Atop a Mountain of Corpses

I wonder if he can see his house from there?

"Now those who were living did their best to survive
In that mad world of gut-blood and fire
And for seven long weeks I kept myself alive
While the corpses around me piled higher."

— Eric Bogle (or The Pogues if you prefer), And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

So, the hero has just defeated a horde of mooks. So many mooks, in fact, that their corpses have been piling up under the hero's feet and formed a veritable mountain of bodies. What better way to celebrate this badass display than to perform a Victory Pose atop said pile?

Frequently (especially in Film Posters) comes with a Leg Cling by the Love Interest in a Go-Go Enslavement bikini, as the hero waves his BFS/BFG (or Cool Sword) in the air triumphantly.

If it's a villain, you can expect them to instead lounge comfortably on their corpse-couch, perhaps off-handedly stabbing any enemies that have a twitch of life still in them. Bad guys with time on their hands and an interest in arts and crafts may turn this pile-o-corpses into a skull throne, with authentic human skin leather for the lining. *shudder*

The PG-13 version of this has the baddies KO'd or too beat up to move. In which case, the hero will usually sit on top of the still moaning mooks and offhandedly thwack any that show signs of resistance. This is especially common if they're waiting to be rescued.

Potential ways to subvert this trope include using the corpse as cover, or surprise attacking anyone who goes over the corpses while you're on the other side of it. Or in some cases, creatures forming themselves with a pile of corpses. Don't expect people who use this trope to touch upon the awful smell that a pile of dozens of corpses in the sun would give off.

Compare Nothing but Skulls and Hitler Cam. Also compare Victory Pose On Person when the winner puts one foot on the body of the defeated, who is often still alive but unconscious, as part of their Victory Pose. See also Buried in a Pile of Corpses.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Berserk, this imagery is referenced and shown before Griffith joins the God Hand, convinced that if he does not achieve his dream, all the deaths of the Band of the Hawk (who died for his cause) will have been for nothing. It's enough to tip him over the edge.
• Black Cat: Janus defends Rinslet from a group of 30+ mobsters and is shown afterward sitting on a pile of their mostly unconscious bodies. (A couple are still groaning.)
• Bleach
  • One of the chapter title pages depicts Nnoitra doing this.
  • This is how Unohana first met Kenpachi. One of her subordinates thought she had made the mountainous pile while looking for a Worthy Opponent, but she was confused by it. She looked up and an adolescent Kenpachi was crouching on top.
• In Jackals, the first image depicting The Hero's mom shows her on top of a pile of corpses with the BFS she passed on to her son.
• Kitsuchi, the badass general from Iwagakure in Naruto literally stands on top of a pile of White Zetsu Corpses, choking out the last one. He killed them all himself. Note that these things are durable enough to take a One-Body Blow from Neji Hyuga, a very strong Jonin, and start regenerating immediately. As well as survive Sakura's Super-Strength — twice.
• One Piece:
  • Rob Lucci, who manages this while resolving a situation where a kingdom's entire army was taken hostage. When he was thirteen. With the corpses consisting of the hostages.
  • Another example occurs when Shiki invades Marineford single-handedly. Garp and Sengoku find him on top of a pile of Marines.
  • During the Marineford War arc, Donquixote Doflamingo was seen to be sitting on top of a pile of Whitebeard pirate corpses before talking with Ivankof about Kuma's modifications.
• There's a non-combat variant in Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, where Panty has a habit of sitting on top of piles of guys she just screwed.
• Amagi Miroku of Psyren, shortly after his big massacre TV debut, does this after he and his sempai-slash-subordinate Grigori #01 (later known as Commander Grana) take out the Special Defense Force unit sent to hunt them down. Man always has perfect poise.
• Rurouni Kenshin: Sanosuke Sagara had a moment when he went back to his hometown to check on his family only to find his father in trouble with local gangsters. They sent 200 men to fight him. And Sanosuke wiped the floor with every single one of them, grinning madly all the way as he had needed "stress relief."
• The title page of Chapter 8 of Sands of Destruction features a silhouette of Taupy standing on a pile of bodies, with a clearer picture of him superimposed on it.
• Spy X Family: In Chapter-63, as Twilight recounts his early life, he mentions that after he lied about his age to join the army, he made it a point to avenge his parents, friends, and hometown by killing as many enemy soldiers as he could, and to show how far he was gone in his quest for revenge, he's shown sitting atop a mound of corpses in one panel.
• In Sword Art Online, the anime shows "Zekken" standing on top of a mountain of defeated players as Lisbeth tells Asuna about how Zekken defeated every single challenger. Considering that Zekken doesn't look at all like she does in the game, this is purely a product of Lisbeth's imagination.

