Death by Cameo

Top: Quentin Tarantino behind the camera.
Bottom: Quentin Tarantino in front of it.

Jhonen Vasquez: You wanted to see me, Mr. Nevers?

Mr. Nevers: I'm going to rape you up the butt and then throw you out the window!

— I Feel Sick

A version of The Cameo (usually a joke) where someone on the production crew (often the director, creator, etc.) appears briefly to just die like all the other Innocent Bystanders.

See also Dead Star Walking, Celebrity Casualty, and Creator Cameo.

As a Death Trope, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead! Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Yoshiyuki Tomino appears briefly on the Solo Ship's bridge during the second Space Runaway Ideon movie. Briefly.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and its sequel Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, OP and insert song singer Takanori "T.M. Revolution! Nishikawa gets two different ZAFT cameos: Miguel and Heine. Both characters are subsequently killed off rather quickly: Miguel dies in the attack that opens the SEED series, Heine lasts around three chapters before being killed in battle. A rather insistent rumor among fans says that Nishikawa's fellow OP singer Nami Tamaki was offered the role of Action Girl Shiho Hahnenfuss, but rejected it because she feared Shiho would end up playing this trope straight.
• Director Shinichiro Watanabe shows up in Cowboy Bebop just long enough to be shot.
• When Kagato escapes from prison in Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki, he kills a Galaxy Police officer that looks like Mr Spock.
• There's a crashed Starship Enterprise on Sonic's island in Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie.

Art

• Michelangelo Buonarroti did this twice in his Sistine Chapel artworks:
  • On the ceiling, he appears as the severed head of Holofernes in a panel depicting the biblical story of Judith.
  • Art historians speculate that the flayed skin of St Bartholomew in "The Last Judgment" is also a self-portrait of Michelangelo. Rumor has it that Michelangelo actually really hated painting, and only painted the Sistine Chapel at the compulsion of the Pope.

Comic Books

• Deadpool dragged Christopher Priest (comics)' corpse into Limbo in Priest's final issue, having apparently murdered him off-panel for "disfiguring him" (making him look like Tom Cruise). All the characters present complain about it at first, but eventually are fine with it.
• In Filler Bunny, GIR from Invader Zim, also created by Jhonen Vasquez, is found dead in a pile of corpses in the third issue.
  • Jhonen himself dies in the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac spinoff I Feel Sick. In his brief Creator Cameo, his boss rapes him and then throws him out a skyscraper window. Jhonen was upset over the Executive Meddling with Invader Zim when he wrote that.
• The Sensational She-Hulk #50 opens with She-Hulk's editor Renee informing her that the series' writer, John Byrne, has died. Shulkie later finds Byrne Bound and Gagged in a closet... only to kill him by tossing him out a window (you had to be there).
• Hulk: Future Imperfect has an urn labeled "Peter David" among the ashes of the fallen superheroes.
• In X-Force (Vol. 3) #18, a headstone marked "Kyle Yost" (the surnames of the book's writers) can be seen in the graveyard Caliban visits.
• Miles Teller, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell show up in The Punisher #12, where they're killed in an explosion as a Take That! to Fantastic Four (2015).
• In Uncanny X-Men volume 1 Annual #12, in a back-up story, the entire creative team appears as the anonymous members of Mojo's "brain trust," including an irate Chris Claremont. He yells at Mojo, who reacts by shrinking his head. (This does not seem to surprise or disturb any of the other creators, including a bored Ann Nocenti.)
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen;
  • Peter Rabbit gets torn apart by foxes in the corner of a Volume II panel.
  • Mr. Toad is later seen preserved in a jar of formaldehyde at the secret annex.
  • Bill and Ben's skeletons can be seen in Greyfriars.
  • Rupert Bear's stuffed corpse is seen aboard the Nautilus in Volume IV alongside a dead Pathetic Shark from Viz preserved in a tank.
• Issue #75 of DC Comics' Looney Tunes comics shows the head of Buster Bunny in Elmer Fudd's trophy collection.
• Cy-Kill from Challenge Of The Go Bots tends to make cameos in various IDW Transformers comics and get killed pretty quickly.
• Bart Simpson gets eaten by the Rigellan Hyper-Kraken in the Doctor Who Magazine story, Space Invaders!.
• Suicide Squad: In the tie-in for War of the Gods, the Grant Morrison self-insert from Animal Man came back, explaining that writing themselves into continuity made it so other writers could write them, too (in this case, John Ostrander). The Writer (as the character is referred to In-Universe) was sent into battle with a new Suicide Squad strike team to help take down Circe, but was killed due to ending up with writer's block right before being attacked by a monster. Did Morrison and Ostrander have some bad blood, or something?
• When Nuclear Man from Superman IV: The Quest for Peace finally got to become a Canon Immigrant in Superman (Brian Michael Bendis), he quickly gets killed by Rogol Zaar.
• The Carnival Night Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 had a spinning wheel that a lot of fans couldn't work out how to pass, calling it the "Barrel Of Doom". As a nod to the fans' hatred of it, E-123 Omega blows one up while passing through the Zone in issue #67 of Sonic Universe.

