Torture is evil. And yet we're fascinated by it.
Tropes:
Physical torture methods- Agonizing Stomach Wound: A wound to the stomach which leads to a long and painful death.
- Agony Beam: The fantastical ability (in whatever form) that causes extreme pain to whoever it hits.
- Amputative Sentencing: A criminal is punished by having a limb or appendage cut off.
- Bathroom Control: A character having a Potty Emergency is tortured by not allowed to go to the bathroom.
- Chastity Belt: Torturing someone by locking a device on their genitals that prevents them from having sex.
- Cigarette Burns: Putting out a cigar/cigarette on someone else, often as a form of abuse or torture.
- Coercing the Informant: The Informant is only giving information because they were threated or tortured.
- Cooked to Death: Covers torture by roasting or boiling a victim.
- Corporal Punishment: Inflicting physical pain as punishment for one's misbehavior.
- Creepy-Crawly Torture: Torture with insects and other crawly things.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: When torture is taken far enough, it may lead to someone dying in a way that is extremely painful, humiliating, and/or bizarre.
- Execution: Many (though not all) methods of capital punishment (especially in earlier periods of history) are intended to have the victim suffer a very slow and painful death, and thus can be considered an extreme form of torture.
- Denied Food as Punishment: Denying food to somebody who needs it is very painful indeed.
- Electric Torture: Torture done by zapping or electrifying the victim — bloodless, but effective.
- Electroconvulsive Therapy Is Torture: Electroconvulsion Therapy depicted in a negative light.
- Execution by Exposure: A victim is Locked Up and Left Behind to die slowly at the mercy of a hostile environment.
- Flaying Alive: Removing someone's skin for torture.
- Flipping Helpless: A creature that is flipped over on its back cannot get back up again without help.
- Forced Addiction: Getting someone addicted to a drug by force to break them.
- Forced Overwork: Forcing someone to work until they give out physically, mentally, or both.
- Force Feeding: Forced to eat.
- Hanging Around: Hanging someone to cut off their air supply without necessarily killing them.
- Head in a Vise: A character's head is put in a screw-press, slowly crushing their skull.
- Iron Maiden: A torture device filled with spikes to stab the poor soul inside of it.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: The hero needs information, and fast—thus, they immediately decide to torture their captive.
- Knee-capping: A good way to keep someone down is to go for their knee.
- Lobotomy: The medical procedure of cutting into part of the brain to change a person's behavior — either as a "treatment" of mental illness, or torture.
- Malevolent Mutilation: Modifying someone's body in a horrific manner, causing them much anguish.
- Mutilation Interrogation: Torturous interrogation wherein the punishment for not talking is having part of you cut off piece by piece.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Someone overpowers another with little effort and in a very painful, bloody manner.
- Playing with Syringes: Unethical and possibly incredibly painful experimentation with the goal of creating something.
- Pressure Point: Not behaving as we’d like you to? Are you being too aggressive? Well, how about I twist one of your joints until it nearly dislocates - does that get the message across? While this method of pain compliance has plenty of legitimate applications, there are concerns that it is used as an excuse to commit torture, especially due to its high degree of plausible deniability.
- Sinister Suffocation: Torturing someone by suffocating them, but not outright killing them.
- Soap Punishment: Punishment for crass language involves having to put soap in one's mouth.
- Stock Punishment: A device that holds someone immobile so that others can assault them with foodstuffs.
- Tar and Feathers: Either as a comedic prank or a serious form of punishment, someone is covered in hot tar and feathers for humiliation.
- A Taste of the Lash: Someone is flogged with a whip or cane.
- Tickle Torture: Tickling is horrible. In all seriousness, long durations have actually been used to break people's mind.
- Water Torture: Such as simulated drowning, i.e., "waterboarding".
- What a Drag: Torture/attack/punishment by dragging someone across the ground.
- Wheel of Pain: People are forced to push a wheel as punishment.
- Zen Slap: A Zen mentor slapping their disciple as a punishment for misdemeanor.
Mental torture methods
- And I Must Scream: When a character is forever stuck somewhere, probably unable to talk, move, or even die.
- Enhanced Interrogation Techniques: Non-physical forms of torture, usually psychological, that still freak someone out enough to work.
- False Roulette: A near-empty gun is fired repeatedly to cause fear that the next trigger-pull with discharge the only bullet—except, the gun is actually empty.
- Forced to Watch: A character is forced to watch as someone they love is tortured and/or killed.
- High-Altitude Interrogation: Getting someone to talk by holding them over a high drop.
- The Ludovico Technique: Drugging someone and forcing them (sometimes up to strapping the eyelids so they can't close them) to watch something related to their bad habits to "cure" them of them.
- Mind Probe: A device that forcibly reads someone's mind, usually in the most painful and traumatizing way possible.
- Mind Rape: Psychological torture that forces the victim to see horrible things, relive terrifying memories, feel things that aren't happening, etc.
- Past Victim Showcase: To show just how bad the torture someone is about to endure is, the villain shows them someone who has already been through it.
