History Main / EyeRemember

* ''Film/{{Anon}}'' involves a society where everyone is required by law to wear an implant that records everything they see. This should make it impossible to get away with murder as the police can simply download the recorded memories; the killer gets around this by hacking his MurdererPOV onto that of the victim so they can't be seen.

* Used in an episode of the ''Anime/AstroBoy'' anime (both the 1960s and 1980s series). The victim in this case is a robot, which makes the whole thing somewhat more plausible, but the folklore about being able to do it with humans is explicitly referred to.
** This plot point was worked into the beginning of the UltimateUniverse {{Remake}} ''{{Manga/Pluto}}'', where a dead police bot's salvaged memory chip reveals that the junkie who smashed him to pieces was only able to do so because the robot was distracted by the sight of a mysterious figure jumping between two buildings who turns out to be the perpetrator of a completely different murder case.
** The classic manga story ''The Eyes of Christ'' revolves around a twist on the trope. A priest who is murdered for witnessing a group of arms dealers testing a robot armed with illegal weapons manages to scratch a clue onto the eye of a plaster statue of Jesus with his fingernail as he dies.
* There was a story in the ''Manga/BlackJack'' manga about a girl who receives an eye transplant from a murder victim who seems to be seeing visions of the last thing the eye's original owner saw. When Black Jack consults a specialist about whether it's possible for an eye to store an image that way, the man bursts out laughing and says that it happens in science fiction all the time, but ThisIsReality. (Though naturally he's wrong about that.)
%%* Used to absolutely ''chilling'' effect in the appropriately-titled "Mermaid's Gaze" story of Creator/RumikoTakahashi's ''Manga/MermaidSaga''.
%% ZCE, please add context as to why it fits the trope.
%%* An atypical example from ''Manga/{{Berserk}}'' in that it does not involve death. Guts's right eye was blinded when it got clawed out by a demon, during the horrific ordeal of being forced to witness the [[spoiler:vicious rape of his lover Casca at the hands of his now demonic best friend Griffith]] during the Eclipse. Being the last vision that his right eye would see and [[RapeAndRevenge the primary motivation of his revenge]], Guts recalls on this event in order to remind himself of how much he hates the man who took everything from him.
%% Not sufficiently clear how the example cited fits the concept of optography. If anyone can cite a moment where said memory is extracted or shown through Guts' right eye to someone else, feel free to add it back in. As is, it stretches the concept of Tropes Are Flexible a little too hard.

* Abiru Kobushi from ''Manga/SayonaraZetsubouSensei'' has a green left eye as the result of a cornea transplant. Said cornea comes from the victim of a car accident, and Abiru claims she can see the last thing the donor saw: the license plate of the killer car. [[spoiler:It's later revealed that the victim was actually a young girl named An Akagi, AKA Kafuka Fuura.]]

* Used in the 1936 film ''Film/TheInvisibleRay'' to determine who killed Sir Francis. This is how the cast learns of Dr. Rukh's quest for mad vengeance.

* The novel ''Literature/TheAlienist'' by Caleb Carr plays this straight, as it's set in the late 19th century. In fact, taking shots of the eyes of a victim is considered more scientific than fingerprinting. It doesn't work.

* In the ''{{Literature/Discworld}}'' novel ''Literature/FeetOfClay'', the city watch are able to see the eyes that were the last thing the murder victim saw. Unfortunately for convenient cases, that person wasn't the killer.

* In the ''Literature/LordDarcy'' story "The Eyes Have It", the limits and flaws of this technique form the core of the story -- the image that Master Sean recovers is a subjective image that isn't a very good objective representation of the killer, which is just as well, as it allows them to avoid the scandal that would have arisen if the fact that the Count [[spoiler:tried to rape his sister, who then shot him in self-defense]] had gotten out to the general public.

* At the climax of Creator/RudyardKipling's horror story [[http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/ghost-stories-kipling.html "At the End of the Passage"]], a friend of the dead man tries this. What he sees in the dead man's eyes is so horrifying that he destroys the film before his companions ([[TakeOurWordForIt and us, alas]]) can see it.

