic grenade.
• Chivalry: Medieval Warfare's "Black Knight" Game Mod makes decapitations (and other severed bits and pieces) non-lethal, allowing for a headless, armless knight to run around kicking people to death.
• In the reboot of Shadow Warrior, Xing, one of the Ancients, lost his head on the order of Enra, the leader of the Shadow Realm, for conspiring with Hoji to poison their sister and try to overthrow him. But because Xing is an Ancient, an immortal demon that cannot be killed except with the Nobitsura Kage, being decapitated is just an inconvenience to him. You encounter his head late in the game, when you journey to the Shadow Realm to rescue Hoji and stop him from creating a Whisperer of you and sacrificing his memories of you, and he proves to be quite the amiable and chatty fellow.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, when HK-47 is describing his history of enacting assassination protocols against Jedi, he notes their love of sending his limbs and head flying with their Laser Blade, which he describes as "an inconvenience".
• The Quest for Glory series has Bonehead, Baba Yaga's gatekeeper. He's a talking skull animated by some form of magic, though little else is elaborated on.
• In Headlander, you wake up in the future with no body and must make do with a space helmet that comes equipped with rockets and the ability to attach to various robot bodies.
• In one of Spirit Hunter: NG's Bad Ends, Kaoru is decapitated. Not only do they remain alive for a minute, but they're even capable of holding a conversation over a phone, something that they recognize should be impossible.
• Dragon's Crown:
  • Skeleton enemies will lose their head if you damage them enough but they will still fight in this state. However, since they no longer have eyes to see with, they'll mainly run around randomly while flailing their sword wildly.
  • The Warrior Monk you meet in the Forgotten Sanctuary is injured by a Hell Hound's head that continued to bite down on her leg even after it was decapitated.
• In Fallout 4, a glitch can cause enemies or even the player to survive decapitation.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the boss monster Jermafenser/Helmethead will lose several helmet-covered heads that proceed to float and attack Link independently of the body.
  • Blind the Thief from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has a similar strategy, losing and regrowing his head through the fight while the extra heads attack Link.
  • Igos du Ikana from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask attaches and reattaches his head to attack Link during the fight against him. Once he and his Skull Knights are defeated and their bodies disintegrated using reflected sunlight, their incorporeal spirits are represented by the same floating skulls.
  • In The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons, a skeletal Piratian had his entire body destroyed except for his skull. Link must carry his skull so the Piratian can help locate the bell his Captain was looking for.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, attacking the body of a Stal creature will just cause the head and body to separate. It can only be defeated if Link destroys the head... but if there are any other Stal creatures of the same type, any head can reaffix to any matching body, leaving the bodies to attack Link until all heads are destroyed. Fortunately, all Stal heads will die from a single blow from any weapon, even if still attached to the body.
• Ed in Ben and Ed can have his head cut off, or he can even detach it himself, and will still be able to continue the level albeit with less maneuverability. Alternatively, he can just reattach it to his body. Justified in that Ed is a zombie.
• The Onkies from the Grow games (and other games from the Eyezmaze website) may sometime lose their head after tripping or doing a big jump, but they can simply put it back on has if nothing happened.
• One of the randomly generated mutations in RAD allows you to throw your head at enemies, which will then explode. Upgrades to this will add either a bone-mohawk or a spiked skull, both of which will cause extra damage.
• Schezo Wegey is infamously beheaded by protagonist Arle Nadja in the PC-98 version of Madou Monogatari Madou Monogatari 1-2-3. Just when Arle thought he was through, his head somehow springs to life and sticks around to continue fighting by casting spells for a while before he goes down for real. He later appears in other installments of Madou, and his decapitation is never mentioned again.
• The second Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt game has a part where the player can open the fridge to find the severed head of Orson Pig from U.S. Acres. Unlike Lyman's severed head shown in the same game, Orson appears to be still alive in spite of his beheading, as he says to Garfield "Watch out for sneaky mice!"
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has the Guardian Ape fight. At the climex, Sekiro uses the sword lodged in the Guardian Ape's neck to decapitate him. This gets you a "Shinobi Execution" screen. After a few seconds, however, the boss gets back up, retrieving his head with one hand and the sword with his other, becoming the Headless Ape.
