Bloodier and Gorier

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Compare 1963 with 1989.

"So give them blood, blood, gallons of the stuff!
Give them all that they can drink and it will never be enough!
So give them blood, blood, blood!
Grab a glass because there's going to be a flood!"

A type of Tone Shift and the violent twin of Darker and Edgier. It's a work that is made more bloody and gory than it used to be, or than its source material is. Heck, a lot of attempts to be darker and edgier end up being this instead.

When the Hayes Office was disbanded in favor of the MPAA rating system, along with everything else, films got bloodier. One aspect of this was remakes of horror films. Often this involves the presence of Made of Plasticine and Ludicrous Gibs that were absent in the original. It's often achieved by simply averting the Inverse Law of Sharpness and Accuracy or turning the Badbutt into a full-fledged Badass.

In horror sequels, this is the typical form of Sequel Escalation. Expect the producers to end up Overdrawn At the Blood Bank. In cases of comedies, this is an aspect of Crosses the Line Twice and Dead Baby Comedy. Expect to see a lot of High-Pressure Blood.

A Sister Trope to Darker and Edgier, Hotter and Sexier, Younger and Hipper.

Compare Gorn, Grimmification, Obligatory Swearing.

Contrast Lighter and Softer, Bowdlerize, Disneyfication.

Examples of Bloodier and Gorier include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • Infinite Crisis is the Bloodier And Gorier sequel to DC's original Crisis on Infinite Earths. The original Crisis had plenty of deaths, but very little blood. Infinite Crisis, on the other hand, had impalements, decapitations, and even heads exploding on panel ... and very few Gory Discretion Shots or Shadow Discretion Shots. No, the editors wanted to show just how Darker and Edgier they were by having as much gore on panel as possible.
    • And pretty much every chapter in the interquel 52 involving Black Adam has him popping heads, tearing people in half, bragging about ritual sacrifice, etc. Though even in Infinite Crisis he gets one of the best: shoving a guy's mask out the back of his face. "No more silly faces" indeed.
    • The added gore is even the motivation of the major villain Superboy-Prime who lived his whole life back when comics were much more sanitized. The idea of a world with imperfect heroes and gratuitous violence drives him insane, making him a major source of the comic's brutality.
  • The Red Lanterns are a Bloodier And Gorier Green Lantern Corps, who vomit blood as a weapon. One of them is a furry blue cat.
    • Technically, their blood is superheated plasma that burns in space. THEY VOMIT BLOOD AS A WEAPON
  • G.I.Joe as done by Marvel Comics. Well into the triple digit years, the company answered fan concerns of why some Joes don't die by having several Joes shot dead. On screen. Through the face. No blood whatsoever.
  • Ultimate Marvel's Ultimatum. It features morbidly obese mutant Blob devouring Wasp's ripped guts, then in Hank Pym biting off Blob's head then later getting blown up by suicide bomber Multiple Man, complete with flying guts and a skeleton being incinerated, then Doctor Strange getting squeezed by his own cape until his head graphically explodes, and so on.
  • IDW's Transformers comics aren't afraid to brutalize its characters. Cybertronian "blood" is purple, but flies about in quite a few stories (Megatron: Origin and Last Stand of the Wreckers, to name two).
    • Marvel's Generation 2 comic series was probably the height of this trope in Transformers. Techno-Gorn was everywhere, with artist Derek Yaniger commenting that he could get away with damn near anything thanks to the Mecha-Mooks principle. Nick Roche of the aforementioned Last Stand of the Wreckers is a Promoted Fanboy who pays tribute to Yaniger's style.
  • Spider-Man villain Carnage received two one-shots in The Nineties, Mind Bomb and It's a Wonderful Life. Both were as gory and squicky as you'd expect from comics which feature Carnage as the main character.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story "Bodycount" from the mid 90's involved Raphael and Casey Jones teaming up with a woman to help her get revenge on her evil twin brother who happened to be the leader of a street gang, the story is probably the goriest TMNT story to date people get their heads cut or blown off, gigantic holes blown through them, shredded by machine gun fire, eyeballs being shot or knocked out of their heads, blown to pieces by missiles,etc.
  • The Batman Adventures is darker and more bloody than the series its adapted from.

