"Ooh, they're goin' tae have tae glue you back together... IN HELL!"
— The Demoman, Team Fortress 2, "Meet the Demoman"
The (usually) video game equivalent of the deliberately ridiculous splatter seen in Peter Jackson's early films. Video game makers who include gore and dismemberment effects (commonly known as "gibbing" or "gibs", short for "giblets") will often go overboard with them and make relatively simple weapons create far more grotesque splatter than you would expect from their real-world equivalents. This can be especially jarring, as the default handling of violence in most media is to err the other way—undersized or nonexistent entry and exit wounds are more common than ones that properly match the weapon used.
Crosses the Line Twice is the key to this trope: Seeing a person realistically take a bullet to the jaw would quickly veer into Nausea Fuel. If their head instead explodes into a cornucopia of viscera and grey matter, we have a harder time taking it seriously and can relax some.
Compare Made of Plasticine (this is the video game equivalent) and Bloodier and Gorier. Compare and contrast Pink Mist, a tamer, more realistic phenomena usually associated with real-world head shots. See also the Chunky Salsa Rule, Overdrawn at the Blood Bank, and Gorn. And, of course, Bloody Hilarious and Not Enough to Bury.
By the way, in case you want to avoid possible fan backlash, it's pronounced "jibs", not "gibs" with a hard G sound. (For the record, "giblets" is also pronounced with a "j" sound.)
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Gantz - nearly all deaths, and even many non-fatal episodes... Which is saying something for an Anyone Can Die series of nearly 400 chapters, with an in-panel body count in the thousands, literally (with multiple events in different arcs producing hundreds of mangled corpses in a matter of pages). With realistic 3D CG art, detailed anatomy, and common loss of limbs. Oh, and better yet, the author rarely splattered someone that "had it coming" - instead of cheering, the audience was more likely to be emotionally invested in or at least sympathizing with the newest crop of brutal deaths.
- Mobile Suit Gundam SEED does this a few times. Most aggressively in "Phase-35: The Descending Sword" where people pop like balloons.
- Full-body explosion is the fate of more than a few of Kenshiro's enemies in Fist of the North Star. You Are Already Dead, indeed.
- Late in Corpse Princess, Hokuto punches someone so hard they turn into red mist and leave nothing but their kimono floating off in the wind. Noteworthy for being a case of "slapping into a red mist" not being hyperbole.
- In episode 7 of Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, Ledo attempts to fight a Hideauze, or squid-like creature humanity is at war with, underwater. However, due to the risk of hitting a friendly, as well as the sheer difficulty of aiming and using beam weaponry, Ledo orders his mecha Chamber to grab it, and squeeze it until it explodes. Large chunks of it splatter onto Chamber as a result.
- Happens constantly in the manga adaptation of One-Punch Man, usually but not always by the fist of the titular character. The sheer power on display means that people and monsters die in absurd and excessive ways, often leaving body parts scattered across the page. One person is even turned inside out by a single punch that leaves a four-foot-wide hole in their chest, and one Big Bad even uses this when he literally heals completely from being reduced to a bloody stain and an eye after being subjected to this trope though it ultimately does him little good.
- Probably the crowner was the fate of Mosquito Girl. After she defeats Genos, she goes in to finish him but before she can, Saitama steps in and slaps her so hard that she ends up splattered up the side of a tower block. "Mosquitoes suck" indeed.
- In Psycho-Pass, people shot with a Dominator set to Lethal Eliminator mode explode like over-ripe tomatoes.
- In Rebuild World, Akira is forced to expend a huge number of CWH rounds to survive a swarm of Yataka Socrpions rushing at him through tunnels. The result is that the scorpions are more or less splattered across the walls and turned into unrecognizable mush. Hunter HQ is unable to determine just how many he killed because of their bodies being mashed together by every One-Hit Polykill, instead paying him based on approximation based on how long he was fighting.
- When Akira uses two assault rifles filled with armor-piercing rounds to ambush a fire team raiding Sheryl's relic shop, two of them end up like this and a third is Blown Across the Room, the leader Zelmo having used them as (not so bulletproof) human shields despite each having Powered Armor.
- When Akira ambushes part of The Rival Katsuya’s Battle Harem, due to him using expensive rounds, that team gets reduced to this.
- Old World Artificial Intelligence androids can reduce a soldier to this with a wave of their arm as a Technologically Advanced Foe.
- In The Voynich Hotel, Elena the maid, who is the ancient witch Lachrymarum, returns home from visiting her mother in Russia to find her ex-yakuza boyfriend Kuzuki Taizou being mutilated by hitmen sent to retrieve the money he stole. She calmly repaints the room with their blood.
- My Hero Academia: The usual result when Tomura Shigaraki uses his Decay Quirk on living beings is a few pieces on a pool of blood. His dog, sister, parents and grandparents ended up being his first victims as a result of his Traumatic Superpower Awakening from the abuse he endured due to his father.
- The result of Suletta crushing an unfortunate terrorist to save Miorine and her father in the season finale of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, complete with one of the man's arms flying right past Miorine.
Comic Books
- The deaths of Lori and Billy during the Prison Massacre in The Walking Dead.