• Chicken from Nuclear Throne gets decapitated when losing all her health, but can temporarily survive (like a real chicken) long enough to potentially regain some health, reattaching her head.
• In Castlevania, Dracula's head pops off his body when you reduce his health to zero, only for him to reveal a more powerful form right afterward.
• Death Stranding has the skeleton soldiers under Cliff's command who are capable of fighting even after their heads are shot off. This immunity doesn't apply, however, if you sneak up behind them and decapitate them with the Strand.
• Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat from Your Head to Your Feet: If you help Mickey fix his comedy routine, his final joke causes the audience to literally laugh their heads off. They're fine since they're all Anthropomorphic Food.
• Agon from Brutal Orchestra is holding his severed head above his body, and still feels pain from it (if Played for Laughs) judging by his frequent Overly Long Screams
• A Bite at Freddy's: Talkshow Freddy is fended off by activating a fan in an air vent, but deploying it at the wrong time can slice off his head. Freddy responds to his decapitation by becoming much more aggressive in his attempts to enter the office.
• Fallout 4: Some enemies, such as ghouls or deathclaws, are capable of surviving with one or more limbs completely removed; however, due a glitch, the head is sometimes counted as a non-essential limb.
• Helldivers II: Some variants of Terminids can survive for several seconds when their heads removed.

Web Animation

• In the second Mystery Skulls Animated video Lewis punches Shiromori's head clean off when she wakes him by messing with his locket. She grows it, and her burnt arm, back in short order but decides to book it rather than have an all out brawl with the fiery ghost.
• In the Strong Bad Email "disconnected", Strong Bad imagines what it'd be like if he had a disembodied head.
• Red vs. Blue: Lopez seems to handle life without a head quite well.
• Bjork in the video for "I Miss You".

Web Comics

• In Another Princess Story, during one Halloween storyline, Roya finds Eliza and Beth after their heads have been removed from their bodies by a headless, ax-wielding woman, who can do the same to Roya. The headless bodies are still capable of some level of sentience and the disembodied heads lose their eye colors until they're attached to a body, causing them to gain the eye color of the body's original head (and in the case of the rider, her sharp teeth).
• Happened in Bite Me! via guillotine; her head was later located by the main character being asked to list head puns (in a room full of severed heads) until she groaned loudly enough to be found.
• Most of the Boneheads are able to take off their heads and be perfectly fine, being undead skeletons and the like. Three of the Boneheads perform while holding their skulls in their hands. This comes as a shock to Sans and Papyrus, who can't just take off their heads. Poor Papyrus thought he killed Brook by accidentally knocking off his head before Jack assured him Brook was fine.
• In Commander Kitty, CK ends up in pieces after a Teleporter Accident, with his still-talking head landing inside a toolbox. Fortunately for him, it seems he just needs someone to snap him back together like a LEGO minifig.
• Daisy Is Dead has two instances.
• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures: "You would be amazed how difficult it is to aim when your head is in a box across the room."
• Runcible Spoon in Dominic Deegan is known for sending his own head flying. Also once happened to Quilt, including the "hey, body, over here" routine.
• Dragon Ball Multiverse: Cell does this to himself to avoid being petrified by Dabura.
• Done in Fanboys in a very nightmarish fashion. With an undead cat.
• Girl Genius:
  • Tinka's head continues to talk after being sliced off.
  • Castle Heterodyne while its mind was stored in the body of Otilia.
  • Doctor Sun keeps Selnikov's head in a jar, preserved and conscious for interrogation.
• In the Girls in Space storyline The Prototype, Fergus Macrumble punches the Henchbot's head off.
• Nostrom in Jack has a habit of switching his head between a bunch of bodies after he goes to hell. And he keeps his bodies' original heads in a jar where they're constantly begging people to kill them.
• Done in Khatru, where Healing Factor powered Ranger unwittingly agrees to test one of Gadgeteer Genius Kira's medical scanning devices. She tries everything to fix him, but in the end, he recovers all on his own.
• Ashley Yakamura from Light and Dark can detach her head, along with other parts of her body.
• In Looking for Group, one of the men in Richard's village. Justified because he's not exactly human...
