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Torture Always Works
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In the magical world of fiction, if torture isn't being just used to prove that the Big Bad is indeed big and bad (or that the Anti-Hero is indeed anti), it works as an instant source of 100% reliable information. The information extracted under torture is always accurate and important, even if the interrogator himself starts with no information at all and so has no way to know if the prisoner is telling the truth or lying. The possibility of having the wrong person, who will say anything under torture whether they know anything or not, will be excluded. Often as not, the victim is then released with no consequences to them if they lied. The only times when torture doesn't work is when the tortured is just too badass to be broken, and doesn't say anything at all. When characters object to torture, they are often portrayed as weak liberal Strawmen who "don't have what it takes" or "don't realize what's at stake". They only make moral criticisms, and never bother to point out that it's unreliable, presumably because they too know that it Always Works. Even when it doesn't work, characters who should know better assume that it will. In Real Life, as an interrogation technique for extracting actual usable intelligence, its efficacy varies wildly — some will tell the truth, others will lie either to spite their torturers or to take revenge on someone by casting them under suspicion to be tortured, others will clam up under poor treatment. It's also been found that because torture is so exhausting victims are sometimes unable to even remember the information their torturers want. Perhaps the greatest problem is that many people will say ANYTHING to make the torture stop. This means false confessions that resemble whatever sort of information the torturer wanted to get. For investigative purposes this result is basically useless but can make the torturer more confident in the technique since it appears to have worked. This plays into another issue which is that true statements may be ignored because the torturer knows what kind of information they expect to get. So the torture continues until the victim is able to come up with a sufficiently convincing lie. Indeed, the fact that people do lie when tortured into a confession is one reason why this isn't generally accepted evidence in courts. Of course, if the purpose of the torture is merely to get a confession — any confession at all, rather than to extract information — as in, the purpose is not necessarily to actually find the true guilty party, but just to have someone, anyone, to fill role of the Fall Guy or The Scapegoat, then torture can be said to be quite effective indeed. The most common form when used by villains is probably Electric Torture. When heroes torture their enemies, they usually use Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, because they Always Work but have a different title and are thus Not Torture. Compare Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique. Contrast Torture Is Ineffective. |
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| Torture Always Works / int_10bc0a19 | type |
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Also used by the Gestapo-esque Particulars in Night Watch. They don't seem to care whether it's a reliable method or not; they just torture prisoners until they admit to any crime the Night Watch needs to solve. Vimes gets information out of a suspect by pretending he's used the horrific ginger beer trick on a comrade, but it's actually several watchmen impersonating the sound of fizzy ginger beer and the resultant screaming. For those with a too-inquisitive mind, you can find the actual trick in the third season of Dexter: Crooked cop Ramon Prado tortures a gang-banger by shaking a glass soda bottle, then spraying it straight up his nostrils, leveraging the pressure with his thumb, which is harmful enough to give the kid a horrendously bloody nose. Technically doesn't work, because the guy legitimately doesn't know anything. |
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Played straight and subverted in His Dark Materials. Mrs. Coulter uses torture twice to get information from witches in The Subtle Knife, but when she's threatened in The Amber Spyglass, she says that she would have thought that they would "know better than to expect truth to come out of torture." | |
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In Dirty Harry, San Francisco Police Department Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan presses down on the Scorpio killer's badly wounded leg (he was just shot with a .44 revolver) until he tells him where to find a girl he had kidnapped and left to suffocate. Naturally, he finds out where she is, only to discover that she has already died. The killer promptly walks away from the law by crying "police brutality", much to Harry's disgust. However, in fact there was more evidence they could have used against him than just his confession. | |
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Psychological torture is used in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit by forcing a suspect into a small closet (he had an intense fear of the dark due to childhood abuse) to make him reveal the location of a woman trapped in a locker with a limited supply of oxygen. | |
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Subverted in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Bellatrix tries torturing Hermione to find out how they got Gryffindor's sword (which Bellatrix thought was being kept in her vault at Gringotts). She uses the Cruciatus curse on Hermione, but Hermione is still able to lie that the sword they have is a fake. Bellatrix does have the presence of mind to double-check by bringing a goblin she was holding captive to verify this, but Harry gets the goblin to go along with the story. | |
