The severing of a person’s head plays on and manipulates a fundamental human fear.
We hear of people dying in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, reaching a twenty-year high in 2025 alone, and this is unsettling. But what particularly chills me to the bone is the February 2026 report on the decapitation of four Haitian women deported from Puerto Rico.
My revulsion is not simply about witnessing blood on ICE’s hands under the Trump administration’s ruthless deportations of asylum seekers, re-condemning them to the perils of the countries they fled. There is something personally gruesome about body horror, and the loss of a head—dead or alive, that it should happen to those who sought refuge and were snatched from it is abhorrent.
The loss of a head is so fucken horrible, and not only for the brutal nature of the act and its infliction of tremendous physical trauma as the spinal cord, carotid arteries and jugular veins are severed and torrential blood from the gaping wound spurts crimson all around. Anatomic literature cites nearly thirty muscles extending from the base of the skull and jaw to the shoulder blades and collarbone, and major blood vessels are also impacted.
It’s believed that the brain remains active for seconds longer, so imagine the possible conscious terror the victim experiences, knowing their head is dislodged from their body. How dreadful it would be to witness a severed head blink or look around. Then there is the obliteration of personhood—as humans, we identify each other by our features, counting our eyes. The head represents the individual. Any execution, clean or botched, represents a total severance of identity, and I struggle to imagine what else is more gross than that.
Extremist groups understand the very revulsion of witnessing the severance of a head, and use filmed decapitations of captives as propaganda for terror. In December 2019, a faction of the Islamist group Boko Haram in Nigeria beheaded Christian hostages in an act of retaliation against the killing of their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during a US raid in Syria that October. The extremists released a 56-second video of the murders. The footage publicly appeared on December 26, coinciding with Christmas celebrations.
A 2014 article titled “The Horror Before the Beheadings” by Rukmini Callimachi and published in the New York Times, exposed the brutal treatment of Western hostages by ISIS in Syria, including torture and mock executions, and the much-condemned beheading of American freelance conflict journalist James Foley that shocked the world. Turning her devastating loss into action, James Foley’s mother created the James Foley Foundation, which advocates for Americans held hostage overseas.
In so many ways, the head not only represents but equals the person. Browsing serial killer archives, I read with morbid curiosity and dread about how, in 1973, American serial killer Ed Kemper, also known as “The Co-Ed Killer,” murdered his mother, decapitated and raped her severed head, then placed it on a shelf. A spine-tingling fascination kept me revisiting the horror, despite the morally unacceptable nature of it.
Dubbed the “Cannibal Killer,” Australian Katherine Knight stabbed, skinned, and decapitated her husband before boiling his head and serving it with vegetables.
Historical accounts tell of botched executions, such as the multi-stroke beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, in February 1587. It took three strikes with the axe, then the cutting of the meat and gristle with a knife. Imagine the gruesome spectacle “when the executioner held the severed head up by its hair to show onlookers that the job was done, it became apparent that the queen had worn a wig—the hair came away in the man’s hand and the head rolled away across the floor” (bit.ly/4dq0P1p).
The rolling head was especially horrible and disrespectful, yet it was the revelation of the wig that mortified the spectators even more, notwithstanding the Queen of Scotts was no longer alive. The occurrence after her death still likely carried a momentous shockwave, making witnesses, and, to everyone who heard about it, changing the impression of who Mary was. A complete disintegration of her personhood.
Condemned to death by Henry VIII in 1541 at the Tower of London, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, suffered eleven blows at the hands of an inexperienced executioner, who reportedly missed Pole’s neck on his first few attempts—accidentally hitting her shoulder, then her head.
One executioner, Jack Ketch, principally a hangman, botched the two beheadings he carried out. It took him three blows and sawing with an axe to behead William, Lord Russell in 1683.
Being hanged, drawn, and quartered in medieval England comprised live disembowelling and burning of the entrails, beheading, then quartering by tying the four limbs to a different horse and spurring them in different directions. Having failed to destroy the English parliament, Guy Fawkes suffered this fate in 1606.
Most people would concede that medieval England meted out punitive acts that caused profound agony, a punishment meant to serve as a deterrent by its very horrific nature. Medieval lawmakers understood the psychology of primeval fear and took steps to amplify the victim’s and witnesses’ terror.
When I write horror fiction, it’s not really about playing with the psychology of fear. It’s more about reflecting the world as it is, a mirror that draws awareness. It’s more about breaking the circle of silence, where the story unfolds in a revelation that’s a statement or an act of subversive activism to draw attention to a cause or a plight that affects lesser-voiced victims. It’s more about a cautionary tale that shows how bad things can get, if we, as individuals and society, don’t change. It may also be about tapping on the fear of the unknown, writing to demystify it.
In my Afrofuturistic dystopian novel Mage of Fools that is also an urgent call to climate action, I interrogate “Ujamaa,” a form of African socialism. In the story, oppression rules, where some are more equal than others. Here is an excerpt of the public execution of a dissenter:
It’s one thing to enforce attendance to a public execution. Who wants to hear the last cries and gasps of closing eyes? But a crushing? The sorcerer Atari with his monster head and misshapen bones oversaw the execution. At first the crowd was curious. Nobody knew how the machine shaped like a human worked. When guards put defiant Baba Gambo into it, his cries told them. The king’s guards fitted the condemned person into the machine. Then it pulped the person limb by limb. The pulping started in Baba Gambo’s hands. You don’t want to hear again that sound from a grown man. Not that there are more men left in Mafinga, except for King Magu and his sorcerer Atari. Baba Gambo went silent after the right leg was done.
What spawned out of the machine and into each limb’s trough was a heavy mush that looked but did not smell anywhere near ripe cocoplum fruit.
Citizens watched in revulsion as guards carefully carted away liquified remains—for the king.
You will not often see headless horror in my fiction but, when you do, there is a moral. And when you see beheadings in stories and the news, you cannot help but recoil with the keen knowledge that these hideous crimes aren’t just ordinary violence. They are the pinnacle of obliterating a person.