  • Also, Richard is beheaded but still able to maintain his normal levels of awesome.
• An entire storyline of Narbonic revolves around how Dave's disembodied head is forgotten on the bus.
• In No Rest for the Wicked, Red severs the witch's head. The witch sticks it back on, grumbling.
• Hector in No Songs For The Dead got his head punched off by Romeo, after which Hector taunted Romeo, saying "You punch like a girl."
• Oglaf has Morag The Immortal, a follower of the dead god Sithrak. As revealed in "Bellows" and "Rise of the Funsnake" Morag's body was eaten by the funworm, a demon god disguised as group of men in a cheap parade costume. She now needs somebody to blow into her neck to talk because nobody understood that one blink meant "yes" and two meant "no".
• In Slightly Damned the third head of Cerberus seems to be perfectly fine with just being a skull/living headgear for Darius. This is a temporary punishment for insufficient vigilance, that dragged out far longer than expected.
• Happens to Xykon in The Order of the Stick.
  • And also to the Eye of Fear and Flame, which was kept by Belkar until it decided death was better than living (well, undying) as an immobile skull with Belkar as a master.
• One Project Future side comic has a healing mage reattach a decapitated waitress's head before her brain died, though she needed additional spinal regeneration afterwards.
• Questionable Content had an Imagine Spot featuring Penelope vomiting a rainbow mixed with Cheshire Cat Grin.
• In Rusty and Co., decapitation does not work on the vampires.
• Happens from time to time in Schlock Mercenary. The level of medical technology available in the series allows entire bodies to be regrown so long as the head remains intact. Der Trihs spent quite a few strips as a head in a jar, as have most of the cast. Karl Tagon once spent an arc as a head in a jar as well. Attached to a headless monkey he was able to control, and still kicked a ton of ass doing it.
• Probably the single most infamous comic from Sexy Losers involved Shiunji, a necrophiliac, a corpse whose head fell off, and what he did to its neck. The comic's subtitle read "I am certain that at some point in the future, I will be prosecuted for this comic in a court of law."
• A pair of minor characters in Skin Horse are a zombie couple comprising a headless body and a bodiless head. Unity has also been known to lose her head on occasion, on one occasion getting into a fight with her Evil Twin in which they both ended up as just heads.
• In Sluggy Freelance, Torg invented the "Zombie-Head-On-A-Stick." It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • To say nothing of the time Riff managed to disconnect his own head (and trap Torg and Gwynn's upper halves in another dimension) by thinking with portals.
• Stubble Trouble features the decapitated characters of Gynette the spidertaur and Lilith the Headless Goth Vixen. Gynette's boyfriend really seems to like her ability and her friends are unfazed as she often takes her head off. Lilith the Headless Goth Vixen was a former model who was famous for her decapitation.
• Rick of Umlaut House is cybernetic below the neck, and his head can detach and walk around on mechanical spider legs.
• Violet Zombie: Penelope Martinez demonstrates this ability frequently, either to scare people or just for fun.
• Zomgan: As Mirae On simply can't die thanks to his quick, powerful Healing Factor, he can survive beheadings and regenrate another head.

Web Original

• Athyrmagaia has the Athyrmatherians, alien creatures which resemble familiar Earth animals like lions, gazelles and wildebeest: except that the head, thorax, abdomen and rump of each Athyrmatherian is a separate animal of its own, having metamorphosed from four separate sibling larvae that then proceeded to unite at adulthood. As such, heads can detach from the bodies and survive for a while separated: which becomes a tactic of a predator group called headhunters that finish their prey by detaching the head zooid and devouring the still-living head, before moving onto the incapacitated body.
• Happens in short film called changing head.
• In "Deadpool: The Musical," Deadpool demonstrates that he's "especially good at decapitating!" by removing a mook's head via katana, and the severed head sings in response: "Heads roll for Deadpool!"
• GR-210 is reduced to just a head in Statless and Tactless when he horrifically fails an attack roll and the GM is feeling vindictive. However, being a robot he's still alive as a head and gets carried around in a backpack.
• This video based on the catchy theme tune to Halloween. "They're decapitated so easily!"
• In Less is Morgue, Brains Vincent survives as a severed head after Riley eats his body.