- The Punisher MAX: "Twelve-Point-Seven mm Dushka's just like our fifty cal. Really designed to be used on aircraft. You use it on people [at close range]— You turn them into◊ paint◊.
- During the superheroes' abortive attempt to prevent the 9/11 attacks in The Boys, one hero tries to push her way through the panicked passengers at supersonic speed. This results in a fountain of ludicrous gibs spraying out of the plane.
- In Über, the Ubers regularly turn ordinary humans into bloody salsa with their Eye Beams.
- In the Spy vs. Spy comics in MAD, the characters would sometimes explode without gore: just a big poof with their clothes flying everywhere. Once Peter Kuper took over the series in 1997, he generally tended to render the spies' wounds much more explicitly.
- Wonder Woman (1987): While Mayfly's death due to running into a gate at superspeed while trying to escape prison is shown as a Gory Discretion Shot some of the splatter ends up on frame. In the next panel while the main portion of her corpse is not shown two disgusted prison guards are shown looking at the bloody hallway and discussing whose job it's going to be to mop her remains up.
Comic Strips
- Played straight in Calvin and Hobbes of all places. Calvin is making a traffic safety poster with the slogan "Be Careful or Be Roadkill!" We never see the finished result, but he states that he hopes he has enough red crayon, and later mentions that he splattered the whole thing with chunky spaghetti sauce so that not only would it look real, it would attract flies.
- Implied but not shown in a Garfield strip, where Jon talks to Garfield about his great-uncle Floyd who drove a dynamite truck, while looking at a photo album:
Jon: Look, here's a picture of him there! And there, and there, and there...
Fan Works
- Alea Iacta Est: Purity's energy blasts can cut through buildings, so a point-blank full power blast to a human doesn't leave much behind.
"Hookwolf was … as far as I can tell, they've collected enough pieces to determine that it was indeed Hookwolf, and he is indeed dead."
- Blanket is rather nauseated by the results of Hookwolf's storm of blades going all-out on a human being.
There is a word for what is beyond blended, but if I think it right now I will never cook with one again.
- Child of the Storm has Harry prone to using this on non-human monsters (particularly vampires) when he ends up in a particularly bad mood.
- Collateral Damage: After Brandish ignores repeated warnings about the Heberts' Disproportionate Retribution technology, and attacks Taylor from behind, there's a noise. When Taylor turns around, Brandish isn't there anymore. Or rather, she's everywhere.
There were no large pieces, no intact bones, no recognisable organs. It was almost as though she’d been spread like butter, or perhaps run through a woodchipper and sprayed evenly over the area.
- This is said to be all that's left of Freddy Fazbear's head after Dante shoves it into a demon-powered fan in Dante's Night at Freddy's.
- A Darker Path: Crawler can't be conventionally killed, so Atropos has to thoroughly blow him up.
When I poked my head up, my first impression was that there had been a whole lot of Crawler, and now he was everywhere.
- Happens to Matt in Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami.
- What happens to a Scyther in New World after encountering Mewtwo.
- Lots and lots in Poké Wars, as a result of the removal of the dampeners keeping Pokemon attacks from being lethal.
- Invoked in The Parts We Play, when District Three Tribute Axel’s repositioned mines literally disintegrate District One Tribute Glimmer when she steps on one by accident after he sets them off.
- Despite being set in the Star Trek universe Bait and Switch (STO) isn't shy about this.
- In Eleya's nightmare, she's saved by an MP squad that uses a blast assault phaser to kill the matron attacking her. Her torso explodes and covers the badly wounded Eleya in gore.
- In chapter seven an Orion mook takes four phaser rifle shots simultaneously from Eleya's away team.
"His shield generator explodes with a shrieking crack and sends bits of him everywhere."
- Legacy of ch'Rihan, during a ship-to-ship battle between a Romulan warbird and the Narada (seen from the warbird's perspective):
"A structural member explodes out of the floor and the operations officer vanishes in a fountain of copper-green."
- The Headhunt: The aftereffects of a Phlebotinum Breakdown in a starship's Inertial Dampening systems leaves a thick red paste all over the ship's bridge.
Lieutenant Kate McMillan: Where the hell is the crew? And what the hell is this shit?
Nameless security guy: L.T., this shit is the crew.
McMillan: (throws up) - Emergence: Yang is so strong compared to ordinary humans that her punches tear through people and make them explode.
- In My Huntsman Academia, Izuku's first use of One For All smashes a Giant Nevermore into a dozen pieces, basically making it explode as feathers and guts fly everywhere.
- In Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction, cow-orker Jimm meets his demise by "the bad guy from the game" blowing him into "smitheroons".
Films — Animated
- The mutant sea-monkeys in Frankenweenie end up like this. And this is a PG movie, for fuck's sake!
- Alluded to in Kung Fu Panda 2, with Shen's giant cannon.
Master Ox: What's in the box, Shen?
Shen: Want to see? It's a gift. It's your parting gift. In that it will part you. Part of you here, part of you there. And part of you waaay over there, staining the wall. - A PG variant occurs in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: anyone hit by one of Jack Horner’s baby unicorn horns will burst into confetti.
