Crying With Blood on Hands Drawing Ref

I told you to stop rubbing your eyes! Now look at them!

"I'm so happy I could cry, but I don't want to because it's really gross."

Or pus, or slime, or icky black stuff... If something's coming out of your eyes and it's not salty water then you can bet your buttons that something pretty bad is happening to you. The trope comes in two flavours, which are, oddly, created to have the exact opposite effect on the audience:

Flavour one is designed to freak them out, and is usually a sign that the person has been infected by some horrible virus, or is being killed by weird supernatural means. Eye trauma is one of the easiest ways to gross people out, and this method has the added advantage that the person can be "cured" without having lost their vision permanently. Alternatively, it signifies that the "weeping" person is in some way inhuman—or at the very least a candidate for supervillainy and somewhat demonic entities and characters. In this context, it's a close simile of the Deadly Nosebleed.

Flavour two, meanwhile, is used to signify someone's death in a poetic and possibly even "beautiful" way, especially if the character is a Tragic Villain. This is far less common, and the aim is not necessarily to freak out the audience but to add a layer of sadness to a death scene. Mopey vampires are particularly fond of this flavour. The undercurrent to this kind of bloody tears is that the person doing the crying is in some fundamental way (be it biologically or emotionally) incapable of doing so through normal means—but is so overcome with emotion that they are doing so anyway.

Alternatively, there's also a third flavour used to signify seeing something so squicky or just plain awful that the person's eyes start bleeding from the sensation. This serves to showcase the object's sheer Squick or general painful suckiness, to the point of being a Brown Note of sorts. Quite commonly used on the Internet.

Along these lines, statuary or paintings doing this with the first flavour can mean someone present is utterly evil (if the items are holy relics) or that the item itself is an Artifact of Doom. With the second flavour, it means the item is a holy relic that's "manifesting" itself this way in response to some tragedy/holiness, whether of its own or those present.

Has nothing to do with the band in Wizards of Waverly Place.

See also: Blood from the Mouth, Psychic Nosebleed and Blood from Every Orifice, Rain of Blood.

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Examples:

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    Anime & Manga

• Black Cat, Episode 01
• When a Behelit summons the Godhand in the Berserk universe, its features rearrange into a human face, which sheds tears of blood and screams. This also happens to Griffith due to being tortured and Guts himself due to having his right eye clawed out by a demon.
• The second flavor of this occurs in episode 25 of Cowboy Bebop, when Vicious kills the leaders of the Red Dragon and takes over the syndicate, executing one of them by slashing him across the eyes and making him "shed tears of scarlet."
• This happens in Princess Ai with the title character, further illuminating her inhuman nature.
• This happens in Magi: Labyrinth of Magic whenever a character uses too much magoi.
• In 7 Seeds, the Ryugu Shelter arc uses the first variation. People who have died due to Arcia X are usually depicted with bloody tears since that's how the parasitoids end up killing their host, eating their way out through the eyeballs.
• Played for laughts in Hyakko where Amagasa-sensei starts crying blood when his students push him too far.
• Chrono Crusade:
  • A statue of the Virgin Mary is seen crying tears of blood at one point.
  • Joshua also cries tears of blood when he first puts Chrono's horns on his head, and in the manga the Apostles cry tears of blood from the strain of a spiritual ceremony called the "oratorio."
  • Statues of the Virgin Mary have a disturbing tendency to do this a lot; one also does in Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, and also in one cut of the famous scene in The Exorcist.
• In Claymore, you at one point see Teresa having a trail of blood on her face. Part of that trail resembled the path of a tear.
• Kyosuke, the protagonist of The SoulTaker often has these as a result of being Back from the Dead. It's more used for him to realize he's close to a Flicker, however. He initially relies solely on this to realize when who he thinks is his sister, Runa, is really just a gun-toting Flicker named Asuka.
• Saint Seiya:
  • Aquarius Camus, Capricorn Shura and Gemini Saga cry tears of blood after being forced to kill Virgo Shaka.
  • Even before, when they showed up and fought Mu, Mu noticed that "their souls were crying tears of blood", being the first to realize they were suffering.
• Saint Seiya Omega visits this trope when The resident lone wolf/ Ikki expy realizes the difficult decision he must make and pull a Heel–Face Turn on his Big Bad Dad as a result of him killing his Love Interest and viewing him as no different from the humans he preaches are the reason why he must destroy the world.
• In Chainsaw Man, the Darkness Devil makes Angel cry those by merely looking at him, though he also has blood coming from his mouth, impliying it's because of one of Darkness' powers and not an exemple of the third flavour.
• Lutecia's summoned creatures cried blood while she was under Quattro's Villain Override in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS.
• Naruto:
  • Uchiha Itachi sheds tears of blood when he strains his sharingan to the limit while fighting his brother just before he dies at his brother's feet.
  • At Itachi's death his brother Sasuke also cries blood tears from Itachi's blood that went into his eyes at the end of their fight.
    • Sasuke now exhibits the same behavior when he taxes his own Mangekyou Sharingan to a much greater degree.
  • The Gedo Mazo Statue starts bleeding from its eyes as it starts transforming into the Ten Tails as of Chapter 595.
  • Creative angles with blood spatter and reflections give the illusion of Zabuza and Haku crying tears of blood when Kakashi runs Haku through while trying to get to Zabuza again.
• Terry Bogard sheds a few when Sulia dies in Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture, and then attacks Mars.
• Samurai Deeper Kyo averts Flavour two by having the Mibu cry tears of blood up until their death, when they can finally cry real tears.
• In episode 3 of Shamanic Princess, Lena cries buckets of these when she overheats while using her Super Mode.
• This seems to be the only way Alucard from Hellsing is physically able to cry, considering his true nature. He sheds them in a nightmare about his defeat at the hands of Abraham van Helsing, and finds himself still crying as he awakens from his dream. Later on he also sheds bloody tears while unconscious and reliving his tragic past and decision to become what he is. The last time Alucard does this is at the time of Alexander Anderson's death, where he openly weeps and sobs.
  • Seras does this in the seventh OVA during a flashback of her horrific childhood where she was forced to watch as her mother's corpse was raped. She also cries blood during Pip's death due to having had her eyes gouged out.
    • She does this in the last episode of the TV series as well.
• In a rare variation that doesn't involve supernatural powers or symbolism, Negima! Magister Negi Magi has Negi bleeding out of his eyes after Jack Rakan beats the crap out of him, in addition to copious Blood from the Mouth. Given that earlier chapters of Negima went with Bloodless Carnage, it's simply an indicator of how badly injured he is.
  • Also, in a flashback during the fight between Rakan and Fate's girls, a young Homura is seen, while despairing over having just been made an orphan, with blood streaming down from her closed left eye (hard to see since she's covering it, but it's there). It's implied that she lost it.
• In the opening of Rozen Maiden, "Kinjirareta Asobi", Jun is depicted with blood coming from his eyes as he is choked by vines.
• Muramasa, a Filler Villain in Bleach, does this.
  • Äs Nödt cries blood when he enters his Vollständig.
  • Urahara Kisuke has both of his eyes destroyed, leaving thick blood trails running from the empty sockets. His eyes are healed by his bankai within a minute or so, but the streaks of blood remain.
• Occurs a couple of times in Inuyasha, perhaps one of the most prominent examples being a yokai that read the minds/hearts/souls(?) of its victims, then would provide them with a happy dream, whilst they were absorbed into the soil, all the while the victim crying tears of blood.
• Happened in D.Gray-Man to Allen when he had to watch a bunch of Akuma getting destroyed by the "Third Exorcists." No wonder he objects to his bosses' methods...
• This happens to Tsuchimikado in A Certain Magical Index when casting a huge spell despite being an esper. Also blood from the mouth and apparently rupturing blood vessels essentially everywhere. He gets better because said esper ability is a passive Healing Factor.
  • Another example in this series happens to Accelerator after watching how Yomikawa got stabbed and then crushed, by Kakine Teitoku, onto the floor many times despite Accelerator begging him to stop.
• While not a real example, Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist has a tendency to look like he's doing this due to blood getting splashed on his face. This is apparently because the author likes to play around with the highlights and such created by a person crying but couldn't due to Ed's never crying being a plot point.
• Sosuke in Full Metal Panic! after he learns of chidori's death (she isnt really) is too emotionally dead to cry, instead a shard of glass cuts his cheek and the trickle of blood serves the purpose.
• When Mitsuko Souma bites it in Battle Royale, Kiriyama opens the fight by lobbing a bag of shattered glass into her face. She spends the entire fight with tears of blood running down her cheeks. Not that it's symbolic or anything.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has a version of it, particularly in the second movie. After Kittan's Heroic Sacrifice. Simon goes on to kick ass and avenge him in the Super Galaxy Gurren Lagann while crying tears of blood. In the movie, the massive mecha is crying glowing tears of blood from BOTH faces.
• Black Butler: The maidservant Hannah does this when her master Alois stabs out her eye (for just looking at him!) in the first episode of the second season. She also does this in the second opening when the bandage covering her ruined eye comes loose.
  • Agni seems to do this when sad... but when he's crying tears of joy, the tears are normal.
• In High School Of The Dead people who get turned into "them." tend to do this a lot.
• In Baccano! Czeslaw's eyes are leaking blood in a flashback because of the horrific Eye Scream torture he was just subjected to.
• Historical shoujo manga Red River (1995), has this in the title page for the 27th volume.
• In the sixth arc of Umineko: When They Cry, Kanon inflicts the second flavor of this upon Rosa. Indeed, in comparison to all the other ways to be offed in that series, it is quite a gentle, and even beautiful, death scene for a character who really isn't prone to them.
• The manga Emerging centers around a mysterious new disease spreading throughout Tokyo that causes infectious High-Pressure Blood to gout from a victim's every orifice. Before the infected reach that stage, however, they will first notice that their eyes are extremely blood-shot, followed by tears of blood as the disease progresses.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica has Sayaka sporting these in episode 7, combined with Berserker Tears as she decimates a witch. And yes, it's just as freaky as it sounds.
• In Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple Anime Hermit does this after explaining his dead little sister backstory, well it's more of a single tear of blood which can actually be creepier if you think about it.
• In Toward the Terra, Carina's tears run red in a tragic variation on a Psychic Nosebleed during the extended Angst Nuke that results when she thinks her four-year-old son has died.
• Played for Laughs in YuruYuri; Chitose is told that she would be automatically lose a pillow fight if she has a nosebleed and Kyouko immediately tries to invoke a fantasy. Chitose holds in the nosebleed, but the blood instead comes out from her eyes.
• Played for Laughs in Silver Spoon: Hachiken is so irritated by his big brother being so nonchalant about getting into Tokyo University, then casually dropping out, he cries bloody tears of RAGE, while biting his lip hard enough to draw even more blood.
• In Symphogear, after singing her Ultimate Song, Tsubasa started not only to make tears out of blood, but she's heavily bleeding here and there.
• It's used as a Running Gag in RIN-NE, where the title character sheds these whenever he's forced to spend a large amount of money. This is because he's a Half-Human Hybrid of human and shinigami, and also because his father is a major-league asshole who has ruined his son's life with financial debts.
• In Golgo 13 The Professional when Duke smashes Silver's face with his gun he has these.
• In YuYu Hakusho the three human test subjects of Dr. Ichigaki cry tears of blood while asking Yusuke to kill them.
• Played for Laughs in I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying when Hajime's friend Miki is yelling at him for getting hooked up with Hajime's crossdressing younger brother.
• Played for drama in the second season of Tokyo Ghoul where Kaneki weeps them in the opening. He similarly weeps a single bloody tear while holding Hide's body.
  • Kaneki does this again in the sequel manga as a symbol of his rapid and deadly aging.
• Yuu cries a tear of blood in episode 11 of Seraph of the End when he's overcome by emotional turmoil upon seeing his comrades in danger.
• Sonic X: At the climax of its adaptation for Sonic Battle, Cream knocks Emerl into the pier. Shortcircuiting, Emerl leaks oil from one of its eyes in an oddly humanizing imitation of Cream's tears right before exploding. Note this was the original version only, the dub censored it to be actual tears
• Rath of Dragon Knights cries tears of blood when Kharl tries to return him to demon form.

