Sex Signals Death

The horizontal tango will be your last dance.

"There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie!
For instance, Number 1: You can never have sex. Sex equals death, OK?"

— Randy Meeks, Scream

Well, the young couple had sex. You know what this means—they are doomed.

Shows where lots of people die tend to have a strange conservatism about who gets killed. If anyone engages in nonmarital sex, especially unprotected and/or with someone they don't really know, you should probably consider them to have a crosshair on their back, even if the killer is choosing their victims totally at random. Fanservice Extras are particularly vulnerable to this trope.

Very common in slasher movies, such as the Friday the 13th series, and the entire basis of such Dark Fantasy and Supernatural Thriller films as Liquid Sky and It Follows. This could be a metaphor for the AIDS scare (then-new in the case of older films), or for STDs in general, although according to one of the makers of A Nightmare on Elm Street, it was simply because he thought that people having sex will forget about everything else and be especially vulnerable to serial killers. Which wouldn't be an Ass Pull if they only died during sex, but when they're prone to it afterward, it is hard not to interpret it as anything but a cautionary message.

The Other Wiki also has a say in this.

If a character doesn't die but is doomed for having sex, it's Downfall by Sex. For a literal application, compare Out with a Bang, Death by Childbirth (yeah, we know...), Curiosity Killed the Cast, and The Murder After. For the lite version, see Kiss of Death. Mate or Die is the inverse of this trope. Contrast Her Heart Will Go On, where the man is doomed, but the woman has Contractual Immortality. Also contrast Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex, which is supposed to be the opposite (two lovers have sex after surviving something that threatened to kill them; it's possible to combine that with this Trope, but only by the cruelest of authors.) In some cases, the doomed man will leave Someone to Remember Him By (Hur, hur, hur...). Don't even get us started if it's with the same gender. Compare Cartwright Curse where death can happen even before the sex merely for being a love interest. Sometimes a consequence of Can't Get Away with Nuthin'. Often takes place at a Make-Out Point. May also be committed by the family members of one or both parties involved, who feel that the act of sex (or acts leading up to the sex) are seen as an affront to Family Honor. Compare Conceive and Kill.

The Literal Man Eater is a particularly twisted sister trope to this one.

As a Death Trope, several if not all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Genderflipped in Shadow Star. Takeo Tsurumaru impregnates several girls in the course of the story. In the second-to-last episode of the manga, he has sex with main girl Shiina Tamai after she tells him that she loves him. Soon... he dies. Shiina, along with her Shadow Archetype Mamiko, makes it to the end.
• X/1999. Sorata and Arashi. Inverted because he dies — first in the movie (though she follows him later), later in the TV series. He's still alive in the manga, but it's a sure thing he'll die sooner or later. In a subversion, it's less about the sex than it is that Sorata, even before the story begins, was destined to die for a woman. Sorata didn't know who he would die for or how; he just jokingly said that, since he absolutely has to die for the sake of a lady, he'd like to die for a really pretty girl. It was many years later (which is the beginning of the story) when he actually met Arashi; knowing that You Can't Fight Fate, he decided to die for her.
• Also gender-flipped in Trigun, with Nicholas D. Wolfwood and Milly Thompson. He dies in the same episode he sleeps with her. She makes it to the end.
• In the Full Metal Panic! novels, apparently, after all these years, Kurz Weber finally manages to get it on with Melissa Mao (after years of Slap-Slap-Kiss). He dies during his very next mission. But it's ultimately averted! Guess who's back after being rescued by the Spetsnaz in the penultimate volume of the novel series??
• Avoided in Crying Freeman. Yoh has to kill Emu for witnessing his crimes, but she asks him to have sex with her as her last wish... but after that, Yoh not only doesn't kill her but he actually takes her in and they become a Battle Couple.
• Strangely inverted in Red River (1995), most of the important characters who die are the ones who never got the chance to have sex.
• In Immortal Hounds, RDS — the disease that takes away someone's Resurrective Immortality — is transmitted by sexual contact, and death invariably follows. Although it turns out not to be so clear-cut.
• Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest: Every man who's ever slept with Ryuuko Konuma has died. Like her father, and that man he sold her to. That's not to say she murdered them directly, either. Apparently sleeping with Ryuuko just sucks away your will to live unless you're a callous, violent maniac... like her boyfriend Haguro. Eeeeek.
• Macross Frontier: Sheryl Nome and Alto Saotome (maybe) have sex not long before battle and then, one is dead/missing and the other has a terminal illness. At least they both get better.
• This is what led to Gilbert's death in Kaze to Ki no Uta while he's in a Star-Crossed Lovers relationship with Serge, although other factors helped as well. Serge makes it to the end.
• Franken Fran: One early client of Fran Madaraki ends up like this after Fran saves his girlfriend by making her part insect. Apparently, the species of insect in question instinctively eats its mate.
• Ōoku: The Inner Chambers:
  • Required by law in that the first man to sleep with an unmarried Shogun (Shoguns being female in this timeline) be executed for "causing harm to the Shogun's person". So ordered because Iemitsu the Younger's first time was via rape, and she couldn't understand that it's not always like that. Yoshimune is horrified to find out this law exists when she becomes Shogun and inadvertently sentenced Yunoshin to death by choosing him to sleep with her, and plans to rescind the law as soon as possible. She employs Loophole Abuse to spare Yunoshin, by agreeing that he died. The tradesman Shinkichi that happens to look like him? Well, that's just coincidence.
  • In a roundabout way, this applies to Emonnosuke. Yes, he's had sex plenty of times before, but when he had sex with Tsunayoshi, it was the first time he had done it for pleasure, not just to attempt to conceive a child. It was also the first time he slept with someone he loved. He dies the next day of what is implied to be an aneurysm. Tsunayoshi lives for a few more years after that.
• A very messy scene in episode 2 of Kaiba has Parm exploding upon orgasming while having sex with Kaiba's body.
• In an inversion, one minor character in Dragon Half survived the destruction of his village and everyone in it because he had snuck out that night to go to the local make-out point.
• In the h-anime Flutter of Birds 2, a young man who visits his mother's hometown i jures his leg and has to spend time in the local hospital until he heals, and where he meets and befriends some the patients and staff. When he becomes close friends with a young woman that has been diagnosed with an incurable disease, she tearfully tells him that she'll never become a bride, so he agrees to sleep with her. When he returns to the hospital the next day to visit her, he's told that she passed away before dawn.