Art

• Samson is frequently depicted this way, after slaying one thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey.
• Frank Frazetta popularized the trope, regularly portraying heroes such as Conan the Barbarian standing atop pyramid shapes to emphasize their heroic stature. Often the pyramid was composed of slain enemies. The former trope image is but one famous example among dozens.
• Liberty Leading the People: The personification of Liberty stands atop a floor of corpses as she leads the French people.
• The Raft of the Medusa: Variation. The dead litter the floor of the raft, while the living stand on top of them and raise their arms, hoping to be rescued. This structure shows up in the painting in two "pyramids", one in the foreground and one in the back.

Comic Books

• In American Born Chinese, the Monkey King beats up the guests at a celestial party and leaves them in a battered pile. He's too pissed to take a Victory Pose, however.
• Another one for standing: in the Carl Barks Disney Ducks Comic Universe story "Back to the Klondike", the young Scrooge McDuck defeats everyone in a bar and uses their unconscious bodies as a makeshift staircase to reach the balcony.◊
• One cartoon magazine series has the protagonists filming a Conan the Barbarian rip-off, with the hero eventually "knee-deep in the bodies of his slain enemies". A producer comments: "We wanted it to be waist deep, but we couldn't afford enough extras."
• The DCU:
  • In the cover of Batman: Endgame, part 5 (Batman #39), the Joker sits on a literal throne of human corpses... but boy, are they smiling.
  • The Joker invokes the villainous version of the trope in a bizarre way in The Killing Joke by using a pile of half-broken kewpie dolls and a tilt-a-whirl cart as a throne. While not strictly a pile of dead bodies, it's pretty damn close...
  • The cover of Superman & Batman: World's Funnest shows Bat-Mite and Mr. Mxyzptlk battling each other atop a pile of Supermen and Batmen.
  • Secret pulls off the PG version in the Wonder Woman (1987) storyline "The Witch and the Warrior", sitting atop the unconscious villains she's defeated.
  • The cover of Wonder Woman (2011) #24 depicts Diana riding a black horse with a raised sword atop a pile of human bones which are mostly skulls, though there is at least one rib cage in the mix.
• The cover◊ of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) #95, the middle issue of the "Snake Eyes Trilogy", has the aforementioned mute ninja commando hunched over a pile of slain Cobra Vipers of various types.
• Marvel Universe:
  • In the cover of Marvel Universe vs. the Punisher, Frank manages to get some Leg Cling in there◊.
  • In one Spider-Man issue, the villain Carnage stands on top of a pile of people he has killed while laughing maniacally.
  • The cover◊ for The Amazing Spider-Man (2015) #799 shows the Red Goblin (Norman Osborn with the Carnage symbiote) standing victorious on the bodies of Spider-Man's allies Miles Morales and Clash with Silk, Anti-Venom, and Johnny Storm laying defeated around them.
  • Ultimate FF #2 has a cover with Dr. Doom atop a mountain of Atlantean corpses.
  • Ultimate Galactus Trilogy: Ultimate Extinction #1 and #3.
  • X-23: Innocence Lost: During her breakout and destruction of the Facility base, X-23 slaughters a dozen or so guards who have her cornered in the room with her incubating clone 'sisters'. When a straggler rounds the corner, he has an Oh, Crap! moment as Laura glares murder at him while crouching on the heaped bodies of his comrades.
• In a segment of Maus, Art imagines himself drawing the comic book while wearing a mouse mask, on top of a pile of anthropomorphic mouse corpses, mirroring his guilt and self-doubt related to the publishing of the first half of the book.
• Minor Threats: On the cover◊ of the first issue of Minor Threats: The Fastest Way Down, Frankie Follis sits on a throne on top a mountain of costumed corpses with her right hand and girlfriend Scalpel sitting besides her also on the pile.
• Done by the Saint of Killers in Preacher, but since he's invulnerable and his guns cannot miss, run out or be anything other than lethal, the corpses pile up on either side of him, since the Big Bad is sending them in to slow him down.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Star Wars: Legacy, Kol Skywalker pulls this off during the first issue◊.
  • My Brother, My Enemy has Janek "Tank" Sunber, one of Luke Skywalker's childhood friends who became an Imperial officer, has this dream◊ about Luke. It's notable that Tank is an infantry officer, the kind who doesn't see his stormtroopers as Faceless Mooks.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, one of the initial scenes in the Dreamland arc features Raphael in this position... right before acid rain burns his skin off, leaving only a laughing skeleton.
• Thrud The Barbarian, a comic strip published in the White Dwarf magazine, once had the eponymous main character creating the pile and posing himself on it (with a woman clutching his leg) so that he could have his passport picture taken (er, painted)...
• Transformers: Galvatron did this◊ during Time Wars.
• This happens with some frequency in Usagi Yojimbo, though it's often due to a camera angle. Almost invariably, they will give off the Speech Bubble for death (a skull of their species).
• Wizard Magazine once did a humorous story on the kill count of Dark Horse's popular characters depicted on top of their own body piles ranging from The Goon, Hellboy, Conan the Barbarian and Miyamoto Usagi having the largest pile.