Film

  • The Thing is considered one one of the few films where being more violent is an asset. Not everyone agrees it is better, just that the violence works better than in typical horror remakes.
  • The Fly remake.
  • The Blob remake.
  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. Although both are remembered as a lot gorier than they actually were.
  • While the murders in the original Black Christmas were all quite violent, there wasn't that much gore. This is "remedied" in the remake.
  • Many of "Dark Castle's" remakes of William Castle films, such as House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts.
    • The original 13 Ghosts was a comedy...
  • The film adaptation of Watchmen is significantly bloodier and gorier than the book, which hardly shied away from violence itself. Just for an example: In the book, Dr. Manhattan killed people by disintegrating them. In the film they explode into Ludicrous Gibs. While even in the books his victims left bloody smears, the gibs were never visible.
    • The scene where Big Figure's stooges are trying to break into Rorschach's cell during the prison riot. Rorschach traps one of the thugs' hands in the bars of the cell, and in the comic, one of the other guys just slits his throat to get him out of the way. In the film, however, he hacks off the dude's hands with a chainsaw.
    • An exception is the destruction of New York, which was just a CGI nuke blast, not loads of people on the ground lying in pools of blood.
  • Saw (and indeed every horror series with a heavy reliance on Gorn) increases the level of blood, gruesome death, and blood expelled via gruesome death with each subsequent installment.
    • To be specific, Saw 1 and 2 were relatively light on the gore, using the anticipation of it to build fear more than the actual act of it, which in the case of the first film was fairly tame when it did happen. Saw 3 and beyond throw this idea completely to the wind and include scenes involving people putting their hands through buzzsaws, a head being crushed between two iceblocks, a man being vivisected by a swinging blade, a woman having her rib cage ripped open, a person being squished by a room with walls that move inward, and in the latest, a man being impaled by spikes that inject acid into him until he melts into a pile of guts.
    • Saw III included brain surgery and Saw IV included an autopsy. Neither situation contains any horror elements, but the Gorn evidently merited their inclusion.
    • Saw 3D (actually the final in the series), finally shows what happens when the Reverse Beartrap, a trap introduced in the first film but never used "to death" despite showing up in following films, opens fully without escaping.
  • Final Destination, in every progressive film, ups the ante in terms of Rube Goldberg style deaths and how bloody/convaluted they can become.
  • Though The Punisher isn't exactly lighthearted family fare in any incarnation (well, unless he's paired with a more traditional hero who prevents him from killing anybody), compare the first second movie to the sequel reboot, Punisher: War Zone." The first second is about action-movie-normal when it comes to the killing, but the second third basically said "screw plot, spurting blood is all we need!"
  • It was hard to top Evil Dead, but Evil Dead II managed it.
  • The Pusher trilogy by Nicolas Winding Refn is fairly violent throughout, but the third installment ends on a particularly gory scene.
  • Rob Zombie's Halloween II is much gorier than his already very violent remake. Whereas the previous film had some rather brutal stabbings and beatings, the sequel turns it up to eleven five minutes in, what with its graphic depiction of emergency surgery, decapitation by broken glass, head-crushings, and more.
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - the stage show had false razors that squirted about a tablespoon of blood. The Movie drenches a large room in one man's blood.
  • The Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland, while not as heavy on the violence as some examples on this page, has considerably more deaths, corpses, and eyes getting jabbed than you'd ever expect from a film called Alice in Wonderland.
  • John Rambo.
  • Stepfather III features more gore than the other three films in the series combined.
  • The climatic battle in Felidae is best summed up as Scar Vs. Simba made Bloodier And Gorier.
  • The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe was a lot bloodier than the original.
  • Street Fighter the Legend of Chun Li compared to StreetFighter. Especially when Chun Li shoots a mook while he's incapacitated and snaps Bison's neck.
  • The villain of the book I Know What You Did Last Summer never successfully killed anyone, while he kills several in the film, the sequels to which also up the red significantly.
  • Needful Things: In both the book and the movie, Nettie comes home after playing her prank on Buster Keeton to find that her dog, Raider, has been murdered. The book has him "merely" getting impaled with a corkscrew, but in the movie, Raider was skinned alive and hung up in Nettie's closet.
  • The 2010 remake of The Wolf Man is far gorier than the original. Numerous extras are mauled to death and even decapitated. The main character's transformation is also considerably more graphic.
  • Actually inverted with Star Wars, where Obi-Wan chops off an alien's arm with his lightsaber (the first time one was shown in use) and blood is seen on the floor. For the rest of series, all the violence is nothing but Bloodless Carnage, so this appears to have been an oversight.
  • House on Haunted Hill remake compared to the original, the original had relatively few deaths and none of the murders were shown, in the remake all but two of the characters are killed and some are graphically dismembered.
  • They seem tame now, but the Hammer Horror films were considered quite a bit Bloodier and Gorier (not to mention Hotter and Sexier) than the Universal Horror films they were re-imagining.
  • Piranha 3D to the original Piranha. Such examples include a woman getting cut in half by a wire, a woman getting her head mutilated by a boat propeller,a man getting his head smashed between two boats, etc.
  • The original Conan the Barbarian film was, while not blood free or wholly faithful to the book series, in line with the action/adventure films of the 80's. It's 2011 reboot, includes feet being impaled and squirting like popped ballons, liquid metal being poured over Conan's father, and a priest getting his head smashed into a staircase.