Films — Live-Action
- Army of Darkness. At one point, a human is dragged into a pit by a monster. For best results, bear in mind at this point that the human body contains about 5 litres of blood. Now watch as a geyser of blood blasts out of the pit.
- Predated by A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) when Johnny Depp's character bites it — he is sucked into a waterbed and a geyser of blood comes out from it. Perhaps somewhat justified because we're dealing with Freddy Krueger here; if he wants you to have more blood, you're damn well going to. When Lt. Thompson arrives at the scene, he asks where the coroner is and gets the response "He's been in the John puking since he saw it."
- Blade II:
- A bomb designed to go on the back of the head to control an adversary goes off, completely disintegrating the entity and leaving nothing but a fine red mist. Granted, it was at waist level, but not even a shoelace was left.
- In another scene, sunlight hits a vampire's jaw - it blows apart in a gory mess upon contact.
- Bumblebee: A robotic variant; Bumblebee throws a chain at Dropkick while he's in helicopter mode and he reflexively transforms back into robot mode, causing the chain to get caught on his moving parts and gruesomely distribute through his body, gravely wounding him. Just as he's about to respond, Bumblebee yanks hard on the chain, shredding Dropkick into gibs of robot parts.
- The infamous "cat scene" in The Boondock Saints. Dictated by Rule of Funny—a cat with a hole in it, or even blown in half, is sad. A cloud of flying meat? Crosses the Line Twice.
- In Centurion, a Pict is thrown head first into a tree. His head explodes.
- What happens to Chucky in Child's Play 2. Chucky, after a dip in the molten plastic and at a final attempt of killing Andy. Kyle quickly saves Andy by sticking a loose air hose into Chucky's mouth and ends up blown into a bloodied mess.
- In Cloverfield, if you get bit by a "parasite, you explode IN HALF. It's also contagious!
- District 9. In amid all the totally serious, gritty Apartheid metaphors are a bunch of alien weapons that can do all kinds of fantastically gory things to a body. It's horrifying at first, and then it's just awesome: they explode into tiny little pieces that litter the landscape. From a single shot from a man-portable small arm that can be held in one hand if need be. Which possibly doesn't need reloading. The first time you see one used, the recipient splatters across the main character's face. It's actually a funny spot, which is needed considering the darkness of the movie.
- D-Day demonstrates the effects of someone getting shot point-blank via Grenade Launcher.
- Dogma: What the fuck happened to that guy's head?
- In Doomsday, just about the only character who doesn't explode in a shower of gore when he dies is Sergeant Norton.
- In Elysium, there are a few glorious instances of people exploding (as well as one droid turned into scrap metal in a similar fashion). The main villain is dispatched by being thrown off a gantry with a live grenade attached to him; he's blasted into several large chunks.
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Extended edition has Galadriel turn an orc that was messing with Gandalf into meaty bits.
- Kill Bill- Boss Tanaka, in what can only be described as a fountain of blood. High-Pressure Blood doesn't begin to describe it. Most of O-Ren's story is somewhat like this.
- Kingsman: The Secret Service employs a variant, with more focus on "ludicrous" than "gibs". People have Amusing Injuries, but without the blood spatter seen in other movies adapting Millar comics — best example being heads exploding in fireworks.
- Played with in The Last Jedi when Kylo Ren orders a massive attack by multiple rapid-fire heavy weapons against Luke Skywalker. The barrage produces a cloud of red haze... which dissipates to reveal Luke standing there unharmed. He's a Force-generated illusion; the red haze is a dust from a red mineral beneath a thin crust of salt.
- In The Last Stand, a mook is wearing a bandolier of shotgun shells when they get hit by a signal flare. The shells start to cook off, then a lot of them explode at once, effectively blowing his torso apart.
- Machete, though many viewers have expressed disappointment that most of the gore is computer-generated.
- In Man of Steel, the Kryptonian brute is shown ripping apart an A-10 and crushing the pilot before they could eject. Because it is seen from a distance it isn't too gruesome, but there is no mistaking the "pink mist" spraying into the wind.
- Weapons used in Men in Black actually go so far into the ludicrous department it's no longer grotesque. The aliens simply explode into slime, which is less disgusting than gibs and less disturbing than gutted bodies.
K: Oh, you've got some entrails on you...
- Paradox contains a shot of what is supposed to be a decapitated body that looks more like the head was mashed into porridge.
- Pulp Fiction's infamous I Just Shot Marvin in the Face scene ends with Marvin's blood and brains completely obscuring the rear window of Jules and Vincent's car. And also soaking Jules and Vincent in his blood and brains.
- The Rambo series was somewhat light on the gore until Rambo IV. The end battle especially. For starters: Exploding heads, gallons of blood everywhere, a guy literally gets his leg torn off by bullets and another is ripped in half, blown apart by mortar shells, and Big Bad getting eviscerated by Rambo at the end. And don't forget the poor saps that were sitting in the jeep that were Rambo's first two victims of the last battle. What's more, the .50 BMG guns Rambo and Schoolboy use really will do that kind of damage!.
- This is how most of Hugo Martinez's men are killed off during the final battle in Rambo: Last Blood, through shotgun shells or explosive booby traps.
