Blood-Splattered Innocents

You've got red on you.
"Your shirt..."
—Tara, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Want a surefire way to Break the Cutie? Well, nothing causes mental trauma quite like being covered in the blood of another person. Not only that, but the image this creates is so arty that it can let you get away with putting lots of violence in your film and still have it called True Art.

Can be a Gory Discretion Shot, although not always - the most common way it will play out is that someone will have a gun to their head, ready to commit suicide. The innocent one begs them to stop, we hear a gunshot, and then see the blood hit the face.

See also Harmful to Minors. Compare with Blood Is the New Black, Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress, Covered in Gunge.

Examples of Blood-Splattered Innocents include:

Anime & Manga

  • Often happens to poor Tetsunosuke in Peacemaker Kurogane.
  • In Serial Experiments Lain, when Lain confronts a suicidal drug-user in a club. Even worse it's Lain's doppleganger talking, but she reverts to being normal Lain while still covered in blood. That was her first Crowning Moment of Awesome, and it sets the grim, disturbing mood of the rest of the series.
  • Happens so often in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (most notably during the Big Bad's Start of Darkness) that you start to wonder how they can afford to clean up the mess so often.
    • Subverted in the manga-only arc Onisarashi-hen. After appearing to play this trope straight three times in a row, Detective Oishi realizes that the Blood Splattered Innocent in question is a bit too blood splattered to really be innocent...
  • When "the children" are discovered by Eureka in Eureka Seven they're covered in the blood of their family that Eureka just killed.
    • In episode 37, blood was splattered all over the mother and child when Anemone slaughtered the anti-body Coralian.
  • Tomoe in the Rurouni Kenshin backstory : "You make the bloody rain fall."
  • Given that many of the characters are homicidal Tyke Bombs with the power to tear humans apart in various graphic ways, there are many examples of this trope in Elfen Lied.
    • Kouta was splattered with blood when Lucy (Kaede) rips his sister into half.
  • Possibly subverted in Code Geass episode 22: the sweet, innocent Euphemia, splattered with the blood of people she was forced to kill by Lelouch's malfunctioning Geass.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya subverts this. Yuki is busy protecting Kyon from Ryoko, and she gets hit with half a dozen steel spikes. Ryoko then impales her with 2 tentacles, ripping through her chest cavity. We see Kyon's face splattered with Yuki's blood. She gets better though.
    • In the movie, though, this happens perfectly. After Yuki turns herself and the world around her into normals, Kyon is sent back to fix everything. Just as he is about to, Ryoko stabs him in the back out of nowhere and pulls the knife out, splattering the now-normal+innocent Yuki with blood. Her expression is Tear Jerkish for the audience, but the whole situation would be a severe case of Nightmare Fuel for the now-normal Yuki.
  • In Red Garden, one of the cops investigating Lise's death gets killed just as he finds Lise, who's Back from the Dead, splattering her with blood in the process. Then it just keeps happening... Poor girl.
  • In Black Butler during the end of Jack the Ripper arc Ciel and Sebastian are standing outside of Mary Kelly's building so they can catch The Ripper. Following a scream Ciel flings the door open only to be hit with a splatter of blood on his face. Ciel's not necessarily innocent, per se (he has no qualms with killing 'bad guys'), but he was only 12 years old at the time, and it obviously affected him to the point of freezing up in terror for the whole next scene.
  • In Pandora Hearts Vincent and the tragedy of Sabrie, though this was possibly not so innocent.
    • A straighter example is Oz in chapter 70.
  • Kyo Kara Maoh: Yuuri when Saralegui gets shot with an arrow.
  • Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru: In episode 4 Yuki gets some of Zess's blood on his face after Zess is stabbed by Uzuki. (A demon is controlling Uzuki).
  • xxxHolic: A slight variant occurs when a woman's wish on a monkey's paw inadvertently causes a man to fall in front of a train. The ensuing spray of blood splashes over the platform and onto her shoes.
  • This seems to happen to Anri an awful lot in Durarara!!!!
  • A variation occurs in Hellsing; during a flashback, we see how Seras avoided being drenched in blood, because she was hidden in a closet, but winds up in a puddle of her own blood after being shot while stabbing a man in the eye.
    • In a flashback to how her uncle turned on her practically the moment her father died, we got an Inverted case. Integra is shot, leading to an otherwise inactive Alucard being splashed with her blood.
  • In Black Lagoon, the "vampire twins" get blood all over themselves. Of course, they enjoy it hugely...as long as it's not their own.
  • Lily in Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force during her time as a lab experiment. Having test subjects undergo Body Horror and burst right in front of her, splattering her with their blood, really didn't help her mental state.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: If you think on it a certain way (i.e. an insane way), Shinji Ikari is one during the destruction of Unit 03. Even though he was doing the destroying. Sorta. He was in the Eva, meaning he felt EVERYTHING that happened; him ripping his friend to pieces, the blood spraying all over him etc etc, but he wasn't in control of his biomech. His dad was. And did it to teach Shinji to follow his orders. Have we mentioned that Gendo is a BASTARD!?
  • Variation in Claymore, where the cutie was already broken before the blood splattering. Her lack of reaction is violently contrast by the horrified reaction of the people around her.
  • Mr.Kubodera death in Another led to this.Yeah,the teacher commited suicide in front of all his student.