Literature

  • The Belgariad and Malloreon series becomes steadily more descriptive and violent as it progresses - probably due to the main character growing from innocent boy to mighty hero chopping heads off left and right. Expect bouncing limbs and gobs of brains as you get to the end of the seemingly kid-friendly series.
  • Arguably, the Sword of Truth is a Bloodier And Gorier, Darker and Edgier, and Hotter and Sexier version of the works of Ayn Rand.
  • The Novelization of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake is several times gorier than the film its based on. For example, in the film, Kemper dies when Leatherface bashes him with a sledgehammer; in the book, he survives this and, convulsing and bleeding profusely, is dragged down to the basement, thrown on a table, and killed when Leatherface hacks into his throat with a meat cleaver.
  • The dark Cinderella adaptation Sunny Ella features an unnecessary throat surgery performed on Cinderella by her stepmother and multiple stabbings. There's also a mildly gruesome vampire subplot.
  • The Looking Glass Wars certainly was intended to be this. However, there's only really two acts of violence that stick out from all the books in the trilogy. Otherwise, the violence is pretty standard, and no more different than any other cheap YA series'.
  • When reading certain Eighth Doctor Adventures (an Expanded Universe spinoff of the family timeslot show Doctor Who), you can get considerably drunk if you take a shot every time there's a gory injury. The Doctor in particular gets hurt in a majority of the books.
  • Count and Countess starts off as violent, but is subtle enough that a kid could probably pick it up and read the first few chapters. By the final chapter, it has become an outright bloodfest.

Magazines

Live-Action TV

  • Monty Python's Flying Circus spoofs this with "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days".
  • Torchwood episode 1 features a man being killed by an alien. Whilst this happens blood spews out from him as though he were a hose. This could be seen as part of the show's attempt to look Darker and Edgier than Doctor Who.
    • Not that its parent show hasn't toyed with this trope. The mid 70's, especially during Robert Holmes's tenure as script editor had everything from blood squibs, impalements to severed heads with stories like The Brain of Morbius and The Robots of Death pushing the envelope. Series 22 was also imfamously brutal, contributing in part to the show's 18 month hiatus.
  • Kamen Rider Amazon is this for the Kamen Rider franchise. The enemies there aren't Made of Explodium (except for some), they bleed a lot of technicolor blood and are easily decapitated. Just look at the deaths.
    • This even carries over to Amazon's appearance in Kamen Rider Decade. It's actually more subdued than the original show, but it's still Bloodier And Gorier since it's from a series where every other villain blows up when destroyed.
  • Supernatural is certainly Bloodier And Gorier than previous shows in the genre, such as The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, etc., as it pretty much revels in Gorn.
  • The second season of V-2009, with Anna killing a Visitor with her scorpion tail, making it rain blood(or some similar substance) and skinning a Visitor alive.
  • Deadliest Warrior was already a pretty gory show with all the dummies and pig carcasses getting chopped to bits, but the second season began filling their mannequins and pig carcasses with fake blood so that EVERY hit would result in copious bleeding (and with the pigs, gigantic pools of blood soaking the floor).