Comic Books

• Played with in Warren Ellis' Black Gas. The main characters avoid being turned into zombies because they go off to have sex in the remote mountain cabin. Too bad they eventually died anyway (though since everybody on the planet dies or is zombified by the end, it's not like they were singled out).
• In X-Wing Rogue Squadron, Ibtisam dies in the same issue that she and Nrin finally officially become a couple. Feylis and Avan, on the other hand, make a no-dying pact, and they both live.
• In the Elfquest spinoff New Blood, the villainous rock-shaper Door seems impossible to defeat until the jackwolf-rider Dodia beats his brains out with a club. As Door and Dodia had just recently Recognized one another, Door took it for granted that she wouldn't be able to hurt him; because they'd already had sex and conceived a Recognition-sired child, however, she was no longer biologically compelled to be his mate and could fight back against his evil.
• Sin City has a few examples:
  • Blue Eyes is an assassin who lures men to their deaths via seduction.
  • When Marv has sex for the first time, it eventually leads to his death.
  • Ava Lord uses a mixture of sex and Wounded Gazelle Gambit to get men to do her bidding, often leading them to their demises.
• Narrowly averted in the Blackest Night arc. Writers initially planned to have the current Firestorm, Jason and his girlfriend Gehenna, doing a make-out session prior to Gen's death. This was later changed to a quiet conversation about getting married and having kids. Then they changed their minds and had it re-drawn into the make-out scene, but this was fortunately lost somehow and they ended by putting in the conversation.
• Hack/Slash:
  • Slashers are, for whatever reason, often attracted to teenagers engaging in "debauched behavior". There's easily a dozen ready examples of teens getting offed as they're about to have sex. Cassie even tried to initiate a make-out session with Skottie Young to lure a slasher to them, lampshading the trope when he rebuffed her. Obviously, this is all due to the prevalence of the trope in '80s slasher flicks, which the series is largely inspired by in the first place.
  • Angela Cicero, the Acid Angel, is a slasher who seduces men into sex before killing them with her pheromone-activated acid secretion powers. Before she was resurrected as a slasher, she seduced her best friend's husband and was murdered for it after the friend committed suicide.
• Invoked in Friday the 13th: Bloodbath. Knowing that sex lures the undead slasher Jason Voorhees out to kill, the men after him deliberately arrange several promiscuous youths to Crystal Lake to lure him out.
• In Pamela's Tale Pamela Voorhees explains why she killed Barry and Claudette:
  Pamela: They let my son drown in that filthy lake and for what? So two libidinous teenagers could make love? They should have been watching him! They should have... saved him, my... The Christys, the police, they did nothing to punish those counselors. The camp reopened like nothing happened. Like my son Jason was but a ghost. All they could think about was carnal pleasures. But I would make them remember what they did to Jason. I would make them pay. I know what you're thinking. They were just children themselves. Perhaps. But when raising good children if you spare the rod, you spoil the child and I could not have that. Children need discipline.
• Throughout the second series of Runaways, it's foreshadowed that one of the Runaways will die before the end of Brian K. Vaughan's run. When the death finally comes, it's Gert, the female Runaway with the most active sex life up to that point.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien³ has Action Survivor Ellen Ripley finally have sex with the prison doctor Jonathan Clemens after spending the past two movies as a Chaste Hero. After a touching scene where he opens up about his past, he's immediately eaten by the Alien. This also overlaps with Cartwright Curse, as it removes the last meaningful companion in her life after already losing her new True Companions from the previous movie in the Downer Beginning. Even worse, it's later revealed Ripley was impregnated by the Alien and she can only stop the contagion by dying, which she does at the end of the movie to stop Weyland-Yutani, the Greater-Scope Villain of the series, from getting it. As the movie was made during the height of the AIDS pandemic, the Alien in this movie is often interpreted as a metaphor for AIDS and the apathetic government response to it.
• Axe Murdering with Hackley: Hackley states on his Vlog that the killers of RKS are contractually obligated to kill anyone who isn't a virgin. As you can imagine, this also includes anyone THEY have sex with, which can put a damper on their love lives. They do this to each other, too.
• The entire plot of Basic Instinct revolves around a female serial killer who goes to bed with men and women and murders them afterwards.
• In the opening of Dog Soldiers, two campers are preparing to make love until a werewolf interrupts and kills them both.
• Friday the 13th series:
  • Justification: In the first Friday the 13th (1980), the killer, Pamela Voorhees, specifically targeted the people who were having or going to have sex, because the two camp counselors who were supposed to be monitoring her son Jason Voorhees when he drowned as a child were too busy getting groiny with each other.
  • Although according to the comic book, Friday the 13th: Pamela's Tale, Barry and Claudette leave to have sex in the woods. Jason follows watches and interrupts them. Barry then chases Jason into the lake where he sinks and drowns. Next year, Pamela stalks Barry and Claudette and then kills them both during their foreplay.
  • A notorious moment in the second movie is where two teens get killed while in the middle of getting it on. Jason kills them shish kabob-style by skewering them both with a spear. Averted with Ginny from the same film, though, who survives despite having sex with her boss.
  • A significant lampshade is hung on this trope in the tenth film in the series. In a virtual reality simulation meant to distract Jason, a pair of scantily clad teenage girls exclaim (among other things), "We love premarital sex!" He proceeds to kill them with each other.
  • Done heavy-handedly in the 2009 reboot; every character who has sex, or wants to have sex, or fantasizes about having sex, or is a creepy redneck who has sex with mannequins gets killed. There are a few others, of course.
• Subverted in Cherry Falls, which has a serial killer who targets virgins. When the Genre Savvy town teenagers figure this out, they decide to throw an orgy... which the killer, having gone completely Ax-Crazy (complete with axe) by the end, crashes and massacres.
• In The Day After Tomorrow, two workers at the local weather service station are making out passionately on the couch when tornadoes strike Los Angeles. In the chaos that ensues, they die, while the Mexican janitor (who was diligently cleaning the floors while the people who were supposed to be monitoring the weather were making out) survives.
• In Eyes of a Stranger the titular serial killer is dumping a body at the beach when he interrupts a young couple having sex in their car. He naturally kills them as well.
• Old People: After the wedding reception, Sanna and Malick go into the cottage to consumate their marriage. As they are, the Old Guy comes in and kills them.
• Psycho is possibly the earliest example ever of this in American cinema. The opening scene of a hotel tryst establishes Marion Crane as sexually active with Sam Loomis, and she famously ends up getting killed in the first half hour. Even the iconic Shower Scene features sexual allegories; during her shower, Marion's expressions start as ecstatic and then turn dreamy, as if she were pleasuring herself, and then the legendary knife stabbings evoke a rape.
• Scream:
  • Scream (1996):
    • Conversed by Genre Savvy horror geek Randy Meeks, who calls not having sex Rule #1 for successfully surviving a horror movie. The other two rules cover drinking and doing drugs, and saying that you'll be right back. Evidently Randy forgot his own lesson later: he gets killed in the sequel, and it's revealed that he spent a night with "Creepy Karen" before getting whacked.
    • Double Subverted by main protagonist Sidney: she bangs Ghostface himself and lives, then ends up killing him in self-defense!
  • Angelina of Scream 3 reveals that she employed the Casting Couch to get the role of Sidney in Stab 3... then she dies seconds later. Damn, do the rules strike fast.
  • In Scream 4, it's revealed that Jill lost her virginity to Trevor, pushing their position as Sidney and Billy expies further. Later, Jill is revealed as the killer, and she offs Trevor shortly, making this the exact inverse of the Sidney and Billy example, right down to the sex of the killer. Then Jill dies too.
  • In Scream (2022), Richie taunts Sam with her sexual history (with him, no less) but it's Sam who ends up as a survivor.
    • It’s also softly averted with Mindy, who makes out with another girl at the party, only to survive the movie anyways.
    • Liv does fit the trope however, she wants to have sex with her boyfriend and had previously slept with Vince (who also gets killed) and Liv gets a Boom, Headshot!.
• More or less every B-Movie and thus, rightfully parodied in the "Thanksgiving" segment of Grindhouse.
• Halloween series:
  • Used in the original Halloween (1978), where three of the five victims had just had sex, and the fourth was on her way to do so. It's heavily implied, however, that Michael Myers has some severe issues with sex, and the selection of victims is not at all coincidental.
  • In an interview with AMC, John Carpenter (the director) states "I have been accused of ending the Sexual Revolution, and for that, I sincerely apologize."
  • The same happens in the remake: Everyone seen having sex dies horribly. Most of the other victims probably weren't virgins either (this pattern is so glaringly obvious in the movie that it must have been intentional). They even went out of their way to mention Laurie hasn't gotten laid. Although, the trope is surprisingly averted with Annie, who actually survived her attack to appear in the second movie and THEN die.
  • In Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, trampy Kelly, who sleeps with Brady, her friend's boyfriend, gets killed, as does Brady, said cheating boyfriend. The virginal Rachel survives.
  • Subverted in the next film. Despite presumably still being a virgin, Rachel's the first to get killed, while two others are killed in the very act of making love, and still another's virgin status is unknown, but she dies too.
• Subverted in two Children of the Corn movies, even though many of the children in the series wish to kill adults because of their loss of innocence.
  • In Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, non-married adults John and Angela have passionate sex. Angela is kidnapped and is almost killed, but she survives. In the same film, teenagers Danny and Lacey almost have sex but are stopped when they find a severed hand. Lacey is kidnapped but is saved along with Angela.
  • In Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return, the main heroine, Hannah, has sex with Gabriel, the man who turns out to be the big bad of the series. She survives.
• In the 1970s The Day of the Jackal, the Jackal meets an attractive married woman at a hotel, has a torrid affair with her, then later discovers her address and goes to her home. When she asks him about what he's doing, because the police were looking for him, and he's driving a car with local plates, which means she knows he stole it, and if he'll just tell her, she won't say anything, he breaks her neck.
  • In the corresponding scene of the 1997 remake, The Jackal, the Jackal picks up a guy at a bar and goes home with him. He's still at the guy's house the next day, using it as a base of operations. When the fellow sees the Jackal on a news report, the Jackal casually shoots him.
  • This was also done, exactly the same, with a gay guy, in the earlier movie version (and originally in the book). The police specifically ignore him because they're looking for a man who had sex with and killed a countess, not some makeup-wearing homosexual.
• In the 1987 film of The Fourth Protocol, from a novel by Frederick Forsyth (the same author of the original The Day of the Jackal novel), the Soviet agent shoots the woman agent dead immediately after they just had sex, which came after she had just completed putting together the components of an atomic bomb for him.
• James Bond movies:
  • Xenia Onatopp's love of Murderous Thighs in GoldenEye is more an example of Out with a Bang, but it's worth noting that several Bond Girls and henchwomen die after hooking up or flirting with Bond:
  • Jill Masterson (drugged and painted in gold from head to toe, which suffocated her because she can no longer breathe through her skin) in Goldfinger. Yes, Science Marches On.
    • Note that Jill's sister Tilly (killed by Oddjob's deadly hat) doesn't count because not only did she not have sex with Bond, she didn't even flirt with him.
  • Aki from You Only Live Twice (poisoned).
    • The other female, Kissy Suzuki, survives even after "marrying" Bond and, in the novels, carrying his only child.
  • Teresa "Tracy" Di Vicenzo from On Her Majesty's Secret Service (shot by Irma Bunt with an M16 rifle).
  • Countess Lisl von Schafl from For Your Eyes Only (hit by a vehicle).
  • The villain Drax's secretary Corrine Dufour in Moonraker. Bond seduces her and tricks her into showing him where Drax's safe was. As punishment, Drax sets his dogs on her.
  • The female Dragon May Day from A View to a Kill (after her Heel–Face Turn, she pulled a Heroic Sacrifice to take Max Zorin down and avenge the deaths of her workmates, whom he killed when they weren't useful anymore).
  • Paris Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies (tortured and strangled. Adding insult to injury, her body is planted in Bond's hotel room in an effort to frame him for murder).
  • Elektra King from The World Is Not Enough (gunned down by Bond himself when her treachery is revealed).
  • Vesper Lynd (drowned) and Solange Dimitrios (strangled) from Casino Royale (2006).
  • Strawberry Fields from Quantum of Solace (drowned in crude oil).
  • Severine in Skyfall (You Have Outlived Your Usefulness to Silva).
  • Lampshaded in GoldenEye, as the villain makes a comment about Bond's track record:
    Trevelyan: ...or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect.