• The YouTube series Some Assembly Required is all about this.
• A short film called Halloween Party has its main character be a guy who can detach his head like a toy.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In the magic-themed episode "Vanishing Act", Cindy Vortex, Carl Wheezer, Sheen Estevez and Betty Quinlan, become floating heads when they enter a strange dimension and look for their headless bodies. Once they enter a picture of a desert, they find their headless bodies are searching around the desert feeling the ground for them. They reattach their heads to their bodies and act like nothing happened (except Sheen, whose head is on backwards).
• Aladdin: The Series has a villain named Kapok whose evil head is separated from his kind body. Interestingly, his head thinks with his mind, but his body thinks with his heart. Aladdin even gets inflicted with the same curse during the episode. Don't worry, he gets better.
• Sarah from The Amazing World of Gumball removes her head every night before she goes to sleep and puts it in the freezer.
• Animaniacs:
  • The Warners exhibit this ability.
  • In one short, "Moon over Minerva", a smitten Minerva Mink's head turns into a balloon because of her pounding heart and starts to float away before she catches it and hastily reattaches it.
• Arthur:
  • In "Meek for a Week", Arthur and his friends imagine Francine, who has recently taken to bottling up her natural aggression, will build up enough pressure that her head will pop off. We then see an Imagine Spot of just such happening with Francine's disembodied head complimenting the beautiful lawn she just landed in.
  • Similarly, a different episode has Buster's head fly away instead, only his head breaks into pieces upon landing.
• Absorbing Man after his battle with the Hulk in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
• The Batman: In "The Joining, Part 1", Batman and J'onn J'onzz are able to interrogate the severed head of Lucius Fox's robot duplicate. "In order to nod, you need a neck."
• This happens to the titular character several times in Beetlejuice, perhaps most unfortunately when he falls in with a group of headhunters. (In one episode, this actually causes his head and body to argue with each other, his body doing so by forming a mouth with its hand.)
• The titular character in Bunnicula has had his head knocked off or intentionally removed it to mess with Chester the cat on a few occasions, he can just stick it back on like it's nothing due to his supernatural abilities.
• XR in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is prone to this.
• In The Cleveland Show, this happens to Rallo after he runs with scissors.
  Rallo's severed head: Little help?
• Clone High has this happen, quite unsurprisingly, to the clone of Marie-Antoinette. In the second-to-last episode, she is decapitated by a helicopter. In the last episode, she appears alive and well, or at least as well as a girl whose head is no longer attached to her shoulders can be.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • In one episode, Courage, Eustace and Muriel have their heads chopped off by the Windmill Vandals' weapons (with their headless bodies frantically feeling around for their lost heads) and end up on each other's bodies. Courage's head (transplanted on Muriel's body) even uses Eustace's complaining head as a bowling ball to momentarily topple the marauders.
  • Moreover, this isn't the first time Eustace has lost his head. In an earlier episode, a space chicken that Courage defeats and leaves featherless and headless in the pilot episode returns to replace its missing head by using Courage's head as a replacement. It only partially succeeds with its plan, taking Eustace's head instead. Although defeated, the head never returns to its original body (at least until the next episode), culminating with the appearance of a headless walking Eustace that scares Courage.
  • Eustace loses his head again in "Mega Muriel the Magnificent" when Courage's computer temporarily takes over his body and accidentally hits a wall while running, causing Eustace to collapse part-by-part. His disembodied head then spends the remainder of the episode watching the possessed Muriel's death-defying stunts on TV, oblivious to the fact that he no longer has a body.
• In The Crumpets, Ditzy's head is detachable, and with its lightness and string, it floats and looks like a balloon. Both the head and body can function on their own. The string can secure her head to the body by a tied knot. Her head can come off by force or surprise. There is an episode where her head is unable to float.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Mr. Freeze is reduced to a disembodied head that can detach from his robotic body to move on mechanical spider legs by the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Cold Comfort". In a Continuity Nod, when he shows up again in the Batman Beyond episode "Meltdown", all that's left is his head. He's understandably not too happy about it. Early drafts for Beyond played this for Black Comedy, with Old Man Wayne keeping the head in his refrigerator. It curses him impotently whenever he opens the door.