Video Games

  • God of War does this to many Greek myths, but by default. The myths were pretty violent to begin with, but you got to see it in the game. Plus those weren't really considered that violent in those days mainly due to Values Dissonance.
  • Mortal Kombat 9 is this towards the rest of the series. Considering how infamous the series already was because of how bloody and gory it was, this is saying a lot.
  • Star Wars: Republic Commando is bloody and gory for a Star Wars game, sometimes riding the fence between T and M-rated levels of gore. Then again, the game is essentially the less-than-smooth insertion of Western fire team (not "squad") tactics to Star Wars.
  • Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete. In the Final Battle, Sephiroth brutalizes Cloud by stabbing him eight times in mid-air, the last stab through his foot and knee. Ouch.
    • Well, bloodier than the original movie, anyway. The game itself featured following a trail of blood in the Shin-Ra building and a giant impaled snake.
  • Time Splitters Future Perfect is a partial subversion of this trope's association with Darker and Edgier. The game had blood and gore for the first time in the series, earning the franchise's first M rating from the ESRB. It's also arguably the funniest game in the series.
  • What, no Gears of War? Aside from the already gruesome chance to kill someone using an assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet attached, the sequel takes the Ludicrous Gibs factor Up to Eleven with a flamethrower, mortar, hand-carried minigun, grenades also acting as proximity mines and multiple types of executions than the standard curbstomping someone's head to the pavement in the original.
  • I Wanna Be the Guy looks like a close pastiche of early console games, except with the player character exploding in showers of gore whenever hit. That, and with the difficulty turned Up to Eleven.
  • The First Funky Fighter is a bloodier and gorier take on Whack-A-Mole. You even get to rip sharks in half with your bare hands.
  • Call of Duty:World At War took this to the extreme. High powered weapons and explosives could rip apart enemies, tearing off limbs and exposing internal organs. The ending consists of Sgt. Reznov hacking away at a German soldier on the top of the Reichstag before impaling him and kicking him off the building.
  • Prince of Persia: Warrior Within added in lots of blood that wasn't present in Sands of Time, despite your enemies being made of sand, and therefore not actually having any blood.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is this to the rest of the Metal Gear series. Not only is it a full-on Action Game, but you can now "Cut at Will". It shows extremely well in the trailer, with Raiden slicing soldiers into a billion little bloody pieces.
  • This happens in the later worlds of Eversion.
  • Inverted in the Command & Conquer Tiberium series. In the original Command and Conquer, infantry died bloodily, screaming loudly. In Tiberium Wars, however, these deaths have been replaced by Bloodless Carnage. Paradoxally, the series itself has been getting Darker and Edgier.
  • Thrill Kill was going to be this, as it was based off of Mortal Kombat with the gorn turned Up to Eleven.
  • The flash Adventure Game, Gretel and Hansel.
  • While blood, gore and organs are nothing uncommon of the classic splatter and zombie genres, Left 4 Dead 2 takes it to the extreme when compared to its predecessor. Shoot someone in the head and watch it crumble?: Lame. Shoot an infected down low and watch its intestines unravel and trail along the ground behind him as he continues to tear after you?: Awesome.
  • The House of the Dead Overkill, ironically, was actually toned down compared to the first three games and Zombie Revenge (and those typing games). House of the Dead 4, on the other hand, inverts this trope almost completely.
  • Serious Sam HD has significantly more blood than the original games it is an Updated Rerelease of, plus Ludicrous Gibs.
  • This is what the higher violence control settings in Rise of the Triad do compared to the lower ones. Also, compared to Wolfenstein 3D, upon which its engine is based, the game is definitely this with the gore on the default setting (which also happens to be the maximum).
  • Easy to mod into Duke Nukem 3D through editing GAME.CON in a text editor. Just don't go too overboard or killing an enemy with the rocket launcher can crash the game.
  • The original Soldier of Fortune had a rather cartoonish gore system, with limbs flying off from shotgun blasts at implausible range, heads blown clean off by the game's Hand Cannon, people inflating and exploding from the microwave gun, bodies reduced to bloody kibble by grenade explosions, etc. The second game had more scarily realistic damage modeling (jaws blown off, brains splattered, blood squirting from severed limbs, etc.). Payback returned to Itchy & Scratchy style gore.
  • The Battletoads Arcade Game is much bloodier than the console games that came before it, enough to justify the game listing each player's "Korpse Kount" and the "Greatest Gravefillers." It's still a game about anthropomorphic toads who can transform their body parts into various weapons, so it's very hard to take seriously.
  • Dragon Age: Origins is pretty bloody and gory for an RPG. Melee combat with enemies that aren't bloodless always results in blood sprayed over the combatants. The finishers take the take though: death by being beaten with a shield, stabbing and decapitation, being impaled on a greatsword, etc. One of the special traits of the unique greatsword Ageless even increases the chances of a bloody kill. There is also a spell that turns a corpse into a bomb of blood and gore and another spell that freezes enemies in place while the blood erupts from their bodies.
  • In Quest for Glory III, many death animations show the hero melting, (if poisoned,) impaled by a spear, or turning into a food product such as a hamburger or (in a famous easter egg) a pizza. (When eaten. And no, it is not as graphic as you think.) While it is not overly bloody, it is certainly more so than the first two games. This is surprisingly Inverted in the fourth and darkest game, in which some deaths just show (vegetarian!) food products if the hero is eaten, and most deaths just show the hero falling. Only few examples avert this.
  • Dot Flow compared to Yume Nikki. Yume Nikki simply has a recurring bloodstain. .flow has blood and/or rust show up pretty everywhere.
  • Perfect Dark in comparison to Golden Eye 1997. There were blood animations in the latter, but not the detailed spatter effects seen in the former. Also, they remain even after the enemies' bodies have faded.
  • Zigzagged with the Super NES port of Smash TV. It was actually Bowdlerised from the original arcade game, but clearly more violent than the typical Super NES game.
    • Same deal with the game adaptation of True Lies. Not as violent as the Sega Genesis version, but still very violent when compared to other Super NES titles.