Fan Works

• Boldores and Boomsticks:
  • Zwei is introduced to Absol doing this. The corpses being Grimm corpses, he's back at ground level in a few seconds.
  • After beating up some Team Skull members, Lux and Sabra nap on a pile of their Pokémon.
• My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator:
  • After the Slayer butchers 1,000 Saber soldiers in a blind rage, when he snaps out of it and wipes off the blood, he finds himself standing upon their dismembered and mutilated corpses with an ankle-deep lake of blood surrounding it. The next squad of Sabers arriving are terrified at what they view as a monster.
  • During Ragdoll's mind reading of the Slayer, one of the things she saw was the Slayer standing upon a mountain of dismembered, disemboweled and mutilated demons. She tries to replicate the scene on a hospital wall with a scalpel.
• In The Night Unfurls, Celestine's depiction of the Good Hunter in one of her visions is a man in a dark coat standing on a field of corpses, an image that appears right after a vision of the same man standing on a hill surrounded by white flowers^note the place where the Hunter duelled his mentor Gehrman.

Films — Animated

• The titular Anti-Hero of Boogie leaves behind piles of bodies everywhere he goes, belonging to his victims. There's also his arch-rival, Blackburn, after a hotel massacre, in a similar pose.
• In the original version of The Thief and the Cobbler, the Mighty One Eye stands on top of the corpses of the king's soldiers near the beginning.
• Akima from Titan A.E. does this to their KO'd kidnappers while waiting to be rescued.
• WALL•E: When the berserk massage robot HAN-S is unleashed on a platoon of Steward bots, it ends with a victorious HAN-S on top of a huge pile of wrecked Stewards.

