Reunion Revenge

During a Class Reunion, someone who was picked on, teased or outright abused during their high-school years takes their revenge on their (many) erstwhile tormentors, one at a time, and usually fatally. The main character(s) may be mistaken for members of the offending group (or may have been unwitting accomplices), but more often are uninvolved bystanders until the first death. Naturally, the rest of the reunion is spent figuring out who the culprit (and/or who their next victim) is.

A version of The Nasty Party. Often takes the form of Ten Little Murder Victims.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Many cases in Case Closed have these, usually involving one of the main casts with their old friends/colleagues/family members.
• Karakurizoushi Ayatsuri Sakon had one of these involving a school's puppetry club. It's actually the victim's older brother who's the murderer, though it's set up to make the bullies think it's the victim's ghost that's doing it.

Comic Books

• In a Donald Duck comic book story, Donald plans to settle some scores with some bullies at a class reunion by training to beat them up. However, Daisy Duck, disgusted at this puerile behaviour, talks him out of it. It turns out that was a good thing considering that Donald learns to his consternation that his former bullies still tower over him and he would have been way over his head starting a fight.
• In Empowered, most of the superheroes are outright jackasses who often pick on the D-listers. So it should come as no surprise that one of them finally snapped at a superhero get-together. There's also a "Not So Different" Remark moment with the title character, who's one of the most pitiful, picked-on superheroes imaginable. Who proceeds to save all of her jackass co-workers.

Films — Live-Action

• In Bloody Reunion, former elementary school classmates and their teacher meet sixteen years later at her countryside cottage for a class reunion. The happy gathering turns into a nightmare as old grudges and hidden truths surface and one by one friends vanish in a series of grisly murders.
• Class Reunion Massacre: Six people are trapped within the confines of their old high school during their 10th high-school reunion with a psychotic, masked preacher who kills them off for their sinful lives they have made for themselves.
• The slasher film Don't Go to the Reunion, an homage to the below mentioned Slaughter High.
• Most Likely to Die: A group of former classmates gather for a pre-party at one of their homes the night before their ten-year high-school reunion, and one by one, they are brutally slain in a manner befitting each's senior yearbook superlative.
• National Lampoon's Class Reunion (1982) built an entire movie around this trope and played it for laughs.
• Romy and Michele's High School Reunion: Two dim-witted, inseparable friends hit the road for their ten-year high-school reunion and concoct an elaborate lie about their lives in order to impress their classmates.
• Rose of Death: On prom night ten years ago, a group of drunken friends go too far when trying to scare a couple of their fellow classmates. After accidentally killing one of them, they decide they have to kill the other one in order to cover up the crime and protect themselves and their futures. Now, ten years later, as they start coming together for their high-school reunion, each member of the group is being picked off one by one by a ghostly killer as some sort of revenge from beyond the grave.
• In Sisters of Death, a group of former college students who belonged to a sorority called 'The Society of Sisters' are sent invitations to a reunion, including money for travel expense. When they arrive, they find themselves on the estate of a man called Clyburn, whose daughter Liz died in an Initiation Ceremony gone wrong. He accuses the group of murder and wants the guilty party to confess. And then the murders start...
• The entire plot of slasher flick Slaughter High, where a nerd named Marty Rantzen tries to get revenge on former classmates and bullies who accidentally and horribly disfigured him through a series of escalating pranks. It ends with it being revealed that everything was just a revenge fantasy of Marty's— he's actually locked up in a mental institution, having never recovered from his trauma.
• A variant in Wild Tales, where a failed composer arranges for all people who, in his eyes, contributed to his failed career to be on the airplane that he pilots and which he then proceeds to fly into the home of his parents, turning the scenario into a Murder-Suicide.

Literature

• In The Demon Princes final volume, The Book of Dreams, supercriminal Howard Alan Treesong pays an amusing (for him) visit to his high-school reunion.
• The plot of The Diamond Brothers book I Know What You Did Last Wednesday is a group of old classmates being invited to a reunion on a remote island being murdered one by one. A parody in that their only crime was coming first in school subjects where the killer came second.
• The Romance Novel Endless Enchantment had this as the plot. A 10-year class reunion takes place on a cruise ship. The heroine was a reluctant member of a Girl Posse lead by a vicious Alpha Bitch in high school. Increasingly dangerous pranks are played on each member of the group until the Alpha Bitch is killed. Turns out that a classmate whose Harvard-bound cousin, the main target of the mean girls, commmitted suicide after being date raped by the Alpha Bitch's twin brother at a graduation party is the one who wanted revenge and her pranks mimicked the same things that the girls did to her in high school.
• Mrs. Murphy Mysteries: Book #8 (Pawing Through the Past), by Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown. When each member of the Crozet High Class of 1980 receives an anonymous note stating, "You'll never get old," most take it as a joke or a compliment. But when the class womanizer turns up with a bullet between his eyes, and more notes — and more bodies — start appearing, Harry and her menagerie find themselves at the center of a revenge plot 20 years in the making.
• The villain of the Mary Higgins Clark novel Nighttime Is My Time is seeking this on the girls who bullied or rejected him in high school. At the beginning of the book, he's already killed five of them. He attends the reunion to kill the final two and also intends to kill one woman's daughter.

