Giving a whole new meaning to 'head shot'.
Sometimes, Desecrating the Dead or leaving them on display just isn't enough. Sometimes, you want to add injury to the insult. Strap a Booby Trap to a corpse, wait for people to investigate, and you get two for the price of one.
This trope covers whenever someone uses a dead body as a Booby Trap. Preying on their enemy's care for their fallen friends, or at least their curiosity, leaving a bomb with a corpse is a particularly insidious lure. For this reason (and the desecration), it tends to be used by Combat Pragmatists or dog-kicking villains who don't mind using a dead body as bait. Compare Why Am I Ticking? (strapping a bomb to a live, unwilling person), Action Bomb (strapping a bomb to a live, willing person), and Dead Man's Switch (a bomb that will go off if a person is killed). Might also be a posthumous Taking You with Me.
For obvious reasons, this is a war crime under Article 6 of 1980 Protocol II
of the Geneva Convention, which also covers booby-trapping sick or wounded persons.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In the Gunsmith Cats OVA, Roy finds a grenade beneath a dead body. He manages to re-pin it, only for his coworker to set off another trap.
- Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Diamond Is Unbreakable: Yoshikage Kira pulls a pre-mortem example with Okuyasu. Okuyasu has been grievously injured and Kira turns his unconscious body into a bomb that will kill the first person to touch him. Josuke must choose between healing Okuyasu to save his life and exploding, or letting Okuyasu die to avoid the trap and continue fighting.
Comic Books
- In one of Garth Ennis' WWII comics, a soldier on the European front deliberately fails to check a vehicle for booby traps after he (and the rest of the squad) consider they went over the Moral Event Horizon. The survivors know it was deliberate because he always checked.
- Sara: The Soviet soldiers are trained to leave unpinned grenades on bodies to ensure a Taking You with Me when the German soldiers check. Sara herself uses it after she's mortally wounded.
- Sin City: Dwight agrees to surrender Jackie Boy's head to Manute and his men in exchange for Gail. As soon as the gangsters have the head they prepare to kill Dwight, only for him to reveal that he put a bomb in Jackie Boy's head. At that moment, the other Old Town prostitutes show up and kill the gangsters.
Films — Live-Action
- Last Action Hero: In a variation, Vivaldi and Benedict rig a nerve gas bomb inside of a dead mobster's body (who they murdered), so this will go off at his funeral, killing the rest of his mafia family.
- Attempted in the movie No Man's Land. When a Bosnian squad gets lost and discovers they stumbled into Serbian territory, they are gunned down with Ciki being able to find shelter in an abandoned trench. When two Serbian soldiers climb into the trench, the more experienced NCO tells Nino, a fresh recruit, that a trick he likes to "play" on the Bosnians is to place a landmine under a body so that if the territory switches hands, the enemy will get blown up when they try to recover their dead. Ciki ambushes them, killing the officer and wounding Nino, and discovers that the booby-trapped corpse was just an unconscious Bosnian.
- In Predators, after Cuchillo bites it, the Predators then uses his corpse together with a voice-disguising device replaying Cuchillo's voice — in which he repeatedly says, "Help me..." — as bait to lure the other humans out. Isabella decides to give Cuchillo a Mercy Kill from a distance via sniper, only for Cuchillo to continue calling for help, leading to the others realizing his corpse is being used as bait. Also towards the end of the film, after Royce had subdued and captured Edwin, Royce decide to turn the Predator's tactics back on themselves by booby-trapping the semi-unconscious Edwin with a dozen grenades.
- In Red Dawn, Toni leaves a bomb under her own corpse when she's dying, killing the next Russian to move her.
- Royal Warriors: Near the end of the film, the last surviving villain, Bandana, decide to taunt Michelle out of hiding by digging out the freshly-buried corpse of Michelle's friend / deceased Love Interest, Michael, coffin and all, and taunt Michelle to retrieve it while hiding C4 in the coffin's lid. But Michelle had other ideas, and pulled a Godzilla Threshold by using an armored, bulletproof police vehicle and plowing it into Bandana's hideout.
Literature
- Fate/Apocrypha: Shishigou Kairi is a mercenary who uses necromancy; and by that he means turning body parts of corpses into weapons, like using finger digits for bullets or hearts as grenades. They also come with additional magecraft effects - the hearts for example release Deadly Gas after they explode.
- The necromantic specialty of the Fourth House in The Locked Tomb is using rapid thanergetic fission to turn corpses into bombs. They're also willing to blow themselves up if they feel it's necessary.
- Pale: Goblins are known to trap dead bodies specifically turning the body into a bomb, mess with the gastric juices, plug it and when it explodes the endoskeleton makes for useful shrapnel. Given that the Kennet Goblins are trying to restrict themselves, in story, they usually use small animals and similar. Think toads but blown up comically like a balloon but with all the bone-cracking changes that that involves, when released the smell is so rancid people even a hundred feet away start heaving.
Live-Action TV
- Bones had a body that had a cell phone triggered bomb embedded inside. Four police officers died and Aubrey was critically wounded jumping on top of Hodgins. Hodgins initially seemed fairly lucky but ultimately was left paralyzed. The perps were a group of young men who just wanted notoriety. We never learn their names save one as Caroline says she’s not giving them what they wanted.