Films — Live-Action

• In 300, Leonidas creates a massive wall to block the Persians with the dead acting as the bricks... and the mortar... and the fill.
  • And makes another pile of corpses later. And weaponizes it.
• In Blade II, Novak stands at the top of a staircase that is littered with fallen security guards. Director Guillermo del Toro acknowledges it as an homage to Frazetta in the commentary.
• Brightburn. Brandon's mother discovers in his coloring book sketches of the atrocities he's committed, and the words Take The World scribbled over and over, plus a sketch of him floating above a pile of corpses.
• Maybe more "beside a mountain of corpses" than atop one, but this is seen in the final shot of Fury (2014). The battle between the crew of the tank "Fury" and the SS battalion took place at night, so while there were obviously droves of casualties among the Germans, the audience never really got a good perspective as to how many. The final shot of the movie is an aerial shot of the busted tank that slowly pulls back further and further to show the absolute mounds of bodies of the SS surrounding the tank, who died in their attempts to assault it.
• At one point in The Gamers: Dorkness Rising Leo starts replacing his frequently dying bard character with spare character sheets instead of resurrecting and losing levels. During a big battle, so many die that the rest of the party use the pile of dead bards as cover.
• Ghostbusters II. "On a mountain of skulls, in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood."
• The Lord of the Rings
  • Gimli the dwarf from The Two Towers sat on top of orc #43. It still moved because his ax was lodged in the orc's spine.
  • In The Return of the King, the Orcs use a Battering Ram against the gates of Gondor. It proves woefully ineffective, and the defenders kill so many Orcs, that they are soon literally running up a pile of Orc corpses to smash the battering ram into the gate. Their commander yells that them for being stupid, and orders a much larger battering ram to be brought out.
• Meng Yi, one of Jackie Chan's characters in the Hong Kong film, The Myth, does the standing version of this during his You Shall Not Pass! scene. Unfortunately, he goes beyond his limits before he could kill the last of the attacking rebels and he falls unconscious while standing, allowing one of the remaining rebels to climb up the mountain of corpses and cut off his head.
• The poster for the teen comedy The New Guy has the titular character standing atop a pile of jocks and bullies with a bunch of hot chicks (two of whom are Eliza Dushku and Zooey Deschanel) at his side, clinging to his legs.
• The at least semi-intelligent monsters in Outlander make a large pile of the bodies of the humans they've killed, which is mostly a larder but they also lie on top of it to reinforce how badass they are. (And in a scene which is going to be really hard to deal with in pre-psychotherapy times, they toss the heroine into it while she waits for certain death.)
• The Prophecy 3: The Ascent: In the climactic fight at the end, Pyriel shows Danyael the mountain of human corpses he plans to leave in his wake as the Angel of Genocide.
• In Serenity, after River declares that the Reavers shall not pass, the rest of the crew is left believing that she is dead... until the doors slide open to show her very much alive, uneaten, unraped, and un-worn-as-clothing, and standing atop a pile of utterly massacred Reavers.
• In the film version of Breaking Dawn, Bella has a nightmare of her and Edward being married by the leader of the "evil" vampires, Aro. The camera pulls back, revealing Bella and Edward standing on top of a huge pile of the bloodied corpses of all the human and werewolf people of Forks, all dressed in white formal garb, with copious amounts of red blood being the only other color. As Das Sporking puts it in 15 Reasons to See Breaking Dawn and 1 Reason Not To, Bella and Edward look like the toppers on a massive wedding cake from hell.

Literature

• The Beginning After the End: Arthur's Big Damn Reunion with Tessia and the Twin Horns after he finishes his years of training in Epheotus has the latter parties find him in a dungeon pulling off a Slouch of Villainy (a rare heroic instance of that trope) Sword Plant atop a mountain made of the corpses of the monsters they thought they would find there, having slaughtered them all on his own before they got there.
• Conan the Barbarian. At almost any point in his life. Ever.
• Discworld:
  • In one book, it's noted that Death met heroes frequently, generally surrounded by, and this was important, the dead bodies of very nearly all their enemies and saying, "Vot the hell shust happened?"
  • It's mentioned in Interesting Times. The Silver Horde are informed that the proper means of conquering the empire is through rivers of blood or over a mountain of skulls. They discuss how in their experience skulls are quite hard to pile up, so they'll need a lot of them. When faced with 100,000-to-1 odds, they remain confident that even after they've gotten tired killing the first few thousand, that the remaining soldiers will be tired too, because by then the soldiers will have to run uphill just to get to them.
• Forest Kingdom: In Book 1 (Blue Moon Rising), the last army of the Forest Kingdom slay so many of their demonic attackers that they're shielded, for a time, by the mounded corpses of their enemies. At one point, Rupert climbs over the pile to rush to Julia's assistance.
• Inheritance Cycle: A scene in the third book has Roran, characterised up to that point as a Badass Normal, standing atop a pile of 193 dead mooks. All of which he killed himself. He managed to do this since they were funneled into a position where they could only fight him one-to-three at a time.
• John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows books tend to have large fights end in the Mount Corpse scenario. In the first story, the hero (well, protagonist,) Ghost, is fighting off a series of human wave attacks. Between waves, he builds a defensive position out of the bodies of the previous wave. (When the people he's protecting express disgust, he says he doesn't have any sandbags and what do they want him to do?) When help arrives, they note that they can't climb down the stairs to the underground room where Ghost is holed up without standing on bodies two or three deep. Also, the burial mound of the Keldara, which is a literal mountain (or at least a respectable hill) of corpses.
• The Hill of Slain from The Silmarillion (Haudh-en-Ndengin) is a literal mountain of corpses◊. Note that this was a mountain of good guy corpses.
• The climax of the Warcraft The War of the Ancients series features one. Broxigar pulled this one on the Burning Legion, when he entered their realm to stop the tide of demons surging through the gateway. To say he succeeded is an understatement: he slaughters demons left and right and ends up standing on a pile of their bodies. Broken and battered, he still taunts them to fight him... but the demons simply don't dare to come close to him anymore. It takes Sargaras, the fallen Titan and leader of the Burning Legion, to kill Broxigar, but not before Broxigar manages to wound him, something no other mortal has ever achieved, before or since.
• In the first book of the Wind on Fire trilogy, the protagonists are fleeing back to their home city and being chased by the Zars, an endless army of beautiful boys and girls who kill anything they come across without the slightest hesitation. When they take out the only way of crossing a chasm, the Zars march off the cliff and fall without even slowing down. Since there's an endless supply of them and they seem to be some kind of Hive Mind, they can keep marching until there are so many corpses they can walk across the gap on a mountain of their own dead.
• There's a short story by Timothy Zahn and Micheal A. Stackpole where Corran Horn works briefly with a disguised Grand Admiral Thrawn, and the subject of art comes up when Corran says the graffiti on walls they're passing isn't the work of Venthan Chassu, but it's more interesting than peeling Star Destroyer White. Pressed for his opinion, Corran mentions that he liked the early and middle works by Chassu, but the man's final work, Palpatine Triumphant, was of Palpatine on a throne of mutilated bodies, and in the narration, Corran adds that the most disturbing thing about it was the Emperor's expression of homicidal joy. Thrawn dryly says that his loss was a pity, thus implying that Chassu was killed for this depiction.

