Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress

The Warden's wedding didn't go quite as planned...

"I saw you in your wedding gown, the prettiest dress
I came into your room that night and made such a mess
In my own way, I lovingly kiss the bride
With your ring in your hand, your eyes and your mouth open wide
In my eyes, blood drops look like roses on white lace…"

— Alice Cooper, "Roses on White Lace"

There's something about seeing a woman in a white bridal gown which is covered in blood. The juxtaposition of the joyous event the wedding dress is supposed to signify with the brutality or tragedy that the blood indicates makes for a striking image. The fact that the red of the blood stands out well against the white of the dress adds to this.

This can be used either to evoke sympathy in us if the bride has gone through something horrifying, or to alienate us from her if she has committed a horrific act herself. Or a bit of both. Sometimes just used to add some surreality to a scene.

The bride might have lost or discarded her shoes. For extra macabre, she might leave behind bloody footprints, either from the blood staining the dress or for having hurt her feet, further symbolizing the defilement of her happy day.

May overlap with White Is Pure. Ethereal White Dress if it's implied that the bride died in the dress. Compare with Wedding/Death Juxtaposition, White Shirt of Death, Bloodstained Glass Windows and Snow Means Death. See also Wedding Smashers, which more often than not causes this. May overlap with Widowed at the Wedding. See also Wight in a Wedding Dress. For extra tragedy, it may be a Hereditary Wedding Dress.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Battle Angel Alita, Alita kicks some mecha ass wile wearing a wedding dress at one point. She wasn't going to marry anyone though.
• Three brides are attacked in Case Closed, with different results:
  • In an early case, the imagery is played straight◊ since the poor bride bleeds profusely from the mouth after she's poisoned by her groom in revenge for her dad's part in the (accidental) death of said groom's mother, 20 years ago. Unusually for this trope, the bride survives and ultimately gets better.
  • Ultimately averted in another case: Satou gets stabbed when first her best friend Yumi and then she pose as Body Doubles of a bride who has been threatened and she's attacked while wearing the bride-to-be wedding gown... but said gown has a thick corset that acts as a protection. She then reacts and helps subdue the attacker.
  • And in the third case... The bride and the groom are murdered. The groom is wearing his white tuxedo when he's found dead. The bride is not in her wedding gown, she has a pink dress on instead.
• In Code Geass, seeing the sweet, naive Princess Euphemia massacring innocents in her frilly dress was a wham.
• In Darker than Black, an Ax-Crazy Mafia Princess wore a white dress to her birthday party, where she intended to have her father and most of his officers killed. Then her "pet Contractor" turned against her, and since his power was blowing a hole in anything he got blood on...
• In GUN×SWORD, the bloodstained wedding dress is all we see from Van's late bride.
• Haou Airen gives us Hakuron, the groom, in a blood-splattered white suit after karma catches up with him and he's shot to death.
• Murder Princess has an archetypal "Disney Princess" dress that gets repeatedly covered in blood, that evokes much the same striking image.

Comic Books

• After Marine Rachel Cole-Alvez has her wedding shot up by members of The Exchange during Greg Rucka's run on The Punisher she's left standing in one of these surrounded by the bodies of her friends and family. She survives, but the trauma drives her to team up with Frank to try and take down The Exchange herself.

Fan Fiction

• Burning Bridges, Building Confidence opens with Marinette having a nightmare about Lila hijacking her wedding, showing up at the church in her own gaudy wedding dress and stabbing Marinette to death. Marinette's 'friends' then proceed to accuse her of faking it for attention, while Lila stands triumphantly splattered with her blood.
• The Enemy's Heart puts Lex Woods in a gore-soaked wedding dress for an Imagine Spot.
  [Scar] was asking her to be, in simpler terms, his wife. That idea should have terrified the E.T., not flashed an image of her walking in a white gown smothered in splatters of blood down an aisle covered with corpses while a barbaric dressed Yautja waited at an altar…neither should such an imaginary ceremony have caused Woods inexcusable excitement.
• I Ain't a Doll, This Ain't a Dollhouse: Days of fighting Dio’s zombies since his transformation during their wedding day has not given time for Johanna Joestar to change out of her wedding dress. By the time Speedwagon arrives with help, her dress is torn and coated in blood stains from both her father and the zombies she was forced to kill.
• Played with in White Devil of the Moon. Miyuki's bridesmaid's gown gets blood on it after youma attack during her brother's wedding (she also uses it to wipe off her sword afterwards). The actual bride's dress did not end up like that (not as severely, anyway), as Shinobu was one of the very few people not participating in the fight.