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Zero Dark Thirty is a rendition of how Osama bin Laden was captured. Torture was involved in getting some of the information about his associates. This spurred a lot of controversy and accusations that the film is pro-torture. Yet torture is also clearly shown as ineffective in preventing an attack, as the prisoner is reduced to gibberish and any worthwhile information either came from non-torture interrogation and overlooked files, and the director said in an interview that the moral ambivalence of the use of torture was intentional. | |
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Near the end of The Foreigner (2017), a terrorist is tortured into revealing the location of a time bomb, even though she could have simply endured the torture a bit longer (or better yet, lied about its location) until it went off. | |
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Played with in Crusader Kings II. You mechanically cannot torture prisoners for playable information, but torture events can give you a fearsome reputation represented by the "Impaler" trait, which buffs your Intrigue and Learning stats and your troops' effectiveness in battle. | |
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Alias: The other torturin' Jack, the one whose last name is Bristow, is much more selective in his use of torture. Other characters torture, but for some reason it never works—even untrained computer geeks can stand up to enemy intimidation...but even hardened agents are putty in Jack's hands. He doesn't use it often, but he is particularly inventive when he does so, which is possibly why he's so effective. Taking the cake is a scene where he stops the heart of someone who gave him false information through asphyxiation...then brings him back with a Magical Defibrillator. "Give me the information I want, or we do that all over again." | |
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Played with in an early episode of Angel. Angel is tortured, and doesn't reveal what the bad guy wants. However, it's revealed afterwards that he was THIS close to do it, but the gang saved him before that point. It is also (possibly) justified, since they hint that the torturer has some sort of lie detecting ability. | |
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A horrifying example in the Bones episode "The Scare in the Score": someone who's after Booth, but doesn't actually know his name, captures one of the men in his old army unit, but after having failed to extract info from another of Booth's comrades (see below), they also abduct an innocent old lady and torture her in front of Booth's friend until he breaks and gives up his name. ...And then, they kill the old lady and move on to torture Booth's friend For the Evulz for one week. | |
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Jack Ryan: In The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the KGB uses sensory deprivation to break a mole in their service, in their efforts to capture the titular agent. Once said agent was captured, the sensory deprivation method wasn't used due to his health, so instead they used other methods that weren't as harmful to physical condition. Ultimately, he did break, though it took a lot longer than the KGB had planned. The designer of the "new technique" muses that the old methods had more to do with satisfying the sadism of the interrogators than with getting accurate information. Played straight in Without Remorse, involving a pressure chamber on an old Navy base used to basically destroy the drug dealer that Clark was questioning. In The Sum of All Fears, John Clark tortures two Palestinian terrorists that he had captured to get information from them regarding their plans. The terrorists had come up with a disinformation plan in case of capture, as an alternate method of attaining their goals. Played extremely straight in Dead or Alive. The members of the Campus torture prisoners several times, which always results in instant, complete, and 100% accurate confessions, which would be pretty damn impressive even for a source who was cooperating willingly. |
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For those with a too-inquisitive mind, you can find the actual trick in the third season of Dexter: Crooked cop Ramon Prado tortures a gang-banger by shaking a glass soda bottle, then spraying it straight up his nostrils, leveraging the pressure with his thumb, which is harmful enough to give the kid a horrendously bloody nose. Technically doesn't work, because the guy legitimately doesn't know anything. | |
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In The Last of Us, Joel gets information through torture twice. In both cases, he gets the information he needs quickly and easily. The first time is justified, as he tortures one mook while keeping a second tied up to corroborate the information he receives, though in the end he doesn't bother to double-check and just kills both of them. The second time is more problematic: in a race against time to save Ellie from being killed for a vaccine, he takes a gun from the guard who was escorting him from the building and demands to know where she is, shooting said guard when he remains quiet. The guard promptly tells him before Joel finishes him off with a shot to the head. Joel has zero means of verifying the information he is given and the information will be useless to him with just the slightest delay, yet he was able to get precisely the information he needed in the space of a few seconds of torture. |
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In The Matrix, Smith tortures Morpheus for the codes to Zion's mainframe. The fact that they've given him a digital truth serum that is hacking his mind does help. | |
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Played straight, once, in Castle: When his daughter Alexis is abducted, Castle and Beckett track down one of the kidnappers. Beckett leaves Castle alone with the seriously wounded man, who refuses to talk even after Castle's Declaration of Protection. Castle takes a deep breath, at which point we cut to Beckett's face as she hears the kidnapper's cries of agony from the other room. In the next scene, they are back at the precinct, having all the information they need. This in contrast to torturing Ryan and Esposito being completely useless in an earlier episode. So in the Castle-verse, Torture Always Works when a protagonist does it? | |
