When Cartman engineered the death of that one kid’s parents, then tricked him into eating them. Not to mention licking the tears off the kid’s face when he started crying.
I know I’ve read or seen some pretty sadistic stuff from more serious mediums, but for the life of me I can’t remember them.
Psychopachik Vampire
Ah, yes: Scott Tenorman Must Die. That was the funniest South Park I had ever seen. Loved it.
Nope, ankle:
And BTW, I don’t think he makes it 
Oooh, did someone invoke Disney? I always thought the death of Quasimodo’s mother was the most graphic on-screen death for Disney (Frollo tore away the baby from her arms with such force that she fell back and cracked her skull on the stone steps of the cathedral). But then raising the baby for twenty years, constantly teaching it that it was worthless monster - that was pretty bad too.
I know this might sound silly, but the bad guy in the current Yu Gi Oh! storyline, Marik, set it up so that the hero must battle his best friend in the card game they play, and chained them both to an anchor. The loser would fall with the anchor and drown to his death, and if the hero either refused to play or forfeited the game, a third close friend - who could not influence the outcome - would be blown up. Pretty sick.
In the computer RPG ‘Knights of the Old Republic’, a young female street kid and her best friend, a wookiee, join your party after the wookiee pledges his life to you after you save his (ala Chewbacca and Han Solo). Later on, if you join the dark side, you can demand that the wookiee kill the girl he has protected through most of her life. Pretty cruel.
I’m pretty sure that’s actually ripped from the mind of William Shakespeare. From one of his tragedies, Titus Andronicus,
Why, there they are both, [the Emperor’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius], baked in that pie;
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
'Tis true, 'tis true; witness my knife’s sharp point.
Then he killed the Emperor’s wife.
Quite some revenge for the rape and murder of his daughter, the aptly named 'Virginius."
Shakespear ripped that off from Greek Myth. And they surely ripped that off from something.
The manga Inu Yasha is pretty much popcorn stuff but I think Naraku’s curse on Miroku’s Grandpa was pretty darn cruel.
Grandpa was cursed with a hole in his hand that will suck in anything. It could be sealed so random objects didn’t get sucked in but it it always grew and eventually swallowed Grandpa. The kicker is that the curse is passed on to Grandpa’s descendants until Naraku is destroyed. So there’s a big crater outside of Miroku’s old home where his Dad met his end and Miroku goes through life always knowing that his hand is going to devour him.
Lavinia, actually – and she wasn’t murdered, though she was mutilated (i.e. tongue and hands cut off, so she’d have no way to convey to anyone what had happened). Titus stabs her (to save her honor, he says) along with a whole lot of other people at the end of the play. (In Deborah Warner’s production she deliberately walked into his knife.)
Really, Titus Andronicus has a lot of stuff fitting this thread. At one point in the play, the villain, Aaron the Moor (a prototype for such nasty Shakespeareans as Iago), tells Titus that his sons, who’ve been framed for the rape of their sister, will be released if Titus will chop off his own hand. This he does, and later has it returned to him with the heads of his two sons.
Some play, innit? :eek: 
Shakespeare’s source for much of the plot of Titus is Ovid’s Metamorphoses – specifically, the story of Philomela and Procne. Philomela is raped by her brother-in-law Tereus (Procne’s husband), who subsequently cuts out her tongue so she can’t tell anyone. However, she makes the truth known by weaving a tapestry about it, and when Procne sees it, she takes revenge on Tereus by killing their son and serving him for dinner, showing the boy’s head at the end of the meal. As is usual in Greek myths, they end up getting turned into things, specifically into birds: Philomela a swallow, Procne a nightingale, and Tereus a hoopoe – later tradition mixed up the birds, so the nightingale is invariably referred to poetically as Philomela.
One interesting note, albeit a bit off-topic, is that Shakespeare is very upfront about his debt to Ovid: Lavinia’s inability to weave a tapestry like Philomela is mentioned in precisely those terms (apparently, her rapists had done their homework), and she attempts to show her father and uncle what’s happened to her by using her nephew’s copy of the Metamorphoses.
Oh, and for reference, and just 'cause they’re both really neat:
The entire Red Wedding plot from A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin.
Robb is the teenage King of the North, waging war against his sworn enemies, the Lannisters. He is injured and takes refuge with the Westerlings, a family loyal to the Lannisters. His younger brothers are reportedly murdered by a man he once trusted, and in his grief Robb turns to Jeyne Westerling for comfort. Though they are sworn enemies, they fall deeply in love and he breaks his vow to marry another in order to marry Jeyne.