Fan Works

• Linkara cameos as one of Namek's village elders at the beginning of the sixteenth episode of Dragon Ball Z Abridged... moments before Vegeta slaughters everyone in said village.
• Each level in the Project Arrhythmia level series The Peer Gyntening features a "savior" character who shows up to save the player but is quickly killed afterwards. The level geer pint puts Ophelia from the Heartstrings series in this role.

Films — Animation

• Ralph Bakshi's films with the exceptions of The Lord of the Rings, Fire and Ice (1983), American Pop, and Cool World, in which Bakshi himself makes a cameo only to get killed:
  • Fritz the Cat: he plays a pig cop who gets beaten to death by the crowd of crows.
  • Heavy Traffic: he plays a pimp who gets his brains bashed in with a tire iron
  • Coonskin: he plays a cop who gets shot in the face.
  • Wizards: he plays two characters; one is a fat guy named Lardbutt whose fate is unknown but his other character Fritz gets accidentally shot by an ally twice, the second one being fatal.
  • Hey Good Lookin': he plays a man who gets killed by gangsters.
• A scene of A Bug's Life has a mosquito hitting a zapper - voiced by director John Lasseter (while co-director Andrew Stanton is his friend who tries to convince him otherwise).
• Happens a few times in the Disney Animated Canon:
  • The deer featured in the opening of Beauty and the Beast is Bambi's mum, just before she is shot. This is a case of animation being reused. Since one of the heads featured on Gaston's wall strongly resembles Bambi's mum, it is implied that Gaston was the killer. A similar-looking deer made a brief cameo toward the end of The Jungle Book (1967), where she is instead stalked by Shere Khan, that film's Big Bad.
  • In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney), one can clearly see Pumbaa being roasted in the background of a scene.
  • In Hercules, when Hercules is posing for a painter, he is wearing Scar's hide.
  • Four times, as a director cameo: Those guys in Mulan lighting the fireworks were the movie's directors (Barry Cook & Tony Bancroft). They jump off and presumably fall to their deaths after seeing Mushu.
• In Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, Producer Bruce Timm makes an uncredited appearance as the Lantern Galius Zed, who gets killed off pretty quickly.
• In the Western bar of The LEGO Movie, heads of characters from Fabuland can be seen on the wall.
• In the beginning of The Simpsons Movie, the members of Green Day are killed when their floating stage tips over into the very-polluted lake.
• When General Plymkin can't get his computer to work in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, he immediately has Microsoft creator, Bill Gates brought in and shoots him.
• The barracuda who killed Nemo's mother and unborn siblings in Finding Nemo was hunted, stuffed, and mounted on a wall in the antique shop in Toy Story 4.
• A Volkswagen Beetle can be seen lying at the bottom of the sea in Finding Dory. This is a nod to the fact that one of the cars that played Herbie in Herbie Goes Bananas fell into the sea and was never retrieved.

