Robotic Torture Device

"Good God man, I'm a doctor not a savage! This is a flu shot! Good day sir!"

Evil Empires can't just slouch around on a throne all day, they have Innocent Bystanders to oppress and Doomed Hometowns to raze! So not every Evil Overlord can take the time out of their busy schedule to personally interrogate a captive (which, let's face it, is the only surefire way to get them to break). So instead they will delegate the use Cold-Blooded Torture... to something without the blood. The Robotic Torture Device is a torture device with various bits of torture equipment, including but not limited to: knives, poison filled syringes, blades, electric shock prods, Agony Beams, or worst of all, feathers.

The robot itself may require the victim be Strapped to An Operating Table, or be motile. It can be programmed to torture captives, or it might just be a swiss army knife for a Torture Technician. For extra Nightmare Fuel, the torture implements will be on arms that hack and stab blindly, with the promise of mauling the victim indiscriminately and never tiring.

Depending on how you want to look at it, it either makes the torture more or less dehumanizing by having a cold and unfeeling robot administer it. At least, we hope it's cold and unfeeling, because otherwise it could get much, much worse.

Expect The Dragon or Torture Technician to coldly intone "We Have Ways of Making You Talk" as it slowly draws near the victim before The Cavalry arrives... or not, which results in a fate that makes falling into a wood chipper seem tame.

Examples of Robotic Torture Device include:

Anime and Manga

• Shows up in a lot of Hentai, especially of the Naughty Tentacles variety.

Film

• The Machine in The Princess Bride. Made all the more horrifying with the eleven fingered man politely asking for Westley to describe the sensation For Science!.
• The IT-O interrogation device they used offscreen on Princess Leia in Star Wars. Thankfully, Beauty Is Never Tarnished. And in fact, in the Novelization and the radio play, we see that Vader sent the droid away and instead performed a rather disturbing Mind Probe.
  • Some EU sources starte that IT-O droids often attack their victim's genitals. You may cringe now.
  • The torture device Darth Vader used on Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Watch it here, 8:20-8:40.
  • There's also the EV series, which came about when a line of supervisors were fitted with torture droid motivators. Jabba employed one, known as EV-9D9, for a while. It's the droid in Return of the Jedi that assigns jobs for R2-D2 and C-3PO, while in the background her assistant is holding a hapless power droid's feet to a red-hot wire.

Literature

• In Sheri S. Tepper's Six Moon Dance there's a sexual bondage device which is set to inflict sadistic pleasure at first... before it just gets sadistic. And deadly.
• The torture device Kafka thought of in the short story In The Penal Colony, which carves a description of the crime into the victim's skin over and over again. In its final use it malfunctions and just killed the victim brutally and quickly, rather than killing them slowly and agonizingly like it's supposed to.
• In Richard Morgan's Broken Angels (the sequel to Altered Carbon) one character is subjected to the Wedge punishment for traitors; a machine designed to slowly torture them to death over the course of an entire day. While the machine is busy flaying skin, breaking bones and cracking teeth for the enjoyment of the watching crowd, it's also carefully administering drugs and medical attention to ensure that the subject is alive and conscious for as much of the ordeal as possible.
  • Appetizingly named "the anatomizer" because of course it renders you into anatomy.
• In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, there is a device designed to deliver electrocution to cause maximum pain but stopping just before the point of death.
• Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun mentions several of these in its scenes regarding the local Torturers' Guild. Two are described in detail: Allowin's Necklace is a mechanical garrote tightened by the tidal motion of its victim's breathing (a victim breathing shallowly can last for hours), while the Revolutionary painfully awakens an unconscious urge toward self-destruction. These urges can be overridden consciously, but in unguarded moments its victims revert to scratching at their own skin or trying to claw out their eyes; they weaken as the victim does, however, and strong-willed individuals can take months to die.
• The Phantom of the Opera: In the original book (1911) there is a torture chamber completely automated: when the victim falls in the room, it activates and gives him the illusion of a tropical forrest. When the victim cannot endure more, there is also a rope to hang himself. The Phantom uses it as a defense against curious people. The first victim of the book was already dead when the Phantom found him.

I have said that the room in which M. le Vicomte de Chagny and I were imprisoned was a regular hexagon, lined entirely with mirrors. Plenty of these rooms have been seen since, mainly at exhibitions: they are called "palaces of illusion," or some such name. But the invention belongs entirely to Erik, who built the first room of this kind under my eyes, at the time of the rosy hours of Mazenderan. A decorative object, such as a column, for instance, was placed in one of the corners and immediately produced a hall of a thousand columns; for, thanks to the mirrors, the real room was multiplied by six hexagonal rooms, each of which, in its turn, was multiplied indefinitely. But the little sultana soon tired of this infantile illusion, whereupon Erik altered his invention into a "torture-chamber." For the architectural motive placed in one corner, he substituted an iron tree. This tree, with its painted leaves, was absolutely true to life and was made of iron so as to resist all the attacks of the "patient" who was locked into the torture-chamber. We shall see how the scene thus obtained was twice altered instantaneously into two successive other scenes, by means of the automatic rotation of the drums or rollers in the corners. These were divided into three sections, fitting into the angles of the mirrors and each supporting a decorative scheme that came into sight as the roller revolved upon its axis. The walls of this strange room gave the patient nothing to lay hold of, because, apart from the solid decorative object, they were simply furnished with mirrors, thick enough to withstand any onslaught of the victim, who was flung into the chamber empty-handed and barefoot. There was no furniture. The ceiling was capable of being lit up. An ingenious system of electric heating, which has since been imitated, allowed the temperature of the walls and room to be increased at will. I am giving all these details of a perfectly natural invention, producing, with a few painted branches, the supernatural illusion of an equatorial forest blazing under the tropical sun, so that no one may doubt the present balance of my brain or feel entitled to say that I am mad or lying or that I take him for a fool.

Live Action TV

• Let's not forget the device Edmund gets strapped to in the final episode of The Black Adder [I].

Video Games

• In Timesplitters: Future Perfect the player could kill a bunch of restrained mutants with one of these. This gets you a What the Hell, Player? comment from Anya.
• The hilariously inventive torture machine from the original Dungeon Keeper. In it's dormant state it consisted of a pedestal backed by a hooded and cowled automaton; when active the automaton inflicted a different torture on almost every one of the different unit classes, including: whipping the kinky Dark Mistresses, rib-tickling giants and barbarians, spinning fairy folk around by their wings, strangling archers with their bows, transforming wizards into frogs and back again, and attacking armoured paladins with can openers.

Web Comics

• Girl Genius had a scene with Tarvek suspended from something complicated and covered in too many spikes and blades. One sight of this convinced the minions to not approach and go fetch the boss. Which turned out to be the whole point.

Western Animation

• Played for laughs in Futurama with the Probulator who is implied to be a robot.
  • Actually, it seems to be some stationary machine, albeit one with artificial intelligence. It's supposed to do... something thawed Human Popsicles are required to do when coming from the past.
    • ... while screaming presumably in pain. Also according to Bender it "knows how to please a man"
• The ticklebot from Xiaolin Showdown.