* Used in ''[[Literature/CircleOfMagic Shatterglass]]'', the last book of Tamora Pierce's "The Circle Opens" Quartet. The detective Nomasdina casts a spell over dead victims to show him the last thing they saw. Unfortunately, the killer always struck from behind, so this was never actually useful.
* In the novella ''Skulls'' by Tim Marquitz, the protagonist, by staring into the eye sockets of one of the titular skulls, sees what the deceased saw at the moment of his or her death.

* In the first season finale of ''Series/AmericanGods'', Easter examines the zombified Laura's eyes to see the face of her killer.

* In an episode of ''Series/BeyondBeliefFactOrFiction'', one story was about a woman who couldn't stop looking at this one guy in a bar. He abducted the woman, demanding to know if she was a cop. The man was eventually arrested and the woman was saved. She later learns that the woman he murdered was the same woman whose transplanted corneas she received. (The implication here was that she couldn't stop staring at the guy because her transplanted eyes recognized him. This was doubly silly because a cornea doesn't actually receive light; it just acts as a lens.)

* ''Series/TheAdventuresOfSherlockHolmesAndDoctorWatson'' mentions this. Holmes says that he conducted some experiments and can tell that it's complete rubbish.

* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': In "[[Recap/StarTrekPicardS1E10EtInArcadiaEgoPart2 Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2]]", the memories of a Soong-type android are stored in its optical processors, so when Altan Soong attempts to transfer the deceased Saga's memories into a V-module as a memento for her "twin sister" Arcana, he runs into problems because the damage to Saga's eye has corrupted the data stream. However, he's able to partially restore the final moments of what Saga saw before she died, and he's horrified to discover that [[spoiler:Sutra is the actual murderer (while Narek, who was blamed for Saga's death, turns out to be the accomplice)]].

* Once on ''Radio/TheRickyGervaisShow'', Risky and Steve convinced Karl that scientists had discovered that crabs dream and devised a way to extract the pictures that were somehow recorded on the insides of their eyes.

* One of the Giovanni powers in ''TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade'' allowed a vampire to do this.
* Corax, wereravens in ''TabletopGame/WerewolfTheApocalypse'', can see the last moments before a person's death by eating their eyeballs. Specifically, they can see it from either a negative (violence, gore, pain) or positive (whodunit, what was happening around them, etc.) perspective depending on WHICH eye they eat. The negative perspective is stated to be generally more stressful, traumatic, and confusing for the Wereraven, but players are advised that favoring only one perspective can/should/will lead to undesirable long-term side effects for their character.

* Used at the end of ''VideoGame/ParasiteEve'' to explain why Aya keeps having flashbacks of herself lying in a hospital bed -- the flashbacks [[spoiler: belong to her sister Maya, whose last memory before she died was of being in the hospital after a fatal car accident, and when her cornea was posthumously donated to Aya, the memories went too.]] FridgeLogic kicks in when you realize that the person who reveals this information to her is a ''scientist''.

* In the {{visual novel}} ''{{VisualNovel/Jisei}}'', the protagonist has a similar power, in which he can feel a dead person's emotions at the time that he or she died. However, he cannot see the person's last moments, and in the event of a murder, he is unable to physically see who committed the crime.

* In Creator/JohnBellairs' ''Literature/TheEyesOfTheKillerRobot'', an EvilSorcerer discovered a way to build a {{Magitek}} robot powered by a human being's eyes. When he decided to put it into practice, he had a grisly idea: what if the last thing a person's eyes sees are himself/herself? He murdered a man and made sure the last thing the guy saw was his own reflection. When he implanted the victim's eyes into the robot, the robot somehow took on the appearance of the dead man.