Films — Live-Action

• Transformers (2007) has Megatron casually flicking (a CGI approximation of) Michael Bay, saying "Disgusting."
  • There was actually going to be a much longer scene with Megatron personally plucking Michael out of a car for no reason other than to be a bastard and to have Michael in the movie. The cast and crew spent almost an entire day tormenting Michael by doing this scene over and over again. Hilariously, after Michael spent a day hanging on to a car, the scene ended up being cut from the movie due to time constraints.
• Director Martin Campbell appears as the tanker truck driver murdered at Miami airport in Casino Royale (2006). He also appeared in GoldenEye as a motorcyclist who gets run over by Xenia Onatopp, and in that same movie Pierce Brosnan's stunt double Wayne Michaels (who performed the bungee jump at the beginning) appears as a helicopter pilot who gets blown away with a machine gun by Xenia Onatopp.
• Exaggerated in City Hunter starring Jackie Chan as the titular character. The City Hunter's partner, Hideyuki Makimura (played by Michael Wong who has been acting since the 1980s) dies in the super-abridged backstory after two seconds of screentime.
• Volker Engel, who was head of the FX unit on Independence Day, had a three-second cameo as an office worker getting blown away. Bonus points for being killed by your own special effect...
• Two of the writers of X-Men (one of them being David Hayter) show up as cops who are taken out in a sneak attack by Sabretooth and the Toad.
• In the 1999 film Idle Hands, The Offspring make a cameo - and lead singer Dexter Holland is killed when Anton's possessed hand rips his scalp off.
• Peter Jackson appears in all three The Lord of the Rings movies. As a drunk in Bree eating a carrot, as a spear thrower at Helm's Deep and as the corsair who gets shot by Legolas (when Gimli hits his bow - extended edition only). Besides these cameos, he's also the 'star' of several inserts - he's Faramir's hand when pointing at the map and Sam's hand when holding the sword standing up to Shelob.
  • In fact, all the corsairs seen are members of the production making cameos, and though it's off-screen, all are killed by the Army of the Dead, making this scene quite full of this trope.
• In The Lost World: Jurassic Park had screenwriter David Koepp get chased and eaten by a T-Rex. He's actually listed in the credits as "Unlucky Bastard".
• Frank Miller appeared in the Sin City film as the preacher who gets shot to death by Marv. He also appears as the man who is killed by Bullseye using a pen (to steal his motorcycle) in Daredevil (2003) and the detective who gets decapitated near the beginning of The Spirit.
  • And in RoboCop 2, for which he co-wrote the screenplay, where he plays a lab tech named Frank who gets blown up. Miller even said in an interview "I think I needed a trademark. So in every movie I'm involved, one thing is sure: I'll be decapitated, stabbed, shot, or any other unpleasant thing".
• Russell Mulcahy, director of Highlander, has a split-second cameo as a man who the Kurgan runs over with a car.
• Christopher Paolini wanted to play a Red Shirt who is beheaded in battle at the end of Eragon, but his busy schedule prevented him from doing it. He's said that, in the event that any more films are made of his books, he'd like to make cameos in all of them where he dies horribly.
• Special effects artist Tom Savini frequently dies in his works, including but not limited to Day of the Dead (1985), Maniac! (1980), and From Dusk Till Dawn.
  • He survives slightly longer than usual in Planet Terror after having one of his fingers bitten off.
• Some Star Wars crew members have such cameos. Sound designer Ben Burtt is punched by Chewbacca in Return of the Jedi (and tries to emulate the Wilhelm Scream while being Blown Across the Room), VFX supervisor Rob Knoll is a pilot whose ship is blown in The Phantom Menace and George Lucas' son Jett is the Jedi who attacks the troopers talking to Bail Organa in Revenge of the Sith.
  • Not especially visible in the movie, but one of the Jedi whom Anakin/Darth Vader kills on the security hologram in Revenge of the Sith is a cameo of stunt coordinator Nick Gillard. It might almost be a double cameo, in fact: this being Star Wars, he was playing an actual character with a name and history, Cin Drallig, the Order's "battlemaster" (the guy who trains all the up-and-coming Jedi in the basics of combat). Drallig even gets a proper boss battle in the Revenge Of The Sith tie-in game.
  • In a cross with Dead Star Walking, Lor San Tekka, Max von Sydow's character, is killed by Kylo Ren just a few minutes after he gives Poe Dameron the MacGuffin at the start of The Force Awakens.
  • Also in The Force Awakens the corpse of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial can be seen roasting over a fire in Maz Kanata's castle.
• Star Trek movies:
  • Not a person but the real life space probe Pioneer 10 appears briefly in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier before getting blown up by a Klingon Bird-Of-Prey.
  • R2-D2 from Star Wars appears floating in the wreckage of the Kelvin in Star Trek.
  • R2-D2 again and a few crew members get sucked into space in Star Trek Into Darkness when the Vengeance attacks the Enterprise. Given that he's a robot, he might have survived both of these.
• In Scary Movie 3, Simon Cowell appears in a cameo at a rap club harshly criticizing the gangstas rapping, only to get shot to death by the furious gangstas.
