Eye Scream/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Live, loud, and messy. Examples of Eye Screams in Live-Action TV include:

1000 Ways to Die

  • "Dead Eye": An arrogant gym teacher who throws a javelin and ends up getting it through his eye when he runs around without paying attention.
  • "Vermin-ated": A fugitive stuck in a pipe whose eye is eaten alive by rats.
  • "Succu-Offed": Two stones stole a Saguaro catcus and celebrate with peyote in the desert. They later get a shared hallucination where the Saguaro tells them they will be punished for their crime. They run screaming as one stoner falls on an Agave plant and is pierced through the heart while the other stoner runs into another Saguaro cactus and gets speared in the eye.
  • "Samurai Death Squad": A Japanese-American street racer gets a lance through his eye.
  • "Contact Die": A chemistry student determined to screw her way to an easy grade by seducing the class genius has her contacts fused to her eyeballs after performing an experiment without wearing goggles. She then spends the last few minutes of her life running around in blind panic (pardon the pun) before slipping on a wax floor, hitting the wall, and breaking her neck.
  • "Scam Eye Am (Dead)": A Nigerian scam artist gets found out and hides behind a door with a coat hook on it. Enter the angry scam victim, who shoves open the door... and guess what's hanging on the coat hook when the door swings the other way?
  • "Eye-Sick-Kill": A lecherous stoner mall Santa who got fired for sexually harassing his female elf workers gets an icicle to the eye when banging on his boss's door.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  • When The Dragon Caleb first attacks the Scoobies, he gouges out Xander's eye with his thumb.
  • And the monster Der Kindestod from the episode "Killed by Death" had stalked mouths that came out of its own eye sockets for easy access to the victim's peepers.
  • "Lessons" A manifest spirit stabs Dawn in the eye with a pencil. Fortunately, it disappears and she's unhurt.
  • In "The Harvest," after his henchmen fail to capture Buffy and Xander, the Master pokes the lead henchman's eye out with his finger.
  • On the other side, there is a Gnarl demon, immune to magic and most injuries - to kill it one has to destroy his eyes.
    • Xander is especially disturbed by this, in a deliberate foreshadowing of his own fate above.

CSI

  • The investigators were called in after a group of bird watchers found a human eyeball in a crow's nest. Cue audience wincing as Grissom pries a dried contact from the eyeball, then drains it of vitreous humor with a very long needle.
  • A man gets a shard of what turns out to be a CD in his eye (not the cause of death), and we get to see a closeup of the coroner picking it out with tweezers so it can be analyzed.
  • 4x4 with the bodybuilder, who got the coroner's finger into his eye. It semi-burst and oozed out thick black slime ..
  • In season 3 of CSI: New York, in Hung Out To Dry, a man was found nailed to a tree through his head. With two long, lumpy stakes.
  • CSI: Miami, never to be outdone in over-the-topness, features a guy getting killed by injecting air into his bloodstream via the veins in his eye. Needless to say, the victim was subdued first. When the investigators figure this out, we get to see it in loving body-cam detail. Although ridiculous, at least it's established as being pragmatic as well... it made it very very hard to figure out the cause of death.
    • The episode where one of the people on the CSI team got shot just under the eye with a nailgun. Cringe-inducing.
    • "Look Who's Taunting" has a killer that pulls out women's eyes and replaces them with glass ones.
  • CSI New York used this in a Season 5 Episode, when Stella and Mac get out to drink a cup of coffee. An eyeball drops from the sky (carried by some kinde of vulture) right into Stellas cup, and leads them to the rest of the body.