Films — Animated

• Wreck-It Ralph plays this trope to a T, complete with minigun for Calhoun to extract revenge. (And a preemptively armed audience to prevent a repeat, at her second wedding.)

Films — Live-Action

• American Heist. SWAT police shoots a hostage taker when their pursuit of some criminals leads into a wedding, leading to this trope (the bride was standing behind the criminal, who'd snatched a little girl as a Human Shield).
• The Hong Kong action movie Black Cat (based on the original Nikita movie) has a scene where the titular assassin bursts into a Jewish wedding and shoots the bride in the head.
• It wasn't a wedding dress, but the horrific humiliation of the titular character of Carrie with the pig's blood saturating her prom dress is real close.
• In The Deer Hunter some not-so-subtle foreshadowing occurs during a wedding when a bride accidentally spills red wine on her dress during a drinking ritual. (The ritual was to ensure luck, of course and since this is a movie about the horrors of Vietnam the groom's fate should come as no surprise.) Yeah, it's not exactly blood that spills on the dress per se, but the imagery and the resulting bad luck echo this trope.
• Also Kim's white dress in Edward Scissorhands.
• The Exorcist: Bile-splattered. Throughout the scenes where Regan is fully possessed, she wears a pretty blue nightgown with ruffles and flowers. The subtext could be that Chris dressed her in this to communicate her love.
• Another not-wedding-dress example: Bette Davis' character in the flashback opener of Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. It is however a white dress that she wears to a party, where her boyfriend is violently murdered.
• Kill Bill: Unsurprising, given that the main character is a badass Samurai-swordswoman called "The Bride." (A chapter of the film is even called "The Blood-Spattered Bride," a typical Tarantino filmgeek ref to the Spanish vampire film La Novia Ensangrentada.) The final battle was supposed to involve her fighting in a wedding dress, but due to time constraints, we get the Anticlimax Boss of her using a heart-exploding technique on Bill, without him even getting up.
• Little Shop of Horrors features this, although because at the last second a new ending was tacked on, the blood appears and disappears depending on the shot.
• Cady's Halloween costume in the teen film Mean Girls. The rest of the party react with confusion as she is the only girl who hasn't shown up in a fanservicy Playboy Bunny or Sexy Whatever Outfit. She probably could have qualified if the dress was more revealing and she wasn't also wearing Scary Teeth.
• In Ms. 45, the last man Thana shoots at the Halloween party is dressed as a bride, and he slumps to the ground with blood all over his dress.
• In the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service featuring the first and only time to date where Bond marries, his wife Tracy is gunned down on their wedding night while driving home following the service.
• The teenage purgers in The Purge: Election Year are wearing bloodstained prom dresses when they attack the deli store. One of them makes note that she killed her parents, possibly explaining where its coming from.
• A mild example in Pusher, where one of the characters has a nosebleed from taking too much cocaine.
• In the Hong Kong action movie Queens High Cynthia Khan's wedding is disrupted by a shootout, and she runs around with an Uzi in her blood-stained wedding dress chasing the attackers.
• Grace, the protagonist of Ready or Not, is forced to become an Action Survivor on her wedding night when her in-laws subject her to a hunt of the most dangerous game. Over the span of the film, her lovely white dress is increasingly ripped, torn and splattered with blood and gore. By the finale, it's practically become a uniform, dull red.
• Spanish horror film [REC]³ Genesis is about an outbreak of a demonic virus at a couple's wedding reception, at one point the bride Clara gets her hands on a chainsaw and mows down some monsters leaving her dress covered in blood. This image was used for the films poster as can be seen on its page over at The Other Wiki.
• Another not wedding dress example, Helen Mirren's character in Red (2010) is shot in the gut and bleeds on her white dress (she survives, though).
• In the film version of Reefer Madness: The Musical, Mary Lane appears in a blood-spattered wedding dress when she and Jimmy Harper both sing the reprise of "Romeo And Juliet" after she was killed by a gun during a struggle between Jimmy and Jack the dope dealer.
• Visually invoked in La Reine Margot when King Charles bleeds all over her white gown. Said gown is not Margot's wedding dress, though.
• In Smilin' Through, Moonyean Clare is shot dead at her own wedding. This goes for all three versions of the movie — 1922 with Norma Talmadge, 1932 with Norma Shearer, and 1941 with Jeanette MacDonald. It's also true of the 1919 stage play that the movies were all based on.
• After everything goes to hell at the end of the obscure horror film The Stepfather II, the female main character staggers in a daze down the aisle in a blood-drenched wedding dress.
• In the obscure Anna Nicole Smith thriller To the Limit, a bride and groom are machine-gunned as they're leaving the church following the wedding ceremony.
• In The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, Bella has a nightmare in which Edward eats all the wedding guests. Not only is her wedding dress bloodied, but everyone is wearing white dress clothing (suits, tuxes, dresses, etc.) and covered in blood.
• Wild Tales: Although there isn't a lot of splatter, Romi does end up with blood down the front of her virginal white wedding dress after she flings Lourdes into the full-length mirror in the ballroom.
• In opening sequence of the comedy zombie movie Zombieland.