- At the end of Ready or Not (2019), Mr. Le Bail does this to all of the surviving members of the Le Domas family, causing them to explode in a shower of gore that paints the dining room — and Grace — red with blood. (Children included.) A hundred years ago, their patriarch had made a Deal with the Devil for his family's fortune, and in exchange, they regularly sacrificed goats and, occasionally, humans (in the form of a Deadly Game of "hide and seek") in order to keep the curse at bay. And when Grace manages to survive their "game", well...
- RoboCop (1987):
- The scene where one of Boddicker's flunkies gets dosed in toxic waste. As he shambles about the factory, begging for help, he gets hit by a speeding Bodikker. His body bursts the same way a water balloon would.
- Not quite "gibs," but there's also the OCP executive chosen to demonstrate ED-209's capabilities. He gets riddled with hundreds of bullets before someone finally pulls the plug.
- Saving Private Ryan. Though the carnage is realistic, there is one scene that applies for this trope, where a man needs to put a "sticky bomb" on the wheels of a tank. And the bomb explodes before he does it. And then an Anti-Aircraft Gun gets used on humans...
- The most famous scene in David "Body Horror? Yes Please!" Cronenberg's Scanners involves two men in an auditorium engaged in a sort of psychic duel: the loser's head explodes in a torrent of blood and pulpy meat.
- In order to emulate the comic series on which it was based, gibs were used in Sin City to the point where simple punches and kicks would result in a big, sloppy gush of blood. It matches the over-the-top nature of the comic series.
- Tremors movies:
- Tremors: Graboids + bombs = raining gibs. This is really a Running Gag, as the characters are usually spattered with the aforementioned gibs.
- Tremors 2: Aftershocks: Shrieker + .50 cal anti-tank rifle with solid bronze bullet = splattered shrieker. Also, shriekers + 2.5 tons of high explosives = raining gibs.
- Tremors 3: Back to Perfection: Ass Blasters + spear + cannon fuse = raining gibs.
- Tremors 4: The Legend Begins: Graboid + traction engine + big hook and belt = raining gibs.
- Triple Threat (2019): Jaka kills Mook, the sole woman amongst the mercenaries, by dismembering her with her own grenade launcher.
- TRON: Legacy: Sure, it's technically the computerized form of blood, but the majority of program deaths have them dying in a graphic spray of voxelsnote . Seen in the first film as well, when Tron gets a Boom, Headshot! on Sark.
- Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is awash with blood and gore. So much that it got an NC-17 rating, and some scenes had to be cut/edited for its theatrical release.
- When Carolina is killed by an explosion in Vlog, her blood paints all four walls of the room.
- Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan kills people by exploding their body splattering everyone nearby with flesh and bones.
Literature
- In The Bible, evil Queen Jezebel is run over by Prince Jehu, leading to this, and also to Not Enough to Bury after her remains are eaten by dogs:
So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot. (2 Kings 9:32-33)
- The Halo novel Contact Harvest introduces the M99 Stanchion, a coilgun sniper rifle capable of inducing this trope on anyone it hits. Considering it fires a .21-cal round at 15 kilometers per second, the gory effects are realistic/expected.
- In the Dale Brown novels Fatal Terrain and Warrior Class, an aircrewman is shredded by a fighter's cannon and a triple-A emplacement, both firing 23mm rounds, respectively. In Strike Force, Hal Briggs, his Mini-Mecha already severely damaged by anti-tank missiles, is put down for good by 30mm cannon.
- In the last book of the third series of Warrior Cats, Hollyleaf falls in rage and shreds mouse to pieces, until all that remains of it is described as red pulp.
- In the Paladin of Shadows book Unto the Breach, Viktor Mahona takes a 12.7 round through his abdomen and much of his body simply disappears.
- In The Wheel of Time, Mazrim Taim establishes the viability of male wizards, long shunned because they're doomed to go insane, with a single command: "Asha'man: kill." It's not described precisely what spell the Asha'man use, but when applied to the front rank of the attacking army, it causes its members to explode. And it can be applied to the succeeding ranks very, very quickly. The aftermath (described in the next book) goes on at some length about the burial of the victorious dead, in clear contrast to the defeated.
- Mack Maloney's Wingman series of pulp novels often included descriptions of what happens when the pilot of a plane (or an unfortunate soldier on the ground) is even clipped by a 20mm round from a Vulcan gun. Considering that Hawk Hunter has six of them mounted on his F-16, they don't fare well.
- In Going Postal, the mysterious "Sorting Engine" in the basement turns out to be a device driven by a flywheel with a pi equal to three, thanks to the incompetent genius of "Bloody Stupid" Johnson. While letters can go through it unharmed, anything else that touches the wheel (like one unfortunate former Postmaster, and later on an angry banshee assassin) is reduced to bloody chunks.
- In Raising Steam, death by steam engine turns people into red mist. Halfway plausible when applied to boiler explosions, a very real danger of the Steam Age, but not with a death that leaves the engine intact and might have involved a blast of live steam. (A horribly painful way to die, but not annihilating.)
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: During the Defense Against Dark Arts class, Snape shows what happens to victims of the Inferi and it's not pretty...unless you consider a bloody stain on the floor pretty. Notably, Inferi are just a type of aggressive magical zombie with broadly the same physical capabilities as a human being, meaning they don't accomplish this through strength, but through sheer enthusiasm.