  • Lampshaded again in Die Another Day, after a Fake-Out Make-Out session (that Bond tries to turn into a real make-out session):
    Miranda Frost: I know the way you operate, Bond. Sex for dinner, death for breakfast. Well, it's not going to work on me.
    • Miranda does in fact sleep with Bond... and is later revealed to be The Mole, at which point she attempts to turn the trope on Bond, complete with a Call-Back to the "sex for dinner, death for breakfast" remark. It's ultimately played straight when she's stabbed through the heart by Jinx, the film's other Bond girl.
  • Lampshaded by M in Quantum of Solace.
    M: Look how well your charm works, James. They'll do anything for you, won't they? How many is that now?
  • This happens to James Bond himself in the Fake-Out Opening of You Only Live Twice, as he's killed by assassins shortly after boinking a Chinese girl.
  • Parodied in Illuminatus!, wherein the British agent Fission Chips leaves a trail of dead Eurasian girls wherever he may go.
  • Played straight and averted in Live and Let Die. Rosie Carver is killed after Bond seduces her. Solitaire, who is supposed to remain a virgin to retain her psychic powers, is also seduced by Bond and was supposed to be sacrificed in a voodoo ritual, but Bond saves her.
  • Inverted in The Man with the Golden Gun. The assassin Scaramanga has sex right before he kills someone that he's been hired to kill. (Bond notes that some matadors do the same thing before a bullfight.) The Trope is played straight, however (maybe even doubly so) because Scaramanga later kills his lover after she double-crosses him and helps Bond.
• In Snakes on a Plane, a couple sneaks into the bathroom to have sex. They are the first to be killed by the snakes. Their drug use may have contributed, too.
• Interestingly, the slasher film did not always contain this trope: in the 1974 Canadian film Black Christmas (1974), the heroine is pregnant, though the movie ends with her alone in the house with the killer. The first victim is also described as a "professional virgin."
• In Boa vs. Python, the python stalks a teenage couple that is having sex, and actually licks the girl, who, because her eyes are closed, thinks it is her lover. Then the python, which should be a constrictor, bites them squarely in half.
• Inversion: In Once Bitten, the hero is targeted by the vampire countess because he's a virgin. He and his girlfriend end up having quickie sex in a coffin, rendering his blood unsuitable for her needs.
• Piranha Part Two: The Spawning's opening scene had a couple discussing where they failed to have sex because the guy found fault in everything. The hotel room was too dry, the beach too sandy, and the boat too uncomfortable. They then go scuba-diving into a shipwreck and decided to have sex, you know, nothing better than that, right? Well, okay, the killer piranha did kinda ruin the mood.
• In Taken, as soon as the slutty best friend says she's going to have sex with a random French guy because "Who cares? He's hot!", it was obvious she was a goner.
• In Tormented (2009), a schoolboy who killed himself because of bullying comes back from the dead to take fatal revenge on the bullies. One of them decides to go to the cemetery and dig up the killer's body but is sidetracked by having sex with his girlfriend while his car is parked there, which turns out to have been a very bad idea because the killer drags him out of the car and castrates him by repeatedly stomping on his genitals, leaving him to bleed to death. Ouch.
• Two of the youngsters that stop by in the Mario Bava movie A Bay of Blood who are speared while having sex. Friday the 13th Part 2 copies this very scene, only putting the guy on top instead of the girl.
• Subverted in The Godfather Part II, where Senator Geary, who hates Michael Corleone's crime racket, is made to believe that he accidentally killed a prostitute during "weird sex games" at Fredo Corleone's brothel; after this, the senator is indebted to Michael for covering up the incident, but is also blackmailed by him. One shot afterwards heavily suggests that Al Neri was responsible for the actual killing.
• Invoked in Evolution (2001) when an Asshole Victim actually sings the song quoted at the top while preparing a rendezvous on a golf course... and is promptly eaten. Slight subversion in that the pair hadn't actually gotten around to the deed (and the woman survives).
• Played with in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
  • Exaggerated into the family-friendly version of this trope: Death By Marriage. As soon as Will and Elizabeth are hitched, you know one of them is about to die.
  • But then subverted, and arguably inverted, when some Loophole Abuse causes that character to un-die, and the two are able to consummate in due course. (And not like that, either.) Heck, even the "family-friendly" element is subverted, because we see them putting clothes back on afterwards. (Not to mention the reveal in The Stinger...)
• Inverted in Death Proof. The first group of girls, while they act fun, are surprisingly conservative, especially Arlene/Butterfly, who actually seems to have some kind of aversion to sex. They die. Horribly. The second group, on the other hand, are very open about their sex lives ("He likes to watch me pee"), and Kim at one point in the final chase scene yells "I'm the horniest motherfucker on the road!" Not only do they live, but they also kill Stuntman Mike.
• Played so straight it's almost a parody in Jennifer's Body, where the title character uses the promise of sex to lure boys into places where she can eat them. It's revealed though that the whole "demonic possession" thing gets kicked off only because its perpetrators thought they had gotten their hands on a virgin sacrifice.
• The Terminator:
  • Sarah Connor's roommate is murdered by the Terminator after a late-night date with her boyfriend.
  • Kyle as well, after he serves his purpose by impregnating Sarah with John and delivering her to the point where she can defend herself from then on (partly because he's already damaged the Terminator so badly himself).
• In Final Destination 4, Hunt has steamy sex by the pool and shortly after dies a very gruesome death by being sucked into a high-pressure drain hole. It doesn't help that he was a Hollywood skeptic that was warned about some weird stuff going on... or saying earlier that if he was going to die, he was gonna get laid first.
• In The Towering Inferno, Dan Bigelow and his secretary/mistress die almost immediately following a tryst in his apartment.
  Lorrie: Well I always did wanna die in bed.
• Although there's no actual sex, the sultan's death in The Thief of Bagdad (1940) has overtones of this — he's given a mechanical woman as a gift, who dances seductively in front of him, and when she goes to embrace him, "she" stabs him in the back.
• In the shlock blood-and-boobs horror film Piranha 3D, most of the victims are promiscuous spring breakers. A pornographer gets his penis bitten off by a piranha, a woman is sliced in half by a high-tension cable (which first removes her bra, then her entire upper torso), a girl gets her hair entwined in the propeller of a speedboat and has her face ripped off — might be one of the definitive "death by sex" compilations.
• Averted in Ghostbusters (1984). It's strongly implied that the final event that allowed Gozer to come to New York (an event that would've caused the apocalypse if the Ghostbusters hadn't killed her shortly afterwards) was Dana having sex with Lewis. It's an aversion because both Dana and Lewis were possessed by, respectively, the Gatekeeper and Keymaster rather than being voluntary participants and because both of them survive the film.
• In Starship Troopers, Dizzy Flores dies within 24 hours after finally having sex with Rico. Something she'd been wanting since the beginning of the movie. The sex, not dying.
• In All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Marlin gets killed just minutes after giving a blowjob to Jake. The cause of death? Getting a shotgun barrel shoved down her throat.
• Inverted in Norwegian slasher Cold Prey / Fritt Vilt. The virgin who just refused to have sex with her boyfriend is the first one to die.
• In Cabin Fever, a flesh-eating disease scares off most of the teenagers spending their break in a cabin in the woods. When only two are left behind, the requisite horror-flick babe figures that, seeing as they're doomed to die anyway, she and the hero might as well go out with a bang.
• The entire plot point of the film, Body of Evidence, starring William Defoe and Madonna, centers around finding out if Madonna's character deliberately screwed her elderly lover to death or not.
• The Cabin in the Woods provides the page image and uses this as a plot point. Like many other horror movie tropes, this one gets invoked, lampshaded, discussed, and justified, not all in that order.
• Played for laughs in Wacko at the Halloween Prom when the Lawnmower Killer shoves Tony Shlongini's head into the garbage disposal in the school cafeteria; the cafeteria matron then interrupts the murder to teach him how to use a garbage disposal properly. The Lawnmower Killer then runs Tony's date, Rosie, who's wearing only a whipped cream bikini, through the cafeteria's conveyor-belt dishwasher.
• In Harm's Way: Everyone connected to Eddington via sex by two steps of separation or less ends up dead by the end of the film.
• In Father's Day (2011) the very act of fathering a child (that is, impregnating a woman) makes you a target for the Father's Day killer.
• The Dark Knight Rises marks the second time in the whole trilogy that Batman violates his one rule completely by accident. He bangs Talia after being removed from the Wayne Enterprises board. Later on, Talia commits suicide when she realizes he has her cornered during a car chase and is hellbent on forcing her to return the fusion reactor to the only place where it could be stabilized.
• The plot of Private Benjamin starts with the titular character on her honeymoon night with her husband only for him to die of a heart attack while they have sex.
• It Follows is about a sexually-transmitted supernatural stalker, so having sex with the wrong person literally and directly makes you the Follower's next victim. It takes this trope straight into deconstruction territory.
• In Attack on Titan Part 1 (of the live-action film adaptation), Hiana falls in love with Eren, and they are about to have sex when a Titan breaks down the wall behind them and eats Hiana.
• Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Hansel and the white witch Mina make love after she heals his wounds. During the final battle, the evil witch Muriel kills Mina.
• We Are What We Are. Mr. Parker murders Anders while he's having sex with Iris.
• Other Halves. Jasmine stabs her partner to death mid-coitus.
• Alien: Covenant; a couple is shown having sex in a shower. Unfortunately for them, a Xenomorph interrupts and kills them.
• Subverted in Night of the Comet. The main character luckily survives the comet's effects because she was having sex with her boyfriend in a steel-lined projection booth when it passes.
• In The Final Girls, the protagonists are trapped in a slasher film and are bound by the genre conventions, which includes the resident serial killer always targeting anything involving sex. They use this to their advantage by having one of the girls do a sexy dance to act as bait.
• The first Count Yorga had Paul and Erica have sex after they find themselves stuck outside Yorga's mansion after their van mysteriously breaks down. Almost instantly, Yorga attacks the couple. They're not killed there (Paul is just knocked out while Erica is bitten). But later in the film, Yorga visits Erica, seduces and drains her which does "kill" her and turns her undead. While Paul tries to go rescue her after he finds her missing, has his back broken by Yorga and later found mutilated under the manor likely by Yorga's brides. Likewise, Hayes is shown to be having sex with a woman in the middle of the film and is killed by Yorga's brides.
• In The Hollow, Erica and Rob decide to have sex in the old shed in the graveyard. Rob is performing cunnilingus on Erica when he is decapitated by the Horseman.
• In Ripper: Letter from Hell, Marissa has anonymous sex with a masked stranger at a party and then becomes the Ripper's first victim as she tries to leave.
• In The Burning, Sally and Glazer are killed shortly after they had sex. Karen and Eddy avert this trope when Karen refuses to have sex with Eddy, but both end up killed anyway.
• Contracted: In a prolonged and horrific fashion. Samantha catches an STD due to being raped by BJ, which slowly transforms her into a zombie (he's an immune carrier of the virus). At the end, she's entirely gone, attacking her mother and then being shot to death by the police.
• Coach Carr's health class in Mean Girls, a parody of abstinence education in which he hysterically warns the students that they will die from STDs and pregnancy if they have premarital sex. Then he hands out condoms.
• Army of the Dead: The opening scene features a honeymooning couple on their way to Vegas. The bride gives her new hubby a blowjob while he's driving... which distracts him enough to smash right into a truck coming from Area 51, resulting in a fiery explosion.
• Dante's Peak: The first (human) victims of the titular volcano are a young couple having a naked dip in a hot spring. When increasing geothermal activity suddenly boils the water, the two of them are cooked alive.
• Little Dead Rotting Hood: In one scene, we see two teenagers having sex in a house. Soon after, a wolf gets into the house and attacks the guy. The subsequent scene shows the wolf killed the girl too.
• Given an explanation in Silent Night, Deadly Night. The slasher Billy, when he was a kid, accidentally saw two teenagers having sex in the boarding school where he lived. The Mother Superior who ran the school caught the teenagers and Billy and told him what the two teenagers were doing was wrong. So when Billy snaps and starts killing "naughty" people in a Santa outfit he equates all sex with naughtiness, leading him to murder six people.
• The VVitch: Caleb the Puritan boy is abducted and implied to have been molested by the Witch that lives in the woods. Likely as a result of the encounter, he dies rambling and insane, surrounded by his family.
• Parking (1985) has a variation where immediately after Orpheus makes out with Calais, Eurydice dies of a drug overdose.
• Death Factory: In true slasher movie tradition, anyone who has sex invariably becomes Alexa's next victim.
• Don't Look: Anytime two people start doing the nasty, it's interrupted by the killer, who offs at least one of the partakers.