  • The episode involving Lady Heather's daughter from the original CSI TV series, "Pirates of the Third Reich". Heather's daughter Zoe is found dead in the desert with her right hand missing. When the Asst. M.E. take a look at Zoe eyes during autopsy, her right eyes detaches from the socket. Test done on both eyes (that I think involved stick a large needle into both eye to get the liquid inside) reveals that the detached eye does not belong to Zoe but to someone who is male. Eventually the audience learns that Zoe and others were held captive and experimented on by a Neo-Nazi. The Nazi follower thought Zoe was the perfect woman, except for the fact that she had mismatched eyes. So he sets out to correct this problem by extracting an eye from a male captive and placing the eye in Zoe socket. (The male victim survived the procedure but was lobotomized in the process.)
  • Another one from original CSI: A hotel maid is found stabbed in the eye with a swizzle stick. They think it's the chauvinistic foreign guest but it's actually her fellow maid who was stealing from all the wealthy guests. The foreigner (a wealthy, extremely demanding Saudi prince) is so moved by "someone who had nothing" protecting his stuff despite his horrible attitude that he gives her struggling family a big check.

Other Works

  • Used for dramatic effect in a number of House episodes. In one, the diagnostics team had to figure out why blood was collecting in one patient's eye, so they numbed his eye and inserted a needle into it to get a sample.

Patient: This isn't going to hurt, is it?
Foreman: No, it's just scary as hell.

    • Used in another episode on a female patient. The Squick was only mollified by Special Effects Failure.
    • In the Season 2 finale, after already having gone through some pretty disturbing injuries, a man's eyeball swells up out of its socket and bursts.
    • In one episode, House diagnoses clinic patients as he's walking out. He passes one patient, who's been having trouble taking out his contacts. House points our he's not wearing contacts, "you've been trying to remove your corneas."
  • River Tam from Firefly had this happen to her with needles at one point during her time at the Academy, though we only see flashes of this from a nightmare in "The Train Job". Later in "Safe", she rails at Mal during one of her crazy fits that "You can't just stick needles in my eyes and ask me what I see!"
    • Also, Dobson suffers a nasty gunshot wound to the eye at the end of the series' pilot. He survives and comes back in the tie-in comic Those Left Behind, where he gets a cybernetic replacement for it. Mal shoots him in his other eye, and then shoots him in the head a few more times, just to make sure he gets the message.
  • Farscape has several disturbing moments with this trope:
    • In the Season 1 episode "DNA Mad Scientist", the crew voluntarily gives samples from their eyes to an alien scientist called NamTar-- which involves a probing machine sticking a needle fully into the eye. Aeryn initially refuses, but when she later agrees to it, the alien gives her an eyeful of Lego Genetics, causing her eye to immediately turn purple for a few seconds. After a bit of Body Horror, the antidote that will return Aeryn Sun's body to normal must be delivered to the eye. With no time to set up the machine, she is forced to put her trust in John's steady hand as he has to delicately stab her in the eye.
    • Near the end of Season 2 ("Plan B"), Natira, a creepy blue alien with spider legs on her head states a penchant for using said legs to remove eyeballs, and then (it is implied) eat them. It happens to one character, and almost happens to John, though we don't see it in either case.
    • But by far the worst one involving a machine that pulls the eyeball out of the socket, exposing several inches of optic nerve, puts a chip on the exposed nerves, and then puts the eye back in ("A Clockwork Nebari").
    • In a flashback sequence, Scorpius, as part of his Extreme Melee Revenge against Tauza, his Scarran caretaker, stabs her in the eyes with the sharpened ends of a broken coolant rod. Horrifically, it doesn't kill her; seconds later, she rises from the floor, her punctured eyeballs dribbling from around the rods in her sockets. ("Incubator")
  • Colonel Tigh in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica had one of his eyes pulled out by a Cylon during his time in prison on New Caprica. After his release he mentions "(they) ripped it right out onto the floor, picked it up and showed it to me. It looked like a hard boiled egg."
  • In the Fringe episode "The Same Old Story", Walter Bishop takes the Eye Remember trope one step further by taking a murder victim's eye out of the socket in order to scan the retina for it's last image.