  • Mr. Mxyzptlk in his debut episode of Superman: The Animated Series at one point removes his own head, which then regrows his body. Of course, he is a Reality Warper.
• In Dilbert, the villainous Lena decapitates her business rivals and keeps their heads in jars, where they are somehow still alive and able to talk. Notably, when Dilbert discovers one of these heads, he speaks to it first, as if he expects it to be able to answer. Lena suffers this same fate herself by the end of the episode.
• Drawn Together: Toot's body manages to flash her boobs at Xandir after she chops her head off in the first episode.
• Family Guy:
  • A Cutaway Gag in the episode "Forget-Me-Not" has Stewie meeting a woman's best friend whom she claims is hot. Said woman comes by holding her severed head.
  • Another cutaway in the episode "Hefty Shades of Gray" shows what it was like for Chris to get off sugar; when Peter asks him for the syrup at breakfast, Chris violently rips off his head in response. Meg laughs at Peter in this state, and in retaliation, he commands his body to throw mashed potatoes at her. At the end of the episode, Lois also rips Peter's head off when he tells her that the Griffins are joining the Trump administration.
• Scared Stiff, the ghost robot in Filmation's Ghostbusters, suffers from this.
• An episode of Flash Gordon (1979) features a race of aliens who can remove their heads.
• Futurama:
  • The Heads in Jars combine this with Brain in a Jar. It's eventually revealed to be a form of limited time travel, creating a tiny bubble in which the heads are perpetually in the time period during which they were alive.
  • Bender frequently suffers this, at least once as a Shout-Out to Star Trek: The Next Generation. In "A Head in the Polls", he purposely sells his body for lots of money (it's worth more due to supply and demand). He drives around in a little car until getting it back from President Nixon. He also uses his ability to detach his head to (what else?) rob people.
  • In "Put Your Head on My Shoulder", Fry has his head surgically removed and placed on Amy's shoulder after being severely injured in a car accident.
  • This happens to Hermes in Bender's Big Score. Somehow, he manages to keep yelling at people for several minutes after being decapitated, before he's put in a jar.
  • In Bender's Game, Zoidberg's head crawls on tentacles once it's been severed from his body. Since that instance took place in Bender's fantasy world it's not certain if the real Zoidberg can do it as well.
  • This happens to the Professor in the video game when Mom decapitates his head to use his brain in her plot against his will.
• Gadget and the Gadgetinis: Fidget gets his head bitten off by a tiger at one point in the episode "Claw's Collection". The tiger spits it out, none the worse for wear, a moment later, leading Fidget to pop it back on.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • Grim is frequently hit with this trope.
  • In an episode parodying "The Fly", Mandy unzips her head and accidentally zips onto a fly's body.
  • Grim inflicts this on Jack O'Lantern, a one-episode villain from the Halloween special. Justified in that he had wished for immortality before he was decapitated.
• The Incredible Crash Dummies seem to spend a lot of time without their heads (or arms or legs) attached.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: This happens to Heloise in the episode "Heads Will Roll", thanks to Dr. Scientist trying to obstruct her from entering Miseryville's Annual Mad Scientist Awards. Both her head and body were able to operate relatively well on their own, with the former managing to somehow build a vehicle out of sticks and stones to get to the awards and Dr. Scientist in time.
• Kaeloo: This happens to Quack Quack the duck, who is indestructible and can't be killed, almost Once an Episode.
• Kevin Spencer: Kevin fantasizes about this in one episode: he imagines himself living in an old age home as a head, refusing to die. The staff decide to just run him over with a car. This trope is played with in the final episode, with Percy.
• In the Canadian short Land of the Heads, a headless vampiress forces his husband to go out into the village and collect the heads of younger people to replace her old and wrinkled one.
• In the Canadian short "La Salla", after a man's head is knocked off, it rolls around the floor singing, while the headless body lumbers around looking for it. Of course, the main character losing his head isn't the only thing that makes this screwy.
• In a particularly bizarre episode of Legion of Super Heroes (2006), on their way to Find the Cure!, Brainiac 5's head is separated from his body by a Portal Cut; the body then proceeds to run amok while the frustrated Legionnaires try to recapture it.