Literature

• The eponymous character in the book Anna Dressed in Blood died in the dress she was going to wear to an school dance, which, of course, was white.
• Worn by a member of a bloodthirsty war party of Indians in the Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian that they had stripped from one of their previous victims.
• In the last act of Federico Lorca's Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), the bride enters the church where her wedding was to have taken place; her white dress drenched with the blood of both her groom and her true love who have slain each other over her.
• When Ellony marries Valraven in The Chronicles of Magravandias, an old wound reopens and bleeds all over her gown. Played with in that women wear red wedding dresses and Pharinet first thinks the color of the fabric has come off on Ellony's hand.
• In Katherine Kurtz' Deryni prequel series Histories of King Kelson Princess Sidana of Meara, on the point of being married to King Kelson, is stabbed at the altar by her own brother.
• The second Firekeeper book, Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart starts off with a wedding between the new heir to Bright Bay and Hawk Haven, former enemies. Lo and behold, it is interrupted by assassins from the former ruler of Bright Bay not happy with losing her kingdom to a proper leader. The bride takes a massive wound, bleeding all over her dress, while her husband suffers only a very minor wound. Which, you know, is bad, because the weapons were poisoned, and bleeding all over her dress allowed the bride to get the poison out of the blood stream.
• As part of his motif of blood-splattered white things to emphasize how the violence of World War II affects a rural Quebec village, Roch Carrier includes a blood-splattered wedding dress in La Guerre, Yes Sir!.
• In Kingsbane, Rielle's golden wedding dress becomes drenched in blood during her escape from Âme de la Terre.
• It's not Sophia's wedding dress exactly in The Kingdom of Little Wounds, but the nightdress she dies in on her wedding night gets very messy.
• Inverted in Lords and Ladies, in which Magrat's mail-order Queen dress gets reduced to bloodied shreds before the wedding, due to her kicking arse during the elves' invasion of Lancre Castle. She could've changed clothes afterwards, but she and Verence decided not to wait a moment longer and got hitched in what they were wearing at the time. Bonus points for wearing the wedding dress over a suit of armor. The bloodstains are green anyway.
• The eponymous heroine of Lorna Doone is shot at the altar as she is about to marry the man she loves. She survives.
• A variant in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: Vin proposes to, and marries, Elend while bleeding from at least three severe wounds, including one in her left boob.
• The Twilight Saga: In Eclipse, Rosalie Hale's Backstory reveals that after being turned into a vampire, she took revenge on her Jerkass ex-fiancee and his friends after they gang-raped and left her for dead in an alleyway. She wore a wedding dress to do so. In a notable aversion, Rosalie specifically made sure to NOT spill blood because she was a newborn vampire and would not be able to avoid drinking their blood if she did. She didn't want ANY part of them inside her.