• In Platoon, director Oliver Stone appears as a soldier who gets blown away by a bomb in a bunker.
• Quentin Tarantino is often the victim of this:
  • In Grindhouse, he plays a minor baddie in Robert Rodriguez's half of the movie. And he gets shot... down there. With a grenade launcher.
  • As Mr. Brown in Reservoir Dogs, he's around just long enough to get fatally shot during the team's robbery. While not a Mook or Innocent Bystander, his appearance is still minimal enough to count as a cameo.
  • In Kill Bill, he plays one of the Crazy 88 and ends up being the first one to get sliced up by the Bride.
  • Sort of, kind of happens in Inglourious Basterds too; at the least his death is implied. He was the first one scalped on-screen.
    • Also, Enzo G. Castellari, director of the namesake film "The Inglorious Bastards", cameoed as a German general who died in the theater explosion.
  • While not a cameo so much as a major character, Tarantino still manages to die in From Dusk Till Dawn. He can't even get a break in movies he didn't direct (though he did script it). Tarantino's character is executed even more quickly in Desperado, another movie directed by Robert Rodriguez (and this time Tarantino didn't even write the screenplay).
  • He appears in Django Unchained as a slave transporter who's shot and promptly explodes due to the dynamite he was carrying.
• Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shows up in Reno 911!: Miami as a badass S.W.A.T. officer, and is accidentally blown up in the same scene he's introduced in.
• Bruce Willis appears in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle as a government agent protecting one of two rings that forms a top-secret government list. As he gets on his private jet, he is almost immediately held up by a masked assailant who takes the ring from him, and then shoots him point blank in the head (off-screen). We later find out that his assailant is an ex-Angel played by Demi Moore, who is Willis' ex-wife. Subtle revenge, perhaps?
• Kurt Wimmer does this in both Equilibrium and Ultraviolet (2006).
• In Piranha (1978) special effects artist and creature sculptor Phil Tippett appears as a diver who is devoured by the swam of piranha.
• The remake Piranha 3D features a handful of cameos. Several porn actresses make appearances, but most notably Eli Roth has a role as a wet T-shirt contest host. Naturally, they all meet gruesome piranha-related demises.
• Ryan Reynolds shows up in A Million Ways to Die in the West as a bar patron who has no lines and gets shot by Liam Neeson.
• In Grindhouse, stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who appears in Death Proof in a major role, has a quick appearance in Planet Terror as a zombie who gets blown away by Wray with a shotgun.
• Forever Evil (1987) has the unintentional variety, where writer Freeman Williams shows up, only to die thanks to a mutant Jawa. This is actually the demo reel, which was added to the story during principal photography. It's easily distinguished from the rest of the movie (and the original cut puts it at the beginning) due to the fact that none of the movie's main characters appear.
• Arguably the best part of the film Zombieland is Bill Murray's brief cameo as himself... that ends with him shot dead because his zombie disguise is too convincing. (to make up for his death, he reappears in the sequel fighting the first infectees of the Zombie Apocalypse)
• Former Coen brothers collaborator Sam Raimi has a cameo in their film Miller's Crossing. He appears as the cop wielding two revolvers who shoots a man trying to surrender to the police, and is subsequently riddled with Tommy-gun fire.
  • Sam's brother Ted often gets Cameos, sometimes deadly, in several of both Sam's and the Coen Brothers' films.
• In The Terminator:
  • The T-800's first victim was played by Bill Paxton, who later starred alongside Kyle Reese's actor, Michael Biehn, in fellow James Cameron-directed film Aliens.
  • Writer William Wisher plays a cop who announces his location and is promptly killed by the T-800.
• In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the janitor who gets between the Robert Patrick's T-1000 and Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 in one of the maintenance hallways of the mall and is riddled with bullets was played by a fan who won the "role" in an MTV-sponsored contest.
• Ted Turner appeared in Gettysburg, which he produced, as a Confederate officer, Colonel Waller T. Patton, who was fatally wounded during Pickett's infamous assault on Cemetery Ridge. Differs from other examples in that, given the context, it is an entirely straight-faced, respectful and even reverent depiction.
• Turned on its head in Spaceballs; during the duel between Lord Helmet and Lone Starr, Helmet accidentally kills one of the film's camera operators.
  • Additionally, John Hurt briefly appears near the end reprising his role from Alien, and winds up dying in the exact same way.
• Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go's appears as The Singing Telegram Girl in Clue, she gets about 10 seconds of screen time before she's shot dead by the killer.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno appears in Welcome To The Quiet Room as a physician who slips and ends up smashing his head open on the floor. He doesn't actually die, but is injured severely enough that he bleeds out and has to be replaced by another doctor.
