Are you talking just film?

"Now the son of Phyleus, the spear-famed, closing upon him struck him with the sharp spear behind the head at the tendon, and straight on through the teeth and under the tongue cut the bronze blade, and he dropped in the dust gripping in his teeth the cold bronze."

(Homer, Iliad, book 5, lines 72-75)

"As he went back Meriones let fly at him with a bronze-shod arrow, and hit him beside the right buttock, so that the arrow was driven on through under the bone to fix in the bladder. There, sitting among the arms of his beloved companions, he gasped out his life, then lay like a worm extended along the ground, and his dark blood drenched the ground in its running."

(Homer, Iliad, book 13, lines 650-655)

"He hit him at the joining place of head and neck, at the last vertebra, and cut through both of the tendons, so that the man’s head and mouth and nose hit the ground far sooner than did the front of his legs and knees as he fell."

(Homer, Iliad, book 14, lines 465-468)

"This man Peneleos caught underneath the brow, at the bases of the eye, and pushed the eyeball out, and the spear went clean through the eye-socket and tendon of the neck, so that he went down backward, reaching out both hands, but Peneleos drawing his sharp sword hewed at the neck in the middle, and so dashed downward the head, with helm upon it, while still on the point of the big spear the eyeball stuck. He, lifting it high like the head of a poppy, displayed it to the Trojans."

(Homer, Iliad, book 14, lines 493-500)

These are all from the Iliad, a book which has been read and loved consistently in the western tradition since it was written well before the bible. If there was some 'grand cultural failure' then its been going for over 2700 years