- When Morgoth duels King Fingolfin in The Silmarillion, he opens many "mighty pits" in the ground with Grond. Later, he steps on the king's neck, and Fingolfin drives his sword through it, spraying blood everywhere and filling the pits. Morgoth was gigantic and survived this, but was permanently scarred. The amount of gore must have been enough to qualify for this trope, although Tolkien leaves it to the imagination. Whether they ever recovered any piece of Fingolfin, is unknown. While there was a funeral for him, they might just have buried his flag. This incident stands out in Tolkien's mythos because most character deaths are fairly clean. Swords and other medieval weaponry don't tend to cause giblets as often as modern weapons, and characters in Tolkien's stories don't tend to go for massive overkill.
- Discussed in Falling Man by Dom DeLillo. While removing pieces of glass from the face of a 9/11 survivor, a doctor talks to him about suicide bombers who blow themselves literally into tiny little fragments. People who aren't killed by the explosion but are standing near it and within striking range sometimes report to emergency rooms months later with little hard lumps in their skin, which turn out to be fragments of the bomber, embedded in the flesh. The doctor poetically calls this "organic shrapnel".
- In Ravenor Returned, a psychic confrontation between Toros Revoke and another psyker ends with the latter exploding in a shower of blood and gore.
- Second Apocalypse: The one-eyed member of the Mutilated is instantly reduced to a "mucous rain" after mouthing off to Ajokli.
- Star Trek: Federation: At one point the USS Enterprise-D reroutes warp power to her structual integrity field, giving the hull a rigidity equivalent to the core of a neutron star, then proceeds to ram the Romulan warbird that had been attacking her. While the Enterprise survives intact, the Romulan warbird is reduced to bits of debris no larger than a computer chip.
- Awaken Online weaponizes this as one of the powers of the Necromancer class: the spell Corpse Explosion does Exactly What It Says on the Tin which causes a dead body to explode and damages players. Jason uses this to great effect such as sending zombies into groups of enemies or launching them into the air like hand grenades.
- This is how the murder victim is found in Magic for Liars: split vertically in two halves with all the blood in their body soaking the carpet. Similarly, medical operations are undertaken by expanding/disassembling the region, making edits, and then shrinking/reassembling all the parts; the text calls this process "exploding".
Live-Action TV
- The Boys (2019): A-Train running into Robin turns her into a gory mess on the pavement. All that's left intact are her hands.
- Breaking Bad: At the end of the very second episode, the contents of a bathtub filled with hydrofluoric acid in which a body was being dissolved burst through a ceiling, spilling an unidentifiable half-liquefied slurry of meat and bone chips all over the hallway. The opening of the next episode deals with the cleanup of said mess.
- An episode of CSI: Miami features a man whose gun has about a bajillion barrels mounted in the approximate shape of a human body. He calls it the Vaporizer. Its effect on a human body is, well....
- Inverted, to no small extent, in Dexter - the main plot kicks off with a neatly-dissected corpse with no blood whatsoever. The protagonist is utterly shocked... and impressed.
- Doctor Who: In "Partners in Crime", this is implied to have happened to Miss Foster, if the "SPLAT!" after she falls to her death was any indication.
- The infamous end of minor character Maneo from The Expanse. When his ship, going at about 900 ᵏᵐ∕ₛ is instantly slowed down by The Ring. Just the outside of the ship. Everything else inside (Including Maneo) are still going the same speed. Combine that with the instant stop, and Maneo is reduced to human pudding.
- In Farscape, early attempts by Scorpius at manned wormhole travel leave the unlucky pilots oozing out of their cockpits in the form of red sludge.
- Game of Thrones: It's unclear if Summer is eventually Devoured by the Horde, but the wights are seen repeatedly hacking him off before the scene cuts.
- In "The Trash and the Snake" episode of Justified, the Wiz is holding a handful of high-powered explosives which use a cell phone signal as a detonator. When a nearby cellphone rings, the explosives detonate, reducing the Wiz to chunky salsa and completely coating Duffy and Boyd in blood.'
- Lovecraft Country: Ji-Ah's tails entering Byung Ho cause him to burst apart in a shower of blood.
- NCIS: Episode 4x07, "Sandblast", a Marine is blown to bits when he triggers an explosion while attempting to knock his golf-ball out of a sand trap.
- In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Crossover", Bashir shoots Odo of the Mirror Universe with a phaser, causing him to messily explode. Of course, Odo (Mirror Universe or not) is a shapeshifter made out of morphing protoplasm in humanoid form, so it was more like popping a balloon full of goo than tearing apart a fleshy being.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation has the episode "Conspiracy", in which Picard and Riker phaser a man who is being controlled by a Puppeteer Parasite. His head explodes and his chest disintegrates, allowing the creature to emerge. With chunks of the man's flesh still dripping off.
- On Supernatural, when an angel attempted to fight an archangel, bystanders ended up picking bits of the unfortunate angel Castiel out of their hair. It happened to the same angel again later, this time from Lucifer.