• Jackie Chan in Enter the Dragon was a stunt coordinator for the film before he became famous; he appears in two scenes in his second appearance where he has a short fight with Bruce Lee before his neck is snapped.
• Professional skate boarder Rob Dyrdek has a cameo as a rapist in Righteous Kill before he's shot dead by Rooster.
• In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Kevin McCarthy (who starred in the original) appears as a crazy man who shouts, "They're coming!" as the main characters drive by, and is then promptly run over by another car.
• John Landis, writer and director of An American Werewolf in London, appears as a pedestrian who is hurled through a plate-glass window by a crashing car.
• Terry Crews shows up as a dead body in Terminator Salvation. This is actually an unintentional example of this trope, as he was originally going to have a larger role, but almost all of his scenes ended up being cut from the film.
• In Starship Troopers, scriptwriter Edward Neumeier briefly appears as a murderer who is arrested in the morning, tried that day, found guilty and sentenced to to be executed that evening. Swift justice indeed.
• In the original Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) John Carpenter himself cameos as one of the gang members climbing through the windows of the station where he gets shot by Napoleon.
• Hard Target's writer and co-producer Chuck Pfarrer appears as the homeless veteran who gets shot through with arrows in the film's opening action sequence.
• Ron Jeremy dies in almost every non-pornographic film he's in (i.e., Killing Zoe).
• Kung Fu Jungle stars Donnie Yen in a lead role, and Louis Fan, Donnie's long-time collaborator (who appeared in major roles in the Ip Man Film Series) as a fellow kung-fu practitioner brutally killed by the Big Bad. Donnie comes across his dead body much later in the film. At least Fan's character puts up quite a fight before expiring.
• Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise in 21 Jump Street.
• Jon Bon Jovi get shot off a horse in Young Guns II (to which he contributed the Oscar nominated song "Blaze of Glory").
• Rick Baker (the head make-up designer for the remake's wolfman and noted special effects guru for films like An American Werewolf in London) plays one of the first victims in The Wolfman (2010).
• In The Hurt Locker, the fate of Guy Pearce (Sergeant Thompson) and Ralph Fiennes.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) director James Gunn plays a maskless Sakaaran who taunts Yondu, then gets stabbed by his arrow.
• Captain America: Civil War co-director Joe Russo is the psychiatrist that Zemo kills and impersonates.
• In The Runestone, David Newman plays one of the cops who faces off against the monster in a hallway. We don't see his fate (unlike the other cops with him), but given we see Marla begging for the shooting to stop and it suddenly stops... well.
• George R. R. Martin is one of the victims in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!. To push the reference to his Anyone Can Die works further, he's right next to a bride.
• In the B-Movie Sharktopus Vs Pteracuda, Conan O'Brien is killed by Sharktopus.
• More of a case of undeath by cameo in Shaun of the Dead, of the zombies outside The Winchester we see both Bill Bailey and later Tyres (the drugged-up courier from Spaced) is among the zombies that Shaun leads away from the Winchester.
• The climax of Deadpool is set on a crashed helicarrier similar to what S.H.I.E.L.D. use in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
• Brad Pitt shows up in Deadpool 2 as Vanisher, a member of X-Force. His entire screentime consists of a single shot where Vanisher dies after accidentally parachuting into some power lines.
• In The Nice Guys, the body of porn producer Sid Shattuck has been said to be Robert Downey Jr..
• In Se7en, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker plays the corpse in the introduction.
• Justin Bieber appears at the beginning of Zoolander 2 just to be killed off.
• Fernando Tielve and Íñigo Garcés reprise their roles as adult soldier versions of Carlos and Jaime from The Devils Back Bone who both get shot in Pan's Labyrinth.
• A crashed red Volkswagen Beetle appears near the end of The Shining which was the car that Jack Torrance drove in the book (changed to yellow in the movie). This is generally thought to be a dig at Stephen King who argued with director Stanley Kubrick over changes he kept making adapting King's book.
• In Nope, two of the eventual casualties during the Star Lasso Experience massacre were played by the owner of the defunct Fry's Electronics chain (whose branding is used in the film), Randy Fry, and his wife, TV anchor Vicki Liviakis; they're the spectators next to the Icee machine.
• Taylor Swift appears in two scenes at the beginning of Amsterdam (2022) before being struck and killed by an oncoming car about 10 minutes in.
• Bullet Train has director David Leitch as the luckless civilian killed by the twins' exploding car in their killing spree flashback.
• Smile (2022): Caitlin Stasey is the first shown victim, and is only in a single scene before her character slits her own throat, though she does appear as the hallucinations which Rose has of the Smile Entity in her form later.
• Adult versions of the protagonists Hank, Eric, Diana, Presto, Sheila and Bobby from the Dungeonsand Dragons cartoon cameo as contestants in the Highsun Games in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. We don't find out but since this is a deadly shrinking maze filled with monsters, they likely didn't survive.