Live-Action TV

• In the Season 2 finale of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Bart, holistic assassin, is seen sitting on top of a pile of the Mage's mooks, after last appearing walking calmly towards the army with a chainsaw.
• Game of Thrones has the Boltons actually invoke this trope as a military strategy during the Battle of the Bastards. Ramsay has his cavalry charge that of the Stark loyalists, and while the two groups are slaughtering each, has his archers keep firing into the mass, killing both his own men and the Starks', until enough are dead that they've created a literal wall of corpses. Then he has his infantry move in and surround the remaining Stark forces, boxing them in between an advancing wall of spears and said wall of corpses (and to make matters worse, his allied infantry is climbing over the wall from the other side). It works horrifically well, only ultimately failing due to the Knights of the Vale showing up in time to rout the Bolton forces from behind.
  • In the behind the scenes videos, the showrunners actually boast about how "realistic" this was for medieval battles - but critics were quick to point out that this decidedly unrealistic and never really happened in medieval warfare.
• QI made fun of this Trope in a discussion about prejudice against people over their height, and idle wonderings if short people are more likely to be power-hungry. Stephen Fry then informs the panel that historically, rulers and despots are no more likely to be short than any other figure and that even Napoleon was of above-average height for his time.
  Sean Locke: It's probably the one thing that short people have to cling on to — one day they might be a dictator. Now we've just taken that away from them.
  David Mitchell: All this not being able to reach things from shelves one day will be made up for when I kill millions of people. I will stand on their bodies to reach the jam.
• The X-Files plays with this trope twice.
  • In "Teso Dos Bichos", a horde of sewer killer pussy cats fill an Absurdly Spacious Sewer with dead bodies, but the cats are not seen triumphantly sitting on top of them.
  • In "Detour", Mulder and Scully fall into a pit full of dead and injured people that were dragged there by the monsters of the week. They try to stack them so that they can get out of the pit.

Music

• It occasionally happens on Manowar's album covers.
• Cannibal Corpse has a song called Rotten Body Landslide about someone being crushed to death in a landslide of bodies while trying to climb a mountain of corpses.
• Jeremy, the titular protagonist Pearl Jam's hit 1992 track, is known to brazenly draw himself posing victoriously atop mountains with the corpses of his defeated foes at their foot.
• Lemon Demon's "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" ends with piles of corpses strewn on top of one another. The guy on top one of those mountains? Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater.
• The cover◊ of Samson's Survivors features the band standing atop a pile of corpses which contains numerous famous figures, ranging from Cleopatra to Jimi Hendrix to Adolf Hitler.
• The title character of "Can't Keep Johnny Down" by They Might Be Giants does the PG-13 version of this.
  Men piled up in a towering mound
  None of them once has found a way
  To keep Johnny down

Mythology

• Celtic Mythology: Cú Chullain is said to have killed so many men in one battle that he "built walls from their corpses".

