Beat Still My Heart: Difference between revisions

my heart is in my hand.. (yeech!)''|'''[[Tom Lehrer (Music)|Tom Lehrer]]''', "[[The Masochism Tango]]"}}

 

 

 

 

Note that the "just ripped out" variety is [[Truth in Television]]: Cardiac tissue, unlike other types of muscle, generates its own muscular impulses, so a heart ''can'' continue to beat for a brief time after it is removed from the body.

 

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=== Supernatural examples ===

** I assumed that it was just [[Rule of Cool|coincidence for drama's sake]].

** Hey, this is a world where [[Functional Magic|Nen]] is regularly used by the characters. Who's to say that the criminal wasn't a Nen user or something?

* In one strip of ''[[Axis Powers Hetalia (Manga)|Axis Powers Hetalia]]'', Russia's heart somehow falls out and splats onto the meeting table, to the horror of the other Allies. [http://www.mangafox.com/manga/axis_powers_hetalia/v01/c004/2.html Shown in a silly yet still creepy way.]

* Dark Schneider, the title character of ''[[Bastard]]'', is also known as 'The Immortal', for very good reasons. When he tears his own heart out to save his adopted daughter/lover, we are treated to a double-dip into this trope. Not only does his heart continue to beat for a while outside his body, splattering blood all over her, but later, when he regenerates, he couldn't just regrow his heart inside his body, nooo... instead, his heart reforms in the air over his gaping chest-wound, and starts BEATING, before tendrils shoot out of the hole to grasp the newly-formed heart...

* When the [[Mayincatec]] cut out the hearts of their sacrifical victims they will often be shown still beating.

* ''[[From Dusk Till Dawn]]'', people! Ripping a vampire's heart out from his own ribcage, and after seeing it still beating (and the vamp still kicking), staking it with a sharpened pencil, sure counts here.

* Although the heart is never technically ''removed'', the beating heart of Draco the dragon in ''[[Dragonheart]]'' can be revealed by lifting up a flap on his chest so that Bowen can {{spoiler|destroy it.}}

* In ''[[Jason Goes to Hell]]: The Final Friday'', after Jason is splattered by a S.W.A.T. team in the beginning, his remains are taken to a morgue. The mortician, while inventorying the bloody mess, begins dictating a description of [[Faux Symbolism|the rotten, twisted black heart of Jason Voorhees]]. As he's staring at it, it begins to beat, gradually at first, then faster, mesmerizing him into picking it up ''[[Squick|and eating it]]'', at which point he becomes possessed by the spirit of Jason and resumes the killing spree.

== Mythology ==

* Koschei the Immortal, out of Russian myth -- his soul/heart (a vortex of flame) is hidden inside a needle, which is hidden inside an egg, which is hidden inside a duck, which is hidden inside a [[Everything's Worse With Bears|bear]], which is kept in an iron chest, which is buried under an oak tree(or chained to the branches), on an island that flickers in and out of existence. Someone ''still'' manages to find it and destroy it. Koschei is immortal until his soul is destroyed.

* [[Older Than Dirt]]: In the ancient Egyptian text called ''The Tale of Two Brothers'', the younger brother Bata removes his own heart and places it on top of a tree. He tells his older brother Anpu/Anubis that he will receive a sign if anything happens to the heart, and that if something ''does'' happen, he is to revive the heart by putting it in a bowl of water. Of course, the heart is eventually knocked down when the [[Femme Fatale]] cuts down the tree, and it dries up into something resembling a date. Anpu finds it and puts it in water, whereupon it grows to its original size and starts beating again, hence reviving Bata. This could be classified as Literature as well, but the story contains a number of mythological elements.

 

* There's the classic Bill Cosby routine about him listening to a radio drama about a chicken heart that not only keeps beating...but grows...and grows...and grows. I forget if that was an actual episode he was remembering.

** ''Lights Out'', episode "The Chicken Heart".

 

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern have both swallowed beating snake hearts on camera as part of their Travel Channel shows. (See below.)

{{quote| '''Repair droid:''' We did not have the parts.<br />

'''Doctor:''' Fifty people don't just ''disappear'', where -- Oh. You didn't have the parts, so you used the crew... }}

* Nobel prize winner Dr. Alexis Carrel decided to take this trope to a new height. Taking tissue from a chicken heart, he kept it alive for ''over 20 years''. No one was able to completely replicate the experiment, and [[Science Marches On|later advances in biology]] proved it impossible, as cells can divide only a certain number of times. How Dr. Carrel got his results is still a mystery.

** Normal cells can divide only a certain number of times. One of the defining features of cancer is that, well, the mechanism that limits the number of times a cell can divide got broken in the cancerous cells. This, incidentally, means that most cell lines used in cell biology labs come from cancers; most of which have outlived the person it killed...

* Not a heart, but a close neighbor: researchers have built a machine to keep human lungs alive outside the body, to keep them fresh much longer for transplant. You can find videos of the disembodied lungs under a glass dome, ''breathing''.

** Not quite as creepy as it sounds, as lungs can't inflate and deflate under their own power even when they're inside the body. The machine makes them expand by altering the pressure surrounding the (passive) organs, which would work just as well for a couple of balloons as for lungs.

* When scientists use stem cells to grow cardiac tissue, they look for [[Creating Life|spontaneous beating in the plate]] to see if/where it worked.

* While any human organ harvested for transplant will be packed in ice slurry for transport, this is particularly crucial for donor hearts. Because it keeps on beating, a heart that isn't chilled down immediately will quickly exhaust its available oxygen, resort to glycolysis to make ATP, and fill its tissues with destructive levels of lactic acid, effectively suffering the ill effects of a heart attack ''while outside the body''.

 

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[[Category:Horror Tropes]]

[[Category:Beat Still My Heart]]