
Lisa Ashen from Dead Silence.
A severed tongue is when an individual's tongue is forcibly removed from their body. Severed body parts of any kind are always a staple of horror fiction and the tongue is no exception. In fictional accounts of Ancient Egypt, the removal of one's tongue was a common means of torture and/or punishment prior to the administering of the ritual of mummification. This was demonstrated in the 1959 Hammer Horror film version of The Mummy in which the character of Kharis had his tongue removed prior to his body being wrapped in linen. This scene was revisited in Stephen Sommers 1999 quasi-remake of The Mummy where the High Priest Imhotep suffers a similar fate.
Another Hammer Horror film that involved a severed tongue was the 1962 film Night Creatures. In the beginning of the movie, a Mulatto worker aboard a pirate ship is accused of attempted rape against the wife of the ship's captain, Nathaniel Clegg. He is sentenced to have his ears slit open, his tongue removed and is left to die on an abandoned island.
In the 1987 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the wisecracking dream-demon Freddy Krueger tormented a young man named Joey Crusel by taking the form of a busty nurse and securing him to his bed by way of projectile ensnaring tongues.
In the 1989 film Warlock, the warlock antagonist of the movie kissed a homosexual man and bit off his tongue and then spit the remains into a frying pan.
In the 2007 film Dead Silence, the ghost of Mary Shaw would attack her victims, leaving them as horrified stricken figures with no tongues.
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