- Castiel got his revenge, though. In his new role as The Starscream and the new God, he did it to Raphael in the season 6 finale.
- Then there was the time Bobby, not possessing a bamboo dagger blessed by a Shinto priest, threw an okami into a wood-chipper.
- In the Torchwood mini-series Children of Earth, enemy operatives plant a bomb in Captain Jack Harkness. Jack becomes chunky salsa dip. Then, since Jack is a fixed point in time and space, he is graphically depicted pulling himself back together. Once he finally comes back to life, he's still not complete, and consequently spends a lot of time screaming.
- True Blood vampires explode into blood and guts with no skeleton or anything that looks like an actual vital organ, when they are staked or decapitated. They look like bloody water balloons.
- A non-organic example happened on Robot Wars during the infamous Series 4 semifinal battle between Hypno-Disc and Splinter. Hypno-Disc was the most-feared competitor in Series 4 for a very good reason, and while Splinter made a valiant effort, once its ablative front plate was torn off by Hypno-Disc's heavy spinning disc, poor Splinter was, as host Craig Charles put it, "splattered". There were barely two components left connected to each other.
Music
- Military Squaddie Songs tend to play this straight. Justified, as military itself is pretty harsh business. Classic examples would be the US paratroopers' song Blood on the Risers and its German counterpart, Abgeschmiert aus 100 Metern.
- They Might Be Giants: "Certain People I Could Name" opens with the narrator describing the aftermath of a grisly battle scene in a movie.
The few surviving samurai survey the battlefield
Count the arms, the legs, and heads, and then divide by five
Pinball
- Shows up at times in the Judge Dredd pinball, most notably when the "Sniper" mode ends with the gunman falling out of his tower and splattering all over a chain-link fence.
- An Easter Egg in Sega Pinball's GoldenEye has Bond get blasted into tiny bits.
- This is a regular feature of Balls of Steel, usually when the player hits one of the wandering playfield enemies with his pinballs.
- In Lethal Weapon 3, firing all six bullets from the Uzi into an enemy causes him to explode into large bloody chunks.
- In Sega Pinball's Starship Troopers, When the Mission Officer briefs you before attacking a planet, press both flipper buttons to make him explode.
- Not surprisingly, the entire playfield of Stern Pinball's The Walking Dead is covered in blood.
Tabletop Games
- Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution: Unsurprisingly, a game that credits Scanners as an inspiration is somewhat fond of this trope.
- Espers with Brain Drain can make other esper's heads explode.
- Overloading psychokinetics make people’s heads explode and their own head will explode if the overload kills them.
- Overloading telekinetics will involuntarily rip apart anyone and anything too close to them and they'll be ripped to shreds if the overload kills them.
- Sufficiently powerful telekinetics can also rip people and objects apart voluntarily.
- Warhammer Fantasy and 40,000 games:
- There's an example in Dark Heresy's Critical Damage tables, where the developers took what looks like a disturbing amount of glee in describing, for example, the results of a high-explosive shell to the head. Some damage results can result in other characters being injured by flying shards of bone. This is turned up to Ludicrous Gibs when one considers how Critical Existence Failure works in this game. A starting character can take approximately ten damage before hitting the Critical Damage charts. These charts are rough, but generally survivable, up to roughly 8 points of critical damage. If a starting character is hit with a burst of bolt gunfire for 17 damage, he may be critically injured on the ground. Then when he is punched in the face for two more damage, his head may spontaneously explode, because that's what the Critical Damage Chart says happens.
- Rogue Trader and Deathwatch, which use the same system, both use the same rules, as does Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, although the lower-tech level means that it isn't quite as gory. Still more than qualifies though.
- In regular Warhammer 40,000, the "Instant Death" rule serves to represent this trope. When a model is hit by a weapon of sufficient calibre (typically a weapon with a Strength of twice or over the model's Toughness value, usually something like a lascannon or missile launcher), it doesn't matter how many Wounds they have, they're dead. The game even notes that "it can be imagined that the target exploded in a suitably gory fashion".
- One fluff line about Tau railguns mentions that an Imperial Guard tank looked fine from the outside save for the two tiny holes on either side... and the spray of liquefied crew on the ground.
There was a small hole punched in either flank — one the projectile's entry point, the other its exit. The tiny munition had passed through the vehicle with such speed that everything within the hull not welded down had been sucked out the exit hole, including the crew. We never identified their bodies, for all that remained of them was a red stain upon the ground, extending some twenty metres from the wreck. - There's an example in Dark Heresy's Critical Damage tables, where the developers took what looks like a disturbing amount of glee in describing, for example, the results of a high-explosive shell to the head. Some damage results can result in other characters being injured by flying shards of bone. This is turned up to Ludicrous Gibs when one considers how Critical Existence Failure works in this game. A starting character can take approximately ten damage before hitting the Critical Damage charts. These charts are rough, but generally survivable, up to roughly 8 points of critical damage. If a starting character is hit with a burst of bolt gunfire for 17 damage, he may be critically injured on the ground. Then when he is punched in the face for two more damage, his head may spontaneously explode, because that's what the Critical Damage Chart says happens.