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Bennet in Heroes tortures information out of a captive with a rather creative and sadistic threat. It works because the victim knew (or at least was convinced) that Bennett would carry out his threat later on if the information proved to be wrong. Subverted in Volume 5, when Bennett's love interest Lauren, a CIA agent, says that torture never works. She eventually convinces Bennet to coax rather than torture information out of Carnival member Edgar. |
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Bungo Stray Dogs: While conversing with an imprisoned Koyo Dazai reminds her that whenever he filled in for torturing during his days in the mafia, the person always broke without fail, causing Koyo to become terrified and comply before he can even start. As a teenager, Chuuya's preferred means of extracting information was to kick people until they told him what he wanted. However, Dazai points out his overly violent methods and tendency to flat out kill people is largely unnecessary, especially when just conversing with a target is easier and doesn't result in a bloody scene. |
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This trope is torn to shreds then analysed in detail in Grand Theft Auto V's most controversial mission, "By the Book", in which the FIB has Trevor torture Ferdinand Kerimov, an innocent man that they captured so that they can eliminate a supposed terrorist. In the final part of the mission, Trevor takes Kerimov to the airport so he can escape to safety, and the following exchange happens along the way: | |
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In La Femme Nikita, Section One used torture constantly - and always with effective results. This provided a precursor to Jack Bauer's methods, as Nikita was produced by the same team that later created 24. | |
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City of Bones (1995): In Charisat, legal testimony by non-citizens is only admissible if obtained under torture. Khat holds out against relatively minor torture for one night, but thinks that when they escalate, he'll surely spill the information he's hiding — or whatever he thinks they want to hear. Fortunately, he's rescued before then. | |
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Modern Warfare: Al-Asad, Rojas' assistant, Rojas himself, Warrabe, and Volk are subjected to the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique. The only one who it doesn't work on is Al-Asad, of all people, but the necessary information is discovered mid-interrogation when he gets a phone call, so perhaps it just didn't last long enough. It even gets discussed regarding Volk in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (though his case may be a subversion, since one of the secrets he reveals is that Makarov and his top advisors are all meeting in Prague, which later turns out to be a trap for our protagonists): | |
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In Mass Effect: Revelation, Kahlee Sanders is kidnapped and reflects on how she'll be deprived until she cooperates. They'll keep her locked in a closet for three days with no food, water or exercise. Then they'll give her a little water and ask her to work for them. If she says no, they'll put her away again. And if she still says no, they'll start beating and hurting her. Sooner or later, the combination of deprivation and discomfort will make her choose the option most convenient to her. | |
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Discussed Trope in Requiem for an Assassin by Barry Eisler. An old enemy waterboards a friend of John Rain for information on how to contact him. He points out that Torture Is Ineffective if you're just fishing for information, as you've no idea what's true and what's being made up to make the pain stop. However for specific information that you can verify once you have it, it's very effective. | |
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Sharpe: in Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe takes offence when Wellington's latest spymaster says he is holding information in case Sharpe is captured and tortured. Sharpe says he would never talk and is rebuked with: | |
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The "Interrogation" missions in Assassin's Creed consist of Altair stalking people into dark alleys and beating them until they give up general information. He's also using more intimidation than actual pain; beating them up is just to subdue them so he can start asking questions, and he doesn't actively torture the victim. | |
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Discussed and doubly subverted in The Maltese Falcon. When Kasper Gutman uses the threat of torture in order to coerce Sam Spade to divulge the whereabouts of the Falcon, Sam responds that torture is only effective if the tormentor is ready at some point during the torture to go all the way and kill the victim; Gutman cannot afford to kill Sam since he is the only person knowing the bird's location and Sam knows that Gutman knows that etc... Which is not quite true since many torture techniques are very painful and specially designed to keep the victim alive for an indefinite amount of time. | |
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Deadpool 2 features the variation of "the threat of torture always works". When Deadpool's friend, Weasel, is captured, Cable tells him he'll start by first bending something that is not meant to bend and he'll go on from there. Weasel tells him it won't be necessary to start bending anything, and tells Cable every detail of Deapool's plan to disrupt the mutant prisoner caravan, including how many people he recruited into his team "X-Froce," that he has an erection on account of how nervous he gets in intense situations, and that there is a high winds advisory. | |
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In Spider-Man: The Movie, Spidey dangles a gang member over the edge of an apartment building. He talks. | |