It’s this Romeo & Juliet romance, very touching… except that it’s all a setup. The Westerlings were in league with the Lannisters the entire time, plotting to insert Jeyne into Robb’s heart and themselves into his trust. When he breaks off his previous engagement to marry her, the spurned girl’s family is enraged by the slight. They ally with the Lannisters for revenge and lure Robb into their clutches and kill him. It’s an incredibly cruel plan, a great dark twist on the traditional fairy-tale romance, and a masterful stroke of villainy.
The cruellest part is the setup - he and Jeyne are feted by the father of the jilted lover, and Robb’s uncle is to be wed to another of his daughters as compensation. When the newlyweds go upstairs to consumate the marriage (with all of the partygoers following close behind), they’re ambushed, as are everyone in Robb’s party. Quite treacherous, indeed.
Huh. I clearly remember it the other way around. I guess I’ll just have to rent it again to get it straight in my head.
Any excuse to watch it I say 
And I remember the scene well, even, for some reason, that the smashed headlamp of the vehicle Billy’s cuffed to being a Lucas item 
And on the subject of Mad Max, what about the demise (or at least the scorching of) The Goose? The cop is burned alive in his crashed car as part of the initiation of the gang member Billy, which makes his own demise a full circle of violence.
Another parcel of villainy from the brilliant mind of Alan Moore:
In Miracleman, Kid Miracleman comes to discover his alter ego has become a murdering psycopath, so he withdraws into catatonia to keep from becoming a killer. The alter ego tricks him into waking back up, and when he does, he tears everybody in the hospital apart limb from limb and leaves their dismembered corpses in grisly display…all except for one nurse.
Before leaving, KM tells her, “You I will spare. You were kind and gentle to me” and leaves. She’s paralyzed with fright, and after he’s gone, begins to move again, muttering “Thank you God, oh thank you…”
Then the next panel KM returns and tells her, “I’m sorry. They’d think I was growing soft now wouldn’t they?”
Naraku in Inuyasha tricked Kikyo into thinking Inuyasha had betrayed her, causing her to imprision Inuyasha for fifty years, pinned to a tree, cursed Miroku’s family, wiped out Sango’s village and caused Sango’s younger brother to become possessed and attack his sister. And that’s just the beginning…
Don’t forget the fact that throughout that during the whole book the readers are lulled into as sense of false security because a) Robb and his people have guest rights (the notion that because they have eaten food under the father’s castle he cannot harm them) b) the father up until this point is seen as a sort of comical character and not really a threat c) and the fact that there are some hugely influential people in the killed party-killing all of them in one stroke was a ballsy move by Martin.
Max’s wife survives the attack; he visits her in the hospital to find her bad mutilated and barely alive. This is retconned in The Road Warrior, but given that they’ve also retconned a nuclear war, it seems a small change.
For me, the biggest shock has always been Professor Zoom killing Iris Allen with Barry chasing him, but unable to catch him and prevent it. The cruelest thing about it is that for Zoom, it was just a way of proving he’s better than Barry, and not some evil scheme to accomplish some other goal.
Yeah, I know that they later decide Iris wasn’t dead, and that she was some kind of traveller from the future whose soul was saved by future technology. It’s one of the dumber retcons to come out of DC (not quite as stupid as Hippolyte time-travelling to become the golden age Wonder Woman, but close) in their attempt to reconcile everything to a single unified continuity.
I was also disturbed by Ozymandias in Watchmen giving a bunch of people cancer primarily to mess with Dr. Manhattan’s mind, although whether he’s Earth’s greatest villain or hero is debatable.
In both of my cases, it’s that the villain does the evil thing for functional reasons, and not primarily out of malice that makes it so disturbing.
I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that Mad Max was supposed to have happened right before the nuclear war. It wasn’t retconned, it just hadn’t happened yet.
Not counting the entire, just finished, reign of Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada at Marvel, the cruelest thing any Evil Villain ever comitted was “The Dark Knight Strikes Back.”
Nothing in the story, mind you, was that evil. The fact that this piece of shit was allowed to be published is the evil act! And that Frank Miller, the self righteous son-of-a-bitch, is completely unapologetic about it makes it all the more dastardly!
IMODO, anyways.
What does the word “retconned” mean with reference to a film?