- Punished with Ugly: A beautiful character is punished by losing their beauty.
- Punishment Box: Punishment comes in the form of being forced into an empty, but probably very uncomfortable and/or lonely, box.
- Reel Torture: Torturing or punishing someone by making them watch a movie, play, TV show, video recording or photo reel that they find so terrible it causes them agony.
- Sadistic Choice: Forcing a person to choose between two terrible options.
- Suicidal Sadistic Choice: Forcing a person to choose between something horrible and death.
- Sleep Deprivation Punishment: Not allowing a person to sleep.
- Torment by Annoyance: Being annoyed so…many…times…
- To the Pain: Telling a future victim exactly what is going to happen to them in slow, painful detail.
Results of torture
- 2 + Torture = 5: Psychological torture that causes the victim to believe something that factually isn't true. For example, 2 + 2 = 5.
- Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Tortured into evilness.
- Break the Badass: Once kicking-ass character was suffered through torture (mentally and physically).
- Break the Comedian: A funny, comedic character is put through hell and back.
- Break the Cutie: A character that was once kind and lovable is put through hell and back.
- Deadly Hazing: A hazing results in death (usually through physical violence but not always).
- Driven to Suicide: The victim kills themselves.
- Interrogated for Nothing: Someone is tortured for information, but they truly don't know anything.
- Stockholm Syndrome: A proposed psychological condition in which people who have been kidnapped/captured come to feel sympathetic for their captors.
- Torture Always Works: When torturing someone not only works in a work, but the information gathered out of it is true, accurate, and detailed.
- Torture Is Ineffective: It accomplishes nothing.
Character tropes
- Bunker Woman: A woman is kidnapped and held somewhere contained, usually a bunker, usually by a man.
- Exalted Torturer: When the person doing the torture is also the hero.
- Loves the Sound of Screaming: Someone finds joy in the loud, loud misery of others.
- Police Brutality: When law enforcement tortures and/or kills civilians.
- Too Kinky to Torture: A character actually enjoys being tortured.
- Torture Technician: The guy with the job of torturing people.
Locations of torture
- Fire and Brimstone Hell: When Hell is depicted as a fiery place of eternal torture.
- Locked in the Dungeon: Someone is locked in a dungeon to be tortured or punished.
- Maximum Fun Chamber: Something torturous is said to be so, so horrible, but is either never seen, or seen, but seems innocent enough until it's used.
- Room 101: The audience may not even know what happens in there, but this room is the one no one wants to be sent to.
- Torture Cellar: A room with the express purpose of torturing people.
Other tropes about torture
- Abuse Discretion Shot: When abuse (including torture) doesn't get fully shown onscreen.
- Abuse Escalation: Some abuse gets so bad that it involves torture.
- Anything but That!: When something pretty mundane (or even harmless) is treated as a Fate Worse than Death.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: What this index is all about.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: A punishment that gets the job done, even though it's ridiculous.
- Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: A threat so odd it's Played for Laughs.
- Defeat Means Menial Labor: A defeated villain is punished with menial labor, often in their (no longer) own place.
- The Easy Way or the Hard Way: A Stock Phrase.
- For the Evulz: A common motive for torturers.
- Hostage-Handler Huddle: The bad guys huddle together to decide how torture is best carried out.
- The Joys of Torturing Mooks: When players of a video game find joy in torturing and killing their always-spawning, nameless enemies.
- Noodle Implements: An odd assortment of objects (and maybe people) are all brought together to do something, but the audience never sees what.
- The Not-So-Harmless Punishment: A punishment seems bearable enough, maybe even laughable… until it's used.
- Painless Death for a Price: Someone on death's doorstep is offered a Mercy Kill in exchange for something valuable (and may be threatened with a long, torturous death instead if they refuse).
- P.O.W. Abuse: Physically and/or psychologically violent abuses against prisoners of war.
- Robotic Torture Device: A robotic device with many tools to torture, from knives to lasers and more.
- Scream Discretion Shot: The audience doesn't see the pain being inflicted, only hearing the victim's scream.
- Shake Someone, Objects Fall: A comedic trope in which simply shaking someone causes everything they have on them to come falling out.
- Spreading the Misery: Someone who suffers wants others to experience the same pain.
- Suckiness Is Painful: Someone is just so bad at something (singing, acting, you name it) that just seeing them do it is painful.
- Televised Torture: The torture is being broadcast, either for the villain's personal entertainment or for public consumption.
- Too Broken to Break: There's no torture that can affect them; the damage was done long before.
- Torture Chamber Episode: An episode in which one or more characters are tortured for the entire duration.
- Torture First, Ask Questions Later: Someone gets so caught up in torturing someone (or has even already killed them) that they forget to ask questions.
- Torture for Fun and Information: A torture-filled interrogation is presented as comedic.
- Torture Porn: A work that's main appeal is its graphic and unrelenting depiction of torture.
- We Have Ways of Making You Talk: A Stock Phrase.
- Whip of Dominance: Using a whip as a symbol of dominance, control, authority, or sadism.