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Jack Bauer of 24 fame is this trope's clear champion. The over-effectiveness is lampshaded in the comedic "Jack Bauer Facts" that circulate the internet: "Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys." In fact, a major theme of Day 7 was how torture was necessary because it's so effective and apparently nothing else ever works. In fact, when someone he's interrogating starts saying anything Jack wants to hear, Jack specifies someone who has been in the business as long as him learns to tell when someone is speaking under duress, telling the truth or will never break. He tells the guy off for pretending and states he knows he's dealing with the kind of guy who will cough up the truth under torture. Jack, being Jack, is right (although he's stopped from completing the interrogation by people who believe torture is never acceptable). Despite this, torture never, ever works when used on Bauer himself. Yet he still firmly believes in it. Funny how nobody ever points this out. Averted in Day 8. Bauer tortures a Russian sniper, going much farther and being far more brutal than ever before, but fails to gain the information he wants. He discovers that the intel is inside the Russian's cell SIM card. Then again, Jack guts the Russian to get the chip. However, for once, it wasn't treated as if the moral of the story is "the crueler the better, it always gets you what you need." Jack had been Jumping Off the Slippery Slope by this point and it was used to show how far off the deep end it was going. Also, the Live Another Day miniseries has Jack rule out breaking someone that way on multiple occasions and has had to get information in smarter ways. By the last episode, torturing someone into giving you information had yet to happen even once. Most shockingly, Live Another Day subverts it at one point as Jack starts to torture the injured daughter of a villain... and suddenly backs down, humbly admitting that he was just doing it out of spite and knew she wasn't going to talk. |
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In his James Bond novels, Ian Fleming (who had prior experience in British intelligence) refers now and then to agents being tortured, on the implicit assumption that, indeed, anyone — even a trained agent — will eventually give up what they know given enough time and pain. | |
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In the Assassin's Creed: Lineage prequel video, Giovanni Auditore (Ezio's father) captures one of Rodrigo Borgia's Mooks and delivers him to Lorenzo de' Medici. Uberto Alberti tortures the captive on a rack, who reveals the Templar plot to assassinate Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza. | |
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World of Warcraft: Death Knights have to torture lots of people to death in one of their starting quests before one of them finally talks... but it's still an example, because as soon as anyone says anything it's the truth. Then it's subverted, because you don't believe them and the victim dies from the wounds before it can finish explaining. In the quest line which precedes your entry into The Nexus, you're required by the Kirin Tor to torture an imprisoned sorcerer until he talks. And when he finally does, all the information turns out to be completely accurate. Subverted in one quest, in which torturing a quillboar gets him to reveal the name of his leader, but only because he's too stupid to avoid unintentionally blurting it out, and offering him food or tickling him will also get him to give the information. In fact, the latter techniques actually work faster. |
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Played straight in Without Remorse, involving a pressure chamber on an old Navy base used to basically destroy the drug dealer that Clark was questioning. | |
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Averted in Sarilho, in which nothing of value is extracted out of the Foreigner after a torture section by not one but two Torture Technicians. | |
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Subverted in Jericho (2006) when Hawkins says torture is great for getting answers, but the fear of torture is better for getting the truth. He even lampshades this trope, saying actual torture only works in the movies. | |
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Interestingly, the Beka Cooper series is set in the same universe, and focuses on a group of proto-cops. Torture is still widely used because the high price of truth spells, combined with political red-tape, put them beyond the reach of low-level law enforcement. Actual, genuine torture is shown to be pretty useless and needlessly cruel, but there's no real alternative. | |
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Jessica Jones (2015): Played with. When Jessica and Simpson capture one of Kilgrave's bodyguards, Simpson wants to pry his kneecap off with a knife to get him to talk, but Jessica points out that he's mind-controlled, so he won't say anything no matter what they do. The bodyguard then says that 1: He's not mind-controlled, and 2: He'll tell them whatever they want, so could they please put the knife away? | |
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Star Wars: Invasion: The Vong, who are experts in inducing and enduring agony, use a number of intense torture devices to break their prisoners, which invariably ends up working. | |
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Inverted in Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Party tortures its victims with the specific intent of getting them to give false information. They don't stop until the victim is 100% willing to say, do, and think anything the Party wants them to without question. | |