** In "The Ark In Space", the Doctor specifically mentions this myth while trying to figure out the life cycle of a now-dead parasitic wasp alien. He retrieves the membrane of its eye and uses some AppliedPhlebotinum and PsychicPowers to project the alien's dying point of view onto a viewscreen. Notably, the view he gets isn't just a snapshot, but an extended sequence of memory like a film that the other characters can watch and comment on.
** "The Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone" have a variation. Staring at an Angel for too long eventually creates an image of an Angel, which is also an Angel, ''inside your eye''. As you can imagine, this is fatal.
** In "The Crimson Horror" the Doctor says this is rubbish, but it can happen under certain chemical conditions. Which happen to him.
* In the second episode of ''Series/{{Fringe}}'', Walter Bishop does exactly that to help the FBI find the serial killer.
* In the pilot episode of the ''Series/RoboCopTheSeries'' show, Robo used this to discover that Cray Mallardo was the person killing vagrants. He had to do a lot of [[EnhanceButton processing]] on the image to get something clear enough to identify what he was looking at.
* The Soviet ''[[Series/TheAdventuresOfSherlockHolmesAndDoctorWatson Sherlock Holmes]]'' series mentions it. Holmes says he conducted some experiments, and can tell it's complete rubbish.
* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager''
** In "Ex Post Facto", Tom Paris is condemned to [[AnotherMansTerror watch]] the ImpendingDoomPOV of a man [[FrameUp he allegedly murdered.]]
** In the episode "Timeless", one of the show's numerous {{Bad Future}}s showed the crew buried in ice. The Doctor extracts the eyepiece from Seven of Nine's body and uses it to pinpoint exactly when she died. Her cybernetic eye contains an internal memory of its own.
* ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': In "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2", the memories of a Soong-type android are stored in its optical processors, so when Altan Soong attempts to transfer the deceased Saga's memories into a V-module as a memento for her "twin sister" Arcana, he runs into problems because the damage to Saga's eye has corrupted the data stream. However, he's able to partially restore the final moments of what Saga saw before she died, and he's horrified to discover that [[spoiler:Sutra is the actual murderer (while Narek, who was blamed for Saga's death, turns out to be the accomplice)]].

* In the novella ''Skulls'' by Tim Marquitz, the protagonist, by staring into the eyesockets of one of the titular skulls, sees what the deceased saw at the moment of his or her death.

* In ''Los Angeles 2035'', some {{mutants}} withe the right [[PsychicPowers Psy + mutation]] can look a dead person in the eyes and watch the last moments of his life. It is noted that post-mortem eye mutilation gets more and more common since the Police started employing mutants.

Subtrope of InterrogatingTheDead. Compare EyeRecall.

%%* An atypical example from ''{{Manga/Berserk}}'' in that it does not involve death. Guts's right eye was blinded when it got clawed out by a demon, during the horrific ordeal of being forced to witness the [[spoiler:vicious rape of his lover Casca at the hands of his now demonic best friend Griffith]] during the Eclipse. Being the last vision that his right eye would see and [[RapeAndRevenge the primary motivation of his revenge]], Guts recalls on this event in order to remind himself of how much he hates the man who took everything from him.

* A [[ForgottenPhlebotinum one-shot device]] in the ''Anime/CowboyBebop'' episode "Sympathy for the Devil" plays out the "eyes of the victim" trick, although the victim in this case is only ''brain''-dead.

->'''Crime Scene Photographer''': They say the eyes capture the last image a murder victim sees before they're killed.\\
'''Detective Cline''': What do they say about the entrails?\\
'''Crime Scene Photographer''': Yuck.
-->--''Series/TheXFiles'', ''[[Recap/TheXFilesS03E04ClydeBruckmansFinalRepose Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose]]''

* Appears as an ExaggeratedTrope in the Creator/MarvelComics ''ComicBook/OriginalSin'' CrisisCrossover series, where TheWatcher's eyes store and can transmit everything he has ever observed with his nigh-omniscience. [[spoiler: This becomes important after he is killed and the eyes are used to involuntarily force characters to learn each others' secrets, leading to a cascade of [[RetCon Retconned]] revelations.]]

* In ''ComicBook/TerrorInc'', the eponymous Terror can access the visual memory of any person whose eyes he grafts to his own body using his broader ability to forcibly take AnArmAndALeg and [[ExploitedTrope exploit]] OrganAutonomy.
* ''ComicBook/{{Trese}}''. Harshly subverted in the very first case of the very first issue, in that the uncooperative interviewee was still alive when Trese harvested the eyeball. [[VanHelsingHateCrimes It's okay, their kind are really creepy.]]

* ''Film/{{Anon}}'' involves a society where by law everyone has to wear an implant that records everything they see. This should make it impossible to get away with murder as the police can simply download the recorded memories; the killer gets around this by hacking his MurdererPOV onto that of the victim so they can't be seen.