Pinball

• Deadpool: Finishing Ninja or Mechsuit Multiball displays a screen showing Deadpool standing triumphantly on the twitching bodies of his enemies.

Tabletop Games

• The Pathfinder Sourcebook Dragons Revisited features a picture of a colossal black dragon crouched atop a pile of corpses.
• The Skull Throne of Khorne: An enormous throne of brass upon which Khorne sits, sitting on an ever-growing mountain of warrior's skulls, in the middle of an ever-expanding lake of blood spilled in battle. Both skulls and blood can come from Khorne's enemies or his own champions, for he cares not from where the blood flows, only that it flows.
  • And several other, marginally less epic examples as well, in both Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. In particular, there are several iconic◊ images of Crimson Fists Space Marines making defiant last stands from atop a mound of their own battle brothers.
  • The iconic full-page illustration from the first Dark Eldar codex has a random Dark Eldar warrior standing atop a hill of skulls. The bonus? An attached poem that set the theme for the entire army:
  We are not creatures of shadow
  But it serves us well
  As an ally in battle and a refuge for rest.
  • In the tabletop game, many horde armies can end up with a rather impressive "dead pile" at the end of a game. Even more impressive if things go badly for them.
  • Some rulebooks, notably Black Crusade specify that this gives the stander a "high ground" bonus in melee combat.
  • There's an out-of-print promotional miniature of Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!), atop a colossal pile of the corpses of the assorted enemies of the Imperium... With a ladder at the back, playing off the idea that the In-Universe reason the Covers Always Lie is that they're propaganda posters.
  • Background fluff says that Khârn the Betrayer died on top of one these made up of his enemies during the siege of Terra during the Horus Heresy. However Khorne took notice of him and made a Devil's Job Offer to be resurrected as his champion.

Video Games

• In Baten Kaitos Origins, if you choose to go back in time to defeat Wiseman, you find him doing this.
• The Battle for Middle-earth has Azog, lord of Moria, emphasize his superiority by literally stating that "I rule from atop the corpses of the Dead Mountain Kings!".
• The Flash game Body Ladder is actually based on this trope — the object of the game is to climb as high as possible on top of the dead bodies of countless enemies as they walk (and later, climb) towards you.
• The Temple of Ormagöden in Brütal Legend.
• The final battle of Cave Story's best ending is fought in a room made out of hundreds of skeletons. Even the ceiling is made of skeletons.
• Seath the Scaleless roars on a pile of dragon corpses in the Dark Souls intro. Nito, first of the dead, is a pile of corpses.
• The credits of Doom (2016) reimagines the iconic cover of the original Doom as this.
• The Killer Rabbit from Dragon's Crown starts the battle by landing on top a massive pile of Northern army corpses. It uses the corpses to its advantage, scattering their weapons when it jumps around and during its Tornado Move.
• The cover of Duke Nukem 3D.
• Legault of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade claims this is where the assassin Jaffar was found as an infant, sleeping on the corpses of everyone else in his destroyed village.
• The Dreaded Red Arremer is first seen sitting atop a mountain of skulls in Ghouls n Ghosts which it throws at the player. This is also Firebrand's intro in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
• In Grim Fandango, Hector LeMans's greenhouse is built on top of a huge hill of flowers. In the Land of the Dead where the game takes place, one of the only ways to make someone Deader than Dead is by using a special chemical that makes flowers grow on their bones.
• Hades from Kid Icarus: Uprising said he was going to destroy a county or two and invoke this trope before meeting Pit again during their Final Battle, and laments that he had only gotten a pile started when Pit showed up.
• In what is probably a Shout-Out to The Killing Joke, at the end of Batman: Arkham Asylum, Joker is seated on a throne resting on a mound of dismembered manikins.
• This is actually a game mechanic in Life Goes On where previous failed attempts at the level leaves behind corpses that can be used as platforms. At least one section requires quite a few bodies to pile up before you can use them as a jumping point to get over a ledge.
• Sakura's ending in Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter showed her future son finding a picture of Sakura standing atop the other characters.
• In Nemesis the Warlock the corpses of the mooks you kill do not disappear, they remain and stack on top of each other and can be used as platforms. In fact, the completion of some levels requires you to pile enough corpses to be able to jump to the exit to the next level.
• OFF: The soundtrack album cover depicts The Batter atop a mountain of dead Spectres.
• In Pizza Tower, the Title Card for "The Crumbling Tower of Pizza"◊ features Peppino looking both victorious and furious while standing atop a gigantic pile of various objects, enemies, bosses and other characters of the game.
• During the intermission in Quest for Glory II, the hero's caravan is attacked by brigands. Just when you think the game is going to make you fight them, cut to the hero standing atop a pile of brigand and saurus corpses in the victory pose.
• Rogue Legacy 2 has the boss room for Estuary Lamech. Lamech isn't standing on the corpses but the background has a veritable mountain of bodies... all rebels who attempted to kill Lamech and Lamech killed them all... by himself. One can certainly imagine he was standing atop them when he'd just finished killing them.
• After the second stage of the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, Scott and Ramona kiss atop a mountain of corpses.
• Seen in the box art of Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD. Also seen one of the cutscenes in Serious Sam II.
• During the Anarchy route of Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, right before Nanashi can enact his plan to restart the world, Skins and Fujiwara rally the remaining fighters in Tokyo to stop him. Nanashi slaughters every last one of them, leaving their bodies piled like mountains.
• Luca Blight in Suikoden II's opening, while sporting a gigantic, psychotic smile.
• In Team Fortress 2, at the end of Meet the Medic, The Medic and Heavy are standing atop a hill of Soldier corpses.
• In Total War: Warhammer III, Skarbrand's introductory video for the Realm of Chaos campaign has the Advisor stumbling across him sharpening his axes atop a pile of skulls. Quite fitting, considering he is a Greater Daemon of Khorne, the Chaos God whose followers are obsessed with blood and skulls.
• The box art of Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior features the titular Fire Warrior crouching atop a mountain of skulls.
• Weaponlord has the final boss fight take place upon a hill of skeletons with a freakish multi-horned demon in the background and the moon appearing after the battle ends, turning red and getting grabbed by a demon's hand.