Literature

• Iason Mink's and subsequently Riki's deaths in Ai no Kusabi are a direct result of the former's refusal to let the latter be in order to continue having forbidden sex.
• Ex-Heroes has Cairex the Demon-Human Hybrid get infected and become a zombie from attempting to get a blow job from zombie Jessica Alba. No one is sure how to react to this story when they hear it.
• "Sex equals death" is the main theme in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Welcome to the Monkey House," in which a dystopian society prevents people from having (or enjoying if they do try to have it) sex. The "villain" responds by basically raping women to force them out of their belief that sex is wrong. It works.
• In Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, a sinister woman drives prominent men to madness and suicide. The unspeakable horror they experienced is strongly implied to be sexual in nature, although Victorian propriety prevented Machen from elaborating.
• In Stephen King's short story "The Raft" from Skeleton Crew, four college students swim out to a raft in the middle of a remote lake. A mysterious oil slick-like creature appears, and devours two of them; the first one touches it, the second steps on a crack on the raft and gets grabbed by his foot. Hours later, the remaining two (a guy and his girlfriend) end up having sex; the girl's hair falls off through the cracks of the raft and the creature absorbs her.
• In the second Night Watch (Series) book, Alisa and Igor have sex, then discover who (and what) each other is. Light magician Igor then kills Alisa for being a dark witch, then goes into a depression and ultimately lets himself die in remorse.
• If it's not clear enough in Troika that Veness is doomed when Indigo sleeps with him, it becomes painfully obvious when she admits to reciprocating his love for her.
• In Jaws, the book actually kills off the character Matthew Hooper during the cage scene. Earlier in the book: he was having an affair with Brody's wife, Ellen. She avoids the trope by never being in the water. The first victim in the book was taking a postcoital swim.
• Lampshaded in The Dresden Files novel Proven Guilty via Dresden's description of some of the monsters in the films shown at Splattercon!!!. One of them is supposed to be a monster that hunts the wicked, which apparently includes anyone drinking or having sex.
• In Last Exit to Brooklyn:
  • The prostitute Tralala is gang raped, beaten, mutilated with a broken glass bottle, and left for dead in a back alley.
  • Harry Black is beaten (possibly to death) immediately after attempting to perform oral sex on an underage boy.
• In Naked Lunch and indeed most of the novels of William S. Burroughs, characters are frequently killed during or immediately after sex, often by hanging.
• In Shadow Kiss, Rose and Dimitri finally give in to their passion for each other... And right after the school is attacked by Strigoi and Dimitri is "taken." Right when they whipped it out, you knew something bad was going to happen to one of them, at least, since a huge plot point of their relationship is that it's forbidden.
• While it is not a quick connection of "sex then death", Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is certainly doomed by sex. The titular character is either raped or seduced (it's slightly ambiguous, but most assume rape) early in the book by a distant relative. This completely destroys her life and sends her on an ever-increasing spiral of despair for the rest of the book, repeatedly rejected because of being Defiled Forever, until at last, she murders the man who deflowered her and is hanged for it.
  • Also, while one may argue whether it happened or not, it's implied Tess and her husband Angel, who once abandoned her just because she was not a virgin then came back and tried to rescue her from execution, consummate their marriage in their hideout. And their hideout scenes are supposed to be those moments of (false) hope.
• Because of a massive subversion of STD Immunity in the world of A Brother's Price, sex with non-virgins is not well thought of. Men are rare enough that those who are not made into husbands are crib captives, made to service women for ten crowns a night in the hopes of impregnating them. Various different cribs have different reputations, some thought to be clean, others not; to someone of noble status, visiting even a 'clean' one is social suicide. There are stories about a married woman "getting an itch to try a crib", catching something other than a child there, and spreading it to her husband, who spread it to his other wives and any children they conceived, to the point where the entire family was killed.
• Never Wipe Tears Without Gloves: In the eighties, gay men were considered to have brought AIDS on themselves because of their sexual behaviors. The book focuses on this quite a lot and author Jonas Gardell makes a lot of references to actual articles written in Sweden at the time and actual things politicians, religious leaders, and other public figures were saying and suggesting. Especially heartbreaking when the book quotes actual newspaper headlines that mention the tragedy when an innocent (i.e., a heterosexual who got AIDS through blood transfusion or heterosexual sex) dies of AIDS.
• In The Testament of Jessie Lamb everyone is infected with a disease that makes pregnant women die before a baby is born, apparently even if the pregnancy is terminated early. Vaginal intercourse with men kills millions of women. As the men are clearly not willing to stop having vaginal intercourse for the sake of women's survival, one can only speculate how the disease affects poor countries, where not every woman can be given an obligatory hormonal contraception implant. The novel itself doesn't dwell on those implications, in England, it seems to be a rather Cosy Catastrophe.
• Discussed and downplayed in How to Survive a Horror Movie. Yes, it's a good idea to keep it in your pants when in a horror movie, but the only sex absolutely guaranteed to kill you is sex in a car.