• A non-school version in Petals on the Wind. Cathy shows up at the Christmas party hosted by her mother, intending to reveal to all attending what kind of person she is.
• Jon Stewart (the same one from The Daily Show) once wrote a short story involving a man who creates an Artificial Human specifically to take revenge on the rest of his class at his high-school reunion. On arriving at the reunion, however, the man discovers that almost the entire class had the same idea; aside from a small group of terrified people in formalwear, the reunion has degenerated in a fight to the death between those seeking revenge. He gives up and goes home, monster in tow.
• Unsound Variations from George R. R. Martin has one of these, though it's not a full high-school reunion, the man simply invited three of his sort of friends from high school. Also, instead of being an opportunity for revenge it's the culmination of it. He reveals to them that he invented a device capable of Mental Time Travel and how he used his knowledge of the future to ruin their lives. His plan to crush them completely like this backfires to about the furthest possible extent. Instead of despairing they gain new hope, since they now know for a fact that they would have been very successful had not a crazy time traveler devoted at least two lifetimes to wrecking their careers. On realizing this he uses the machine again, which means bad news for an alternate reality them, but at least means he's no longer a danger in their current reality.

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock features Liz Lemon going to her high-school reunion wanting to get back on the Alpha Bitch and other people who bullied her. However, it turns out that everyone at her school felt that she was the bully. While she saw herself as a mousy nerd who coped by being a Deadpan Snarker, everyone else saw her as a bitch who continually insulted them whenever they confronted her about something or, in the case of the "alpha bitch," legitimately tried to befriend her just so she'd stop hurling vicious insults at them.
• Charmed once had the Charmed Ones go to their high-school reunion where Phoebe was ostracized and mocked for being promiscuous during high school.
• The killer in the Cold Case episode "Stand Up and Holler" gets arrested during the high school reunion.
• The Criminal Minds episode "Painless" features an anniversary memorial of a school shooting/bombing (not technically a school reunion, but it functions the same way). Survivors of the initial attack are killed one by one. At first, the team suspects a partner of the school shooter (who committed suicide during the first attack) is trying to finish his work, but it turns out it's another of the survivors. He was ostracized throughout high school and wanted the fifteen minutes of fame that came to some of his classmates. He wants revenge on them for stealing his spotlight.
• An episode of CSI: Miami had a football star (and former Jerk Jock) killed by someone who he had cocooned in duct tape and left in a locker, the resulting injuries ruining his life.
• Inverted in the Designing Women episode "They Shoot Fat Women, Don't They?", where Delta Burke's ex-beauty queen Suzanne Sugarbaker is mocked at her high-school reunion for being fat. The episode is also a Very Special Episode touching on the topics of weight prejudice and world hunger.
• The high school reunion in The Drew Carey Show provides two. The biggest was Oswald finding himself stripped and bound to a bed by "Porky" Parker, an overweight girl at the time who he had a fling with but then denied all knowledge of - and who was now slim, attractive, and out to humiliate him. A low-key example landed on Kate, who made explicit her desire to find someone with money when talking to the other members of Oswald's barbershop quartet. Their response in song:
  You never talked to us in high school
  Why should we give a damn now?
  Bitch.
• In Frasier, Frasier Crane is absolutely delighted to be able to squire the old alpha cheerleader and then way-out-of-his-league Lois to his nigh-school reunion ball. But being Frasier, he messes it up.
• On Haven, Duke and Nathan's high-school reunion comes up and one of their former classmate's Trouble is to turn people young again, and then kill them.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has a Class Reunion two-parter episode. Dee mingles with the old popular clique. She says she's infiltrating their group to get revenge on them, when it's clear she's just happy to be popular for once. So the rest of the gang try to get revenge without her. The clique later kicks her out for sleeping with Rickety Cricket which she didn't do. Then the whole gang get their revenge together and fail at it twice.
• Lois had a class reunion on Lois & Clark in which a classmate who was picked on takes her revenge on the popular people.
• Leverage features one mark who asks what the point of all his success is if he can't rub it in the faces of everyone who bullied him in high school. Unfortunately, his means to that success include assisting murderous dictators, and he ends up being dragged out of the reunion by the cops screaming "I'm better than all of you!"