    Comic Books

• The villain Misery from Image Comics sheds a tear of blood every time she uses her powers.
• In Global Frequency #3, an alien thought-virus infects a group of people living in a housing block; each one of them begins to ooze blood from their eyes.
• In Gotham City Garage, James Gordon sheds blood tears when he tells Kara she's been found by Lex Luthor's enforcers and has to run away now.
• The "zombies" in Black Gas have completely black eyes and weep black tears.
• The Sandman:
  • The Corinthian sheds tears of blood when Morpheus dies. Of course, since the Corinthian is an incarnated nightmare with razor-toothed mouths where his eyes should be, and in a past life was a serial killer who ate his victims' eyeballs (this incarnation is apparently firmly on the side of good, but no less creepy), this is really an example of both flavors at once. That said, this is actually a touching moment.
  • Amedeo gets these too, in the second part of The Corinthian: Death In Venice. Because the mouths are growing in.
• In Scare Tactics, the vampire Screamqueen cries these when she read Grossout's story about how he became a walking tumor.
• In Supergirl story arc Bizarrogirl, the titular Bizarro character cries bloody tears when she realizes she's killed a man.
• Batman:
  • In the 20th anniversary re-colouring of Batman: The Killing Joke, Joker himself cries a bit of blood after Going Mad From The Revelation. This is likely from the chemicals he'd just taken a dip in that would permanently disfigure him to look the way he does.
  • Such tears are one of the symptoms of the Clench in Batman Contagion and Alfred ends up bandaging Tim's eyes while hopelessly trying to care for him while the rest of the Bat-family is searching for a cure.
  • Bruce himself ended up with this during the "Amazo Virus" arc of Justice League (2011) when he was infected with the eponymous virus as it was making him turn into a more bat-like creature.
• Joshua Brand cries tears of blood when he triggers his powers in Shaman's Tears (hence the title). The three tears are transformed into three streaks of warpaint running down his cheek in his superpowered form.
• In Robyn Hood: The Curse #6, Marian cries tears of blood when she pushes her magical abilities to the limit casting a spell to banish the two gods to the other side of the universe.
• In every version of The Transformers comic books, characters bleeding Energon from their eyes when badly wounded is incredibly common.

    Fairy Tales

• "The Juniper Tree": Young Marlinchen cries tears of blood at her brother's secret funeral.

    Fan Works

• Bram Stoker's Ozymandias features a vampire version of Adrian Veidt who can go about in sunlight, but his eyes leak blood if he's underfed.
• In Gensokyo 20XXI, Yukari cries these when she wakes up to find that she and the other youkai had been captured and is overwhelmed with sadness.
• Mai does this in How I Became Yours when Katara murders her by bloodbending her to death.
• Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger: In the chapter "Vengeance", Weiss sheds tears of blood while screaming in pain after Adam cuts her eyes out with his sword.
• Who can forget My Immortal (hard as they may try) , in which characters only cry tears of blood and never regular tears? And they cry about every ten seconds. Only once she cried black tears.
• As one of the pioneers of the Pokemon Creepypasta subgenre, Pokémon Lost Silver features ??? actually GOLD crying tears of blood after he becomes a ghost and loses his limbs.
• Project Riribirth: The cover of the second chapter of the audio drama prequel depicts Riri with blood streaming from her eyes as she cradles the broken Ironheart helmet.
• Anchorite Ranith at the end of the World of Warcraft fanfic Stand of the Exiles. Unfortunately, it was narm.
• Dynn Manthis in Ch. 12 "Infiltration" of Star Wars Paranormalities Trilogy: Episode I. Dynn (now heavily mutated by her Forceless arm, with red sclerae among these mutations) when talking with a disguised Zolph Vaelor has one of her eyes randomly bleed. This is because the Forceless arm has gained control of some of her bodily and can screw with them as much as it likes. However, because of a Force bond between the two of them, Zolph can feel the pain in his eye, too. Lucky for him, he was wearing a close-faced helmet as part of his disguise at the time.
• Thousand Shinji: As Shinji is in a coma, his girlfriend Asuka sheds tears of blood because he is hurt and she cannot help him.
• John from Welcome to Silent Hill has this happen when Hannah loses control.