Live-Action TV

• 24
  • In the first season Kim Bauer sneaks out with her friend Janet York to meet up with a couple of college guys. Janet has sex with one of the guys while Kim just makes out with the other one. When it turns out the college guys are set to kidnap the girls, it's the start of a pretty bad day for Kim, but Janet? She gets her arm broken, doped up on heroin, run over by a car, and is finally suffocated to death.
  • In Season 8, Renee Walker is killed by a sniper after having sex with Jack.
• This enduring trope may have had its first instance on TV with the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode aptly entitled "Coming, Mama" (episode #217, originally aired 4/11/61).
• The Andromeda Strain: The satellite containing The Plague happens to crash near two teenagers that were planning to have sex on a car in the wild. They bring the satellite to town where it's opened, and they both end up being some of the first victims of the eponymous Andromeda contagion.
• Banshee: Jason gets killed for having sex with Rebecca.
• Boardwalk Empire:
  • In the season 2 finale, Jim Neary is in the midst of boning his secretary over his desk when Jimmy Darmody and Richard Harrow barge in unannounced. They shoo the secretary out, make Neary sit down at his desk, and type a note at gunpoint in which he "confesses" to being coerced by Eli Thompson into falsifying voting records, then Harrow shoots him in the mouth and makes it look like a suicide.
  • In season 3, Benny Siegel makes an attempt on Gyp Rosetti while Rosetti is in the midst of kinky sex with a redheaded waitress. He fails to kill Rosetti, who uses the waitress as a human shield to take the bullets, and only succeeds at killing a couple of Rosetti's guards.
• Bones has it with Sweets. The first scene of the season 9 finale is him having sex with Daisy, who hadn't been doing much with him lately 'til then. In the season 10 premiere, which was part 2 of the arc, he doesn't survive the episode.
• Invoked in a Halloween Episode of Boy Meets World where the kids are being stalked by a killer out of the Scream movies. The Genre Savvy in the group recognize that people who have had sex are going to be killed off.
  Eric: I'm dead!
  Jack: I'm dead.
  Shawn: I'm as sick as you can get without actually dying.
• Buffyverse:
  • Disaster occurs after the first time Angel and Buffy sleep together. Enter Angelus, who then kills Jenny Calender and tries to destroy the world.
  • Xander attracts quite a number of demon girls who want to have sex with him and kill him. At once for the first case, the substitute teacher who turns out to be a female mantis.
  • The prevalence of this trope is lampshaded in Angel after Cordelia's first brush with a Fetus Terrible.
    Cordelia: I learned something, too. I learned, uhm... men are evil? Oh, wait, I knew that. I learned that LA is full of self-serving phonies. No, had that one down, too. Uh... sex is bad?
    Angel: We all knew that.
• This happens almost every episode in CSI. If two characters are shown having sex, and it's enjoyable and unwed and not in the missionary position, one or both of them are doomed. This has more to do, however, with the fact that any character outside the main cast whose personal life the show delves into is doomed, regardless of what they're doing.
• Alana De La Garza, who plays Marisol Delko Caine on CSI: Miami, has said that she knew her character was going to die when she heard that Marisol and Horatio were getting married.
• Done entirely straight with two of the regulars on CSI: NY: Flack and Angell.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Army of Ghosts": Minor characters Gareth and Addie run into the Cybermen hiding in the building after slipping out for a quickie.
  • "The Shakespeare Code" starts off with a young man invited into his beloved's house, where he's obviously excited to consummate their relationship... except that she's an alien witch who's plotting to kill him.
• Downton Abbey invokes this trope in season 1. Kemal Pamuk and Mary Crawley have sex, and Kemal died in the act. It's implied it may have been a heart attack.
• HBO's Game of Thrones certainly depicts a world in which many beloved characters die. As a lead-in to the Red Wedding, you know the young couple Robb Stark and his newlywed Talisa are screwed when they are shown together happily... screwing. As a bonus, their deaths are foreshadowed the moment they decide to name the unborn child after Robb's late father, Eddard Stark.
• On Heroes, Elle and Sylar entertain a brief sociopath/psychopath romance and immediately have sex when they realize that the second eclipse was blocking their powers. Once they regained their powers, however, he murders her after they fail to murder Bennet and he realizes that their relationship had no possibility of being sustainable.
• House,
  • Sex and sexually transmitted diseases are routinely the cause of a number of horrific medical cases, up to and including heart failure, car crashes, paralysis, life-threatening pre-teen pregnancies, and even African Sleeping Sickness.
  • "Sex Kills" is the title of one of the episodes.
  • Subverted in one episode, where we're led to believe that a woman's sexual promiscuity may have led to her illness, but it turns out that the cause is something completely unrelated that she couldn't possibly have foreseen.
  • Subverted in another episode where Cameron assumes the (male) porn star they're treating is sick because of his profession, but it turned out to be caused by his over-sanitary childhood instead.
• The premise of the comedy series Laid. A woman discovers that all the men she's ever had sex with are dying. In the order she slept with them. All in really random ways, like getting hit by a car or getting an aneurysm or getting hit in the head with an indoor cricket ball.
• Lost
  • The first two times depicted couples having sex on the island, the female of the couple (Shannon, Ana-Lucia) was shot and killed later in the same episode; the latter was the one who killed the former (accidentally).
  • Also Libby, whom it's strongly implied was about to do the deed if she hadn't already.
  • Also, sleeping with Sayid is practically a non-stop ticket to the afterlife. In fact, this is what kills Shannon. He later marries Nadia and actually ends up shooting Elsa himself.
• Lost Girl invokes this trope frequently with the succubus Bo "draining" all of her lovers/victims' sexual energy.
• Married... with Children: Played for laughs in "Ship Happens'' on the S.S. Sea Dodge which is a fitness cruise for fat women sinks as soon as the crew's "after-hours activities" begin. Al, Peg, Marcy, a fat woman named Kay, and Gilbert Gottfried wind up stranded at sea and everybody else on the ship drowned.
• In the Masters of Horror episode "Pick Me Up", a rocker and his girlfriend unknowingly pick up the serial killer Walker from the road. The girlfriend flashes her panties to Walker, pissing off the boyfriend. Walker kills them both, but the girl specifically for being skanky (and he tortures her to death whereas the boyfriend got a quick one); he actually abhors sex.
• The Murdoch Mysteries Halloween Episode "I Know What You Did Last Autumn" is a Slasher Movie pastiche in which a Monster Clown who previously took photos shaming promiscuous colleges students has progressed to killing them. Except he hasn't; the new clown is killing everyone involved in the shaming of one particular student, and the fact it initially appears to fit the pattern just shows their hypocrisy.
• Mini Series and book example: in Porterhouse Blue a middle-aged bedder, who senses a college's only research graduate student's secret obsession for her, sneaks into his room in the middle of the night and rapes him. However, moments into the act they both explode because, while sneaking in, she lit the gas without knowing the chimney was blocked. (For reasons too complicated to explain, the blockage consists of gas-filled condoms, so the explosion is pretty spectacular.)
• Subverted on an episode of Special Unit 2, in which the Monster of the Week only targeted virgins. Although those girls all recovered in the end, as opposed to many victims of the week.
• In Supernatural, many women who have onscreen sex with Sam or even kiss him are doomed to die afterward, and it's not much better for women who sleep with Dean.
  • Sam's long-term girlfriend Jessica suffers a flaming death in the pilot that matches how Sam's mother was killed, and the show later reveals that Jessica had already been killed and demon-possessed at the time.
  • Sarah Blake initially survives kissing Sam in the first season's "Provenance", but returns in the eighth just to be killed by Crowley because the brothers previously saved her and Sam cares about her.
  • In "Heart", Sam is forced to kill Madison, the first woman he has brought himself to sleep with since Jessica, because there's no cure for being a werewolf and she wants to die.
  • After a long, twisted sexual relationship with the demon Ruby, Sam learns in "Lucifer Rising" she was manipulating him the whole time to resurrect Lucifer. He holds her in place as Dean skewers her with her own knife.
  • One of Sam's former teenage love interests whom he at least had his first kiss with is a kitsune who feeds her sick son freshly killed human organs. Sam trusts her reasons, but Dean kills her behind Sam's back.
  • The hunter Annie Hawkins has had sex with Sam, Dean, and Bobby Singer at separate times— and she shows up for an episode when she's already a ghost.
  • Castiel, who has lost his grace and struggling with being human, is taken in by a kind, pretty young woman named April. He loses his virginity to her, but the next morning she reveals herself to be a Reaper sent to torture and kill him. He's revived, she's killed.
  • Lampshaded when Sam pretends to become a born-again virgin:
    Suzy: Sam, what brought you here to reclaim your virginity?
    Sam: Well, I guess because every woman I've ever had relations with, uh... it hasn't ended well.
    Dean: [chuckling] He ain't lying.
  • Subverted in season 4's "Sex and Violence" when the brothers are hunting an unidentified siren. Signs point to the medical examiner as the siren and she has sex with Sam while he seems overly interested in her, but the real siren is the guy Dean is cosying up with.
  • Inverted in the middle of season 5 when Jo rejects Dean's flirting during their "last night on Earth", saying she'd prefer to keep her self-respect... and she dies later in the episode anyway.
• Lampshaded in That '70s Show when the gang goes to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974 in one episode. After one girl is killed following the events of the trope, Hyde comments that she had to die "as all movie sluts must do."
• In Torchwood, in the second episode ("Day One") there's a sex gas alien that inhabits a young woman's body and has sex with men to remain alive via orgasmic energy, but this in turn kills the man, thus her victims literally died by sex.
• Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps: In the episode When Janet killed Jonny, Gaz is killed by Donna's severed legs. And he doesn't mind it.
• VH1 did a special regarding horror movies. Throughout the show, they listed "Horror Movie Rules". One of the top rules was simply, "Virgins live, sluts die."
• This happens in seasons 7/8 of The X-Files A few episodes after Mulder and Scully start their sexual relationship, Mulder is abducted and returned dead.
• It is invoked in the final episode of the first series of Y Gwyll by Dyfan. He justifies the murder of Gwen, with whom DCI Mathias starts an affair, by claiming that they were profaning the resting place of Gwen's adoptive daughter/Dyfan's biological daughter (they only kissed in the bogs).