Webcomics

• The protagonists of Baskets of Guts do this on Chapters' covers on occasion. One of them◊ is also a Shout-Out to Conan.
• This rather dark Brawl in the Family strip does something similar to the Wind on Fire example above.
• In Buck Godot, Hyraxx de Mofiti does this in one panel, standing on top of a pile of assassins she fought to get to Buck.
  • Well, she's a tabloid reporter. People are afraid of her for good reason.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: In the beginning of the last volume (Wheel Smashing Lord), a flashback shows Yaun — before he became Jagganoth — after he's killed six thousand soldiers in one day. With that many bodies, he has needed to be somewhat systematic: he's piled most of them in huge mounds around him, and only keeps a smaller pile as a seat.
• A man sits atop a pile of defeated zombies in the third volume of The Living Dead.
• Wonderella makes a pile of the bodies of other superheroes in this comic after killing them (though that wasn't actually required). Don't worry, they'll be back in a month.
• The Order of the Stick: Belkar Bitterleaf is a SEXY SHOELESS GOD OF WAR! The potential Moment of Awesome is then destroyed — because they were easy enough to kill that he made a pile of them, he gets nothing for it.
  • The trope is used practically in another moment — A death knight has his hobgoblin troops swarm Azure City's walls, until they die in such numbers that the other troops may walk over their corpses as a ramp to go over the walls.
• Doctor Bunnigus of Schlock Mercenary once mused that when she heard from Schlock again, he'd be calling atop a steaming pile of corpses. Much to her chagrin, she was right. Though to be fair, Schlock wasn't actually responsible for this particular pile.
• Tower of God's Aleksai Amigochaz is in this position after clearing the first test of Evankhell's Hell.
• Unsounded: When Duane briefly fears Lemuel was killed in battle he finds him atop a mound of corpses, hacking the corpse of a gaint boar that had trampled him and prevented him from going after the rebel that killed his friend Danila and singing about the death of the gods.