    Films — Live-Action

• Le Chiffre, the villain in the James Bond film Casino Royale (2006), suffers from haemolacria in one eye, causing him to weep blood when stressed.
• Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead is a horror film that has a scene with a girl bleeding from her eyes shortly before she starts throwing up her intestines.
• Flavor two example: When Lady Deathstrike fights Wolverine at the end of X2: X-Men United, her defeat by having liquid adamantium injected into her makes it look as though she's crying tears of liquid metal
• Flavor two example: in Kill Bill, when Gogo Yubari is killed with a nail through the head, she cries blood.
• Flavor two was also used in John Woo's The Killer for two major scenes: one being the blinding-by-muzzle-flash of Jenny during the restaurant shootout that kicks off the plot, and the other being the death of the title character when he gets shot in the eyes by the main bad guy.
• This trope is used in the movie One Hour Photo which, instead of being one of the two aforementioned flavours, is in fact distilled Nightmare Fuel.
• The opening of Bram Stoker's Dracula has Vlad, the title character, so crazy-angry at the death of his wife (since it was a suicide, which according to the religious doctrine of the age meant that she was damned) that he openly renounces God. He then takes his sword and stabs it into a stone cross, which bleeds. Then the statues in the chapel start crying blood. Then his candles start oozing blood. Then blood starts pouring out of the walls. Then Dracula drinks the blood and becomes a vampire. Narmtastic.
  • Later he cries when Mina breaks up with him by letter. Multiple streams of blood seep out of his eyes.
• I Am Legend has people who are infected by the virus start to cry tears of blood. Then gain a craving for human flesh...
• Marlena in Cloverfield oozes blood from her eyes, just as we learn how seriously screwed she is.
• In Stargate, Ra's hand device, described as being able to melt bone, can cause its victims to bleed out the eyes and nose.
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor uses this when, after the Dragon Emperor and his army are transformed into terracotta statues by Zi Yuan's curse, they seem to start crying mud.
• This happens to Marni in Repo! The Genetic Opera after Nathan unknowingly poisons her. Not so sure if Blind Mag counts for this
• The X-Files: I Want to Believe has a scene where the priest (Billy Connolly) cries blood after a vision. It's what convinces Mulder that the case really does have a supernatural bent to it.
• Dead Air: These are one of the signs that a victim exposed to the Synthetic Plague will soon succumb.
• At the end of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Bill Haydon, having been exposed as The Mole, is assassinated by Jim Prideaux, his former lover and colleague, with a small calibre bullet through the head. Before Haydon collapses a single teardrop of blood runs down his cheek, matching the Single Tear shed by Jim.
• In House Of Tolerance the Jewess cries tears of semen. This is also a Brick Joke set up earlier in the film where she confesses this sexual fantasy to the customer who defaces her.
• In Hamlet adaptation Legend of the Black Scorpion instead of the ghost of the prince's father, we have the father's armor weeping blood from the eye-holes.
• A snowman starts shedding tears of blood at the end of Iced just before the thought-to-be-dead killer bursts out of it to attack the Final Girl.
• In Queen of the Damned, elder vampire Maharet weeps a Single Tear of blood in a dream/memory of Jesse's. Possibly the only aspect of the film more book-accurate than its predecessor, as when Louis cried in Interview with the Vampire, his tears were just tears.
• One scene in The Trip (1967) has Paul with red tears pouring down his face, holding what looks like a child's dismembered arm, while Sally stands nearby with blood dabbed on her face.

    Literature

• Older Than Print: Kriemhild from the Nibelungenlied weeps tears of blood after her husband Siegfried dies.
• Authors and poets in the Heian era (for example, the Tale of Genji) were obsessed with this trope. "Crying tears of blood" in that time period was the melodramatic equivalent of modern English speakers "crying their eyes out," resulting in some romantic poems of the period reading a little differently these days.
  • 'Oh, my darling, my sleeves are stained crimson with blood at the thought of you...' Ew.
  • A phrase the Japanese borrowed from China. In Classical Chinese (and occasionally nowadays) the phrase "tears of blood" is up there with "having your intestines and liver disintegrate inch-by-inch" for expressing romantic tragic love.
• In James Swallow's Warhammer 40,000 Deus Sanguinius, the advent of a Walking Wasteland daemon causes a psychic (on a spaceship, off planet) to weep blood.
  • Similarly, in Red Fury, when Serpens uses Nyniq to communicate with Caecus, she weeps tears pink with blood.
• The Night Lords novel of the above setting has The Exalted, whose facial expression is frozen in a grimace by the Warp-induced mutations of his skull structure. ^note not to mention all those extra fangs The one time he is excited enough to force his mouth to contort into a smile, the muscular strain kicks his tear ducts into action, leaking "tears of oily [dark] blood".
• The character Icaris, a Khorne Berzerker from the Warhammer 40,000 short story Honour Among Feinds by Dylan Owen weeps blood constantly because his opponents won't get to worship Khorne, just die in his name.
• The Dresden Files: Ever wonder what happens when the Winter Queen of Faerie gets annoyed at a smartass who won't shut up and starts freezing the water in their eyes? Because Harry Dresden knows.
• When the vampires of The Vampire Chronicles cry, their tears are blood.
• In J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood, creatures called sympaths (beings who can read and manipulate emotions that are feared and persecuted by the vampire race) shed tears of blood.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero in Hell, Astreus would weep tears of blood if he could, for his exclusion from Heaven.
• In Star Trek: Vulcan's Soul, a victim of the Intellivore ends up releasing these. It also overlaps with Psychic Nosebleed, seeing as the vast telepathic mind of the Intellivore has scambled the psychic receptors in the victim's brain.
• Referenced in the Vampire Hunter D novel Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane where Dhampir are described as crying tears of blood. D, being The Stoic doesn't give any corroboration.
• For unclear reasons, most of the non-humans in Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak series cry tears of blood.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe
  • In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Seeing I, the Doctor gets a mild case of this when the surveillance device implanted in his left eye is activated.
  • In the New Series Adventures novel Paradox Lost, this is what happens to the victims of the Squall's psychic attack.
• In Teresa Frohock's Miserere: An Autumn Tale, the Katharos bleed from the eyes after contact with the Fallen— sometimes the ears and nose as well.
• In Stephen King's short story The Man in the Black Suit, Satan sheds them in the effort of swallowing a large fish.
• In a variant, Jack Fleming from The Vampire Files has sweated blood — lots of it — while recovering from being poisoned.
• In The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, Queen Aslaug weeps a single tear of blood over the death of her stepsons Erik and Agnar.
• In A Game of Thrones Ned Stark dreams of his late sister Lyanna crying tears of blood, underlying her tragic fate - she died at age sixteen on a pool of her own blood and still haunts her older brother with a promise she made him keep.
• In Bruce Coville's short story "Wizard's Boy", the Wicked Witch Dark Anne weeps sand when her beloved pet abomination is killed.
• In Void City, vampires have all of their bodily fluids replaced by blood. When Tabitha cries after being turned, her tears come out as blood.
• In the tenth Madgie, what did you do? story, we have Toki crying these, after the Madgie's death during the Cold Sorrow. Said blood tears also had the effect of turning the snow crystal, along with sprouting flowers.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, blood constantly seeps from the eyes and mouth of lesser Shade, a sign of one that was only turned recently.