Literature

• Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead from the Land of Oz appear on sale in a junk shop in Out of Oz. Tik-Tok is damaged beyond repair and Jack's head has rotted away due to mice nesting in his brain.
• In The Purple Cloud, nearly all human and animal life is wiped out by the titular Fog of Doom, with protagonist Adam seemingly the Sole Survivor. At one point Adam finds the corpse of the author's friend Arthur Machen, who was trying to complete his last poem when the purple cloud reached him. Adam thinks about how noble it was for Machen to keep writing even though no one except God would read his work.

Live-Action TV

• Michael Keaton appears as the senior 30 Rock custodian in their hundredth episode. For extra danger, he's also one day from retirement and carrying around a photo of his fiancée.
• A running gag on Big Time In Hollywood Fl, where simply put: the more famous the guest star the less time they last.
• Danny Trejo is decapitated and has a bomb planted inside of his skull by cartel members, after appearing on one or two scenes of an episode of Breaking Bad.
• Burn Notice did this in the fourth season premiere, with Michael Ironside. He was on the show for all of two minutes before an unmanned drone fills him with bullets. The potential for a Sam Fisher/Michael Westen crossover sadly been missed.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019):
  • Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) from Batman (1989), Dick Grayson (Burt Ward) from Batman (1966), and Helena Kyle (Ashley Scott) from Birds of Prey (2002) ^note plus an uncredited voice appearance from Dina Meyer as Barbara Gordon, also from Birds of Prey all appear in live-action for the first time in decades, only to be obliterated by the antimatter wave.
  • An elderly Bruce Wayne (Kevin Conroy) dies in Hour Two. This was Conroy's first live-action appearance as Batman, after almost three decades of voicing the character.
  • At the end of Hour Three, the entire multiverse is destroyed, which means that all other cameos ^{Long List}Alura Zor-El (Erica Durance) from Supergirl (2015), Ray Terrill (Russell Tovey) from Freedom Fighters: The Ray, Clark Kent (Tom Welling) and Lois Lane (Durance) from Smallville, Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) from Black Lightning (2018), Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis) from Lucifer (2016), two Barry Allens (John Wesley Shipp's from The Flash (1990) and Ezra Miller's from the DC Extended Universe) and an alternate-universe Jonah Hex (Jonathan Schaech) from Legends of Tomorrow also qualify for this trope.
• Delocated:
  • Paul Rudd appears as himself in the pilot episode, and ends up being shot dead by the Russian assassin chasing after the protagonist.
  • John Hodgman shows up in the Season 3 finale, and like Rudd, is accidentally killed by the Russian mobsters chasing Jon.
• Doctor Who: In "Voyage of the Damned", composer Murray Gold and orchestrator Ben Foster appear in a band playing on a starliner called the Titanic. While their fates were off-screen, it seems unlikely that they survived, especially when the Heavenly Host droids slice up most every survivor of the meteor shower with their metal halos.
• Firefly: Making a special appearance as the interviewer in the web-only production of R. Tam Sessions, Joss Whedon is killed by a crazed River.
• Kelly Long is a member of the Game of Thrones art department and plays Joyeuse Frey, Lord Walder Frey's latest wife, and dies in place of book character Aegon Frey with her throat slit by Catelyn.
• The Grand Tour: The "Celebrity Brain Crash" segment in every episode is supposedly a time where a celebrity comes on to play a trivia game... but none of the celebrities ever make it. They all suffer some sort of freak accident when they're within view of the tent.
  James May: ...Does that mean (s)he's not coming on, then?
• In the Key & Peele sketch "Suburban Zombies", Kevin Sorbo shows up as a badass, gun-toting action hero...who proceeds to get killed and eaten in a spectacular aversion of the Black Dude Dies First trope.
• Not a member of the crew, but close: Greg Grunberg has appeared in most works helmed by his childhood friend J.J. Abrams. When Executive Veto nixed the death of Jack in the pilot episode of Lost, Grunberg was cast for one scene just to get killed by the monster.
• Also not a crew member, but every episode's special guest star on Police Squad! would only be in one scene, the opening titles. The announcer would voiceover, "Tonight's special guest star - (guest star's name here)!" during the title sequence, and the special guest star would then be killed (often in a hilarious, over-the-top manner). For completeness' sake, the list is Episode 1: Lorne Greene (stabbed and thrown from moving automobile), Episode 2: Georg Stanford Brown (police officer crushed by safe), Episode 3: Robert Goulet (shot by firing squad), Episode 4: William Shatner (restaurant patron, survives machine gun attack only to die via poisoned glass of wine), Episode 5: Florence Henderson (cooking show host, gunned down by machine gun on the set), Episode 6: William Conrad (stabbed and thrown from moving automobile, bookending the fate of Episode 1's special guest star Lorne Greene).^note Conrad's scene was filmed as a last-minute replacement for a scene featuring John Belushi at the bottom of a river with his feet encased in cement after Belushi died of a drug overdose before the episode's air date; the footage of his "death" is believed lost.
• The Red Dwarf episode, "Psirens" has Starbug enter a Derelict Graveyard full of crashed spaceships that are recycled props from other TV shows and movies. There's the Narcissus from Alien, a Klingon Vor'cha class attack cruiser from Star Trek: The Next Generation and an Eagle from Space: 1999.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): The episode "A World of His Own" is about an author who can create anything with his magic dictaphone. If the resulting dictation tape is destroyed, so is the created object. Rod Serling appears at the end and says something to the effect of "We hope you enjoyed this little fairy tale full of nonsense." When he does this, the main character says "Now, Rod, I wouldn't use the word nonsense." He then takes an envelope out of a safe — the envelope is labeled "Rod Serling" He tosses the envelope into the fire and Rod Serling says "That's the way it goes" before disappearing in a puff of smoke.
• Tom Hanks (who also directed the episode) appears briefly in as a dating service manager in the fourth season premiere of Tales from the Crypt, "None But the Lonely Heart''. He lasts two short scenes before he gets his head shoved through a television screen by the episode's Villain Protagonist.
• The last event in the Grand Finale of Two and a Half Men—right after Charlie had a piano fall on him—was when the audience's view expanded to include Chuck Lorre himself. And then a piano fell on him, just as it did to Charlie. The idea was apparently to show that just as the show showed disrespect to Charlie by turning him into a threatening stalker, so it's also going to kill off the director himself in the same way as what just happened to Charlie.