• In the Lilo & Stitch: The Series Halloween Episode "Spooky", the episode's titular experiment scares Mertle Edmonds and her posse by shapeshifting to appear as Lilo (in her dead hula girl costume from earlier in the episode) with her head detached from her body.
• Dr. Pretorious from The Mask has heavily modified his body, including allowing his head to be detached from his body and move around on spider legs. Unfortunately, this tends to work against him, as his opponents tend to take advantage of this and knock his head off to distract him during his plans. His body can move independently on its own.
• Mega Man (Ruby-Spears): At the beginning of "The Incredible Shrinking Mega Man", Mega says "don't lose your head" to a disassembled Roll.
• Metalocalypse: Mashed Potato Johnson, the oldest living blues guitarist, educates Deathklok on the music, relateing several gruesome stories on the origins of songs, including one Shorty Johnnytop, who made a deal with the Devil and was hit by a train — "...as his head traveled in the air, he wrote 'Blue Train Blues'."
• Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot has this happen occasionally.
• Unsurprisingly happens a few times in Nightmare Ned's many Nightmare Sequences:
  • In "Headless Lester", Ned has a run-in with the eponymous campfire-story creep and afterwards walks back to his cabin, whereupon his constantly giggling head topples off his body after his worried cabin counselor grabs him by the shoulders. Notably, and a bit ironically, this was in the one episode of the series wherein the obligatory nightmare wasn't actually being had by Ned.
  • In "A Doll's House", this happens to Ned when he drives a toy car down his house's stairs in an attempt to escape his (now giant to him) cousins. His cousins "fix" the broken "dolly" by sticking Ned's head on a cheerleader doll, much to Ned's chagrin.
• In the Oggy and the Cockroaches episode "It's Been a Hard Day's Noise", Oggy gets this after repeatedly opening and shutting a door. Proof here.
• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit demonstrates the ability to attach and detach his head at will, with no justification other than the Rule of Funny. It is unclear how well he can function headless, as in two cases, his head doesn't get very far, and in the third, he's reassembled by outside means. A post-Disney short indicates that other characters in the setting can do this too.
• The Owl House: In the very first episode, Eda gets her head cut off by Warden Wrath. Luz is horrified, but thankfully Eda is still alive (though she does complain that losing her head is rather uncomfortable and inconvenient).
• The Patrick Star Show: Patrick can safely remove his head from his body, which gets used for a couple of jokes.
  • In "The Patterfly Effect", Patrick's head detaches from his body. It runs wild around the house until Bunny calms it down with some breakfast. Squidina brings his head back into the kitchen while the body is trying to eat.
  • In "Blorpsgiving", a wedding ceremony would involves both parties' heads being torn off their bodies to be refit into fancy clothes; harmless to Inga-Tron, but it would kill Quasar. Patrick, feeding popcorn into his severed head, casually comments, "I don't see what the big deal is."
• In one Robot Chicken sketch, the Crypt Keeper tries to find a new job after his show is canceled, but when he finds one he's quickly fired for disrespecting his manager. Following this, his wife leaves him, which drives him to suicide. When he tries to hang himself, his head pops off.
• Scaramouche the assassin android from Samurai Jack is seemingly killed in the first episode of Season 5, his head being the only part of him that survived. Five episodes later, it reboots, and he hops off to go tell Aku that Jack has lost his sword. As a head, though, he becomes prime Butt-Monkey material, being kicked and tossed around by people and denied entrance to a ship due to his lack of a body.
• Seven Little Monsters: Seven, the youngest of the titular monsters, is able to survive removing his own head.
• The Simpsons:
  • Scratchy from The Itchy and Scratchy Show loses his head tons of times thanks to Itchy. Whether he lives or dies from it seems to vary.
  • One Couch Gag has the Simpsons switching heads. This was repeated in the Season 2 DVD artwork.
  • In "Treehouse of Horror IV", Homer is decapitated while spending a day in Hell.
  • Homer's costume (which becomes real) in "Treehouse of Horror XVI".