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In The Dark Knight, Batman uses it on a mob boss by dropping him from two stories up (conventional Batman interrogation techniques involve dangling the perp from twenty or thirty stories up until he talks) and breaking his legs. This works a bit better. Except it still doesn't work. The mob boss still doesn't tell him anything, because he's way more scared of the Joker than anything the Batman could do to him. This calls to mind earlier, when Batman had the Joker in custody, and Joker himself told Batman that he could wail on him all day, and he'd still never tell him anything until he decided he wanted to. This is in stark contrast to Batman's very effective use of torture in Batman Begins, who determines information about the growing conspiracy from crooked cop Flass, and finds out that Dr. Crane/Scarecrow is working for Ra's Al Ghul. This is part of the more mature theme of The Dark Knight. The Joker even gives the Batman tips on how to beat someone up while Batman is pounding him. Batman begins by slamming Joker's head against the table, which the Joker says is a poor way to start, since it makes the victim too dazed to feel any further injury. Which is immediately proven: Batman smashes Joker's hand, which Joker no-sells and says, "See?" | |
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Played straight again and again in The Shield. Vic Mackey and his Strike Team frequently torture suspects before arresting them to get useful information. This can range from simply pointing a gun at the suspect or beating them to stabbing them with a badge pin or drowning them in oil. The perps always know exactly what the cops want to find out, they always give in and reveal the details, and they never attempt to give misleading information or tell outright lies. Could be partially justified because Mackey has a fearsome reputation and is likely to track down and punish anyone who tries to play him, but it even works in situations where the suspect ought to be more scared of the people he is betraying, or where he is about to leave town never to be seen again. | |
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Subverted in an episode from the first season of New Tricks. The team has the suspect in custody, are applying various amount of Perp Sweating to get him to confess, and it appears he is ready to crack, when the trope is subverted by the sudden arrival of the suspect's attorney. The suspect had secretly used his his mobile phone to call his attorney, who was able to listen to - and record - everything that was going on. | |
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The First Law is about a torturer. Of course, it get subverted ruthlessly in that he knows most of the 'confessions' are false and he only does it to achieve the political goals of his superiors. | |
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In Farscape, Rygel once tortured a Charrid to death and managed to extract some valid information from him. But he was more in it for the sadism anyway, since his race was devastated by a Charrid invasion attempt. Also, Scorpius' ex-girlfriend Natira tortures a captured mercenary by ripping one of his eyeballs out and apparently eating it. Quite naturally, the mercenary begins confessing, though Scorpius' ability to detect lies helped a lot. |
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Also deconstructed in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Die is Cast", in which the not quite reformed Garak is forced back into Cardassia's brutal Obsidian Order. In his previous stint as a spy, Garak had been among other things a skilled torturer and is sent back into that role...but when assigned to torture his friend Odo for information about the Founders, it's Garak who breaks. He desperately begs Odo to give him any information, even if it's a lie, so he can stop the torture and report it to his superiors. | |
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Discussed in the Archer tie-in book How to Archer. When you're a Cold War-era spy captured by Cold War-era professionals, it will be effective. They'll poke your eye out. They'll electrify your scrotum. They'll shove a thermometer up your dickhole and then smash it with a hammer so it shatters. You are going to talk. So you might as well talk immediately and save yourself all that trouble. | |
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Tortall Universe: Subverted in the Trickster's Choice, in which after Fesgao asks if they should use torture to get the information from an assassin, Aly replies "Any amateur knows torture is chancy at best. People do still lie under torture." It helps if you are in an universe that has truth spells and truthdrops... Interestingly, the Beka Cooper series is set in the same universe, and focuses on a group of proto-cops. Torture is still widely used because the high price of truth spells, combined with political red-tape, put them beyond the reach of low-level law enforcement. Actual, genuine torture is shown to be pretty useless and needlessly cruel, but there's no real alternative. |
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Subverted in The Passion of Joan of Arc. They drag Joan to the torture room but she simply explains to them the logic listed in the description above. | |
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In Girl Genius, Othar Tryggvassen (Gentleman Adventurer!) assumes this is what Baron Wulfenbach intends, but the Baron is simply interested in taking him apart to see what makes the spark tick. "No matter what you do to me, I'll never talk!" "Ah, if only that were so." | |
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Played with in Vinland Saga. After catching an English spy, Askeladd takes a pair of shears to his fingers, one by one. The guy does eventually tell them what they want to know, but he holds out just long enough to hear that his reinforcements (led by the feared Thorkell the Tall) have arrived to attack Askeladd's men before he talks, which pretty much makes the whole torturing him thing moot, since Askeladd wanted to know what kind of reinforcements the spy might have. The torture victim laughs in their faces as Askeladd cuts off his head. | |
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Played with in Reservoir Dogs: At one point the crooks try to beat information about The Mole out of a cop they've taken prisoner, but when Nice Guy Eddie shows up he points out that this isn't a reliable technique. Of course, Mr. Blonde turns out to be an Ax-Crazy psychopath who just wants to torture a cop for no reason, so this ends up being moot. | |