    Live-Action TV

• Merlyn Temple of American Gothic (1995) cries these, or at least her body does, during a lovely guilt-inducing vision which haunts the coroner of Trinity—since he was complicit in covering up Sheriff Buck's crime of "mercy killing" her. The accompanying Madness Mantra on the tape recorder, both as an artificially deep Voice of the Legion and a freakily speeded-up version, is the icing on the cake for this very disturbing scene. (You know the villain of a piece must be awful if this is the sort of thing the good guys do regularly to combat his plots.)
  • Someone's at the Door.
• In Andromeda Beka once got these from overdosing on Flash, a highly addictive stimulant taken as eye drops.
• In the Doctor Who episode "Doomsday", a character who had been converted into a Cyberman cries oily tears as she turns on the rest of the Cybermen with a weapon that can kill them, meanwhile repeating the last thing she said before being converted.
• The Hands of Blue from Firefly use a futuristic device that causes ocular haemorrhaging and subsequent cessation of electrical activity in the brain. This device is used on Agent McGinnis and the Feds with nightmarish results in the episode "Ariel" after they admit that they have had verbal contact with River, whom they want to recapture.
  • They start to bleed from the nose and mouth, too. The device appears to kill by causing fatal internal haemorrhaging.
  • In Those Left Behind, the weapons used by the Hands are shown to be even more powerful, liquefying a man's entire body and leaving only a tattered husk of skin behind.
• Game of Thrones: After spending a good minute asphyxiating, Joffrey begins to bleed from the eyes before he finally expires.
• The Wonder Twins from Heroes have a weird joint power; the woman, when stressed, begins to ooze black tears of poison. Anyone within a certain radius also begins to ooze the tears, but unlike her they subsequently die. The only way to stop the "infection" and revive those who have not been infected for long is for her brother (who is unaffected) to hold her hands and calm her down, at which point the tears turn into regular water. At the start of season two they did this around eighty times an episode; eventually Maya learned to control it herself. This has resulted in many fans making unflattering comparisons to...
• On NCIS, they receive a clue ahead of time from a serial killer, implying the next victim will cry tears of blood. He does. It's creepy.
• In Supernatural, the first sign of Bloody Mary's presence is that her victims begin to bleed from the eyes.
  • A statue of the Virgin Mary also started to cry blood to mark the approach of the demon Alistair.
  • In a season 8 episode, Castiel sheds a bloody tear as a side effect of Naomi's mind-control.
• This is how vampires cry on True Blood.
• The X-Files had an alien virus made of black oil that could control its hosts. The infected were shown to have black oil swirling on their eyes and would sometimes weep it too.
• Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger: Bandora suffers from this while harnessing the darkest of magic to summon Dai Satan.
• A woman is seen weeping tears of blood in the title sequence of the 2013 season of the British medical documentary 24 Hours in A&E. She had broken bones in her face.
• This is what happens when someone takes an adverse reaction to Miraku, the Super Serum in season 2 of Arrow.
• In Smallville, this is an early sign that the resurrection serum is starting to wear off. When Adam Knight is first seen suffering from it, he tries to dismiss it as a broken capillary, which is probably true to some extent.
• The Blacklist: Victims of a virus in "Karakurt" suffer from seizures, foaming at the mouth, and bloody tears.
• Murdoch Mysteries: The Victim of the Week in "Shades of Grey" starts bleeding from her eyes after taking an overdose of pennyroyal oil to induce an abortion.
• Vlad secretes a thick black liquid from his eyes in Series Four of Young Dracula, after he bites his father to save him from Elizabeta's poison lipstick. To top it off, it also comes out of his ears, nose, and hands. Nightmare Fuel at its finest.

    Music

    Myths & Religion

• In some Islamic traditions, the damned will weep blood in Hell.
• Occurs in one version of the Greek Myth of Orpheus. When he played his music for the entire underworld, the Erinyes (the furies) who tortured condemned souls therein, actually stopped the torture to weep bloody tears at the beauty of the music.

    Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Ravenloft (2nd edition) used to have a magic item that looked like a valuable coin. It could be used to trick merchants, but every time the owner used it this way, he would begin to shed tears of blood that terrified anyone viewing him. The amount of time the Tears of Blood persisted depended on how big an amount of money you stole. The coin was cursed and very hard to get rid of — it bonded once you used it in a single scam, even once.
  • A wheep is a type of undead that appears as a shirveled corpse with mouths in its palms and empty eye sockets (its art depicts it with large nails driven into them) that constantly leak black ichor that interferes with its sniveling and wailing. These "tears" are a deadly poison that applies to a wheep's claw and bite attacks, but also make the thing easy to track through a dungeon.
• Magic: The Gathering:
• Pathfinder has Szuriel, who sports a steady stream of blood from her eyes. This is far from the most terrifying thing about her.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade, since vampires have no bodily fluids apart from vitae, when they cry, they cry tears of blood. It is considered very vulgar among the Ventrue.
  • This seems to apply to most stress responses, as there are occasional references to "blood sweats" when a vampire is particularly aggrieved.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Apparently, staring at a Chaos symbol for long enough will result in this, along with mild nausea and insanity.
  • When psychic powers are used, psychic phenomena sometimes occur as a side effect, ranging from harmless flavor text to terrible game-altering chaos. One of the lesser effects is "Tears of Blood", where all portraits, statues, and other inanimate objects with "faces" appear to weep blood for a short period of time.

    Theatre

• William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has a statue crying blood in a prophetic dream.

    Toys

• Living Dead Dolls:
  • Lamenta has them, but unlike most examples she doesn't seem to suffer from them.

    The third of three sisters who pollute our world
    The offspring of a witch who had three little girls
    Lamenta is the most beautiful and holds the most power
    Her sweet tears of blood shall rain down like a shower

  • The Hopping Vampire's doll has them, though its description doesn't mention why.

    Video Games

• The Convenience Store: One night, the Player Character can go in a hole in the fence behind the titular store, where she finds a small shed. Inside is a dead body with blood trickling down his face from his eyes.
• Later in the game, Heavy Rain has this happen to Jayden because of his overuse of ARI to desperately trying to figure out who the Origami killer is. At first it's assumed that its the drug Jayden is taking as the cause, but its seen in one of the endings that ARI is just as addictive. For reference: Blood out of nose: It's the drug. Blood out of eyes: its the ARI.
• A teaser trailer for The House of the Dead: OVERKILL has the announcer saying that you'll "cry tears of blood from your own eyes!", or something similar.
• The opening to Resident Evil 5 shows some poor guy being infected with Uroboros that makes him weep black, oily tears.
• Okaeri: The woman hanging from a noose in the living room has blood coming out of her eyes.
• The Castlevania games have a number of examples:
  • First and foremost is the recurring villain Carmilla. She's been appearing since Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and while she doesn't personally cry tears of blood, she has a mask and a flying skull that do. For this reason, she's associated with one of the series' greatest musical themes, "Bloody Tears" (which also debuted in Simon's Quest); it's her theme in Castlevania: Judgment, for instance. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow gave all this history a Shout-Out in the narration:

  "Poor, beautiful Carmilla... you will cry bloody tears before this night has ended."

  • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow utilizes the villain-induced statuary variety in the castle's throne room, in which an enormous statue of a woman's face has cried a river of blood across much of the room, all in response to the presence of Graham Jones, who believes he is the reincarnation of Dracula. However, this may not in fact have anything at all to do with the villain's presence, since a statue that continually cries blood seems like something Count Dracula would have had installed in his throne room simply for decor.
  • There's a statue in the X68000 version of Castlevania (later ported as Castlevania Chronicles) that cries tears of blood that turn into invincible skeletons. "Bloody Tears" is played here too.
  • There are similar statues in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance in the Skeleton's Den that also produce Blood Skeletons with their tears.
  • And in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin there's a quest that requires fetching some holy water, which you get from a crying statue. From the same game, one (Technically two since you control a pair of characters in this game) of the bonus characters have a picture of a woman crying blood on their Game Over screen. Somewhat startling the first time you see it since they are the only characters with a different game over screen and the image is rather creepy.
  • A statue that cries blood is also seen in one room in Castlevania 64. The blood turns into a blood monster.
  • In the arcade game Haunted Castle, Dracula keeps a big painting of a blonde woman that weeps blood when Simon goes near it. The Bloody Tears song is remixed in this game as well.
• Siren, where all the shibito have tears of blood. Justified as it's their human blood being ejected as their red liquids get replaced with the red water.
• The Tears Of Lhys from Planescape: Torment were wept by the Mercykiller Lhys (naturally), falsely condemned for a crime and tortured to death; his innocence was only discovered after the fact. He wept exactly twelve tears of blood before dying. These became minor artifacts, and could be used by the character to permanently enhance one's Constitution score.
  • Also, the Nameless One weeps bloody tears after reliving an evil moment where one of his previous incarnations lured a girl to her death by pretending to be in love with her.
• The Sorrow, a ghostly spirit medium and member of the Cobra Unit from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, cried tears of blood from his left eye before and after his confrontation with Naked Snake. It's later revealed that he was the paramour of Snake's mentor The Boss, and was shot through that eye by her in order to keep their child safe from the Philosophers. That child, by the way, would grow up to be Revolver Ocelot, which is later used to Hand Wave Ocelot being possessed by the ghost of Liquid Snake: his father was a medium. And then the nanomachines Retcon came along in Guns of the Patriots and confused everyone even more.
• Solving one of the puzzles in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening results in two statues joining a third in weeping tears of blood.
• The PS2 RPG Magna Carta: Tears of Blood has this too, obviously enough. And with a weird theme song, too.
• Zero Two, the True Final Boss of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, bleeds from his eye when attacked.
• The final boss of Skies of Arcadia has a special attack which starts with bloody tears coming down from his eyes.
• Towards the end of Silent Hill, during a confrontation with Harry in which Lisa Garland discovers that she is not actually human but the same as the other demonic nurses created by Alessa's nightmares, a cutscene shows her weeping blood before it begins to just ooze out from her skin.
  • "Blood Tears" is also one of the fan nicknames for the music that plays during this scene (officially titled "Not Tomorrow").
• Wallachia of Melty Blood. This is because his eyes are pools of blood, which is why he keeps them closed.
• The original readme(and subsequent instruction manuals) of Doom read "Some of the ceilings in DOOM can smash you, making you cry blood."
• In Daggerfall, being infected with vampirism (a .06% chance every time you get hit by a vampire (who, by the way, are obnoxiously powerful)) causes you to have a dream the next time you sleep in which a beautiful woman cries tears of blood.
• The intro movie for the fifth chapter in Phantasmagoria shows Adrienne lying on her bed when suddenly tears of blood start streaming down her cheeks. It turns out to be a bad dream.
• Daniella in Haunting Ground.
• The Hunter of Left 4 Dead has blood all around his eyes, suggesting Eye Scream of some variety. (It's not clear whether he actually has eyes or not.) They don't bleed during the game, though.
• Flavor 1 is used a lot in Trauma Team. This is almost always the point where the person bleeding from the eyes is about to die from the Rosalia virus.
• Sepperin Stage 2's stage title in RosenkreuzStilette is "Bloody Tears". It even features a statue crying blood in the background of the Poltergeist boss battle at the end.
  • The sequel Freudenstachel contains a Flavor 2 example when Eifer Skute's Dark Devil form is defeated.
• Subverted in AdventureQuest Worlds, where FEAR, the main boss of the Fear Chaser event, actually leaks lava from his eye sockets.
• Jinpachi in his ending of Tekken 5.
• Ishida Mitsunari cries Black Blood in his red path ending in Sengoku Basara. The fandom tends to joke about runny mascara.
• Some upgrades in The Binding of Isaac will turn Isaac's tears red, with various effects. Incidentally, these upgrades include propping his eyes open with toothpicks (which makes him cry harder) and reading demonic scriptures (gives Isaac a damage up for the room).
• Briefly in Dead Space 2, when Isaac gets done with the NoonTech Diagnostic Machine. And it's worse if you fail the sequence, resulting in a fountain of blood erupting from Issac's eye.
• Shepard weeps blood and has a Psychic Nosebleed while being telepathically contacted by a leviathan, the creatures that created the Reapers and on whom most large Reapers are modeled in form in the Leviathan DLC for Mass Effect 3.
• Happens to undead Sky Dragons in Cave Story.
• In the second episode of the Darkness series of horror Flash games, a ghost girl who has tears of blood running down her face stalks the heroine.
• In Dishonored, victims of the Plague cry tears of blood. Hence why they are called Weepers.
• In A Witch's Tale, the White Rabbit cries perpetual tears of blood.
• In Castle Red, Margaery is a maid with blood running from her eyes. Later on, Cecilia sports this following her Face–Heel Turn, Peter's eyes start bleeding just before his death, and depending on what happens in the Hanging Gardens, Jonathon may gain some Bloody Tears as well. It appears to be the first symptom of worm infestation.
• One of the female devils in Soul At Stake appears to be weeping these.
• In the Team Fortress 2 comic "The Naked and The Dead", after Medic manages to save everyone whose blood has been drained by sponging it up and pouring it back into their gaping chest wounds, Scout runs up to Miss Pauling when they reunite and gives her a hug, prompting a jet of blood to shoot out her eyes.

    Visual Novels

• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, the final case of the third game has Godot bleeding from a cut on his face, which is hidden behind his visor and leaks out to appear as if he is crying blood. This happens as you are about to finish proving him to be the real killer in the case, and his following line calls back to his earlier claim that "the only time a lawyer can cry is when it's all over".
• Doki Doki Literature Club!: You can get a special scene if you compose poems that appeal to Natsuki in the first two days of Act Two. When she shows you her poem, it's all in garbled code (which someone actually found out was in base64 and managed to translate) ^Translation Open Your Third Eye. I can feel the tenderness of their skin though the knife, as if it were an extension of my sense of touch. My body nearly convulses. There's something incredibly faint, deep down, that screams to resist this uncontrollable pleasure, but I can already tell that I'm pushed to the edge. I can't... I can't stop myself. She then proceeds to ask you why you flaked on her, and that it was the only thing she had left to look forward to. The screen turns a dim red as she tells you Yuri is a "sick freak" and you shouldn't associate with her. As she continues to ramble, her eyes and mouth become blacked out, blood begins pouring down her face, and the music grows distorted. Eventually, she dons a huge Slasher Smile, screaming "PLAY WITH ME!!!" as her neck snaps like The Crooked Man. Her sprite then lunges toward the screen and you get the "END" card backwards. The game then goes back to normal as if nothing happened.

    Webcomics

• The mannequin in Silent Hill: Promise once activated, sheds a single bloody tear.
• Zimmy of Gunnerkrigg Court has her eyes completely obscured by black gunk, until the next rain washes it away — that's how we know she got red eyes. She's considered technically human, though with some weird... issues. Either way, it looks creepy.
• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Dan McNinja claims that he can store poison in his eyes and "shoot it out later like a toad" (a reference to the horned toad mentioned above). Turns out he isn't exaggerating.
  • Not completely sure this belongs here, but Dan also caused someone to pee blood. He'd run out of urine, but was so terrified that his body continued to pee anyway.
• Subverted in Sluggy Freelance: when vampires cry tears of blood, that's simply analogous to humans crying normally.
• The trolls of Homestuck cry tears that correspond to their blood colour, Word of God is that their blood dictates the colour of the rest of their bodily fluids, and tears just happen to contain the same pigment as their blood, rather than the actual blood, thus making this technically an aversion.
  • Played straight in a flashback scene which shows the day Terezi had her eyes burned out by being forced to stare into the sun.
• In Penny Arcade, Tycho manages to inflict this on Gabe with a slide show.
• Eerie Cuties: Virgins shed tears of blood in the reign of the vampire queen.
• In the Oblivion-based online interactive story PREQUEL, Katia Managan has the natural Khajiit ability of darkvision. At least twice in the story, she activates it when heading into a dark place, then forgets to deactivate it when she turns back into the sun. She bleeds from her eyes a bit afterwards.
• Karin-dou 4koma: On Valentine's Day, Mifi plans to surprise Elza with a Naked Apron and chocolate lipstick. However, she then talks in on Elza expressing her happiness over receiving simple chocolates from Seren instead of "getting weirdly gimmicked" and immediately starts screaming and crying tears of blood.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Lalli gets these alongside a Psychic Nosebleed while performing an extremely straining magic act.

