Rat Torture - in Fiction

In Fiction

An account similar to the Sonoy torture appears in the 1899 Octave Mirbeau novel The Torture Garden, and psychologist Leonard Shengold has identified this as the possible source of the story that the rat Man told Freud. Part of the book, an imaginary dialog between a torturer and a beautiful woman who is sexually excited by the accounts, is set in China.

The threat of the torture occurs in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The central character, Winston Smith, is arrested by the Ministry of Love and undergoes a process of mental reprogramming. The ministry imprisons him in Room 101. Here Winston must face his greatest fear: rats. A cage filled with hungry rats is placed over his head, their only source of food or escape being by eating their way through Winston's face. At this point Winston breaks and begs that the method actually be used on his lover Julia, a sign that he has finally been broken.

Rats also feature in the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum. The narrator lies on the rack and can only watch as a scythe swings back and forth, approaching closer each time, and rats swarm over his body. The narrator later manages to make the rats eat through the straps.

In the 1997 Fantasy novel Temple of the Winds, this form of torture was used on the character of Cara. The insane Drefan Rahl in an attempt to learn the location of his brother, the protagonist Richard Rahl, uses a heavy chain to tie a cauldron to her stomach, then shoved rats under the rim of the pot. He put hot coals on the top, causing the rats to claw at Cara to try and get away from the rising temperature inside the pot. Resisting the torture she nearly dies, but is saved at the last moment by Richard and Kahlan. The television show based on the books, Legend of the Seeker, depicts Cara in her youth being tortured by rats as part of her mord sith training. The 2003 movie 2 Fast 2 Furious features a very similar scene where antagonist Carter Verone tortures a police detective into distracting cops so Brian, Roman Pierce and two thugs can escape with several bags of money.

It was also used on a victim in The Bone Collector.

In the 1991 novel American Psycho, the narrator Patrick Bateman performs rat torture on a kidnapped woman by cutting open her vagina enough to fit a plastic tube into and forcing a rat to crawl into her vagina. He removes the tube, staples her labia together, then watches as the rat eats the restrained woman from the inside out.

Rat torture was exhibited in the television series Game of Thrones. In "Garden of Bones", the fourth episode of the second season, the head torturer, "The Tickler", and an assistant place a live rat into a bucket which is fastened to the victim's abdomen. The bucket is then heated, forcing the rat to gnaw into the bowels.