Web Comics

  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja may not have become gorier per se, but its recent conversion to color has made all the blood rather... well, bloodier.
  • The Order of the Stick, being a stick figure comic, would not seem to have much potential for blood and gore. This page changes that, with the first appearance of the spell Implosion and a character being ripped in half on-panel, complete with red bits.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Happy Tree Friends does this as a way to mock Tastes Like Diabetes shows.
  • Does it count if it's with robots?
    • The Transformers Generation 1 movie also did this with robots.
    • Beast Wars was the worst about it, having characters blown or hacked apart. Of course, they were almost always put together just fine, making it pretty hard to believe in the deaths of some characters, who endured much less than Waspinator does every day of his life (his spark is in his head
    • GIVE ME YOUR FACE. (And that line doesn't cover the staff impaling that is also included.)
      • Not mention what happens to poor Ravage. Robot injuries were fairly common in the cartoons and comics, but the films made it much more visceral.
    • The Transformers: Generation 2 comic was probably the "goriest" incarnation of Transformers ever. It had all the visual trappings of the Dark Age of comics with truckloads or blatant robot substitutes for organs and blood.
  • G.I. Joe: Resolute, although it's not really to excess, largely avoids the A Team Firings from the original series and actually shows Snake-Eyes getting his muting injury, though it's covered in a cloak.
    • Although the Joes now shoot and kill Cobra troopers, it should be noted that the bad guys still fire like Stormtroopers.
  • Often how Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons work.
    • In one episode, Ned Flanders makes a movie retelling events of The Bible in incredibly gory fashion. For example, when King Solomon gives his legendary judgement , he simply cuts the baby in half then and there - and then has a My God, What Have I Done? moment and cuts himself in half.
  • The later episodes of Family Guy can get quite gory with things like people's limbs being torn off, disemboweled, heads exploding, torn in half, etc, compared to the earlier episodes where hardly any blood was seen.
    • Even when a guy that was shot about 20 times and died had not a single drop of blood shown coming from him.
  • The 1978 The Lord of the Rings cartoon even compared to the live-action ones
  • Adventure Time with a couple episodes after season 1.
  • In the Sixth Season Futurama episode "Prisoner of Benda" a member of a stage audience gets his arm cut off, however all you see are rings representing his skin, muscle/blood and bone. Later, in the Season 7 episode "Tip of the Zoidberg", Zoidberg is forced to give Fry a liver transplant for his Simpson's Jaundice brought on by excessive bleeding, with Leela as the donor. Cut to the rather catastrophic end result: Leela is sawed in half at the waist, her upper torso hopping around the operating table, with blood dripping from incision area into a clearly visible pool of it.

"All you had to do was stop cutting my spine when I said 'Stop! You're cutting my spine!'"

  1. A notable example included an Aborted Arc featuring Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds Fou-lu decapitating usurper Soniel with the very Evil Weapon Soniel had tried to use to kill him. In non-Japanese non-Playstation releases, this scene ended up completely cut from the game, despite the fact it was depicted only via silhouette.
  2. involving Soniel's decapitation