• SpongeBob SquarePants
  • Man Ray's head is removable, as shown in his first appearance in "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III" when he takes it off and gives it to SpongeBob when he literally can't show his face in Bikini Bottom anymore. When he later appears in "Shuffleboarding", he weaponizes this by throwing his head at SpongeBob while fighting him and Patrick at the laundromat, only for it to fly into a washer and shrink because it's dry clean only.
  • In "Squid Noir", Patrick throws a rock at Squidward, thinking that he's being attacked by a monster when he's actually playing his clarinet. The rock pins Squidward's head to a wood mount on his wall, leaving him without a head.
  • Patrick's head harmlessly popping off his body for whatever reason is something of a Running Gag in the show (especially in post-sequel era). For example, in "Escape from Beneath Glove World", when Patrick finds out that the Hieronymus Glove robot literally wants Patrick's head, Patrick nonchalantly removes his head from his shoulders and gives it to him.
• In the Star vs. the Forces of Evil episode "Game of Flags", Star's Uncle Lump was decapitated during the Game of Flags at last year's family reunion, but they managed to save his head and attach it to the body of a horse. Later in the episode Uncle Lump's head bounces in from off-screen, still alive but incredibly annoyed that he lost another body.
• Steven Universe: In the Crossover episode "Say Uncle", When Belly Bag explains who Uncle Grandpa is, it makes Steven's and the Gems' heads float off their bodies and orbit the Earth. Pearl is understandably freaked out by this, she feels to make sure her head is back on her body where it belongs and then proceeds to Faint in Shock; Amethyst freaks out because her head reattaches backwards, and Garnet visibly shudders after being frozen in an uncomfortable expression. Steven takes it a lot better, giving Uncle Grandpa a fist bump when they come back.
• SWAT Kats has this in the episode "Metal Urgency": the Metallikats are reduced to heads scuttling around on spider legs after their bodies are crushed. This doesn't prevent them from driving the Metallikat Express or operating a pair of gigantic combat robots.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), Leonardo cuts off the Shredder's head in a Single-Stroke Battle. This would have been more effective if the Shredder wasn't actually an alien inhabiting a much larger robot body.
• In the Teen Titans (2003) episode "Fractured", Larry briefly makes little wings grow on Starfire's head, causing it to fly off of her body and needing to hold onto it to avoid it flying away.
• Tex Avery MGM Cartoons:
  • The outlaws in the short "Deputy Droopy".
  • This happens to Spike/Butch in the short "Darevil Droopy" when he tries to sabotage the "Test Your Strength" Game for Droopy.
• The Tick: In a time-travel episode, the Tick has his head momentarily teleported, minus his body, onto a golf tee in the 1950s. He loudly declares "Men in plaid!" at the sight of the golfers.
• Happens in Tiny Toon Adventures in the short "Born to be Riled" when Babs does an impersonation of Shirley Loon.
• The Tofus: This happens to Mrs. Tofu in the episode "The Great Escape" when Mr. Tofu performs a magic trick that ends up resulting in her head being teleported to a nearby box via magic while her now headless body is clearly seen still standing in the larger box.
• Transformers:
  • Megatron, Bulkhead, Sentinel Prime, Starscream and Waspinator have all suffered from this in Transformers: Animated.
  • As does Optimus Prime in Transformers: Generation 1. Unicron gets reduced to a head after his body is blown up, and he's incredibly dangerous whenever he regains consciousness.
  • All of the Headmasters have this as their backstory. (To summarize, the future Headmasters were a subgroup of Autobot pacifists called the Nebulans who were sickened by the conflict, and as a result had little trust for any other resident of Cybertron. to gain trust, five Autobots removed their heads and offered them to the Nebulans to earn trust. Later, the Nebulans could no longer avoid the war, but were still unwilling to trust the headless Autobots enough to reassemble them, so as compromise, they used special technology on five of their own, so they could become the heads, working with the five Autobots in a symbiotic bond. Each Nebulon controls the body, while its partner's true head — which is hidden somewhere — maintains telepathic communication while providing fighting skills and advice. Unfortunately, it isn't long before the Decepticons learn how to do this too.) Also, Arcee becomes a "new" Headmaster in the finale of the series, the same deal as the others.
  • Waspinator in Beast Wars, several times. In fact, numerous characters, primarily Predacons, end up in pieces, including an intact head. Silverbolt is the only Maximal who suffered this indignity while serving as a Maximal.