Music

• "White Pearl, Black Oceans", a song by power metal group Sonata Arctica. A reclusive lighthouse keeper heads into town one night, meets a woman, and later sleeps with her. On his way home, her husband beats him so badly that he's unable to make it back in time to light his lamp. Naturally, a ship crashes that very night, everyone on board dies, and the lighthouse keeper is so ridden with guilt that he throws himself from his tower.
• Briefly treated for laughs in the video for "Sweet N Sour" by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. A couple is making out in a bathroom and then a monster comes out of the toilet are decapitates them.
• The video for "Bad Romance" uses this.
• The Bonzo Dog Band's "Death Cab for Cutie". Girl cheats on her boyfriend, takes a cab home, driver jumps a red light, splat. (Bit unfair on the driver, though, unless he was the one she was cheating with.)
• The video for Cephalic Carnage's "Ohrwurm" is a rather gruesome and graphic rendition of this trope.
• Adam Ant's "Here Comes The Grump" from his solo album Friend or Foe?
  Doctors said: "Adam, sex kills"
  So come inside, come inside, come inside, come inside
  Come inside and die
• K.T. Oslin brings up the AIDS scare in "You Can't Do That":
  Well let's talk about my love life
  It used to be so free
  If I saw something I wanted
  I just drag it home with me
  Now you're talking blood tests
  And sexual history
  Aw it used to be fun to do run, run
  Now it's life and destiny

Music Videos

• The music video for "DyE - Fantasy" has a bunch of teens mutated into monsters with one of them being killed by having her eyes explode from looking at an Eldritch Abomination... for breaking into a pool to make out. Yes.
• Implied in the video for the Ultravox song "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes". The video's protagonist is a worker at a nuclear power plant who, when the reactor goes into meltdown with no hope of stopping the explosion, hurries home to spend one last romantic evening with his wife. The video ends with the couple in bed; the last thing we see is a shot of their television (bearing an onscreen message warning of the impending disaster) which then goes blank as a blinding light floods the room.

Myths & Religion

• The wrong kind of sex in a lot of mythology and classic literature (premarital, adultery, incest, impulsive, etc. depending on the age) could lead to various unpleasant fates, from infertility to being turned into trees.
  • For instance, in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus accidentally marries and has sex with his mother Iocaste. And just to show that sexism is timeless, guess which one of the two of them dies, and which one goes on to become a cult hero in Oedipus at Colonus?
    • To be fair, Iocaste commits suicide, specifically because of her learning that Oedipus is her son. Oedipus apparently thinks it sufficient to tear his own eyes out of his eye sockets.
    • In classic Greek theater, the hero of a tragedy was never allowed to die, but suffer greatly and live with the pain in order to grow as a person from it so this was more a convention of the theater style of the time rather than a literary choice.
    • And according to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and Euripides' Phoenician Women, his sons Etheocles and Polyneices thought of him as a curse and a pariah to the point of forcing him to step down as king, locking him away and later kicking him out of Thebes along with his daughter (and their sister) Antigone.
    • His father Laius abducted and raped Chrysippus (who he was the tutor of) and the gods placed a curse on his family, saying that Laius' son would kill his father and marry his mother.
• Most Death by Sex tropes originate from the fact that Scripture prescribes capital punishment for many forms of sex: Adultery, homosexuality, bestiality. Many experts now believe that this was the Jewish way of increasing their population numbers through increased births, in comparison to other nations that allowed and encouraged other kinds of sex. When Christianity also adopted these laws among other cultures, the moral became woven into stories ever since, as An Aesop theme that "God Is Watching" and that He punishes those who choose to violate his law; this is also symbolic of the idea that such types of sex are essentially "killing" the persons in an extended sense (i.e their descendants, society, etc).
  • Not all violations were punishable by death, however. If neither of the lovers was married (or betrothed), the Bible commands the couple to be married immediately, unless the woman's father refused. Note, this order to get married (and pay the dowry associated with the marriage) stands whether or not a child was conceived. Oh, and a man who married his wife this way can never divorce her.
    • Though this also held for rape. It just about makes sense within the view at the time of women as property - you break it, you bought it, essentially. However, from the wife's point of view, when compared to spending the rest of your life inescapably married to your rapist, death by sex might be preferable. It should be borne in mind that the victim was never required to live with her rapist or ever sleep with him again.
    • The reason for this being that in Bible times non-widowed non-virgins had virtually no chance of being married after being deflowered, (unless already betrothed) so marrying her rapist/lover was the only way she could get married and have some status in society. Getting married was a woman's only option in those days unless she wanted to be an outcast.
  • Not all scholars agree that homosexuality was outlawed; in fact, it was more likely just talking about ritual prostitution, pederasty, and/or raping of POWs, all of which were common practices throughout the Ancient World.
    • Or anal sex, hence the specified "like a woman" in the passages. Other forms of homosexual acts would have been OK though.
  • In the Book of Numbers, a man named Zimri has sex with a Midianite woman named Cozbi (who has been taken into his household as a wife or a concubine), and the two get run through with a spear in the middle of the act. It seems to be a case of a Maligned Mixed Marriage, as Cozbi is both a foreigner and a pagan.
• Mahabharata: Pandu, the King of Hastinapura, goes on a hunting expedition, and kills a stag that was mating with a doe. The stag and doe turn out to be the sage Kindama and his wife who wanted privacy. The dying Kindama curses Pandu that he will die should he have sex with anyone. The despondent king abdicates in favour of his blind brother and retires to the forest with his two queens, Kunti and Madri. Pandu practices celibacy while he requests his wives to invoke the demigods and have children with them. Thus the five Pandavas are born. After several years, Pandu is overcome with lust one day upon seeing Madri return from bathing and is unable to restrain himself. He dies due to the curse and the grief-stricken Madri commits suicide, while Kunti is forced to live in order to raise her five young sons.
  • Long ago, there was a king named Sudasa who ruled over Ayodhya. Due to a series of unfortunate events, Sudasa is cursed by his preceptor Vashistha to become Rakshasa (a cannibal demon) for twelve years. Sudasa lives in a jungle, and one day, he encounters a sage having an intimate moment with his wife. Impelled by cannibalistic desires, Sudasa devours the sage, and consequently, the Rakshasa is cursed by his wife that he will die if he tries to have sex. After twelve years, Sudasa returns to his original human form but is unable to have children. He requests his queen, Madayanti, to approach Vashistha and have a son with him. The son, Asmaka eventually becomes the next king and continues the dynasty.
• Ramayana: The sage Agastya narrates the backstory of Ravana to Rama. Once, Ravana and his soldiers set up camp in the Himalayas, during his expedition to conquer the celestial realms. One night, Ravana sees a gorgeous nymph named Rambha and approaches her. Rambha reveals that she is engaged to Nalakubera, the son of Ravana's elder half-brother, Kubera (God of Wealth). However, Ravana has his way with Rambha who rushes to her fiance in tears. Nalakubera consoles Rambha and curses Ravana that he will die if he ever commits rape. Since this curse doesn't break the terms Ravana's boon of invincibility (to not be killed by any creature except humans), Ravana fears his nephew's curse and does not violate any woman.
• Discussed and averted in The Epic of Gilgamesh, where the titular character refused Ishtar, a goddess, seducing him, and in a very interesting case of genre-savviness (remember, this is THE oldest preserved written story EVER, it is the example from not far away from Ur), by naming the mythological figures who met horrible demises accepting such offers. It's debatable whether he knew what his refusal would mean or not but most accounts say he knew he was caught in a Morton's Fork so chose the path he was more comfortable: facing down the divine rage of Ishtar's father.