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On Scandal, Huck manages to successfully torture information out of a captive even though he keeps the guy's mouth duct-taped shut until after he's past the point of being able to form coherent words. On the other hand when Huck himself is captured the torture fails because they can't break him and he doesn't know anything anyway. |
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Lost: The flashbacks of the Ben/Sayid torture episode, One Of Them, saw Sayid successfully torture a former superior officer of his to get the location of US soldiers. He used pliers to great effect it seemed. He also prepared to torture more Others in The Glass Ballerina, telling Sun he would capture two of them and kill the rest. Sun asked why he would take two and Sayid replied: "One to make the other cooperate." Badass mofo. |
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Rome In the first episode, Lucius Vorenus has a specialist torture detachment crucify Gaullish prisoners to find out who stole Caesar's standard. The first man to put up screams in agony and reveals the information right away. Of course, the modern Western audience is so used to hearing about Jesus Christ suffering on the cross that this effectively puts across the point that crucifixion really hurts. Pullo and Octavian kidnap Evander and torture him into admitting he had an affair with their friend's wife Niobe. However Octavian is suspicious at the quick confession and insists they continue—it takes hours of torture before Evander admits the real secret, which is that he fathered a child with Niobe, and the baby that Niobe's teenage daughter has been passing off as her own is actually the child of Niobe and Evander. Atia has to torture a confession out of a slave not because it's more effective, but because under Roman law that's the only way a confession from a slave would be held valid. Not that she has any qualms about this. |
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In Prison Break, General Zavala becomes the new head of the prison guards at Sona. Unlike his predecessor, he isn't corrupt and believes Michael Scofield about Gretchen Morgan being a criminal. Zavala has Gretchen tortured and, while that doesn't reveal any information at first, concludes that her behavior and composure indicates that this isn't her first time being tortured, confirming that she isn't who she claims. Later, she pretends to break and agrees to take them to a safe house, only to surprise and kill the General and his escort. | |
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In Darker than Black, torture (or the threat thereof) tends to work on Contractors because, being emotionless, they have no emotional stake in their objectives and will spill the beans unless there's a rational reason not to. Of course, that means that a sufficiently good argument or bargain not involving the threat of force is just as effective, but Hei, who has a very un-Contractor personality at times, prefers torture. | |
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A French Village: Müller regularly claims this to his victims before beginning, saying it's just a matter of time and technique before people talk. Generally it seems to be the case, but in one case he's thwarted when a captured Communist who's aware he has a weak heart dies after he'd held out. | |
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In Oedipus the King, the shepherd who found the abandoned infant Oedipus and gave him to Polybus is brought to Oedipus and refuses to talk. Oedipus orders his guards to twist his arm behind his back until he does. Later, he threatens to have the man killed when he hesitates again. Only then does Oedipus become the last in the play to deduce the Awful Truth that he indeed did, as prophesied, kill his father and marry his mother. | |
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Played straight in A Song of Ice and Fire. A knight in Queen Cersei's employ initially gives the false confession they had agreed upon when questioned by the Faith Militant, but under torture he gives up the true story. As part of the same plot, a bard is deliberately tortured into making a false confession. Ironically, he's the only one to stick to his story when everyone else has recanted afterwards, as it drives him insane. | |
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Not done for interrogation purposes, but in Warhammer 40,000: Gladius, one quest has the Chaos God Slaanesh demand that the Chaos army drive the robotic Necrons insane. The Chaos forces succeed by capturing the Necrons, discovering their pleasure/pain centres and then tortured/pleasured them into madness. | |
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Slightly ambiguous in A Clockwork Orange, but seems to indicate that even if torture did work, would that really justify its use? | |
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In The Sum of All Fears, John Clark tortures two Palestinian terrorists that he had captured to get information from them regarding their plans. The terrorists had come up with a disinformation plan in case of capture, as an alternate method of attaining their goals. | |
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Spider-Man: Madame Web is a victim of this in Grim Hunt after she was captured and tortured for weeks by the Kravinoffs, and because of her powers, she saw herself eventually giving in, which she eventually did. | |
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Discussed at length in The Battle of Algiers. Torture does work, as the French gain valuable information from it, but the movie depicts it as counterproductive by leading to backlash among the Algerian population and even the French public. | |
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In Darkness at Noon, Gletkin, an interrogator during Stalin's purges is a firm believer of this, stating: "Human beings able to resist any amount of physical pressure do not exist." This is despite the fact that during the Civil War, Gletkin was captured by the enemy, and they tied a lighted candlewick on to his shaven skull, but he didn't confess. When this is brought up to him, Gletkin counters that this was only because they didn't have enough time to torture him, as he was rescued a few hours later. | |