Live-Action TV

• Breakout Kings: In "Off the Beaten Path", Erica is captured and dressed in a wedding veil by the escapee after she has freed his original victim. Charlie rescues her by shooting the escapee, splattering Erica and the veil with his blood.
• In the series finale of Daredevil (2015), Wilson Fisk's wedding to Vanessa becomes a Mêlée à Trois between Fisk, Daredevil and Dex (aka Bullseye). Vanessa, who's caught on the sidelines, ends up with a lot of blood splattered across her wedding dress.
• The Season 3 finale of Dexter ends with a drop of Dexter's blood from his injured wrist falling onto the back of Rita's wedding dress as they dance at their wedding. Possibly a foreshadowing of how marrying a serial killer is going to get Rita killed by Trinity at the end of Season 4.
• Doc Martin: Louisa, after a man's carotid artery is cut in the course of her honeymoon from hell.
• In one episode of Flashpoint, a gunman tries to kill Donna Sabine's husband during her wedding. He misses but hits the best man in the leg, and Donna, in her wedding dress, ends up being the one to tend to him.
• In a Season 4 episode of House, a Patient of the Week becomes ill at her wedding. One of the symptoms is a mild version of this.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia — Mac tries to fake his own death by driving his car into a wall and is badly shaken/concussed by the event. Disappointed that the car doesn't blow up, he takes his friend Charlie to go get something to help things along, he finds a wedding dress in a pawn shop which he is completely enamored with. When he and Charlie return to the car, Mac is wearing the dress and bleeding all over it.
• Kamen Rider has done this once in Kamen Rider Kiva. Mio attempts to kill Taiga during their wedding ceremony. However the blood is later shed on her by Bishop. It should be noted this is the only time we see a Fangire bleeding, and even then its blue.
  • Kamen Rider Decade where in her visions Natsumi is always wearing a white dress. It is revealed it the last episode to be a wedding dress. It also crosses with Blood Spattered Innocent as she is forced to watch either Decade kill everyone or Decade get killed. The season finale hints at the latter, though he survived for two new movies to end the series in December
• In Legacies, during the episode "Mombie Dearest", Josette Laughlin is resurrected, wearing the bloodied wedding dress she was wearing when she was killed in Legacies' parent show, The Vampire Diaries.
• An episode of Lie to Me has a bride spattered with blood when her new husband is shot at the reception.
• M*A*S*H — In the episode "Margaret's Marriage," Head Nurse Margaret Houlihan is being married in the MASH's mess tent, when the ceremony is interrupted by incoming wounded, and after the ceremony is sped up, Houlihan, still in her wedding dress, and the rest of the doctors and nurses, still in their dress uniforms, have to rush to operate on the wounded. They all end up with blood on their clothes.
  • In a later episode, Margaret finds herself wearing one during a Dream Sequence.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • In "Ring Out Your Dead", a bride taking pictures on her wedding day is shot from inside the church. Though not a lot of blood is shown in order to keep the age rating, there is a red stain around the entry wound.
  • In "Till Death Do Us Part", the second Victim of the Week is shot with ball bearings while modelling a wedding dress at a bridal show, leading to this trope.
• In One Tree Hill, when Lucas finds Peyton, blood-soaked in her wedding dress, after nearly dying in childbirth.
• In Orphan Black Season 2 Episode 4, Helena appears like this after she is forcibly married to one of the Prolethians. She manages to escape and slashes Daniel's throat in Rachel's apartment to prevent him from harming Sarah further.
• The promotional website for Showtime's series Penny Dreadful displays pictures, poems and items with a "Victorian horror" theme, including a wedding dress on which bloodstains appear if it's clicked.
• In Revenge (2011), the third season In Medias Res opening has Emily in her wedding dress aboard a yacht being shot twice by an unseen assailant and falling overboard. When events catch up to the opening, the bloody dress washes ashore without Emily in it and is discovered by Jack and Aiden, alerting them that something has gone horribly wrong.
• Rizzoli & Isles: "Cuts Like a Knife" opens with a bride staggering into a wedding chapel, her dress soaked with blood from her Slashed Throat.
• Shortland Street: Tess at her and Tom's wedding reception after being stabbed by her stepfather. Also Maeve and Nicole after they're in car accident immediately post-wedding.
• Smallville - Chloe Sullivan in Season 8, Bride and Legion. Becomes a component of strong horror when she is possessed by Brainiac.
• The UK Crime And Investigation Network has a trailer for the show Snapped: Women Who Kill which shows us a bride. The narration asks us what we would do if we were getting our wedding dress fitted when our groom-to-be phoned up telling us the wedding was off. The camera pans back to show that the bride is holding a gun and that her gown is covered in blood.
  • Also, in the episode where she actually got married, she immediately has to go into the OR, and is only wearing a scrub apron over her wedding dress as a bit of protection.
• In the Torchwood episode "A Day In The Death", Maggie, a woman Owen later talks to, was covered in blood following the fatal car crash an hour after her wedding. Also, in "Something Borrowed" Gwen's wedding dress gets splattered with some black alien blood.
• In an episode of Victorious, Jade wears one of these. It's supposed to be a replica of a prop from her favorite horror movie.
• The opening to season 2 of Wolf Like Me features Mary (a Werewolf) having a Catapult Nightmare with one of these, after her unborn baby turns into a Werewolf, tears its way out of her womb (and through her maternity wedding dress), and attacks everyone at her wedding to Gary. The dream ends with dozens dead, Mary in a bloody and torn-up wedding dress, and Emma (her flower-girl dress as blood-soaked as Mary's wedding gown) exasperatedly asking why Mary got pregnant.