- Kind of up to the Game Master, but in Paranoia experimental weapons from R&D quite frequently have ... interesting ... effects upon the target. And the user. And the user's teammates. And, oh, everyone within a half-mile or so. Paranoia is for GMs who like killing player characters, and players who don't mind their characters dying if they can do so in an entertaining way. "I press the red button on the strange black gizmo I got from R&D." "A voice comes from it: 'Tactical Thermonuclear Warhead activated. Detonation in 2.3 seconds. Have a nice daycycle, Citiz-BOOOOOOM!'"
- The old Middle Earth Role-Playing Game had some quite... interesting critical hit tables. One for each damage type. They included lines like "The electrical shock vibrates the targets' bones into dust." and "The target is hit in the ear, all the ear-wax runs out."
- This is true of its parent game Role Master, which featured not only spectacular criticals which would shame Mortal Kombat, but slips on imaginary turtles for the critical fumbles.
Theatre
- Implied in Urinetown after Bobby gets thrown off a building.
Officer Lockstock: Shovel and a mop, Mr. Barrel. You know the drill.
Web Animation
- Happy Tree Friends. Nearly every episode has one, if not several, extremely gory deaths. But that's the whole point of the show — seeing the cute-looking cast of Woodland Creatures get hilariously and painfully slaughtered again and again mercilessly.
- DEATH BATTLE!: Several episodes have the losing combatant turned into lifeless fleshy chunks by their victorious opponent.
- "Carnage vs. Lucy" has Lucy ripping Carnage to bloody shreds with her second move via her Vectors (the first being to hold him in place when he first lunges at her). Thanks to Carnage's Healing Factor, he just laughs it off, even as she does it several more times throughout the fight. Ultimately, she has to vaporize him with a literally explosive punch to finish him and make sure there's nothing to regenerate from.
- "Saitama vs. Popeye" has Saitama splatter Popeye with his first punch. Thanks to a nearby can of spinach, Popeye walks it off and eventually emerges victorious.
Webcomics
- In Dominic Deegan, Well-Intentioned Extremist Celesto Morgan's trademark move is to overload people with Chaos magic, causing them to explode rather messily in all directions.
- The Order of the Stick's Belkar Bitterleaf turned his Evil Counterpart (well, Good Counterpart) into a salsa dip (extra chunky) after getting a large number of adventurers to gank him. Or at least, cut off his tail and stuck it into a jar of salsa. He also used said kobold's head as a chip bowl. The kobold in question is attempting to avenge his father, whose head ended up as Belkar's hat.
- Rustallica's decapitation-by-pineapple in Sarah Zero.
- The Sacrifice comic on L4D.com features some incredibly over-the-top gibs.
- Exterminatus Now #474: "Stay Sanguine" has Simmons talking with a seer named Dewhurst over hologram. It's fairly obvious from the first panel that Dewhurst is covered in blood, and he's directing a cleanup effort through the whole page. The page ends with Dewhurst requesting that a helmet be developed for his lab - not really protect his subordinates from the incident occuring again, just to at least "catch the splatter".
Dewhurst: Well we must've been pointed right at the anomaly because right as we opened channel, the psyonic blowback took both of my espers out like that.
Simmons: ... What do you mean 'took out'?
Dewhurst: (yelling at somebody offscreen) Gavin! You're just spreading it around, you pillock! Did your mum never teach you how to use a mop?
Simmons: Never mind. - Metompsychosis Union: Killit's flashback to the last time they were freed includes memories of tearing through a bunch of scientistis, some of whom they made quite a bloody mess of.
- Schlock Mercenary: Neeka, the Tough's newest surgeon. Adorable, very skilled, very, very messy. M'Conger gets a first-hand taste, and then there's her previous employers' references...
Tagon: Whaaa... she did that with knives? It looks like a bomb went off.
Chelle: Watch! She's going to reassemble all three of those guys, minus the fifty-seven bullets they had in them. - In Grrl Power, a minor villain is shot in the shoulder; a few panels later, the projectile goes off, basically julienneing him off-panel and leaving Sydney drenched in blood and decorated with a chunk of his torso and an ear, among other things. Sydney compared it to blowing up a man-sized garbage bag filled with lasagna.
- Unsounded: Knock destroys Toby's reanimated body by slamming a lift door on top of it, flattening him and sending limbs and blood flying.
- Kill Six Billion Demons: During King of Swords, God-Emperor Solomon David demonstrates this trope on the losers of his tournament.
Web Original
- Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG: Rule 1867. Can't have a gun that reduces people to Rorschach tests.
- Ten Little Roosters has this for the deaths of Gavin and Lindsay.
Western Animation
- TRON: Uprising actually manages to be worse than TRON: Legacy in this regard, using the shattered voxels as a way of depicting scenes of brutality and murder that wouldn't be out of place in a Tarantino flick in a Disney cartoon.
- This frequently happens to Waspinator in Beast Wars.
- Mega Man (Ruby-Spears):
- When Hard Man gets shot in the mouth, his body explodes violently.
- Bomb Man is struck and gibbed by his own weapon after Mega Man copies the Hyper Bomb and returns fire with it.