• Viva Piñata has this as a mild inconvenience. It happens to Dr. Quackberry in "Party Parasite".
• The What If…? (2021) episode "What If... Zombies?!" has this happen to Scott Lang. Since Hank Pym's attempt to save Janet van Dyne from the Quantum Realm ended with Janet becoming Patient Zero to a Zombie Apocalypse in this universe, Hope assumed that Scott had died with the others. Until the group makes it to Vision's stronghold and discover he made a cure for the zombie plague; while reduced to a head in a jar, Scott is alive and well thanks to cure testing. He even takes the time to make a lot of head puns at his situation.

Other

• Happened in the YTV block ZAPX Movies to Simon Mohos during one of the program blocks that happened between the scene from Beetlejuice mentioned above and the commercial break, where his head was lying on the floor calling for his headless body which was seen searching for his head in the background.

Real Life

• A series of controversial experiments by Robert White showed that it is possible to transplant a monkey's head onto a different monkey's body, although establishing spinal communication between the two was not possible. Originally proposed by the surgeon as a means of prolonging the lives of quadriplegics whose own bodies are failing, this technique has been soundly rejected by bioethicists... not because it's gruesome, but because donor organs can save more lives if they're distributed among many transplant patients, rather than the whole body being used to aid one.
• Mike the headless chicken was a chicken who survived a full two years after his owner tried to chop his head off and slaughter him for supper. The axe had missed one of Mike's ears and most of his brain stem, and a clot in his jugular vein prevented him from bleeding out. For all intents and purposes, Mike didn't notice that he was missing the top half of his head, and behaved like any other chicken; he could still walk around, albeit clumsily, and would try to peck the ground for food, preen himself, and crow. Mike's owner toured the country with him for the next two years, watering him with an eyedropper and feeding him worms and small grains of corn. Mike finally passed away in a motel room after choking on some corn, and his caretakers left Mike's cleaning syringes behind at the previous sideshow and couldn't save him.
• Tapeworms. Their head, known as the scolex, is all the tapeworm really needs to live, while the rest of the body, consisting of segments called proglottids, are just merely reproductive organs that in fact break away from the body to release its eggs. As such, tapeworm removal is very difficult, as even if the entire length of the body is removed, if the head remains, it will just grow an entire new body.
• Cockroaches can live for weeks after decapitation. They will eventually starve to death because they can't eat without their mouth.
• Back in the days where Losing Your Head was a punny way of saying "capital punishment", some curious people (again, we can't tell you who or when) did a series of experiments which basically consisted of waiting until the next execution, then shouting at the head to see whether and for how long they could keep its attention. The head can stay conscious for 10 seconds or so, though most lost consciousness instantly due to shock. We can thank the French for this information, since they kept using the guillotine for executions until the 20th century.
• When Charlotte Corday was executed via guillotine, a man named Legros disrespectfully picked up her head and slapped it across the face. According to witnesses, her face, which had been peaceful, briefly reacted and turned indignant. Legros was arrested for his actions.
• Internal decapitation, in which the skull is forcibly separated from the spinal column but the soft tissues of the neck remain intact, can be survivable if the injured person receives artificial respiration and other care. If the spinal cord isn't broken, a full recovery is also possible.
• A male praying mantis can survive for a short time after decapitation. The female has a tendency to bite his head off, and this feature allows the male to finish mating before he dies.
• Some snakes, particularly rattlesnakes, can react to their surroundings and bite up to an hour after decapitation.
  • A Chinese chef was bitten and killed by a cobra AFTER he had chopped its head off and was about to dispose of it.
• A scientific study showed that a type of sea slug known as Elysia is able to decapitate itself to rid its body of parasites (by getting rid of its entire body). It's probably able to survive because it's also a partly photosynthetic slug, and can sustain itself on photosynthesis long enough for its body to regenerate in a few weeks.
• The ocean sunfish (Mola mola) and its close relatives look like this trope, as their post-cranial structures are diminished to the point where their bodies appear to end just behind their gills. A subversion, as all essential body parts are present, just drastically foreshortened and compressed.

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