    • Later, he despairs of his seemingly going insane and attempts a self-lobotomy by hammering a long metal stick through his eye. Thankfully he numbed it first, and Olivia stops him before much damage is done.
  • A Supernatural episode involving a demented, body-parts-stealing scientist includes a scene where one of the main characters nearly gets his eye scooped out with a melon-baller. Talk about your Eye Scream.
    • They also did it two seasons earlier, with an abused boy telekinetically stabbing his stepmother to a wall through her eye. Yikes.
    • The premiere episode of season four had a psychic seeing the true face of an angel (Cas), and in turn had her eyes burned out, complete with blood streaking down her face, and her eye sockets being a black void of nothing. How this show is able to get away with stuff like this is beyond me.
    • Before he occupies his human vessel, Cas also burns out the eyes of a pack of demons. And in another episode, when Michael melts a human to death ( he is talking to Zachariah at the time) , and his victim's eyes are shown to be empty sockets.
    • There are two more in season one with Bloody Mary liquefying people's eyes; and the hot poker reflected in Dean's eye in "The Benders".
  • An episode of The Daily Show (unexpected source, I know) has Lewis Black commenting on a basketball commentator discussing in so many words how he's going to masturbate to pictures of Ashley Judd after the game. After reminding us what Judd and the commentator look like, Black goes on "And when I think of him masturbating to her, I look like this!" Cut to a photo of Black jamming his thumbs into his eyes and blood coming out of them. The obvious photoshop work does little to make it less gross.
  • The episode of Heroes where HRG gets shot in the eye. Not only that, but you get the main squick at the end of the episode where he's hooked up to numerous medical equipment, and is brought back to life by his daughter blood. Usually, it's not quite as squick when someone heals, but you get to gradually see it grow back, along with the rest of his face, and smoke coming out of the socket.
    • Claire stabs Sylar in the eye with a pencil in "Pass/Fail". The effect is made partially funny with the pathetically whiny noise he made.
  • In the third episode of the sci-fi series Lexx the crew is stranded on a planet where the inhabitants make "Pattern" out of human body parts. The do this by playing a lottery; one of the participants already lost an eye and has to give his other one.
  • Byker Grove had an infamous episode in which PJ (played by Ant McPartlin of Ant and Dec fame) was blinded when he removed his goggles while paintballing.
  • An installment of the All That sketch "Have a Nice Day with Leroy & Fuzz" showcases the former taking the latter's blood pressure... by wrapping the cuff around Fuzz's neck & pumping until his eyes exploded. (Some Squick removed by the fact that Fuzz is a puppet & his eyes had clearly been replaced with balloons for the shot.)
  • In Twin Peaks, Nadine's eye was accidentally shot out by Hank when they were out hunting.
  • Despite being relatively innocuous, How Its Made featured an episode detailing laser eye surgery. In all its horrible detail. It featured, among other things, hooks, sponges, swabs, and what was effectively a miniature wood planer. Squick. This all has to be done while the patient is awake and aware...
    • The instrument is a microkeratome, and the patient is given a nice hefty dose of local anesthetic drops and oral Valium beforehand (we don't just slice off a big corneal flap with no preparation). The patient has to be awake so that they can focus on the laser's tracking sensor, which in turn assures that the laser ablates the tissue precisely within the patient's visual axis. LASIK is one ophthalmic surgical procedure you'd much rather be awake for, as the results tend to be sub-optimal otherwise.
      • While I do not doubt or argue with you... I don't think there's enough valium in the world to keep me calm while someone shaves my eyeballs and lasers them...
  • Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner parodies this in their comedy routine, "The 2000-Year-Old Man". One of the Old Man's non-sequitors is "Keep away from my eye!"
  • Comedic example: an episode of Friends involving Rachel with an eye infection reveals Rachel freaks out every time someone gets close to touching an eye.