Video Games

• EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance: Lucky Lamp Project artist Needle Sandman cameos as a bonus item in Stage 2. When found, he will begin dancing across the screen. The only way to interact with him is to perform a Final Crash attack on him, destroying him to receive a single 1 point bonus gem.
• In the fifth chapter of Half-Life: Opposing Force there are two scientists lying dead near their desks, which carry the nametags "S. Reardon" and "S. Jones", referencing Gearbox Software developers Sean Reardon and Steven Jones.
• As always, subverted by The Simpsons. Specifically, The Simpsons Game. The family fails in their mission to kill and/or subdue Matt Groening.
• Mortal Kombat's Ed Boon and John Tobias tend to appear as severed heads in the spike-pit levels. And then several Midway employees have their names written on the tombstones in the Graveyard stage.
• Batman: Arkham Knight opens with a cutscene where a lot of people die in a diner, all of whom are modeled after Rocksteady's staff.
• Doom II:
  • The Big Bad of the game, the Icon of Sin, is actually a giant wall with a shoot-through brain texture. Behind the brain texture is a small passage leading to a chamber containing the skewered head of John Romero, one of the game's programmers and level designers. John Romero's head is the actual boss entity in the game, and the Icon of Sin is killed by firing rockets into the brain, which will travel down the passage and explode above Romero's head. John Romero actually found out about this while testing the final level and recorded a soundbite for the boss that was a backwards-masked recording of him saying, "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero."
  • In the add-on level pack Requiem, the 24th level, "Procrustes Chambers," features a Space Marine crucified on an inverted cross, with a sign reading "ADEL" nailed to the top. The designer of the level, and the artist of that texture, was Anthony Czerwonka, also known as "Adelusion."
• In the fanmade RPG DRL, John Carmack is a secret boss at the end of the game, accessible by nuking the Spider Mastermind while invulnerable.
• Tanner, the protagonist of Driver appears working undercover as a chauffeur and gets killed in the "Two-Faced Tanner" mission in Grand Theft Auto III. In retaliation DRIV3R had the player track down and kill 10 Hawaiian shirted men called Timmy Vermicelli, parodies of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Tommy Vercetti.
• Buddy Faith, the first corpse in Ace Attorney Investigations, was modeled after game director Takeshi Yamazaki. Mr. Yamazaki was allegedly so disturbed seeing himself as a corpse that he requested a slight redesign.
• Dead Space
  • The development staff of appear on the Ishimura's list of casualties.
  • Invoked by the Dead Space 2 promotion that produced its Contest Winner Cameo, literally called "Get Dismembered in Dead Space 2". The winner, Dan Emmerson, is the poor guy who tries to enter the elevator only to be impaled by a Slasher during Chapter 2.
• In Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge, the developers appear as the lost souls in the second level.
• Variant: The arcade version of Altered Beast (1988) features a large tombstone you can destroy, which according to the inscription belongs to former SEGA mascot Alex Kidd.
• Variant: a mission of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 features the EA headquarters in Los Angeles - which the player can demolish at will.
• Jitsu Squad contains a cameo of Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins in the background of Castle Hellstorm... as an armoured skeleton. He may be all bones, but he can be recognized via his helmet and lance. An animated skeleton of Simon Belmont shows up in the same stage.
• The Scribblenauts games include avatars of several of the games developers, all of whom you can kill.
• Monstrous versions of Banjo-Kazooie appear as mounted heads in Grabbed by the Ghoulies.
• In Conker's Bad Fur Day and its remake, Live and Reloaded, Banjo's head is mounted on a wall in the bar, and Kazooie's head is stuck on the end of an umbrella.
• Alice: Madness Returns has an Easter Egg where the skeletal remains of Raz can be found.
• The player can invoke this in PAYDAY: The Heist during the first mission at the First World Bank. The bank manager, who is modeled after one of the developers, has the key needed to progress, and you can either cuff him or shoot him to take it. Of course, if you do shoot him, you'll have to wait longer to respawn if you are taken into custody.
• Organ Trail, the player can invoke this by naming one of their survivors Ryan, after the game's creator Ryan Wiemeyer and shooting him, the instant they have the chance. Of course, the only reward for that is an achievement.
• One of the potential anomalies you can encounter in Stellaris is a mummified alien child in a lifepod that was launched from a dying homeworld. Its genetic makeup reveals it would have been a very strong specimen should it have matured, essentially a dead baby Superman.
• In Terranigma, you can visit the Developer's Room in the form of Quintet's offices in Neotokio. Later in the plot, the city is wiped out by a Depopulation Bomb.
• If you choose to get back on the train at the start of The Town with No Name, Joey from Shane shows up begging you to come back. The protagonist shoots him and says his name isn't Shane.
• Warhead was the main antagonist of original Vectorman game, being a high-level Orbot gone rogue when a working nuclear missile was attached to his programming by a lesser Orbot. Warhead was destroyed by Vectorman at the end of the game, and in Vectorman 2, his disembodied head can be seen buried in the background of Level 9.
• Xena: Warrior Princess, being developed by Electronic Arts and produced by Universal Studios, have the shark from Universal's Jaws showing up on a beach as a strung-up carcass, killed by pirates prior to the level. Repeatedly hitting the shark’s carcass will make it spit out beach volleyballs, broken pieces of surfboards, and an anchor.

Web Animation

• Everything Is Broken: Rhianna's Author Avatar gets murdered by Flippy in part 12.
• The Happy Tree Friends team animated a music video for Fall Out Boy's "Carpal Tunnel of Love" featuring the Happy Tree Friends characters. Fairly late in the video the four band members appear in Happy Tree Friends form, and just like those characters they all meet a gruesome over-the-top death.
• Michael Bay appears in Sonic for Hire only to get harpooned by Eggman.
• Many characters in Vinesauce's The Blue Shell Incident appear only to die, including Santa Claus, Sans, Piglet, and the M&Ms.

