Valentine's Day Violence

Someone is going to have their heart broken...

"Oh, me. My humble love note is turning into a Valentine's Day massacre."

— Apu, The Simpsons, "I'm With Cupid"

Ah, the 14th of February.

Spring is approaching, and love is in the air. Flowers and chocolates are exchanged, couples showcasing their public displays of affection while the onlookers gag in disgust and expressing their vitriol on this particular day, and... wait, are we hearing sirens and people screaming for their lives on one street? And why are there crowds beating the bloody living crap out of each other on another street? And why are there Hockey Mask and Chainsaw-clad slashers, and heartbroken Yanderes not given chocolates, running rampant on yet another street? And several couples arguing and brawling right in front of you? And why are there supernatural tentacles creeping through the sewer grates? And is that a snowstorm up ahead?

Seems this is not what you had in mind when it comes to "painting the town red" on Valentine's Day.

Even the holiday's origins aren't even fluffy and romantic to begin with; St. Valentine, according to legend, was beheaded after defying an emperor's edict on banning soldiers from marrying. And Lupercalia, its ancient Roman predecessor, had a ritual where goats and a dog were sacrificed, whose blood was anointed to laughing priests and their skins were used as whips by the laughing naked priests to be whipped at towards women praying for fertility and unsuspecting passers-by. The modern Trope Codifier of this is the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, where seven members of Bugs Moran's gang were killed by rival gangsters pretending to be police, and Al Capone was thought to be the perpetrator of the massacre.

As the saying goes: All's fair in love and war.

A Sub-Trope to Crappy Holidays and Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday, expect also action and crime films, and Valentines Day Episodes to deviate from the typical romantic flair and to spice up what is normally a Dump Month. Might involve a Perilous Marriage Proposal or Wedding Smashers.

For action and horror-themed Christmas-related tropes respectively, see An Ass-Kicking Christmas and Twisted Christmas. See also Valentine's Day Vitriol, for when people simply dislike Valentine's Day.

---

Examples

Anime & Manga

• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: The "Bloody Valentine Incident" was a nuclear attack that destroyed the PLANT space colony of Junius 7 on Valentine's Day, triggering the first war between the PLANTs (and their unified military, Z.A.F.T.) and the Earth Alliance.

Comic Strips

• Many Valentine's Day-themed strips in Calvin and Hobbes have Hobbes riling Calvin up by teasing him about having a crush on Susie, Calvin getting enraged and the two of them getting into a Big Ball of Violence. One occasion when they did this was interrupted by Susie showing up and throwing a snowball at Calvin for sending her a valentine's card with a drawing of her as a worm-eaten corpse.
  Hobbes: Oh HO-O-O! You sent her a CARD?? Doctor Love, paging Doctor I.M.N. Love!
  Calvin: (buried in the snow) I'd say we're about due for another St. Valentine's Day massacre.

Fan Works

• A variant with A Darker Path; It isn't about the day specifically, but to arrange an Ironic Death for the mind-controlling villain Heartbreaker, Taylor hits him in the jaw with a foot-long Valentine's Day candy heart (shattering his jaw and breaking the heart in half) to stop him using his powers, then stabs him in the heart with one of the jagged pieces.

Film — Live-Action

• Holidays: In "Valentine's Day", Maxine has a thing for her coach. Once he gives her a Valentine, she decides to reward him with Alpha Bitch Heidi's heart, since he needs a transplant.
• Hospital Massacre: Both the prologue and the film itself are set on violent Valentine's Days nineteen years apart.
  • In the prologue, Susan turns down Harold on Valentine's Day, and mocks him with her friend David. Harold then breaks into her house and impales David on a hatstand.
  • In the movie itself, Susan stops by a hospital on Valentine's Day, where Harold kills multiple people, including her boyfriend Jack (whose head he presents to her in a box) and tries to kill her.
• My Bloody Valentine and its remake both have a series of murders taking in a small mining town near Valentine's Day.
• Picnic at Hanging Rock: The mysterious disappearance of the girls at Appleyard College happens at a Valentine's Day picnic on Hanging Rock. It befits the sense of sexual repression that motivates the rest of the story, and the disappearance is never solved or answered, ultimately causing two more deaths in the aftermath.
• The kickstarter for the plot for Some Like It Hot was when musicians Joe and Jerry witnessed the Valentine's Day Massacre, and fearing for their lives, dressed up as women and joining an all-girls jazz band.
• The St Valentines Day Massacre, a 1967 film starring Jason Robards dramatizing the aforementioned massacre in Chicago.
• Valentine:
  • The prologue is set at a Valentine's dance years prior when Jeremy Melton asked each of the girls to dance with him. Only Dorothy accepted, but when they were caught making out, Dorothy accused Jeremy of raping her. Their classmates then attacked him and pigs' blood poured on him.
  • Years later, Jeremy returns in the run-up to Valentine's Day and murders the girls he asked to dance (and anyone else close to them). He sends them gory Valentine's Day cards, before hunting them down and killing them in a Cupid mask. He then attacks at a Valentine's Day party, where he kills all of them (the police, and plenty of the guests) except Final Girl Kate, gets Dorothy killed by the police and misidentified as the killer in revenge, and appears to get away with all his crimes.
  Roses are red, violets are blue, they'll need dental records to identify you.