Music

• Non-wedding-dress example: about half way through The Birthday Massacre's song Happy Birthday, the speaker's black-and-white dress becomes a black-and-red dress. It should be noted that this is the song that gave TBM their name.
• Kate Bush's "The Wedding List": "God help the bride / She's a widow, all in red / With his red still wet."
• There is an English ballad called "The Rose and the Lily" that invokes this trope. Done by Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson on the album "Gift".
• Alice Cooper's "Roses on White Lace" is a very literal example.
• How to Destroy Angels' video of "The Space In Between" has the dead bride (Mariqueen Maandig) still in her wedding dress after she and her new husband killed each other. The dress itself is gray instead white unlike most wedding dresses, however.
• The covers of My Chemical Romance's sophomore studio album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and live album Life On The Murder Scene (itself a photo recreation of the former album's drawn cover) feature a woman in a blood-splattered wedding dress (though it's much easier to tell she's in a wedding dress on the latter's cover).

Opera

• Jack Beeson's Lizzie Borden has Lizzie trying on her late mother's wedding dress prior to the climactic moment, resulting in this trope in The Reveal.
• An opera based on Lolita ends with Lolita visibly pregnant while wearing a bridal gown with a vaguely hand shaped bloodstain over her vaginal area. It symbolizes her abuse and death in childbirth.
• Older Than Radio: Used in Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Female lead Lucia snaps after her Break the Cutie ordeals, goes insane and kills the guy she's been forced to marry on their wedding night, then comes downstairs from their room in her bloody gown, singing about the guy she truly loves while all the assembled wedding guests stare in horror. The aria she sings is named "Il dulce suono" ("The sweet sound").
  • While it's certainly more effective on stage and with a lot of coloratura soprano singing, let us not forget that Donizetti's opera is based on Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor, which in turn is apparently based on a real-life story passed down in Scott's family.