- Thr Breaking Bad episode "Negro y Azul" has the cartel sending a message to Hank by strapping the severed head of his informant to a tortoise. Hank is so disgusted that he goes to the car to try and calm down, which saves his life when one of the other cops moves the head and sets off the bomb hidden in it.
- In The Promise, Zionist militias are so well known for booby-trapping corpses that the British army automatically search for them whenever they see a hanged soldier. Even with this preparation, one still gets a commanding officer.
- In the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Battle at the Binary Stars", Captain Georgiou knows that the Klingons are picking up their dead from the battlefield, so she attaches an armed photon torpedo to one of the corpses. In a case of Laser-Guided Karma, her own corpse was desecrated by the Klingons, although out of necessity rather than revenge.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed Origins: It's possible to contaminate corpses with a toxin that will rapidly drain the health from any enemy who gets near it. If they're killed by the poison, their corpse will also become contaminated. As soldiers will automatically run over to a dead body to inspect it, this can lead to a chain reaction that kills most of an enemy fort as soldier after soldier run over to inspect the ever-growing pile of corpses.
- BioShock 2: With the fully upgraded Insect Swarm plasmid, any enemy your bees kill will become a trap, exploding into yet more bees when another enemy walks past.
- BioShock Infinite: If Booker has the Murder of Crows vigor, he can create Crow Traps that attack enemies who touch them. If he also has the Crows Trap Aid, the bodies of enemies killed by Murder of Crows become Crow Traps.
- Call of Duty: World at War: During the beginning of "Little Resistance", US Marines ahead of Sgt. Roebuck's squad discover a crashed Corsair fighter-bomber, with its dead pilot still inside. Roebuck immediately orders these Marines to investigate the crashed plane, when they soon discover to their horror that the Japanese had rigged the American pilot's body with grenades, killing at least two of the Marines near the plane.
- Cursed Treasure II: One of the upgrades for each of your towers allows them to convert the corpses of slain heroes into hazards - a poison cloud if the kill was made by an orc den, an explosive mine if by a demonic temple, and a lightning trap if by an undead crypt.
- Dawn Of War: The Dark Eldar Haemonculus can learn the ability to detonate nearby corpses to deal damage and knockback to nearby units.
- Diablo II: One of the spells the Necromancer can learn is Corpse Explosion, where a targeted corpse can be made to explode and damage nearby enemies.
- Fallout: New Vegas:
- Caesar's Legion sometimes hide land mines near or beneath the bodies of those they kill, as a nasty surprise for anyone trying to loot or move the corpse.
- Also mentioned by a former NCR Ranger in the town of Novac. The Legion used a child to trick the rangers into lowering their defenses when looking for Legion slavers in a burned up house, only for the kid to drop a live grenade at Andy's feet before retreating into a closet. This caused enough damage to force Andy into retiring to Novac.
- The Accursed faction in Minion Masters has the Corpse Explosion spell, that detonates specific remains called Undying Corpses on the battlefield when played.
- In Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara can booby trap dead enemies with poison clouds. The sequel game does the same but with grenades.
- Slay the Spire, like Diablo and Minion Masters above, has a Corpse Explosion skill for the Silent, which applies Poison to an enemy and makes it apply damage equal to its max HP to all other enemies when it dies. It's widely considered one of the strongest AOE cards in the entire game, being able to make multi-boss fights like Donu and Deca much easier.
- Sniper Elite 4 has an option to booby trap the bodies of fallen enemies. The achievement is even called "Dirty Tactics".
- Star Wars: The Old Republic:
- An Imperial sidequest on Balmorra has an Imperial Intelligence officer task the player with planting booby-trapped comlinks on enemy corpses to terrorize La Résistance as well as civilians scavenging the bodies. The PC can choose instead to plant booby-trapped hand grenades, which a resistance fighter would be interested in but a civilian theoretically wouldn't. Unusually, choosing to plant the hand grenades results in a What the Hell, Hero? moment from the Intelligence officer, who wanted civilians to get caught up with booby-trapped comlinks so they'd learn to just stop risking their lives scavenging dead soldiers. Planting the grenades instead causes more civilian casualties due to them trying to scavenge them in the hopes of reselling them to either the resistance or the Empire.
- One of the Imperial Balmorra exploration quests has the PC tasked to plant poisoned human cadaver parts among local Colicoid hives after the Insectoid Aliens develop a taste for human flesh. Either the Colicoids all die off, or they come to associate eating humans with getting sick and dying; in either case it makes life safer for the Balmorrans and Imperial forces.
- A variation in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: It's not a corpse exactly that's rigged to blow up, but its sarcophagus. In fact, the body was removed to make room for more explosives.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Some time after the fourth trial, the students discover the body of an unknown individual wrapped in a cloak with a mask over their head in the botanical garden. When they try to investigate it, the body is revealed to have been rigged to explode if the mask is taken off, leaving it an indistinguishable pile of smoldering remains.
Web Comics
- Unsounded: The nation of Alderode reportedly reaggravated its Forever War with its neighbour Cresce by executing a Crescian surveying team and, when the Queen protested, delivering their heads to the palace, stuffed with explosives.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: The episode "The D'oh-cial Network" has Bart playing an online war game in the school computer lab with several other boys, secretly planting a bomb in a pile of corpses so that Kearney will get a face full of ass shrapnel when he goes to loot their ammo.
Kearney: [after an explosion happens on his computer] Damn! I got ass-shrapped!