    Web Original

• Mystery Skulls Animated: Lewis cries black rivulets of tears after his heart is cracked when he drops Arthur. Since Arthur is restored in the lockets' picture after this it seems the vengful ghost had just realized they were once friends.
• Ayla and the Grinch in the Whateley Universe. Phase is fighting a demon and losing. He's beaten and broken, and lying at the feet base of the thing, and blood is dripping from his eye. Along with pretty much everywhere else. He gets rescued and healed.
• Zalgo makes his victims cry oil when He Comes.
• In the world of Year Zero, an anti-viral agent nicknamed "Copper" causes orange secretions in users. In the "Star Chamber" terrorism incident, a supposed government agent is seen "crying orange tears."
• The title screen of Sonic.exe depicts Sonic with Zalgo-style black bleeding eyes.

    Western Animation

• In the Family Guy episode "Patriot Games" when Stewie smashes a glass over Brian's head blood starts dripping from his eyes.
• William Murderface, bassist for Dethklok in Metalocalypse sheds a Single Tear of blood in the episode "Birthdayface," when the other members of the band get him a collection of priceless pieces of American history, specifically for him to destroy as he sees fit.
  • The music video for 'Detharmonic' has singer Nathan Explosion crying tears of blood as he does his taxes. Taxes are just that brutal.
• Castlevania (2017)
  • Dracule cries bloody tears in the first episode upon hearing of his wife's execution. No doubt referencing the song from the games. The second season similarly shows his eyes becoming almost uniformly red with blood whenever he gets really angry, though it doesn't drip from his eyes like it did in the first episode.
  • Carmilla's eyes become bloodshot as she's losing her last fight against Isaac and his army of night monsters. As he moves in for the kill, she sheds one last tear of blood and kills herself in a violent explosion in a failed bid to take Isaac down with her.
• Final Space: In Episode 8, the protagonists enter the mind of the titan Bolo. The experience is quite stressfull, and halfway Gary starts bleeding from his eyes as a result.

    Real Life

• Haemolacria is a physical condition in which blood is found in tears; this can be anything from a small trace to flows of red.
• Stretching the definition a little bit, but the horned lizard (also known as the "horny toad") can squirt blood from its eyes up to a distance of three feet to ward off predators.
• There are claims that some statues of the Virgin Mary (and statues of others, but almost exclusively Mary) have wept skim milk, blood and other substances in a miraculous fashion. Skeptics claim that the phenomenon can be attributed to condensation, group suggestion or hoaxes. Fortean Times reports frequently on these occurences.
  • There's a story about weeping icons of Virgin Mary in Peter the Great's Russia. They started weeping (lamp oil, not blood) in one of the monasteries. Peter arrived to that monastery, examined an icon and found there's a small reservoir of oil in it. Then he decreed: "If any icons in my country weep with oil, the monks' asses will weep with blood!". Miraculously, the miracles of weeping icons ceased and never reappeared during Peter's lifetime.
• St. Jacinta Marto, one of the three kids who saw visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, was also a horrifically Ill Girl (you do not want details) who died as per her own predictions at the age of eleven in a Lisbon hospital. During the hearings for her beatification, the nuns who prepared her for burial testified that they found tears of blood on her face.
• At least one Ancient Greek temple used machinery to make statues of gods appear to weep blood.
• Some people suffering from stigmata are said to weep tears of blood.
• If a person suffers of extreme altitude sickness, their ocular tear conducts break and blood pours from them. By that time, though, the person is practically dead because of the chronic lack of oxygen.
• In a very scary version of Truth in Television we have an episode of National Geographic, featuring a girl spontaneously bleeding from her eyes, head, nose, and hands. There is no known reason for this.
• Something like this occurs with hippopotamuses, except in this case, they sweat blood, or a substance that resembles blood.
• Rats eliminate excess porphyrins, a dark red metabolic waste product, in their tears and nasal mucus. Inexperienced owners of pet rats sometimes rush their animals to the vet, assuming a runny nose or irritated eyes are actually bleeding.
• Endometriosis is an unpleasant condition where the lining of the uterus shows up in places it's not supposed to, such as the body cavity. There was a woman who had a patch show up in her eye. Meaning she wept blood every month.
• Ebola makes you bleed from every hole in your body. Including your tear ducts.
• People who have had certain types of eye surgery sometimes cry blood afterward to clear buildup in the tear ducts.
• People who suffer from nosebleeds can occasionally find blood flowing from their tear ducts as a result of blood failing to clot and being backed up into the nose until it's only way out is through tear ducts.
• Heartbreakingly inverted with the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. When paramedics found him, horrifically beaten and left for dead tied to a fence, his face was covered in blood except where it was washed away by his tears.

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Crying With Blood on Hands Drawing Ref

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TearsOfBlood

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