  • Deadwood: In one episode, two of the characters get into a fistfight in the street. While grappling on the ground, one of the fighters jabs at the other man's eye, who then pops up with his eyeball DANGLING FROM THE SOCKET! And oh, how he screams. It's one of the few times something on television has caused me to leap from my seat screaming in terror. * Shudder*
  • While G'Kar is a prisoner of the Centauri emperor on Babylon 5, the emperor doesn't like the way G'Kar looks at him, and has the guards remove one of his eyes. This happens offscreen.
  • Played for laughs in Slings and Arrows in the third season when New Burbage produces King Lear, and Geoffrey has special effects designers demonstrate different approaches to the blinding of Gloucester with dummies.
  • Didn't The X-Files have a bunch of alien mooks running around who had their eyes sewn shut?
    • Yep. And also an episode about an Asian gambling ring where losers had to forfeit their own body parts for organ transplantation. We don't see the actual surgeries, but one of the men who was questioned had a fresh gauze-pad on his face, indicating that he'd just forfeited an eye.
    • And mentioned in "Eve" where the insane Eve 6 says she bit a guard's eyeball (complete with clacking teeth for emphasis). "I meant it as a sign of affection..."
  • In an episode of Grey's Anatomy (the one with the bus crash), one of the patients has a pencil driven through his eye into his brain. Not a fun moment when McDreamy takes that cup off his face.
  • In The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode "Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep", Sarah stabs the villainous bastard Eugene in the eye with a syringe as she breaks out of his van.
    • Also, in the first series, Cromartie acquiring himself a brand new pair of peepers from the unwitting scientist who grew his new skin. Mercifully offscreen.
  • Kenny Powers knocks his old baseball rival's eye out with a baseball in Episode 5 of Eastbound and Down.
  • In the Bones episode "The Double Death of the Dearly Departed", Cam sticks a needle in the corpse's eye. We get an extreme closeup; Booth has a more distant view, but is visibly squicked.
    • Reversed in "The Gamer in the Grease". The corpse is submersed in beer to remove the flesh. We're treated to an eyeball coming out and floating up. Like the opening scene wasn't squicktastic enough...
  • In episode 1.12 of Dollhouse, Alpha does a two-fisted "bowling ball maneuver" on his handler, with squash and squick ensuing.
    • "I understand hell now!"
    • A less graphic variation occurs earlier in the season when Echo is turned into a "human camera" -- her eyes are used as lenses for a federal agency surveillance cam and she herself is made blind. We cut away from the drill hitting her eye just a second early, but the image is quite horrifying enough.
  • Oz. When a former rival gang member turned prison guard annoys the boss of El Norte, he orders Miguel Alvarez to make an example of him. We don't see the attack, just a scene where the staff are having a meeting and suddenly hear this terrible continuous scream. Suddenly the guard bursts into the room having been stabbed in both eyes. But luckily we do get to see close-ups of his empty, bloody eyesockets. Several times.
    • There's also Schillinger getting some glass shards thrown into his eye courtesy of a drugged up Beecher. He eventually gets better, but for a while he has to wear a cool eyepatch.
    • Peter Schibetta having his evil eye ripped out by Chucky Pancamo
  • The season three episode of Angel "Double or Nothing" featured a demon who sucked out people's souls by sticking his fingers in their eyes.
    • Also the season 1 episode "Parting Gifts", where demons attempt to remove Cordelia's eyes while she's still conscious.
  • In the highly underrated TV series The Lost Room, there was an artifact known as the Eye. It was a glass eye that allowed its bearer to heal the sick or wounded, but also to fire off disintegrating Eye Beams. The catch? You had to lose your left eye to use it. Yeah.
    • "Get me some Novocaine."
  • In the second episode of Deadliest Warrior (Viking versus Samurai) the samurai put arrows through test dummy eyes. And then they show it in slow motion, showing the arrows wiggling as they come to a stop. More precisely, the testers set up a gel head with eyeballs and a Viking helmet. The samurai promptly puts one arrow through each eye, leaving the test dummy with twin two-foot arrow hafts sticking out from where his eyes should be. Made worse by the fact that the doctor said that you would still be feeling it, still remember it, and would hemorrhage to death in so much agony.