- In the season 2 finale of The Owl House, the Collector decides to take revenge on Belos for betraying them by flicking him into a wall with so much force that his Blob Monster form simply explodes, reducing the Big Bad of the past 2 seasons to a smear on the wall. Once the Collector starts having their fun with the isles, the kids have to run through Belos's splattered remains to reach the portal, and a glob of the stuff even drips onto Hunter's shoulder!
Real Life
- Any high-explosive or fragmentation weapon, from a simple hand grenade to a bunker-buster, can turn a human being to red paste. The more powerful the explosive, the thinner the paste...
- During the infamous Byford Dolphin Explosive Decompression accident, the fourth diver practically exploded when the diving bell was opened accidentally. The pieces were then sucked out and ejected, with one piece landing atop the oil derrick some 30 feet above the accident site.
- Being sucked into a jet engine. Anyone who has survived it is because the jet engine was shut down before they hit the blades at full force.
- Speaking of planes, when a passenger plane collides with terrain or water at a high rate of speed, its occupants will often be shredded by the impact forces. Take Swissair Flight 111 for instance, which impacted the Atlantic Ocean at nearly 350 MPH. There were 229 people on the plane. Investigators recovered 15,000 separate body parts: 66 parts for every person on the plane. note
- Weapons like heavy machine guns, anti-material weapons, sniper rifles, medium and general-purpose machine guns, and some standard firearms can cause irreversible damage that one would never want to see close up. The Barrett .50 Caliber Anti-Material Sniper Rifles, D Sh K Heavy Machine Guns, M2 Browning Heavy Machine Guns, and standard Miniguns like the M134 Minigun won't leave much of you to recover, only to clean up.
- The infamous Exploding Whale incident: To get rid of a rotting whale carcass, the Oregon Highway Department decided the best method would be to blow it up with a half-ton of dynamite and leave the pieces for the birds to eat. It was expected that the placing of the explosives and prevailing winds would push most of the debris out to sea, but instead, the explosion was ill-timed and the wind stopped blowing just as the whale detonated, resulting in most of the whale being thrown straight up rather than in an arc. The blast hurled whale chunks as far as 800 feet away, with one chunk caving in the roof of a car (thankfully, a parked one.) The car's owner said that he'd just bought it during a dealer's "get a whale of a deal" event.
- A similar instance of this occurred in a crowded street in Tainan City, Taiwan. The corpse of a beached sperm whale was being transported on the back of a truck to a facility for study, during which the buildup of gas from decomposition caused part of the carcass to violently explode and shower the entire area with blood and entrails. The resulting mess and lake of blood were described as being disgusting and smelling absolutely foul.
- Tragically, those who jump in front of trains tend to end up this way. A lot of the time, the fragments are so unrecognizable they can't actually be buried. Someone has to clean the remains off the track afterwards, too.
- Animals don't exactly fare much better; an example being a case of a donkey getting hit by a speeding train in Pakistan, and what the train does to it can best be described as 'disassembles the animal into a collection of variously-sized pieces of meat in a fraction of a second', with the resultant pieces strewn everywhere. To the train, this collision doesn't even dent it, and it keeps on going unchallenged.
- There is an unofficial rule among emergency workers in most racing series that no racer is formally declared dead at the track unless this trope applies (one version described: "Nobody dies unless they are decapitated or incinerated in their car"). Anything short of Ludicrous Gibs and at least SOME resuscitative effort will be attempted until the driver can be declared DOA at a hospital.
- Per at least one book on IRL safety operations, this was put in place after Gordon Smiley's death in 1982 (which in and of itself would qualify for this trope) which delayed Indy 500 qualifying for four hours until a coroner could be summoned.
- The death of Russell Phillips is possibly one of the most gruesome NASCAR deaths in history. The roof of his car was ripped off at high speed during a crash, and Philips was essentially crushed between the steel fence and his car's interior and splattering his body all over the track. It was so bad they had to hose down the stands (and the audience). In video footage, an EMT is shown rushing to his car, then stopping and just walking away upon realizing there was nothing to resuscitate.
- Of technical note—in many jurisdictions, an EMT cannot declare resuscitative efforts futile (and thus declare death) unless the patient has "Legal Signs of Obvious Death." Those include the following: decapitation, decomposition, gross incineration, and gross evisceration.note This means that an EMT must sometimes declare Death By Ludicrous Gibs.
- Blowing from a gun, an old method of execution that consisted of firing a cannon with the victim bound to the front, typically resulted in the victim's remains being scattered over a wide area.
- Wood chippers and several similar pieces of farm machinery. Until safety devices were mandated in the 1980s for these, there were regular accidents involving people being sucked into said chippers. All with the exact same outcome as displayed in The Coen Brother's Fargo movie. Deaths with these things numbered in the dozens just in the USA for decades, and still occur rarely due to malfunction or a complete idiot operator overriding the safety gear.
- This can happen to anyone in an armored vehicle if they are unfortunate enough to be leaning against an outside wall if the armor takes a direct blow that doesn't penetrate; if the vehicle is not adequately buffered on the inside, the resulting shockwave travelling through the armor and into the soldier can completely destroy their body and spray what's left of them all over the inside of the vehicle.
- Industrial accidents will almost certainly invoke this and/or Cruel and Unusual Death.