• A non-fatal, Played for Laughs version takes place in the Married... with Children episode "Blond And Blonder". Kelly and her group of friends, with Kelly's younger brother Bud in tow, attend the five-year high-school reunion that's hosted for students in Kelly's year. There they encounter a former high-school nerd who's now a handsome millionaire, who eventually teams up with Bud to exact revenge on the girls who had wronged the guys back in high school.
  • A similar version of this when Peggy and Al go to their own reunion and find that the nerds who they once bullied are now filthy rich with gorgeous women hanging all over them and tauntingly declaring "Should have done your own homework, guys!"
• An episode of Martin had Martin go to his ten-year reunion by showing up his former classmates, especially his popular rival "Pretty Ricky" Fontaine. After the latter insults Gina's looks (which were affected by an allergic reaction and painful trip to the dentist) and continues to mock her after refusing to apologize, Martin promptly punches him out.
• Subverted in The Mentalist when it's revealed that the killer was not the guy who was a victim of a high-school prank. The popular girl convinced the Victim of the Week, who was her accomplice to the prank and had a crush on her, to take the blame, which got him expelled and ruined his college chances. When the now grown man tried to blackmail her so he could get the money to help his wife, she killed the couple so the scandal wouldn't ruin her career.
• Murderville: The third episode sees a Tech Bro murdered at Terry's high-school reunion, and the three suspects are all high-school classmates who had motive to kill him.
• In the Only Fools and Horses episode "The Class of '62", Roy Slater, hated by Del and his friends at school, and even more so as an adult for being a Dirty Cop, arranges the reunion himself, to enact a very specific revenge on Del Boy: holding the fact he's Raquel's ex over his head.
• One episode of NCIS subverts this, as it opens with a high school reunion, and features one former nerd, who joined the Special Forces after high school, taking down a man who previously bullied him. The subversion comes from the later reveal that they actually became friends in adulthood, and the whole act was something they pre-planned. (The ex-bully's subsequent death, the main case of the episode, was not.)
• The Sean Cullen Christmas Special had, throughout the evening, an old schoolmate trying to kill Sean for taking the last place in the orienteering club. But then it turned out that Sean had never joined the club, and the other guy had spent his whole life chasing the wrong man.
• Smallville: The Season 10 episode "Homecoming" sees the return of Greg Arkin, one of the antagonists from Season 1. Clark at first believes he's come with this trope in mind, but when he sees him talking to Lois, it turns out Greg has pulled a Heel–Face Turn and wants to thank Clark for setting him straight.
• In an episode of the sitcom Taxi, Louie lets Bobby the actor impersonate him at his high-school reunion, playing a handsome "full-sized" version of him and getting (non-violent) revenge on all the class's Beautiful People. "Yeah, I shot up in college. It was written up in all the medical journals."

Music Videos

• The music video of Bowling for Soup's "High School Never Ends" consists of various people pranking younger versions of the band's members during their school days, and how the band got even with them during their reunion.

Tabletop Games

• Exalted:
  • Horrible, horrible version: one of the Deathlords, Eye And Seven Despairs, was Driven to Suicide during his life as an Exalt by the rest of his Circle. He's since developed a twisted obsession with tormenting the Shards they were bonded to (of which he has three of the four) that is occupying significantly more of his attention than his actual job, namely destroying the world. To the point where The Starscream is looked upon as higher on the totem pole then he is.
  • Also, Autochthon built the Exalted so he could kill his brothers and sisters that picked on him and destroyed his inventions. So he creates the Exalts who kill the other Primordials, or mutilate them and imprison them in their king's own body. Talk about overreaction. Of course, given how dickish they really were, this is not that monstrous, from a certain point of view.

Video Games

• In Until Dawn, a group of friends were reunited on the one year anniversary of the deaths of their two friends after a prank went wrong. Their brother Josh decides to get revenge on the friends for the deceased Hannah and Beth.

Web Comics

• Helen B. Narbon plans to pull one of those during her high-school reunion in the webcomic Narbonic. However, it is eventually revealed that people didn't shun her due to disliking her — they avoided her because they were scared stiff by her easy access to mad science. Faced with this realization, Helen decides not to turn them all into gerbils after all...
• A storyline in PvP had Francis attend his high-school reunion, intending to get some revenge on his old bully Teezo Cunningham, only to discover that Teezo had only gone to the reunion specifically to make amends for being such a dick in high school, due to his crappy home life. Francis doesnt know what to do with his information, as he's still mad at Teezo but cant hate him when he's sorry for what he did, though the two ultimately reconcile.