Web Original

• During the fight at the gate of the Old World in the Escapist's Doraleous & Associates the Old Master Testecles manages to get quite the impressive kill count, having a literal mountain of bodies.
• In the Extra Credits series on the Irish Potato Famine, in one video they emphasize Sir Charles Trevelyan's determination to use the famine to anglicize Ireland by drawing him like this.
• The closing shot of Spatula Madness.
• The flash video The Ultimate Showdown ends with Mr. Rogers standing triumphantly atop a pile of corpses brandishing a sword.
• Subverted/inverted/played with in a Flash game (I forget the name) which is basically you facing hordes of men coming at you from both sides of the screen. The bodies never fade and pile on top of each other, and it's soon revealed that it's actually quite hard to make a mountain of corpses that you stand atop of. Standing in one place you find yourself standing in a pit between two WALLS of corpses, with sword-wielding crazies coming on you from above. And if you work to make the hill, the sword-wielding crazies are too low for you to hit. You have to basically make a PLAIN of corpses to survive too long here.
• SCP-5140 reveals everyone who's climbed Mt. Everest has done this. Following an avalanche in April 2024 caused by rising temperatures, aerial scans and excavations made by the Foundation revealed that around 45% of Everest's mass is made of impossibly large piles of anomalous human corpses.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Monk Gyatso's remains are found atop a pile of skeletons dressed as Fire Nation soldiers. Notably, the soldiers are burnt but his own bones are unmarred, inferring that he somehow managed to turn their own firebending on them.
• Mickey Mouse at the end of "The Barnyard Battle".
• In the Futurama episode where Fry/Professor/Bender go forward in time, Bender wants to stay in a Terminator-like era and build a home atop a mountain of skulls.
• In an episode of Kappa Mikey, when Guano is asked to draw up a plan to replace Ozu's precious bonzai tree he instead draws himself standing on Mikey's and Gonard's bodies while Mitsuki and Lily hang onto his legs.
• The Powerpuff Girls, being the ultra super-powered heroines they are, play the PG-13 example of this trope straight and end up standing atop a mountain of their foes' brutally KO'd bodies at the end of the 1998 show's opening.
• Samurai Jack often ends up standing atop a mountain of robot corpses.
• In The Simpsons episode "Itchy and Scratchy Land" Homer arises on top of a pile of defunct robots he "killed" by taking flash light photographs of them.
• In the South Park episode "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society" when the boys all suddenly become attracted to Bebe because of her budding breasts they revert to a primitive state and attack each other grunting like apes, Stan finds a bone and beats up the rest of the boys with it and he stands on top of their unconscious bodies yelling in triumph.
• In the TMNT: Back to the Sewer episode "Identity Crisis", one of the memories that ends up breaking Raph's brainwashing involves Raph doing this over a bunch of Foot Ninja◊.
• In The Transformers episode "Triple Takeover", Blitzwing defeats several Autobots and makes a throne from their bodies. They are rescued and repaired later.
• The Venture Brothers: Brock, during a stay in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• In the Wander over Yonder episode "The Cartoon", the intro for the eponymous Show Within a Show depicts Lord Hater standing on a pile of assorted, beaten-up hero and villain characters from previous episodes, with Princess Demurra doing a Leg Cling.

Real Life

• During the Mexican-American War, there were several reports of corpse walls of Mexican soldiers forming. One officer even described how they formed. Apparently, the Americans were trained to shoot the enemy only within a certain range and this caused a lot of corpses to start falling in a narrow band. It became harder for the Mexican Soldiers to pass these bands so they became even easier to shoot. This caused little walls of bodies that the Mexicans literally had to climb over only to themselves be shot and add to the wall. Some reports say these grisly barricades were several stories tall and the victorious forces literally had to climb over them to advance.
• During the Battle of the Somme, the German commander Falkenhayn insisted on the immediate recapture of every bit of ground the British took, proclaiming that "the enemy should have to carve his way over mountains of corpses". Unfortunately for Falkenhayn, as inefficient as the British were in advancing, they were tenacious in defending, and he was trading his toughened veterans away against over-eager amateurs.
• At one comic convention, everyone who was dressed up as a comic-book villain got together to give a young girl cosplaying Wonder Woman the perfect photo op: they all laid down in a pile on the stairs as if they had died, as the little girl stood at the top of the stairs holding up her sword.

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"Do you want to tell him he probably won't get any XP from killing them?"

"Let's draw straws."