    • In Episode 3, Spartan versus Ninja, the ninja demonstrate Black Eggs, which would put crushed glass into the eye.
    • In Episode 7, Shaolin Monk versus Maori Warrior, the Shaolin representative shish-kababs and yanks out the eyeballs of the dummy with the Emei Daggers before continuing to slash and stab at the dummy for a full half a minute. This even caused one of the hosts to remark: "So, um, what happened to being pacifists?"
  • Lie to Me has a serial rapist who, not happy with just raping his victims, also blinds them by pouring acid in their eyes so that they live to remember him as the last thing they saw, but can't ID him for the police. We are thankfully spared the act itself, but we are treated to a look at the face of one of the victims after the wounds have healed.
  • Ideal: Craig, after becoming leader of his gang by brutally attacking the other members, makes Psycho Paul the leader of the gang again when leadership proves too much for him. Psycho Paul then gouges his eye out with a spoon. And later gives it back to him, encased in glass.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus had an interscene animation gruesomely exaggerating the point that "television is bad for your eyes."
  • In the season 1 finale of Dark Angel Lydecker knocks a man unconscious and spoons out his eyeball (into what looks like a pudding cup) to use for getting past security.
  • One episode of NCIS focuses on a pair of eyeballs (and nothing else) that were mailed to a Sailor. Extra disturbing moment? Tony finds himself attracted to them.
    • That's not even the Squickiest example on this show! In another episode, the victim was missing one eye. Guess what? He pulled out his own eye AND ATE IT!!!!
    • And for a possibly more (or maybe less, depending on you)Squickier example a recent episode ends with Ziva and Tony in a bar, and Tony receives a gin and tonic from an unknown patron- later thought be the currently re-ocurring Port-to-Port killer- and picks up the glass to drink from it, only to see an eyeball encased in one of the ice cubes. The episodes closes with him yelping and dropping the glass which shatters on the counter
    • And for a less squicky example, in "Under Covers", the late Sophie Rainier had a gold, heart-shaped computer chip surgically embedded in her eye. As Ducky says in the scene where they discover it, no one would normally notice it unless they knew it was there.
  • During a second season episode "Smite", Otto, an incarcerated member of the motorcycle gang Sons of Anarchy has his eye stabbed with a broken mop handle by members of a rival gang. To add insult to injury, it's his good eye that gets stabbed - the other was already mangled by an ugly scar.
  • Given the fact that Red Dwarf's Kryten is an android, he's able to pull out his eyes, and does so from time to time. In one episode, seeing something unbelievable, he pulls them out and rubs them on his pants!
  • An unsub in Criminal Minds is an "Enucleator". Yes, it's common enough to have a category.
  • There was a Smallville episode once with a Meteor Freak who had the ability to control glass. In one scene, he has been arrested for trying to kidnap his daughter and is in an elevator with a bespectacled policeman. He compliments the mans eyewear and the next time we see him, he's stepping out of the elevator alone and the cop is on the ground with his face covered in blood. Yeah, not hard to figure out what happened.
    • There's a small bit of Fridge Logic to this one, as most spectacles today are actually made of clear plastic, not glass.
  • The BBC's production of King Lear is particularly disturbing because Leo McKern, who played Gloucester, was missing an eye in real life.
  • On Brimstone, the only way to return a damned soul to Hell is to put out both of his or her eyes.
  • 24. After being slapped around by Leytanin (spelling?) way too much, Renee finally loses it and stabs him in the eye first before stabbing him another 14 times elsewhere.
    • We are then treated to some wonderful views of the empty socket.
  • In Vampire Diaries Pearl's method of pointing out to Damon that she's not asking for his cooperation is to shove her fingers into his eyes.