Web Videos

• When reviewing the Charmed high-school reunion episode, Obscurus Lupa voiced her annoyance with this trope, remarking that she can barely remember her high-school classmates, let alone enough to actively hold a grudge against them.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series villain Mary "Baby-Doll" Dahl kidnaps her former costars, but just to force them to go through the motions of the show. Except for Cousin Spunky, whom she attempts to kill with dynamite. (Who wouldn't?)
• Danny Phantom: Big Bad Vlad Masters throws a reunion to get back/murder his former best friend (who has no idea and still likes him, ironically) in order to win his best friend's wife. Thankfully, that oblivious man's son is... Danny Phantom.
• Dan Vs. "The High-School Reunion": Dan, being Dan, tries to get revenge on his old classmates because he felt high school was just constant ridicule. It turns out Dan was popular because his over-the-top revenge schemes were very entertaining. Instead Chris was the unpopular one out of the duo. So Chris decides to get revenge. But they think it was all a part of Dan's plan which makes Dan even more popular.
• One of Darkwing Duck's many origin stories (actually the real one) was remembered when Megavolt attempted revenge at graduation on the bully and the cheerleader that not only made fun of him (and bullied Drake Mallard as well), but trapped him in his experiment which ended up giving him his powers. (And theoretically frying his brain, or he might have just snapped on his own. Hard to say.) Megavolt tries again at a class reunion against the two bullies unlike the first time that he tried to kill everyone there, who are still as contemptuous as ever. He is stopped by Darkwing and Gosalyn and the bullies learn Darkwing's true identity and are deeply impressed that Drake is a superhero. Although they promise to keep his secret, Darkwing decides to guarantee that by hypnotizing them to forget the fact while brainwashing them to treat Drake Mallard with some respect.
• Johnny Bravo has combined this with She's All Grown Up: Johnny wants to take revenge on a girl who always made fun of him when they were kids but it turns out that she turned into a total babe. The rest of the episode is spent agonizing whether she likes him now or she's just playing a prank on him like she used to. It's a prank.
• Kim Possible had a variation on this. In "Attack of the Killer Bebes", Doctor Drakken (formerly Drew Lipsky) used three robotic women to kidnap three of his former college buddies, who had made fun of Drew's extremely junky "Bebe" prototypes in the mid eighties. One of the targets was Kim's father, Dr. Possible, but he failed to make the connection to his teenage arch-nemesis. He was spurred into action by the invitation to the upcoming reunion, and held them hostage at the reunion hall.
• In "Bully for Parker", an episode of Producing Parker, the main character plans an elaborate revenge for her high-school reunion, but has second thoughts when she spends some time with her most vicious tormentor.
• The Venture Brothers: Mike Sorayama, an old college classmate of Doc's, dies and has his designated pallbearers (Doc, Brock, Pete White and Baron Underbheit) kidnapped. They get locked in a dungeon and learn that Sorayama was Faking the Dead and wants revenge for petty slights, all related to his one-sided crush on an attractive classmate. Underbehit tricked him into smoking oregano, to which he was allergic, making him miss a study date; Pete, the campus DJ, played an embarrassing fake dedication; Brock beat the crap out of him (and everyone else) in a drunken rage after getting kicked off the football team. In the end, it turns out that Sorayama really is dead, and the one carrying out the revenge was just another of his lifelike robots. It's even worse for Doc; as near as he can recall, all he did was seduce a monster based off the girl in a Dungeons & Dragons game that Sorayama was DMing. Sorayama's real reason was that he thinks Rusty actually slept with the girl; he didn't, but Brock did, and he jumped to conclusions when he saw her emerge from Doc and Brock's dorm room.
• T.U.F.F. Puppy had an episode where Dudley and Kitty are assigned a mission to Dudley's high school. Somebody's been sabotaging the reunion, resulting in people getting hurt. Dudley suspects some of his troublemaking schoolmates (who are still bullying jerks to him until he reveals he's a T.U.F.F. agent and his rodeo clown outfit was a disguise). Turns out the culprit was the lunch lady motivated by the then students insulting her meals, though given her cooking was so disgusting that only Dudley liked her food, it's hard to feel sorry for her even without her vengeance.

Real Life

• Bas Rutten, former UFC World Heavyweight Champion and MMA Legend, was actually physically weak in high school and bullied often. When he came back for a school reunion he was a highly decorated fighter and challenged his former bullies to a fight. They all declined.

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