Comic Books


Film

  • The movie Doomsday loved splattering random people with blood.
  • In Kill Bill, the Bride introduces O-Ren through a Start of Darkness flashback to O-Ren's childhood done in anime style, where Boss Matsumoto and his men kill both of her parents as she hides under the bed. At one point, a sword blade goes through her mother and the bed courtesy of Matsumoto himself, and her mother's blood drips down onto her. And Luis Bacalov's beautiful score from "The Grand Duel" is playing throughout.
    • Not to mention the second "chapter" of the movie is entitled, The Blood Splattered Bride, a Shout-Out to a Lesbian Vampire film with the same name.
      • In fact, she's splattered with blood for pretty much the majority of the movie.
      • She sure as hell ain't innocent for most of it, though.
  • The last straw for Carrie is when a bucket of pig's blood is dumped on her by the Alpha Bitch and her Jerk Jock boyfriend at the prom, after she had been made the prom queen. Carrie proceeds to snap out and turn her telekinetic powers into a weapon of revenge and destruction.
  • Played for Laughs in Dracula: Dead and Loving It, when the main character has to stake his fiance's vampiric sister. The resulting blow causes a geyser of blood that coats him and everything in the room in copious amounts of blood. But wait, she's still not quite dead yet...Time for another whack.
    • Slightly subverted in that Van Helsing, who is in the same room at the time, comes out without a drop on him as he hid behind a pillar. As he puts it "Everything in life comes down to location, location, location..."
  • Used in Kingdom of Heaven, in which a horse is splattered with so much blood it panics, rears up, and throws its rider.
  • Phil, the nervous navigator in Memphis Belle suffers a Heroic BSOD when an aircraft in front of them explodes, splattering blood and organs over the plexiglas nose...
    • Subverted when the windshield is shot through and the bullet hits a bottle of tomato soup sitting on the dashboard, causing the pilo to panic and start screaming about being shot until the co-pilot tastes it (presumably for it having a strange consistency), and declares it to be soup. Very Funny...
      • The co-pilot declares it to be soup after finding a broken thermos, which was formerly filled with soup.
  • Played for (deadpan) laughs in Icelandic film Noi Albinoi, in which the protagonist acidentally tips an entire bucket of goose blood onto his father and grandmother.
  • A nameless innocent is splattered with blood during Loki's 'smiting' in Dogma. As the only 'pure' person in the boardroom of executives she is allowed to survive, although Loki does consider shooting her for not blessing him when he sneezed...
  • In Splice, this occurs to the front row of people at the press conference once Fred and Ginger, the two transgenic organisms created by Clive and Elsa for medical research, start fighting each other.
  • In Pitch Black, Shazza gets a surprise face-full of blood when Zeke shoots one of the crash survivors, whom he takes to be Riddick about to attack her. "Crikey!"
  • Poor, poor Shilo Wallace. Her father and godmother, the only people she's ever met thanks to her dad being a lunatic, are both brutally murdered by the movie's resident Magnificent Bastard, and she walks away from the murder site covered in both of their blood.
  • Probably the closest that the viewing audience has come to being the innocent in a film is a scene in Quarantine where the main character's camera man uses the lens of the In-Universe Camera to beat back an attacker, causing the screen to become covered in blood.
  • Jack Regan suffers this in the second Sweeney movie when an armed robber evades capture by putting a sawn-off shotgun in his mouth. And it's not just blood either. Regan realistically freaks out and frantically scrubs his face clean.
  • The titular character of La Reine Margot in the poster and the film. While this visually invokes Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress, the white gown isn't Margot's wedding dress.

Literature

  • In Shadow Of The Hegemon, Petra is covered in the blood, bone, and brains of her would-be rescuers after her kidnapper, Achilles, reveals himself and shoots them. She refuses to move or speak until she is allowed to wash the blood off.
  • Warrior Cats: Lionblaze. Although most of the times he ends up splattered with blood, he's responsible, the times in Long Shadows when Tigerstar shows him visions of himself killing Heathertail in a series of violent fashions may count.
    • Generally averted with everyone else.
  • In Sten by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch, first aid training had the recruits practice on a robot simulating a wounded fellow soldier. If the recruit wasn't quick enough, an "artery ruptured," spraying him with simulated blood.

"The dye used in that blood won't wear off for two days. Maybe that'll help you think about how you'd feel if that dummy had really been your teammate."