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The Hitherby Dragons story "An Oracle For NP" deconstructs this. It starts with a torturing that reveals the location of a bomb from someone who has no way of knowing where it was from or how. Further experimentation soon reveals that a suitably chosen torture victim can give correct answers to any question whatsoever, and the world soon shifts to a high-tech utopia built on the backs of a caste of victims. | |
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PandoraHearts subverts this in the first five minutes. Though the torture is mundane... the victim promptly gives quick information. Quick, and WRONG information! | |
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One of the big features of The Punisher (THQ) was the ability to torture any random mooks, either through "standard" means like pressing your gun against their head, or threatening to put them into furnaces or put a freaking drill through their head. Only some of them would actually give you useful information, though (although they all gave you information of some kind). There's also two mooks per level who, if you torture, might say something that causes Frank to have a flashback. He'll even comment after killing/sparing them. | |
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Warhammer has an inversion: one Witch Hunter manages to get the information he needs from Slaaneshi heretics by giving them a potion that numbs all sensory input. To those who worship a god(dess) based on constant physical sensation, it's a complete Mind Rape. | |
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Always works when Butler Parker or one of his associates attempts it using psychological tricks instead of hard-handed torture. | |
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The Punisher (2004): The Punisher hangs a guy from the ceiling in chains, tells him how he's going to take a blowtorch to the guy's back, and then explains that he'll be cooking the guy's back at such a high temperature that the nerves won't even get time to register the pain before dying, so all the guy will feel is cold. Frank then uses the blowtorch to cook a steak, (providing the sound and smell of sizzling meat) while running a popsicle up and down the guy's back. It works. The chief benefit of this is the fact that it's a complete psych out. That said, the film never explores how far Frank would actually have gone. By contrast, a later torture scene involving Quintin Glass and Frank's next door neighbor subverts the trope; Glass gets nothing, in spite of removing every piece of the man's extensive body piercings the hard way. | |
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In one of the dead drops in inFAMOUS: Second Son, the informant informs Delsin that Augustine has been torturing people for information to his location. Most quickly swear that they could lead her right to you. However it is clearly a subversion as they are most likely saying this just to get the torture to stop. The informant all but confirms this but still warns Delsin to watch himself. | |
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In The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the KGB uses sensory deprivation to break a mole in their service, in their efforts to capture the titular agent. Once said agent was captured, the sensory deprivation method wasn't used due to his health, so instead they used other methods that weren't as harmful to physical condition. Ultimately, he did break, though it took a lot longer than the KGB had planned. The designer of the "new technique" muses that the old methods had more to do with satisfying the sadism of the interrogators than with getting accurate information. | |
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The Holy Office: The Inquisitors strip Francisca and torture her until she confesses being Jewish. Likewise, when they catch Luis a second time, he's tortured for quite some time until he spits the names of all the practicing Jews he knows. | |
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Played with in Flashman and the Mountain of Light. After being captured by a general of the Khalsa, Flashman is told that he will be tortured for information, with the rationale being that a man as brave is he will only give up what he knows after he's been driven out of his mind with pain. However, not only does Flashman not have any information, he is also an utter coward, and so he breaks down into a terrified wreck at the mere thought of physical pain. Unfortunately, such is his reputation for heroism that his captor assumes he's putting on an act in order to avoid giving up what he knows, and begins torturing him anyway | |
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Lampshaded and played with in Person of Interest. Root needs answers from Shaw, and she notes that, statistically, torture only ever gets false answers or at the very least useless ones. That doesn't mean that she's not going to torture Shaw, because she is on a schedule. | |
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Act of Valor deliberately subverts this. When a CIA agent is captured by the drug traffickers in the film, she is brutally tortured but utterly refuses to break under the pain. Later on, when Christo, the leader of the drug traffickers, is captured and questioned by Miller, the interrogation consists entirely of the two men sitting at a table and talking, with Miller simply laying out the reality of the situation: Christo will be going to prison, and unless he cooperates, he will likely never see freedom or his family again. Christo breaks immediately and tells them everything he knows. | |
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The Avengers has Invincible where Steve was captured and HYDRA tortures him, not to get information, but to break the Avengers and SHIELD's spirit by physically and emotionally shattering their leader. They nearly succeeded. | |