Puppet Shows

• Meet the Feebles is a complicated case because almost all of the named characters die regardless of whether or not they had sex. The ones that do are arguable borderline examples though:
  • Heidi kills Bletch and Samantha during her rampage. Trevor, who drugs Lucille and almost rapes her, also gets killed by Heidi.
  • Harry spends most of the movie thinking he's going to die from "The Big One" (myxomatosis). He's informed by his doctor that he only has a milder disease and is not going to die, only to be killed by Heidi moments afterward. Harry is the only character in the movie who has sex on-screen and dies without doing something else to deserve it, and his death is more ironic than karmic.
  • Dennis, the perverted panty-sniffer who is used as a pornstar by Trevor, is used by Bletch as a Sacrificial Lamb to test the quality of drugs he purchased. Because the "cocaine" is really Borax, Dennis dies from ingestion.
  • Sidney, who has nonmarital sex offscreen before the events of the film, is shot in the kneecaps while coming to the rescue of his son, Seymour, but lives. The mother of the child, Sandy, gets her head blown off by Heidi.
  • Sebastian, the Camp Gay director who sings a whole song about the joys of the supposedly sinful act of Sodomy but doesn't have sex onscreen, survives by hiding in a giant carrot during the rampage.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder since it stylises itself as "the Darker and Edgier Dungeons & Dragons", invokes this with a number of its monstrous races, especially the Always Female ones that thusly need humanoid men to procreate.
  • Harpies traditionally eat their mates after sex, and in fact consider it shameful not to do so, especially if they become pregnant as a result.
  • In a reversal, though, Sirens are well-known for literally dying of grief and heartbreak (or just committing grief-fuelled suicide) if their mates run away or are taken from them.
  • Hags may or may not eat their lovers; it depends on whether they feel hungry or think it would be more "fun" not to.
  • Jorogumos mate with humanoid men to become pregnant, then use their poison to paralyze their lover before implanting the fertilized eggs inside of him; the jorogumo painstakingly keeps him alive and well until the egg hatches, whereupon the baby jorogumos eat their father as their first meal.
  • Lamias tend to eat their lovers after they grow bored with them, assuming they don't kill them in the course of sating their lust.
  • Thriae Queens look like this trope but are an inversion since they require human consorts to fertilize their eggs. Generally speaking, they only take "prime specimens." Since their lot is to wind up as the honored concubines of a sexy Bee Lady, living in luxury while consuming a Fantastic Drug that leaves them in a blissful state, many thriae have no problem recruiting. Some take concubines from slaves offered up in exchange for the queen's prophecies. When the concubines are no longer able to perform their duties, they are painlessly euthanized (like a pet), consumed, and replaced. So it's death by sex because age prevents the men from having sex.
  • A few variants of the "succubus demon" archetype:
    • Succubi steal life force through acts of passion in a straight-up version of this trope; they will switch genders and otherwise change shape to hunt different targets. Succubi also want to use sexuality to tempt mortals to do evil acts because sin is more important to demons than simple destruction.
    • Incubi are a different creature in Pathfinder, being a male demon born from souls that were damned for engaging in their sexual desires that were horribly violent. The likely outcome of being an incubus' victim is the sex is not consensual and death will be a relief.
    • The Erodaemons are a group of daemons who embody death by heartbreak and will drive people to suicide and murder by seducing them and messing with their emotions, reputations, and relationships for fun.
    • Next there are the Paraikas, evil djinn-like creatures who embody destruction by unbridled lust. They like to tempt mortals into ruin — and while they're at it, they spread sexually-transmitted disease because it amuses them.
    • Folca is the daemon Harbinger (demigod) of abduction, children, and sweets. Yikes.
    • Naderi is the goddess of tragic romances and suicides.
    • It goes horribly right for one succubus, Arueshalae, who seduced a priestess of Desna (goddess of dreams, stars, travel, and luck). She decided to see the dying priestess' mind and found herself drawn into Desna's presence. Chaotic Good Desna received her priestess, then turned to Arueshalae, saying "Even demons can dream." Fast forward a bit, and Arueshalae is The Atoner and canonically a redeemed soul with the outward appearance of a succubus, as well as Desna's champion.
• Grave Robbers from Outer Space got in on this with its "Only the Virgin Survives" card.
• All Flesh Must Be Eaten: Invoked deliberately in the scenario "PHADE to Black". Four years ago, a mad teenager used an obscure voodoo ritual to raise his AIDS-infected, drug-overdosed girlfriend back from the dead, screwed her and then destroyed her the next morning when he came back to his senses. However, the virus in her body had mutated into a new zombie STD and the promiscuous lad began spreading it far and wide when he moved to a huge state university not long after. He and many hundreds of thousands died in a shocking wave of PHADE deaths... and then the real horror of the disease revealed itself, as the dead rose up again as semi-intelligent, blood-drinking zombies.

Theater

• In the Broadway musical Into the Woods, the heroes split up to search for Jack to protect him from a marauding Giant. While she's searching, the Baker's Wife meets up with the Prince and has sex with him; she's crushed by the Giant immediately afterward.
  • Well, after she has a soliloquy/musical number that sums her mindset up as "my affair has made me more grateful for what I have but hey it was kind of nice." She's more killed by barely-repentant adultery than killed by sex since she's a married lady with a child.
  • Meanwhile, by contrast, the entirely unrepentant and equally married Prince is punished by hooking up with Sleeping Beauty. Then again, who was expecting something by Stephen Sondheim to be fair?
• In Victorian theatre, the only accepted way for a "fallen" woman - that is, any woman who had sex outside of marriage, or had an affair - to redeem herself was to die. Preferably after seeing the horrible consequences of her actions. One notable example is East Lynne: A woman is convinced by a rival of her husband that her husband is having an affair, and so agrees to run off with him. But the rival abandons her, so she returns to her former house in disguise as a governess to her own child. When she reveals herself to him, he dies. Everyone then finds out who she is, but she falls ill and dies shortly thereafter. Her melodramatic cry on her child's death, "Dead! And never called me mother!" is still quite well-known today.
  • Aversion: W. S. Gilbert's 1874 play, Charity has up a woman, Mrs. Van Burgh, who was virtuous in every way, except she had never actually married her husband. She has spent all her time since his death doing good deeds and trying to rescue other women back to the path of virtue. Victorian theatre demanded that she be ruined, and die in order to be redeemed. Gilbert allowed her to be ruined by public opinion and the hypocritical antagonist (he lectures Ruth, one of the women Mrs. Van Burgh gave a second chance to, on how abominable it is that she is being foisted on society as if she was an unfallen woman. Guess who had seduced her?) - but then both Mrs. Van Burgh and Ruth head off to Australia as traveling companions for a colonial bishop whose son is in love with Mrs. Van Burgh's daughter. You wouldn't believe the uproar this caused in the newspapers of the time, which fell over themselves trying to see which could declare the play more immoral.
  • Another aversion. Dickens' David Copperfield has Emily, David's first love, dumping her fiancé Cam right before their wedding to run away with David's best friend James Steerforth and become his concubine. She ultimately lives, and after LOTS of misfortune (principally, Steerforth being an absolute Jerkass to her), she goes to Australia with her father Daniel. The book also includes Emily's best friend Martha, a prostitute, who helps Daniel and David to find the missing Emily and also survives.
  • Dickens used the trope straight in Oliver Twist with poor Nancy, who also was a prostitute and ended up dead.
    • This is less "because she's a prostitute" and more "because she hangs around with Bill Sykes." Granted, she does think Sykes loves her, and presumably has had sex with him.
• Stephen Sondheim does it again in Passion, where Fosca dies three days after, um, a final bit of passion.
• Romeo and Juliet would be an example, except the two secretly marry before they do that sort of thing. Although since they marry against their families' wishes, and the story was originally meant to be a warning tale of young people who fall in love too quickly, do foolish things, and suffer horrible consequences, it still counts as an example of "death as a punishment for socially unacceptable sex".
• Done after a fashion in Wicked where the very next scene after Fiyero and Elphaba have their G-rated sex scene in 'As long as you're mine' and kiss Fiyero gets beaten to death. He gets better though. Sort of. The novel, of course, plays it straight.
• Two Words: Spring Awakening.
• Subverted in Much Ado About Nothing as Hero is falsely accused of sleeping with another character the night before her wedding. To clear her name, she fakes her death which forces all the characters who ostracized her to realize that they were wrong to mistrust her.

