Gory Discretion Shot: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:blood spatter.jpg|frame]]

 

Blood or brains are seen splattering against a wall and the rest is left to the imagination.

Sometimes, a variation occurs where blood seeps out of the bottom crack of a door or some opening in order to imply that someone is either severely wounded or killed.

 

 

Combine it with [[Bloodless Carnage]], and you get the [[Sound-Only Death]]—the audience ''hears'' the gunshot and the body hitting the deck, but what they ''see'' is (for instance) the victim's hat falling to the ground with a hole through it. Or the killer walks through a door and we hear gunshots and screams after it closes behind him. Also crosses paths frequently with [[Scream Discretion Shot]].

{{noreallife|Real Life does not have [[Discretion Shot]]s of any sort.}}

 

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* In ''[[So Ra No Wo To]]'', Filicia's old tank platoon's communications officer, Anna, is killed by a HEAT round (along with everyone else). The viewer gets a [[Lightning Reveal]] of Anna's arm, still holding her trumpet, protruding from under a heap of twisted metal.

* Used in [[Haou Airen]] when {{spoiler|Hakuron kills Kurumi's first would-be rapists.}}

** Also, when {{spoiler|Fuuron kills the shopkeeper for refusing to sell him the Dragon Sphere}} in volume 8.

* It's funny to say that this happened in the first episode of the 1997 adaptation of ''[[Berserk]]'', where all we see is a shot of a table top being splattered with blood when Guts cleaves a mook in two with the Dragon Slayer. Coming from a series that ''thrives'' on grossing the audience out with as much [[Gorn|graphic violence]] as possible, that is.

** We would have seen Guts splattering [[Giant Mook]] Bazuzo's head in two with the added bonus of his eyeball popping out from blunt trauma like in the manga, had there been no Gory Discretion Shot in the second episode as well.

 

== Art ==

** Even more impressive is the fact that, even though they turned the gore [[Up to Eleven]] in the movie, this scene remained intact, and was still way more unsettling than anything they actually showed. Keep in mind, those included a man's forearm bone puncturing through the skin as his arm was broken, Dr. Manhattan ''literally'' exploding people with his mind, and a mook getting his arms sawed off with a grinder. The gore is relatively easy to accept once the shock value wears off; trying to imagine what happened is far more likely to keep you up at night.

* When {{spoiler|Gammid rips Javi's sigil-enhanced arm off}} in ''Negation'', a silhouette is used to imply the action.

* The Ultimate Spider-Man comics were much more open with dark and edgy topics, but still refrained from graphic violence, being a mainstream comic aimed mostly at teens and young adults. One discretion shot in particular stands out, though, when the Kingpin executes an insubordinate...subordinate by crushing his head between his massive hands. Most of the event takes place in a panel that shows only Fisk's tower viewed at a distance, though later on in the comic a clip of security footage does show the moment where the man's head caves in (still a discretion shot, however, because Fisk had put Spider-Man's confiscated mask over his head).

* Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog is exempt from most forms of gory violence, but it's not immune when discretion shots are involved.

** Another one occurs in issue #234. Antoine D'Coolette is charged with protecting King Elias while Dr. Eggman launches another assault on the Freedom Fighters and the Royal Family. Metal Sonic Mk. II is about to infiltrate the Royal Family's escape vehicle, when Antoine catches up and distracts Metal Sonic enough to let go. Eggman, in frustration, activates Metal Sonic's self-detruct mechanism, catching Antoine's entire body, throwing him to the ground, unconscious, and presumably mortally wounded. Every other panel scene with Antoine in it after the explosion obscures his face, whether by special angles, or someone obscuring his face. For example, Sonic's head while speeding as fast as he can with Antoine off to the hospital.

* Subverted in an issue of the [[Archie Comics]] ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' series. Bebop and Rocksteady are at the zoo when they see all the animals trapped in cages. They point their guns and start shooting, and it ''looks'' like they've killed the animals...but when they meet the Turtles we see that Bebop and Rocksteady actually shot out the bars of the zoo cages to free the animals. They take the animals back to a Garden of Eden-like alien planet that they've decided to call home, stopping off only to drop the villains the Turtles have defeated back on the prison planet they escape from.

 

== Film ==

* ''[[Mystery Team]]'' does this to prevent the audience for seeing the effects of a cherry bomb {{spoiler|HITTING A MAN SQUARE IN THE FACE}}

* In the 1946 [[Roy Rogers]] classic ''My Pal Trigger,'' a Gory Discretion Shot is used when the cougar attacks Trigger's mother, and later when Roy surveys how badly she's been hurt. Of course the extent of the injury couldn't have been shown on screen back in '46, but Roy's ''reaction'' to it creates a [[Nothing Is Scarier]] moment because you ''can't'' see the gruesome injury, freeing your mind up to conjure horrible things.

* In ''[[Tomorrow Never Dies]]'' a [[Mook]] is thrown by [[James Bond (film)|James Bond]] into a printing press; all that's seen is the baddie falling through the paper and the ensuing copies coming out stained red.

{{quote|'''Bond:''' They'll print anything these days.}}

** Later, Dr. Maturin himself gets shot in the gut. He has to operate on himself, with *no* anesthesia. The best the viewer sees of this operation is a blurred view through Dr. Maturin's mirror, and the surgeon's own grimaces.

* Lawrence of Arabia employs this when Lawrence is captured in Dera'a. While T.E. Lawrence's autobiography describes the attempted rape and the beating in great detail, including the shocking (for the 1920s) admission that {{spoiler|Lawrence enjoyed it}}, the movie manages to be *more* creepy with the Turkish official coughing as he watches, the look on Lawrence's face as he braces for the first blow, and Lawrence's friend seeing him get tossed outside afterwards.