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Last Res0rt subverts it with Daisy Archanis and her leaked confession that she's actually the Galaxy Girl Scout Arael who set off a huge feud, which was apparently extracted using torture... and everyone knows it, including Daisy's supporters, arguing that because she was tortured for the information, it MUST be bogus. Veled admits later that she didn't need to torture Daisy for the information — just the audio confession thereof, since Veled can extract whatever somebody knows just by touching them (and thus confirm the truth of Daisy's statements). In other words, Daisy had to be tortured into compliance, not into supplying new information. | |
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Subverted in the Trickster's Choice, in which after Fesgao asks if they should use torture to get the information from an assassin, Aly replies "Any amateur knows torture is chancy at best. People do still lie under torture." | |
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In The Power of Five, Scott Tyler is kidnapped by the villains and kept sleep-deprived, drugged, and starved until he agrees to do whatever the villains say. | |
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In Erfworld, Parson's understanding of the enemy plan (after Wanda reports that their prisoner has given it up) matches what we know of Ansom's actual plans. However, it's an open question how much this owes to torture (which the two have of a history of doing recreationally anyway) and how much to other psychological pressures and regular mind control, using magic. | |
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In the movie Payback, Mel Gibson's character willingly submits to being tortured just so he could feed his torturers false information. (They wouldn't believe him if he just told them before the torture) | |
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Subverted in American Gods - when Shadow is captured and interrogated, he's completely cooperative and truthful, but his captors don't believe him, so the Bad Cop continues to beat the tar out of him. Until Laura shows up, anyway. | |
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Used on Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy's interrogation subjects are usually demons, whose loyalties are extremely weak. Once she has someone at her mercy, it rarely takes more than a minute for them to start talking. | |
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In Flight of the Nighthawks the protagonists torture an assassin for information about his organization's base. However, they only need him to think about it, as they have a mind reader among the interrogators. It still takes days. | |
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In GURPS, torture gives a huge bonus to interrogation rolls but Social Engineering turns this on its head. A subject who is overwhelmed by torture or a long interrogation will say whatever they think will stop the torture rather than what they think is true. As a result the bonus can play against the interrogator. | |
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According to Aquarium, there are no strong people. There are only bad interrogators. | |
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Ken Shamrock did this once to Christian, after he had been implicated in the kidnapping of Shamrock's on-screen sister, Ryan. Christian and his cronies, Edge and Gangrel, were yukking it up in the ring about how they had gotten to Shamrock, only for Shamrock to come storming out to the ring and — after sending Edge and Gangrel out of the ring — began brutally beating Christian. Christian refused to talk at first, making Shamrock accelerate his punishment. After several minutes in his crossface lock, Christian squealed. | |
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Lone Wolf features a rare example of a hero torturing information out of a villain in Book 18 Dawn of the Dragons. In the beginning of the adventure, Lone Wolf has the opportunity to interrogate a man who had been caught plotting to assassinate him. The gaoler offers Lone Wolf his torture tools (including hot coals) but Lone Wolf declines. Lone Wolf then proceeds to either Mind Control or Mind Rape the prisoner into telling him who wanted Lone Wolf dead. It works but then the prisoner uses the last of his willpower to bite into a trick tooth containing deadly poisonous gas. | |
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The torture skills of the Quisition in Small Gods is equally remarked upon. In this case, though, whether or not the victim is actually in possession of important information or is a heretic is considered ultimately unimportant. They figure that simply being suspected of something is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, since surely the Great God Om would not allow suspicion to fall on an innocent. Sound familiar? | |
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Subverted in Replica. Dirk Mosely, Paxco's chief of security, enjoys using torture, but knows one must be sparing because people can and will say anything to make it stop. | |
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Deliver Us from Evil Series: This is played with when Holmes was kidnapped and tortured by Moriarty and his henchmen. It is averted that Holmes just barely avoided crossing over the Despair Event Horizon but when his rescuers found him, it was clear that he was pretty far gone. | |
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Subverted in Transsiberian. Kolzak tortures Abby to find out where her boyfriend Carlos is. She legitimately doesn't know, however. He then tortures her in front of her acquaintances, Roy and Jessie, thinking that seeing Abby in agony will cause one of them to talk. Jessie, who know exactly where Carlos is dead, by her hand, is visibly disturbed during the scene. She breaks down, seems as though she's going to crack, and then lies again. Badly. | |
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In Revolution many characters, but especially Sebastian "Bass" Monroe use torture to get information extremely quickly from any captured villain or lesser character. Miles, however, is shown to be resistant to torture as he is the resident badass. | |
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