Professional Wrestling

• Su Yung's Red Baroness is "The Undead Bride," sometimes changed to "The Undead Bloody Bride," and she is a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl who does come to the ring in one of these.

Tabletop Games

• One of the sample characters in the Hunter: The Vigil sourcebook Slasher is the Painted Bride, a woman possessed by the spirit of a murdered bride who manipulates other brides into murdering their groom-to-be. For her, the blood splattered dress look is permanent; if she wears other clothes, the colors turn white after a couple hours, and red streaks begin to appear on her chest after that. Likewise, as a Legend (think Candyman), her means of possession/summoning usually involves the bride getting something red on their white dress.

Theater

• The Bride's wedding dress becomes this by the end of Blood Wedding.
• Mean Girls just like in the original film, Cady wears one of these to the Halloween party and stands out for actually being scary instead of in a Sexy Whatever Outfit / Playboy Bunny style outfit. The theatre version ups the amount of blood on the dress and adds a prop knife sticking into her back so that it's more obvious for anyone in the cheap seats.
• In the 2019 revival of Oklahoma!, the ending was changed to have Curly shoot Jud at point-blank range, leading to his groom outfit and Laurey's wedding dress being covered in blood.
• Magda's white nightgown in Tanz der Vampire.

Video Games

• Aya Brea is found wandering around New York in one in The 3rd Birthday. You don't find out why until the end.
• Bloodborne has Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen. Lore heavily implies that it was she who gave birth to the creature that causes most of the problems later on in the game, Mergo. The Blood Stains are mainly around her stomach area, leaving some very disturbing implications, but when you fight her it gets MUCH bloodier...
• In Clive Barker's Undying, Lizbeth wears one of these.
• As pictured above, during the city elf origin in Dragon Age: Origins the Warden (if female) is kidnapped by the arl's son during her wedding, which results in this as she proceeds to slaughter the entire guard of the castle she was held captive in. While you get better armor almost immediately, nothing stops you from playing through the entire scenario in the wedding dress for some extra badassery. It's really just a bit fancier looking clothing though (unlike the one shown in the concept art), but given that the character is a commoner in a medieval era it is probably closer to reality.
• Subverted in Final Fantasy X, where Yuna wears a very white dress as she attempts to make Seymour un-undead.
• The title character of Guenevere gets slashed during an assassination attempt during her wedding. She isn't afflicted with any lasting damage, but her Fairytale Wedding Dress is.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us has some pretty strange endings, but Harley Quinn's takes the cake.
  The defeat of Superman filled Harley with confidence. She knew what she was capable of, and knew what she wanted. She traveled to the visitors' Earth and freed The Joker from prison. Returning to her world, they married in a ceremony that set Gotham ablaze. At the reception, the cake cutting ceremony took a gruesome turn. As her new husband playfully mashed her face into the cake, years of abuse took its toll. Something in Harley snapped. She used the ceremonial knife to slash Joker's throat. Still in her wedding gown, Harley now resides permanently in Arkham Asylum.
• The Left 4 Dead 2 DLC The Passing features a Witch in a wedding dress. Playing the wedding music startles her, and startling her provokes a Horde attack.
  • There's an achievement for playing the song, designed to trick players into that trap.
• Perhaps not quite the same, but in SaGa Frontier, Emilia spends the last scenes of her quest (including the boss fight and following violent scenes) in the wedding dress she never got to wear after her fiancee was murdered. Of course, if it ends happily, her dress is put to correct use and is completely clean. The official artwork of her in her dress and veil, holding a large gun, makes for a striking juxtaposition.
• Snow White in SINoALICE is often depicted wearing clothes resembling wedding dresses, with a bloody smear located somewhere on the otherwise pristine, immaculate clothes. This is relevant to her backstory, as the Evil Queen attacked her at her wedding, prompting the Prince to take the attack and Snow White to kill the Queen, staining her dress with their blood.
• Male example: as a consequence of the events of the "Wedding" story mission in Sleeping Dogs (2012), Wei Shen gets a blood-covered white tuxedo.
  • The mission itself involves the Sun On Yee getting attacked by rival gang 18k during Wei Shen's boss Winston's wedding day. The shootout ends with Winston cradling his dead wife who was fatally shot in her bloody wedding dress, before he succumbs to his own wounds. Cue Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• In Tekken 7, Nina Williams returns as the Fatal Bride clad in a torn, bloodied wedding dress.
• Time and Eternity has this happen to Toki/Towa at the start of the game, during the Widowed at the Wedding scenario that kick-starts the plot. It happens again during their second attempt at the wedding, but this time the blood is Toki's own.
• The backstory of the character Bloody Mary from the game Twisted Metal Black tells how she finally snapped at a friend's wedding, tired of always being the bridesmaid and never the bride. She stabbed the bride to death and stole the bloodstained dress to wear herself.
• Xenogears.
  • Especially unique is that you can get that dress as equipment if you don't attack Dan in the martial arts tournament