Live Action TV

  • D.L.'s murder in Heroes resulted in Niki being sprayed with his blood.
  • Played for laughs in Red Dwarf episode "Justice", when Lister's pus-filled head burst. We just hear a splattering noise, and then the Cat enters, covered in blood and pus, and looking traumatised.
  • In Lost an extra named Doug is shot by mercenaries and has his blood sprayed on Sawyer (who, it's worth noting, is in no sense of the word innocent).
    • They also do this in Season 1 when Arzt is blown up by dynamite. Hurley, Locke, Jack and Kate are covered with pieces of him, leading Hurley to exclaim "You've got a piece of . . . Arzt . . . on you."
  • Played for squicky laughs in the Supernatural episode, "Mystery Spot". Sam is going slightly mental from watching Dean die over and over again and is hacking apart the Mystery Spot with an axe while Dean and the tied up owner wait. Dean goes over to try and get Sam to calm down, they have an offscreen arguement and then Dean's blood splatters all over the owner.
    • Used more seriously in another Supernatural episode, "Bloodlust". Dean kills a vampire brutally (by holding it down and cutting its head off with a circular saw, offscreen) and when he looks back up at his brother, who's staring at him, his face is splattered in blood.
    • Another notable usage occurs in the Alternate Universe episode "It's a Terrible Life", when Sam Wesson gets a bloody introduction to the finer points of monster-hunting.
  • Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - but only because a character was acting in a film that had a fatal gun accident.
  • Dexter and his brother watch their mother and her drug-dealing buddies chopped to pieces with a chainsaw. Then they're left there for days. Neither of them grow up to be well-balanced individuals.
    • The first time Dexter gets a flash of the repressed memory of his mother's murder at a similarly gruesome crime scene, it causes him to lose his cool and fall right into a pool of blood, leaving him covered in it. While adult Dexter is certainly not an innocent, the image works as a visual reference to the event that left him psychologically damaged.
  • NCIS: When Kate is shot, Tony is sprayed with her blood. One of the saddest shots of the series.
  • B.J. goes through this before even arriving at the 4077th Mash in "Welcome to Korea", when he, Hawkeye, and Radar stop to help a group of soldiers on the side of the road.
  • In State of Play, Della moves from the "protect the story" angle to the "we need to help the police" side of the argument when the detective she'd gotten to know as a source was shot by a sniper in front of her.
  • How about Sookie in like every. single. episode of True Blood? To her credit, she usually gets over it pretty quickly. Or maybe that's just because it usually happens right at the end of the episode.
  • "Your shirt"
    • To explain: When Tara is fatally shot, her final concern is for Willow's ruined, blood-splattered shirt.
  • An early episode of Dollhouse had a flashback of Alpha's first rampage, during which we see Echo in the house showers drenched in the blood of the slaughtered people around her. Of course, being a doll, she is fairly oblivious to the fact that she should be traumatised (and barely even aware that there is anything wrong with the dead).
    • The same episode opens with Topher, usually a self-contained smart-ass, covered in blood and stammering like a little kid about the killings he's just witnessed. Topher gets this again in 2.11 when, not two minutes after kissing Bennett for the first time, he ends up with her brains all over his face.
  • Happens to a nosy reporter in an episode of Sanctuary. Interestingly, her cameraman seems more traumatized by it than she is.
  • In the opening of theCriminal Minds episode "Coda", an autistic boy is seen in profile, walking to the bus stop to catch his ride, just as he does at exactly the same time every day. It's only when the camera pans around to the front of him that it's revealed one side of his face is splattered with blood; one of his parents had just been critically wounded in their home and the other, kidnapped.
    • J.J. got splattered with someone else's blood in a season five episode.
  • A very angsty and emotional CSI ep had Grissom covered in Warrick's blood for a couple of scenes after Warrick died. Grissom had held him to his chest and it got all over.


Music Videos

  • In the music video for We Are Scientists "It's A Hit". This is an example it being used as a nondiscretion shot, as we clearly see the fatal punch land, and then cut to the Littlest Cancer Patient sprayed with his hero's blood.
  • Occurs at the end of the music video for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy", when the title character blows his brains out in front of his class.


Video Games

  • Cloud plays the part of the blood-splattered innocent in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, though in his case he wasn't actually within range when Zack was shot, and ended up with blood on his face because he was embraced by his friend before he died. The image was still just as striking, though.
  • One of the most striking images in Xenogears is that of a young Fei, his face splattered with the blood of the mother that protected him.
  • Helena in Dead or Alive 2, this occurred when her mother took a bullet meant for her.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. All the backstories of the Beauties, but Crying Wolf's especially. She was found carrying the corpse of her baby brother, whom she had accidentally killed, through the wild of Africa.
    • Taken to extremes with Laughing Octopus who was forced to bathe in the blood of her own family.
  • Dragon Age has Anora, whose face was covered with the blood of her father, no less.
  • Coach Oleander's backstory in Psychonauts has him watching his father (a butcher) chop up his beloved pet bunnies for food.


Webcomics


Web Original


Western Animation

  • Happens to Butters in South Park, during an eighth season episode called "You Got F'd in the A." In a flashback, Butters loses control of one of his shoes while tap-dancing, causing an accident in which eight people are killed. Their blood splatters all over him as he looks on in horror. The incident is effectively repeated at the end of the episode, when Butters, having finally overcome the trauma, agrees to tap-dance in a competition... only to lose his shoe again, killing the opposing team and their coach.


Real Life

  • Jackie Kennedy in her pink suit, 22 November 1963.
  • One of the most vivid images from the current Iraq War is of a blood-splattered little girl crying as a US soldier walks past her—her parents were killed moments earlier. That's their blood.
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