Webcomics

• Homestuck. When Andrew Hussie ran a Kickstarter to raise funds for an adventure game adaptation, the reward for a $10,000 donation was "Your fantroll will become canon.". The reward for a $100,000 donation was "Your fantroll will survive past the first panel." These reward tiers were originally intended as jokes, but two people actually donated $10,000. True to his word, Hussie prominently featured both characters, then killed them in the very next panel.

Web Videos

• Freshy Kanal: Freshy Kanal himself appear briefly in "Ghostface vs. Samara Morgan" where Ghostface phones him about the matchup before hanging him.

Western Animation

• Maxwell Atoms shows up in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy getting his best idea ever right before the hourglass that controls his existence is dropped and Billy assures Irwin that it was no one important.
  • In "Little Rock of Horror" one of the random victims to get his brain sucked by the alien creature is a cartoon version of Voltaire, who wrote (and sings) the alien's song.
• In the Christmas Episode of Invader Zim, writer and storyboard artist Ian Graham makes a cameo as a man who is crushed by the debris from Zim and Dib's robot battle.
  • As well, Jhonen Vasquez swallows a piranha in The Wettening. That other guy who is a higher up later gets crushed by a wave buying a hot dog. The more you know! (Said higher-up is the episode's director, Steve Ressel.)
  • Frank Conniff, who wrote for the show (but is more famously known as TV's Frank), is crushed by the giant mutant hamster's foot in "Hamstergeddon".
• The season finale of Total Drama had a "new intern" appear (well actually two: one in Canada and one for America) who was the winner of the online game. The intern tested the final stunt, only to fall into the lake and get eaten by the waiting sharks.
• It happens in The Fairly OddParents! movie Abra-Catastrophe, although it requires a little bit of Fridge Logic. During his battle with Evil Overlord Crocker, Timmy and Crocker himself get shrunken down to subatomic levels. The audience is given an Establishing Shot zooming in on the pencil erasure of a rather frustrated looking series creator Butch Hartman. Fast forward a few minutes and Timmy splits an atom, resulting in a nuclear explosion, as expected. Timmy and Crocker survive via different forms of magic, but Butch and his studio are nowhere to be seen.
• In Courage the Cowardly Dog, series creator John Dilworth's name appears on the list of people who checked into the Katz Motel. By the end of the episode, Katz made it clear that every guest before the Bagges was killed.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "The Otto Show", Spın̈al Tap's tour bus crashes in a fiery explosion thanks to Otto's reckless driving.
  • Shirley Temple appears briefly before getting eaten by King Homer in "Treehouse Of Horror III".
  • "Marge Vs The Monorail" has Simpsons crew members Rich Moore, Wes Archer, and David Silverman falling to their deaths riding the escalator to nowhere.
  • The Flying Nun cameos in "Brother From The Same Planet". The wind carries her over a hill where an explosion can then be seen.
  • The frogs from the '90s Budweiser commercials cameo in "The Springfield Files" but get immediately eaten by an alligator who mentions the rival beer, Coors.
  • Mario appears on a bus full of Italian tourists laughing at Homer in "Homer And Ned's Hail Mary Pass". Homer kills him by throwing trash cans at him, complete with the death animation from the original Donkey Kong.
  • "Treehouse Of Horror XX" had a segment parodying Alfred Hitchcock movies. While Lisa is trying to murder Bart, they accidentally push a man resembling Hitchcock off a cliff, an homage to his cameos in his movies.
  • Corpses of The Simpsons appearing crudely drawn as they originally did in The Tracey Ullman Show appear buried in both "Treehouse of Horror XXIV" and "Adventures In Baby-Getting", a Godzilla skeleton appears beside them in the former. Weirdly this forshadows a segment in "Treehouse Of Horror XXV" parodying The Others, where The Simpsons have to share their house with the ghost of their Tracey Ullman counterparts.
• The Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "The Siege of Starro" has Gleek appear as a stuffed trophy of the Faceless Hunter.
• After TUGS, the short-lived sister series of Thomas & Friends ended, the models that were used on TUGS were recycled and made various cameo appearances on Thomas. A particularly grim example is in the episode, "Edward, Trevor, and the Really Useful Party", where the model of Puffa appears in pieces in the scrapyard.
• Pinky and the Brain: In-Universe example in the episode "You’ll Never Eat Food Pellets In This Town Again" where Pinky and Brain are Animated Actors who have their show canceled and Brain's agent Nifty Bizarre gets them in cameo appearances in other shows. In "Star Trak: Deep Voyage 12" Pinky and Brain appear on screen as aliens for a whole second before being blasted by a laser and in "NYDP Blues" they appear as dead bodies at a crime scene.
  Nifty Bizarre: Blue sky it for me, what do you wanna play next?
  Brain: Something other then a corpse?

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