  • During the credits, one episode of Tosh.0 shows a montage of people doing things to or with their eyes (licking them, shooting milk out of the sockets, and so on).
  • In the opening of a Malcolm in the Middle episode, Malcolm uses this to get Hank away from the TV - he pretents to watch a documentary on eye surgery, when he's really watching a lingeri calendar shoot.
  • In season one of The Wire, the most conspicuous injury (and the injury to which the most attention is paid) that Brandon receives when he undergoes torture at the hands of the Barksdale gang is that one of his eyes is gouged out, while the other is left not only intact, but open after death.
    • Prezbelewski pistol-whips a teenage drug runner, blinding him in one eye.
  • In the premiere of Rizzoli & Isles, a serial killer and his apprentice who kidnapped Jane Rizzoli leave her alone in a van to check on her grave. During this time, Jane looks around the van for something to fight back with and/or break free from her wrist-binding duct tape. As the serial killer returns, Jane lays motionless. The killer prepares to continue cutting her, but finds her body is smoking. He goes in for a closer look, but is burned when Jane pokes him in the eye with the lit end of an emergency flare she found.
  • This may go in Film, but there are at least two counts of this in the tv series of movie shorts Masters of Horror. The first is in the episode/movie Incident on and off of a Mountain Road, where the killer (dubbed Moonface) uses a drill press to drill neat holes through victims' skulls--entry point being the eyeballs. The second time that I know of is in the episode/movie Cigarette Burns, where the Chinese butler of a wealthy film enthusiast gouges his eyes out with a knife after being driven insane by La Fin Absolue Du Monde.
  • In Royal Pains, Hank has a patient who is having an occlusion in a blood vessel of the eye. To relieve the pressure and save his vision, Hank takes a needle and... One of the very few instances of Eye Scream being a good thing.
  • During an episode of the American version of The Office, Michael and Dwight set out to prank the Utica branch of Dunder-Mifflin while disguised as warehouse workers. While passing a security guard, Dwight expressed a nigh-irresistable urge to "do something to his eyes". As Dwight explains, "The eyes are the groin of the head."
  • Believe it or not, one episode of the kids' show Mist: Sheepdog Tales involves a sheep who's fallen over and is surrounded by crows who are planning to peck her eyes out.

"It happened to my aunt, you know. You remember One-Eyed Betty?

  • The Tales from the Crypt episode "Carrion Death" features a murderer getting his eyes pecked out by a vulture.
    • The episode "Forever Ambergris" features Steve Buscemi catching a flesh-rotting virus, causing one of his eyes to ooze right out of its socket. His idol then puts out a cigarette out on it.
    • The episode "The Assassin" has a man killed by a woman slamming a high heeled shoe in his eye.
  • The death of Jory in Game of Thrones has him get a dagger in the eye, followed by a close-up of his face as he takes a good few seconds to die.
  • Alton Brown explains in the Chili Pepper episode to wear gloves when handling capsicums because, as he found out, capsaicin stays on human skin for hours and is the reason he can't wear contacts. A Scream Discretion Shot is provided to illustrate.
  • In the Law & Order: CI episode, "See Me", an optometrist repeatedly operated on several schizophrenic patients too frequently and often in bizarre ways (only operating on one eye or making an incision on the edge of the iris). As it turns out, he believed that he could treat the visual hallucinations suffered by removing part of the lens. It also turned out that the doctor suffered from schizophrenia as well.
  • Glee, of all shows, has a moment, when Blaine's eye gets scratched after being slushied by Sebastian because it was full of rock salt.
  • Near the end of the Masters of Horror episode "Cigarette Burns", Bellinger's butler cuts out his own eyes after seeing 'La Fin Absolue du Monde', an Artifact of Doom that drives those who have seen it insane.
  • "Heathen", the reviewer for ER on Television Without Pity refused to describe or even think about eye injuries on the show. Instead, the patient had something in his... toe.
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