 

== Literature ==

* ''[[Narnia|The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe]]'': "The children did not see the actual moment of the killing. They couldn't bear to look and had covered their eyes."

* Apparently [[Older Than Radio]] in ''[[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'', when Huck and Jim come across the [[Haunted Headquarters|House of Death]]. There's a dead body inside the house, and Jim goes to investigate, leaving Huck ([[Take Our Word for It|and also the reader]], as Huck is the [[Unreliable Narrator|narrator]]) to the side. All we learn of the body is what Jim tells Huck: He was shot in the back, dead for two or three days and [[Nightmare Fuel|naked]].

* A variation is used in the [[Hardy Boys]] Casefiles and the [[Nancy Drew]] Files. Whenever somebody had to die when the Boys or Nancy were present they usually did so in a way that no blood was actually spilt. An example is a [[No Celebrities Were Harmed]] Howard Stern called Ron Minkus getting electrocuted at a mall whilst the Boys were there.

{{quote|''Most of the wizards managed to turn their heads away. A few - and there are always a few like that - watched in obscene fascination.''}}

* In a very early version, Ancient Greek Tragedies often used this trope. In the ''Medea'' a woman is given a dress that melts her skin; in the ''Bacchae'' a group of women tear a man to pieces and prance about with his body parts; in ''Oedipus Rex'', Oedipus uses pins to claw out his eyes; in the ''Agamemnon'' the title character is brutally murdered in his bed. All of these gruesome scenes are described but never seen, given all the more detailed description precisely because they are hidden from sight; the death of Agamemnon is noted for being particularly gruesome.

 

* The ''[[MacGyver]]'' episode "The Heist" has a non-gory gory discretion shot in which the death of an embezzling accountant is represented by a shot of his glasses falling to the ground with a [[Moe Greene Special|bullet hole through one lens]] (but no bloodstains).

* {{spoiler|Eden's}} suicide in ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]''

* In a seventh-season episode of the Canadian cop show ''Cold Squad'', "C'Mon I Tip Waitresses", a dentist is being investigated due to the disappearance of several of his patients. One woman visits the dentist, and is restrained to a chair while the doctor prepares to murder her and perform dental surgery to contort her face. The camera pans to her trying to futilely move her arms as the dentist operates on her (while she's still conscious).

* [[Garo]], being an action/horror combination series, mostly does this whenever a [[Monster of the Week]] devoured its victims.

 

== Music ==

* In Garth Brooks' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIHfRnf_-IU ''The Thunder Rolls''], it jumps from a woman pointing a gun at her husband to a window that suddenly shatters, thus avoiding the onscreen shooting.

* At the end of [[Pearl Jam]]'s "Jeremy" music video, Jeremy [[Ate His Gun|shoots himself in the mouth]], splattering blood on his classmates. In the edited-for-TV version, the shot of him putting the gun in his mouth is cut.

 

== Video Games ==

* Played straight in [[Dead Rising 2]], sometimes to a ridiculous extent. In one cutscene, the characters find a man dead from a gunshot to the forehead. You'd never know it, however, unless you went back to the body and looked at it after the cinema, because the body is only shown from behind and out of focus, and the characters' comments on the subject amonts to, "Hey, look at this!" and "Well, look at that."

* In ''[[Resident Evil 5]]'', decapitations, such as those by chainsaw, are moved off-screen with only blood splatter being shown. Watching in multiplayer mode reveals that there's no actual beheading animation.

 

== Web Comics ==

* In [[Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures|Abel's Story]], some particularly gory scenes are depicted as silhouettes.

* There's a particularly chilling example in ''[[Lackadaisy Cats]]'', with the Marigold Gang and an unknown guy in a pinstripe suit. The last panel of the flashback is Mordecai raising an axe above his head, saying "Keep your head still."

* Used a few times in ''[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja]]'', such as [http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/15p34 here].

* Used in ''[[Homestuck]]'' a couple of times. When Jack Noir receives Bec's powers, all we see is a brief shot of Bro and Davesprite staring before the screen fades to static.

* [[Dubious Company]]'s Tiren attacks a group of soldiers off-panel. All the reader sees of the carnage is Sal's [[squick]]ed [[Nausea Fuel|out]] reaction and a bit of blood speckle the wall.

* An example from ''[[Zombie Ranch]]'' is shown [http://www.zombieranchcomic.com/2009/12/09/nuthin-but-meat/ here]. A child zombie's skull is detonated, but all we see is the resulting splatter on the wall.

 

== Web Original ==

* [[Protectors of the Plot Continuum]] tend to do this with more violent or disturbing fics - sometimes a violent scene in a mission will consist mostly of descriptions of the agents vomiting, with a few [[Noodle Implements]] from the fic thrown into the description.

* Mostly avoided by ''[[Happy Tree Friends]]'' as just about every injury, no matter how gory (and gory they almost always are) is shown on-screen with no discretion. However there are moments where the death is mostly off-screen, such as one episode where Nutty gets trapped under a vending machine as its spiked dispensers lower towards him. The closest one scrapes his eye before we cut away, blood leaking out from under the vending machine. Another involves Flaky, after swelling up due to an allergic reaction, being popped by a pin. We cut away just as the pin pokes her eye and see blood, limbs and other body parts flying across the screen.

 

== Western Animation ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:This Index Happened Offscreen]]

[[Category:Death Tropes]]

[[Category:Discretion Shot]]

[[Category:Horror Tropes]]