Louis Blanc, History of the French Revolution of 1789 v. 1 (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1848), p. 556.

In the last book of The Wheel of Time, Lan Mandragoran does this with Demandred, to show the result of their duel, and to dishearten his army. The Legend of the Princess: In a past life, Ganondorf gave Princess Zelda the disembodied head of her fiancé. When the people cut off and displayed the head of a ‘traitor,’ they made the ‘sovereignty of the people’ more than a pretty compliment. They enacted the sovereignty by exercising a traditional prerogative of the sovereign. Cutting off … heads … the rabble had re-defined themselves as the sovereign people. Instead of learning the old lesson of the heads, they teach a new one. … The lesson of the heads is that there has been a fundamental change in social hierarchies and the distribution of power. Article Three of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen declared that the people were ‘the source of sovereignty.’ [Thus,] taking a head transforms the menu peuple from the passive ‘source of sovereignty’ to the active executor of sovereign power.” [15] Godzilla vs. Kong: Kong rips MechaGodzilla's head off with his bare hands and holds it up high in the air like a trophy, roaring and beating his chest triumphantly — it seems Mike Dougherty wasn't entirely joking when he said decapitation is a Running Gag where Ghidorah's left head is concerned (in some form or another). San: Three Kingdoms Comic is a parody of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, an old work with a substantial number of severed heads in its own right, but here it's played for dark humor: Yuan Shao would really rather that you don't put the head of a slain enemy on his desk, please.

Tara

When the Orcs catapult into Minas Tirith "all the heads of those who had fallen fighting at Osgiliath" it's depicted as an atrocity.

In Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, it's mentioned that Kyle Katarn's father was beheaded and his head placed on a spike. After the protestors got the heads, they placed them on pikes, held them aloft, and marched through Parisian streets beating drums. A journalist and dramatist named Louis-Abel, Beffroy de Reigny was informed about the protests and left the safety of his home to investigate. When he reached the Boulevard du Temple, he reported:

Notes and Sources

In the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel Dune miniseries, after the Beast Rabban is killed by a Fremen mob, a boy holds up his severed head. Improvised pikes, made from bayonets on poles, were used by escaped convicts during the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804.