Hazing is not a pleasant business. Whether carried out by Sinister Sorority Sisters, the Fiendish Fraternity, the Brotherhood of Funny Hats, or the Girl Posse, hazing is at best humiliating, and at worst physically dangerous. This is when it goes too far and results in death. Expect this usually to be making a point about how Popular Is Evil, the Toxic Friend Influence, or how Peer Pressure Makes You Evil. It's particularly common in cases of the Gang Initiation Fight.
Sometimes, the hazing will be deliberately fatal due to Bystander Syndrome or the Token Evil Teammate. However, most likely, it will be an Accidental Murder. Exaggerated examples may involve the hazing turning deadly due to Bullying a Dragon. Often a result of Gone Horribly Wrong. Occasionally the hazing may be deadly by design. In this case, it usually overlaps with If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!, Deadly Graduation, and/or A Real Man Is a Killer.
Sadly, this is Truth in Television during initiation rituals, especially when they involve alcohol or other dangerous stunts. However, as it's sadly still common and a morality trope, no real-life examples, please!
A sister trope to the Deadly Prank and Prank Gone Too Far. If the hazing involves pulling a prank, it may overlap, but it's not necessary.
Examples:
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Film — Live-Action
- A Few Good Men centers around a legal case involving two Marines on trial for the death of one of their teammates. It’s eventually uncovered that the case was not murder, as the troopers had been ordered to haze a recruit, but unbeknownst to them their teammate had a heart condition and as a result died from the stress.
- Full Metal Jacket: Private Pyle is being broken down by the Trope Codifier for Drill Sergeant Nasty, but the tipping point is when his fellow trainees, after being collectively punished for his screwups, throw him a midnight "blanket party" (as in, they restrain him in his bed with a blanket and beat him with bars of soap wrapped in towels). This doesn't kill him, but it breaks his sanity and he eventually kills Sgt. Hartman and then himself.
- The Hazing: The pledges break into Professor Kapps' house to steal a book of ancient magic in an initiation rite. They discover him sacrificing Jill, and he turns out to be a Satanic, body-snatching Serial Killer who manages to kill several of them before the night is out.
- Hell Night: The fraternity pledges have to last a night in a spooky house where a Pater Familicide apparently occurred years previously. A killer — actually, two killers — is stalking the grounds and kills everyone but Marti.
- Kill List: The ending reveals that the entire "kill list" was actually an Initiation Ceremony for Jay and the pagan cult that's been stalking him. As a hitman, he easily dispatches the list members but then has to Duel to the Death with "the hunchback", who is revealed to be his kidnapped wife and son, Shel and Sammy. Upon killing them, he's crowned by the cult...though it's not answered as to what or who he is to them.
- Killer Party: The sorority hazing is that they have to spend the night in a house haunted by a bloodthirsty ghost/demon. Both Jennifer and, later, Phoebe, become possessed due to the hazing, with Jennifer killing several people and the movie implying that Phoebe killed Viva on the way to the hospital.
- Midsommar: Christian seems to be being initiated in the Hårga when they subject him to numerous druggings and finally being sexually assaulted by Maja, to whom he had previously shown some attraction. It turns out that Dani, not Christian was the person being inducted, and as a result of the initiations (i.e. that she saw him having sex with Maja), she chooses him to be the final sacrifice on Midsommar.
- Ring of Terror: Lewis has a heart attack while trying to steal a corpse (and after encountering a screeching cat) in his initiation into the Fiendish Fraternity.
- Scarecrow Slayer: Dave and Kai have to steal a scarecrow as part of a fraternity initiation. Dave gets shot by a farmer, and his mortal body dies but his soul transfers into the scarecrow.
Literature
- Tour of the Merrimack: Book 5, The Ninth Circle, kicks off with a cohort of Palantinian recruits initiating a newbie by having him jump off a cliff. The trick is that a net will deploy to catch him halfway down, but the sensor that's supposed to trigger it was blocked by a pebble. Predictably, the poor kid lands on the rocks at near-terminal velocity. The cohort runs and tries to cover it up, rather than trying to get help/fess up. They're drummed out of not just the army, but society at large, because Palentine takes No One Gets Left Behind very seriously. This leads to the disgraced cohort stealing a starship and becoming Space Pirates. The dead recruit returns at the end as a Patterner, a Cyborg built (or, rather, rebuilt) to perform complex math very quickly for combat reasons, and takes them on as his command staff. It's implied that the device was deliberately sabotaged to provide a corpse to make a new Patterner out of, which can only be made from a soldier's body.
Live-Action TV
- Bonanza: In the episode "The Initiation", there's a hazing ritual where the recruits have to have ice poured on their chests. Sonny has a heart attack when the ice touches him, and everyone believes the pledgers to be responsible. It turns out that Sonny actually had a congenital heart defect.
- Bull: "A Business of Favors" revolves around the death by drowning of a fraternity pledge.
- CSI: After apparently failing to enter the fraternity, in "Pledging Mr Johnson", a pledge chokes to death on a strip of raw liver that he was asked to ingest as a last-shot hazing attempt. However, it's revealed that this was actually a front by the fraternity leader, who found out his girlfriend had signed the pledge's penis. The pledge choked on it when the string the leader tied to it to yank it back out broke.
- The CSI: NY episode "Some Buried Bones" features a young pledge to a university secret society found dead in a Hedge Maze with an Absinthe spoon imbedded in his neck. Subverted in that the exit-beating the group gave him when he wanted out is determined not to be the cause of death.
- Ghosts (US): Trevor ended up without his pants when he died because of his efforts to avert this. He gave them to Pinkas, a young recruit at his Wall Street firm, when the others tried to make Pinkas run through the freezing night without his clothes, and Trevor realized he'd likely die of hypothermia. Trevor also OD'd on that same night of excess.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
- Played with and zigzagged in "Brotherhood". Will is raped during his Fiendish Fraternity initiation, which results in him killing his rapist at a later date and in a separate incident. He also tries to kill himself over the trauma of being sexually assaulted, but survives.
- Subverted in "Great Expectations". A thirteen-year-old boy dies from an infected injury caused by a sexual assault in the locker room. At first, the team believes it's a hazing, but ultimately find out it was "just" a violent attack.
- Midsomer Murders: "Death's Shadow" reveals that a young boy named Felix's suicide 30 years prior was the result of this: The gang of local youths had him put a noose around his neck and stand on a chair blindfolded and with his hands tied, then went for a smoke. The chair fell over and Felix was dead by the time they came back, so they made it look like suicide, the lack of explanation causing Felix's unwed mother to kill herself. In the present, one of the boys responsible learns he has cancer and goes to confess what he'd done, wanting to clear his conscience before he dies... to the local vicar, who it turns out was Felix's father. A Roaring Rampage of Revenge ensues.
- Psych: In "Scary Sherry, Bianca's Toast", Doreen accidentally falls to her death and is killed during a sorority hazing. Her adopted sister and best friend Alice starts killing the sorority sisters as a result.
- Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye: Subverted in "Fraternity". A senator's son dies in the middle of initiation. Initially, the senator and the FBI think that the victim died after being pressured into drinking too much as part of the induction. However, the victim actually died of exposure to peanut oil put on his cup by one of the other college boys. The alcohol consumption delayed people's realization that something was wrong, but the Initiation Ceremony had nothing to do with the death.