Video Games

• Occurs in 6 Days a Sacrifice, part of the Chzo Mythos. Janine having sex with Theo was what ended up allowing John Defoe to take full control of her. By the end of it, she got impaled in the chest and literally crushed inside a wall. NEVER have sex when there's obvious signs of someone being partially possessed.
• One of the more controversial things you can do in the Grand Theft Auto series, since its introduction into the 3D world, was to be able to take a prostitute to a secluded part of whatever city you're in (like in an alley or a closed-off section of it), then wait until the car stops shaking. Afterwards, when the prostitute comes out of the car, you could then murder her and get the money back that you spent on the experience (since she then was programmed to return to the game world as a pedestrian that you could kill).
• In Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, it's more like Kinky Sex Signals Death. The female BDSM fanatic is murdered, while the woman who is having monogamous vanilla sex with the protagonist and wants a committed relationship survives.
• In the Leisure Suit Larry series, this trope appears twice.
  • In Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards sleeping with the hooker at Lefty's Bar without protection causes your family jewels to explode a minute or so later.
  • In Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), you can seduce the maid in your resort hotel room and sleep with her, only to have her brother (who's in the military and likes to shoot things) walk in on you.
• In WhichWay, a flash adventure game, every time you end up with a naked or half-naked woman on screen, you will be ambushed by a monster within seconds.
• In Until Dawn, Jess can suffer this fate, depending on how good at Pressing X To Not Die you are. Can be played even straighter if Mike and Jessica are the only characters to die, though Mike can only die long after trying to have sex with Jessica, and is one of the easiest characters to save.
• A variation occurs in SHUFFLE!, where one of the more magically-inclined characters you can choose erases Rin's memories of her during sex. His memory is returned to him by an act of The Power of Love, which she wasn't expecting.
• In the Silent Hill series, any woman who implies that she might perform sexual favors on the protagonist will die in an agonizing way within a few scenes. It began with Maria in Silent Hill 2 and continued with Cynthia in Silent Hill 4.
• Inverted in God of War III. Aphrodite has sex with Kratos late in the game. She is the only Greek God spared of his wrath. This is more a case of Dummied Out, as the designers originally planned for Aphrodite to pull a knife on Kratos if you went back for round two, which would end in her death, but decided against it.
• In the Neverwinter Nights module series The Bastard of Kosigan, you can go through it in such a way that every woman you make out with or have sex with dies soon afterward. Of course, being the non-linear sort of story it is, all of them but Alex can survive too.
  • Several quests in A Dance with Rogues, most notably the Dhorn Generals' Heads quest in the first chapter, involve having sex with someone to get something before killing them.
• Fallout
  • Fallout 3 has a house in Minefield with two skeletons embracing on a bed, indicating they may have been lovemaking when the bombs hit.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, the player sometimes gets the opportunity to invoke this on others — most notably, a female main character can opt to screw and then murder Benny in his sleep! Or just make him think you're going to sleep with him in order to get him vulnerable.
• After a while of playing Kara no Shoujo you begin to wonder if maybe the writers were trying to scare teens away from sex. The first set of victims are targeted partially because of this and most of the time the main character has sex he ends up dead soon after. That or the girl does.
• Happens to a seduced NPC in the Human Noble origin in Dragon Age: Origins. He or she opens the door of the playable character's room to investigate a noise and gets an arrow in the chest. However, if you choose not to seduce them, you'll find their dead body slightly further on, so the only real difference is whether or not their death occurs onscreen.
• If you side with Citra in the ending of Far Cry 3, she literally backstabs Jason after having sex with him.
• NetHack has the succubus and incubus. Without proper protection, there are quite some ways for an encounter with them to be fatal.
  • Slash'EM Extended makes it much more likely for the encounter to cause negative effects for the player, and also adds more ways for the player to die, e.g. suddenly being attacked by the rape demon after they already took off their clothes.
• Your character dies after mating in Cubivore; the number of mutations you have determines how many times you mate before giving up the ghost. After that, you continue playing as one of your offspring.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has a surprisingly tragic example, with Paul Anderson, an Anarch ghoul you are sent to get informations from. Turned out he had sex with Hannah, his prostitute girlfriend, who he was genuinely in love with. Unfortunately for both of them, she had just been infected with a disease by an Apocalypse Cult of insane vampires; by the time you arrive, Paul already has succumbed to the sickness, and Hannah survives just long enough to give you clues about the cause before dying as well.

Web Animation

• Weebl & Bob: "We were doing Position 97 near a porthole... and she just fell out!"]]

Webcomics

• Chopping Block has this too — is there any Slasher Movie theme Mr. Butch didn't try?
• This Dumbing of Age strip provides some Conversational Troping. The morning after Dorothy and Walky's first time together, Dorothy is horrified to learn she overslept and missed a class. Walky jokingly compares their situation to a horror movie; unfortunately, he does so within earshot of Joyce.
• Averted in The Order of the Stick. While Nale regularly sleeps with Sabine (a succubus), he uses potions to protect himself from her touch-based Level Drain powers.

Web Original

• Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG 501-1000
  835. I cannot lure out the Psycho Killer into an ambush by having sex with another character.
• The Dorkly article, "These Eight Characters are Definitely Going to Die", includes in the list, "Female Character who Got Naked".
  How They're Going to Die: As implied punishment for expressing their sexuality.
  Why: Because the ghosts of our Puritan forebearers still haunt us.
• The various "Rules for dating my teenage daughter" lists (where the rules are stated by a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad) feature several movies which are unacceptable as date material as they may lead to sex. The notable exception is "Movies featuring chainsaws are okay" (by implication, movies showing teenagers having sex being butchered by a lunatic offer useful moral lessons).

Web Videos

• Parodied in the Cracked video "Why Horror Movie Slashers Are the Best Wingmen Ever", which features a slasher movie villain deliberately arranging for two good-looking teens to have sex so that he can invoke this trope.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Penny dies in the third act, which was also when Captain Hammer started bragging about sleeping with her. During a PRESS CONFERENCE. While it is possible that he is lying (Captain Hammer being a total Jerkass, after all), the fact that Penny looks uncomfortable at his assertion, not outraged, confirms they did it.
  Cpt. Hammer: [singing] This is so nice; I just might sleep with the same girl twice.
• Nightmare Time: In the episode “Abstinence Camp,” any campers who even come close to having sex are killed by Lumber Axe, a murderer who hates any sort of intimacy. He kills one camper for masturbation, two more who are making out in the woods, and almost axes two more for showering in the same stall before they are interrupted. Only Grace, who is so pure she hasn't even seen herself naked is able to take him down.
• WatchMojo described this as #10 in their list of "Top 10 Horror Movie Cliches":
  Let's kick this list off with the cliché that's probably the greatest reason many of us enjoy watching gorefests to begin with. Horror films always have people, specifically young adults, getting it on and baring it all. Not just eye candy, it mirrors teen fears around sexuality. As a result, most horror flicks push the parent-approved message of abstinence. Don't believe us? Then why does the film's always blonde quote-on-quote "whore" get axed and the prudish but keen-minded brunette always survive?
• In The Nostalgia Chick's review of Dante's Peak, she claims that volcanoes have a sapient hatred of fornication since the first people it kills are a pair of Skinny Dipping tourists and the hero is motivated by a dead fiancée. It also spends much of the movie "cockblocking" him and his new Love Interest.

Western Animation

• Futurama:
  • Episode "Fear of a Bot Planet" parodies the B-movie tradition by having a robot couple making out in a car say things like "It's okay to let our guard down, even for a moment!" before being attacked by a "scary human".
  • Episode "Amazonian Women in the Mood" in which the men are sentenced to "death by snu snu". On learning of their fates, Fry and Brannigan are naturally thrilled.
  Fry: Farewell, friends. I never thought I'd die this way... but I'd always really hoped!
• The Space Mutant movies in The Simpsons seem to parody the B-movie genre, as the aliens tend to attack young lovers or horny teenagers making out. (Or in one case, being a shapeshifter who seduces a man before attacking him.)
• Discussed in Total Drama Island. In the horror movie-themed episode, Genre Savvy Gwen lists three rules for surviving a horror movie, the final one being a G-rated version of this.
  Gwen: Okay, rule one: Don't go off on your own. Rule two: if you do go off on your own, never go into the woods. Rule three: If you do go into the woods, never ever make out in the woods, or you will die in the woods! '[pause]'' Where's Izzy and Owen?
  Duncan: Breaking rules one through three.

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Doesn't matter, had sex!

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