18 of the most violent TV shows ever, ranked – Hannibal, Game of Thrones and beyond

Trampled by horses. Spike through the mouth. Death by enormous mallet. All are possibilities when you're an ill-fated character in History's Vikings. You didn't get this in Asterix.

Even the billboard ads for The Strain were controversially graphic, featuring a worm eating its way into a human eye. But that was just a taster of the vampiric violence delivered by the series itself.

Diabolical serial killer James Purefoy and his legion of followers claimed many victims before they were brought down by Kevin Bacon in this grubby FOX thriller that ran from 2013 to 2015.

HBO's harsh prison drama saw inmates poisoned, lynched, burnt, shot, raped, beaten and even crucified. Weekly. Porridge it wasn't.

AMC's Preacher hasn't disappointed fans of the ultra-violent comic, delivering a TV adaptation that's every bit as unflinching. Who can forget that plane sequence with Cassidy?

With a serial killer as its lead character, it's no surprise (motherf**ker) that Dexter delivered its fair share of brutal Bay Harbour butchery. Michael C Hall's anti-hero had killed approximately 130 people by series end.

Frank Castle's righteous rampage reached a brutal conclusion in the final two episodes of The Punisher. First, his foe Rawlins is stabbed, blinded, then beaten to death, and later Frank's former ally Billy gets his pretty face mangled by a broken mirror. Ouch. 

HBO's fang-tastic series gave us sex and violence in equal measure and frequently at the same time. Remember when Bill twisted Lorena's head around 180 degrees, while they were having hate sex? Grim.

Living up to the legacy of the blood-stained trilogy that inspired it, Ash vs Evil Dead delivers plenty of groovy gore each and every week, as Bruce Campbell continues waging war on Deadite scum.

Our hero Kovacs endures all manner of atrocities in Netflix's recent sci-fi thriller. But given that Altered Carbon is set in a world where human bodies or "sleeves" are disposable, we reckon it's all totally valid violence.

Yes, the routine acts of violence we see perpetrated on the increasingly goopy undead have now become almost comical. But Negan's brutal beating of Abraham and Glenn with a barbed-wire bat was certainly no laughing matter.

Few are granted a quick and easy death in HBO's merciless fantasy epic. Stabbings, slit throats, mauling by wild dogs, amputated penises and, in one instance, a skull crushed to a pulp by someone's bare hands. Strewth.

Ryan Murphy pulls no punches in his anthology of terror. Killing sprees, severed limbs, cannibalism, guinea pigs exploding in microwaves... AHS offers up a smorgasbord of savagery.

Slasher begins with a pregnant woman being butchered, her baby ripped away from her, and it doesn't let up from there. (Season two features a particularly wild and wonderful death by chainsaw.)

The absurd but hugely enjoyable Spartacus delighted in the outrageousness of its violence. Positively soaked in blood, hundreds of unfortunates were spectacularly torn apart in this sword-and-sandal series.

In the sick and surreal world of TV's most horrific show Hannibal, eye-gouging, torn flesh and flayed skin were commonplace. In one particularly nauseating scene, the wicked Mason Verger – high on drugs – even carves up his own face and eats it. Bleurgh.