Although Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty isn’t afraid to get gross, one of the anarchic animated comedy's jokes saw the series take its gruesome dark humor too far—and the show referenced an obscure, dark French horror movie in the process. Rick & Morty is no stranger to boundary-pushing humor. Ever since the show began life as the obscene web series The Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, Rick & Morty has always been quick to sneak in jokes that straddle the line between good and bad taste.
Rick & Morty has also frequently thrown in a few gags that pole-vault straight over the line into seriously tasteless territory. One such gag occurred in a season 5 episode that saw the Smith family killing dozens of alternate versions of themselves in a convoluted plot to work out whether they were real or duplicates. Oddly, the Rick & Morty season 5 joke featured a reference to an obscure French horror movie, although many fans were too busy gagging at its grossness to notice.
One moment in season 5’s “Mortyplicity” sees a clone of Rick skin the real Rick alive to give himself a more human appearance. Although the episode isn’t as hated as season 4’s “Claw and Hoarder,” the image is more gory and explicit than anything that most episodes of Rick & Morty offer. Fortunately for Rick, his attacker is stopped and killed before he dies, although Rick does spend a few minutes flayed alive on a crucifix. This memorably shocking image is lifted from 2008’s controversial horror Martyrs.
The reference might seem random but it doesn’t come completely out of left field, as the Rick & Morty episode echoes one theme of Martyrs. As countless Ricks and Mortys kill each other in an endless circular quest to work out which ones are clones and which are real, the plot becomes reminiscent of Martyrs' darker, more self-serious inquiries into where the lines between life and death (and innocence and guilt) lie. While the Rick & Morty episode remained relatively light-hearted in terms of tone, the gross gore was more than the likes of Bob’s Burgers or The Simpsons would ever get away with. The Martyrs nod was a gruesome reminder of how much more creative freedom Adult Swim affords Rick & Morty compared to other network's animated sitcoms, as well as a bracing surprise for viewers expecting a harmless episode.
The nod to director Pascal Laugier’s New French Extremity movie was not the first time that Rick & Morty referenced an obscure horror release, either. Although it was not as violent, one Rick & Morty season 4 outing saw the series include a nod to the 1990 horror movie Jacob’s Ladder as the show playfully implied the entire series was being imagined by Morty as he dissociated on the battlefield. Fortunately for fans, this obscure Rick & Morty horror nod was not as bloody as the Martyrs reference. Jacob's Ladder was also not quite as little-known as Laugier's controversial horror, meaning more Rick & Morty fans were likely to recognize the earlier reference.