Flaying Alive: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"Bored now."''|'''Dark Willow''', from [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer|Buffy]] season six episode "Villains."}}
We as humans like our skin to be intact. It protects everything inside the body from various diseases, and contains a great quantity of nerve endings — meaning that to have it forcibly removed is excruciatingly painful, and being stripped of enough of it will lead to a horribly slow death. As a result, flaying is the signature method of [[Cold-Blooded Torture]] for some of the nastiest [[Complete Monster
Scalping is a form of this that was particularly prevalent in [[Injun Country]]. In real life it was probably more common to take the scalp from a dead foe than from a living one, as their main purpose was to turn in for bounty (more portable than the whole skin.) But there were certainly some documented cases of people surviving a scalping.
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* In 1934's ''[[The Black Cat]]'' Dr. Vitus Werdegast ([[Bela Lugosi]]) does this to architect Hjalmar Poelzig ([[Boris Karloff]]) with very good reason.
{{quote|'''Werdegast:''' How does it feel to hang on your own embalming rack, Hjalmar?}}
** The film is (just) pre-[[Hays Code]], but the scene is all [[Shadow Discretion Shot
* Happens quite a bit in the various ''[[Hellraiser]]'' movies.
* Leatherface almost completely skins a still barely living man with an electric carving knife in ''[[The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2]]'', and in ''The Beginning'' he flays Dean's arm with a knife (apparently [[For the Evulz]]) before running him through with a chainsaw.
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* In ''[[Saw|Saw 4]]'', one of Jigsaw's victims is trapped in a device designed to slowly scalp her by pulling her hair.
* Happens to one of Dr. Furano's mooks in the opening of ''[[Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl]]''.
* [[Predator
* The [[Imperial Japan|Imperial Japanese Army]] does this to a significant character in [[Zhang Yimou]]'s first film, ''[[Red Sorghum]]''. This is done to remind about the brutality of the [[Second Sino-Japanese War]], during which the film is set.
* ''[[Train]]'' opens with this happening to a guy, though unlike the rest of the film's victims, he is mercifully unconscious.
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* In ''[[The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle]]'' by [[Haruki Murakami]], one character tells the story of his time in the war where he ended up captured and was [[Forced to Watch]] his comrade skinned alive. The narrator only escaped torture by pretending that he didn't understand Russian.
* The short story ''The Anatomy of Desire'' by John Theureux is about a man who was skinned and is still alive, and falls in love with a nurse at the hospital.
* This is a favored tactic of [[Evil Sorcerer|the Black Mages]] from the ''Mithgar'' books; their victims need to be in pain in order for the Mages to wrench the life essence needed to power their spells, and so most become adept [[Torture Technician
* [[Friday the 13th|Jason]] does this quite a bit in ''Jason X: Planet of the Beast''.
** He kills the sheriff this way in ''Friday the 13th: Hell Lake''.
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*** {{spoiler|Not just irony: since Willow accidentally set up the whole "she and the Scoobies can't see each other" just by convincing herself that she couldn't face them after what she did, did she accidentally create the whole Gnarl situation by convincing herself that she deserved to be punished for flaying Warren?}}
** Glory threatened to do this to Spike in Season 5 (''think I can do it all in one strip, like an apple?'') but doesn't make it very far.
* The Skin Taker in ''[[Candle Cove]]'' often threatened Pirate Percy and
* ''[[Criminal Minds]]
** A deranged cult in the episode "The Tribe" does this to a group of university students, making sure to prolong the suffering of the victims for as long as possible.
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* In "A Yard Too Far" from ''[[The Ren and Stimpy Show]]'', Ren, in a [[Zany Scheme]] to steal hog jowls from a windowsill, tears off Stimpy's skin. The camera pans away from Stimpy before his skin is pulled off... and after Ren pulls it off, [[Getting Crap Past the Radar|it pans back to Stimpy, who is now completely skinless]]. [[Serial Escalation|Skinless Stimpy shows up again later, reacting to his skin being mauled by the baboon.]]
* In an ''[[The Simpsons|Itchy and Scratchy]]'' [[Show Within a Show|episode]], Itchy nails Scratchy's feet to an escalator, which peels away his fur and skin, but doesn't kill him. Later on, the skinless cat is wearing his fur as if it were a coat, [[Butt Monkey|and then]] is beaten to death by anti-fur militants.
* During the ''[[Regular Show]]'' [[Halloween Episode]], {{spoiler|Muscle Man}} is dragged of by The Wizard. He returns a few moments later, ''[[media:
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