Webcomics

• #Killstagram: Near the end of the second season, Sarang's deceased lover, Back from the Dead, puts her in a wedding dress and razor-wires her to a coffin, intending for her to die with him. Her struggles cause her to bleed on the dress, and the dress continues to get bloodier as the Deadly Game reaches its climax.
• A blood-spattered bride is not actually seen, but in this strip we see that Penny Arcade's Tycho and Gabe are well aware of the power of this trope.
• While it's not a lot of blood, Oasis still qualifies in this Sluggy Freelance strip.

Web Originals

• This set of photos on Wedinator submitted by the lady pictured, she decided to wreck her wedding dress this way to celebrate the finalisation of her divorce. It appears to be cow blood.

Real Life

• Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg (better known as Ena) was the youngest granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She married King Alfonso (the last King of Spain before Juan Carlos) in Madrid in 1906. During their carriage procession, an anarchist's bomb exploded, killing many of their entourage. A guardsman riding alongside the bride was decapitated, drenching both Ena and her dress in his blood. None of the usual post-wedding photos were made; the press printed sketches instead. It became Harsher in Hindsight: Ena passed haemophilia ^note a disease that can make people bleed longer than normal, bruise more easily, and be more vulnerable to internal bleeding into the Spanish Royal Family — as with the Romanovs the heir to the throne was afflicted, the monarchy was eventually deposed in 1931, and a bloody civil war ensued.
• During the worst periods of the pogroms in Imperial Russia, it was not uncommon for anti-Semites to seek out new brides specifically as targets for their violence as a symbolic gesture (since the brides would eventually bear the next generation of Jewish children). Since custom in the brides' communities dictated that the dead be buried in whatever they were wearing when they died, several of these young women were laid to rest in their bloodied wedding gowns. (This, incidentally, was the origin behind the folk tale that inspired Corpse Bride.)
• Jacqueline Kennedy, First Lady to President John F. Kennedy, was well known as The Fashionista, and on November 22, 1963 she wore a pink Chanel suit while riding through Dallas with her husband. When JFK was murdered that day, the image of her in that pink suit stained with her husband's blood became one of the most enduring images of the assassination. Her suit is now in the National Archives.
• Angelina Jolie decided she wanted one of these when she married Jonny Lee Miller, so she wrote the groom's name on the white shirt she wore to her wedding, in her own blood.
• Gladys Ricart was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend while getting ready for her wedding.
• Sahda Bibi, a Pakistani woman, was stabbed to death while she was preparing for her wedding. Her murder was believed to be an Honor Killing: Bibi was marrying her true love, rather than going through with the Arranged Marriage her family wanted.
• The sad case of Estrella Carrera, who was found stabbed to death shortly after her wedding, still wearing her wedding dress.

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