Literature

• Massively Multiplayer: The Valentine's Day Massacre, the timeline's equivalent to Columbine, has 21 people shot dead at school as part of a Murder-Suicide.
• Picnic at Hanging Rock: The girls disappear at a Valentine's Day picnic, where people's watches stop working, and a full-scale time warp seems to happen, with events occurring either much faster or slower than seems natural or possible.

Live-Action TV

• Criminal Minds:
  • It's mentioned offhandedly that it's Valentine's Day at the end of "Closing Time", an episode that saw multiple people get killed in projection of the Serial Killer's discovery that his wife was cheating on him and his son is Not Actually His Child. JJ also kills him at the end.
  • "Mr and Mrs Anderson" is set around Valentine's Day and shows Morgan and Garcia preparing for Valentine's Day while the team goes about catching a married couple who are kidnapping and murdering women at the time, though it turns out that their crimes date back to 2010.
• CSI: NY: "Blood Actually" shows the team splitting up in three to solve three cases on Valentine's Day. All have a degree of ironic love themes ultimately culminating in violence, best illustrated by "In The Name Of Love." An apparently Ugly Guy, Hot Wife combination turns out to have been a murder by the Clingy Jealous Girl wife, who became obsessed with the thought that her husband was cheating on her — because he put a passcode on his phone. He had actually been planning a trip for them to take together.
• Flashpoint: The fourth season episode "A Day in the Life" features the team handling multiple calls on Valentine's Day, with the more experienced characters (rookie Raf is also introduced in this episode) declaring it "the busiest day of the year". Considering that each episode usually focuses on one case, and this one focuses on three, with other teams mentioned as being busy handling other cases off-screen, they may be right. The cases in this episode:
  • A suicidal man threatening to jump off a bridge due to grief over his wife's death. Valentine's Day is both their wedding anniversary and the anniversary of her death.
  • A woman who has discovered that her underaged daughter is dancing at a nightclub, and has taken the manager hostage, believing him to have unscrupulous designs on the girl.
  • An obsessed Stalker with a Crush invading his former workplace looking for the object of his affections, and killing a man he suspects of keeping them apart.
• Inside No. 9: In "The Twelve Days of Christine", the Valentine's Day section shows Christine getting a Valentine from her first boyfriend, from primary school, who died when he was young, which begins a series of strange and unsettling events when he seems to be stalking her. However, this is all a Red Herring — he's actually a personification of Christine's death coming towards her.
• Into the Dark: Two out of the three Valentine's Day episodes have horrific acts of violence being perpetrated on the holiday.
  • "Down" starts on February 13th and has Jennifer get stalked by a guy she casually hooks up with after they get stuck in an elevator. However, it continues into the next day as it turns out he's a Stalker with a Crush who kills two people and abducts her, causing her to kill him in self-defence in the early hours of Valentine's Day.
  • "My Valentine" shows the titular Valentine preparing for a comeback concert on Valentine's Day. After being confronted by her abusive ex, Royal, and his new girlfriend, Trezzure, she winds up as the Final Girl once her best friend and everyone else at the bar is murdered and Trezzure kills Royal.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • Valentine's Day: Wealthy banker Boyd sees his wife Christine being raped via video chat on Valentine's Day when he calls her with the surprise news that he's coming home for Valentine's Day so they can celebrate together. Christine is then abducted by her attacker. Or, at least, that's how it appears, until it turns out Christine was actually just into having violent sex with her lover. She faked the abduction for money once Boyd caught her. However, her co-conspirator still ends up going to prison, while she's found not guilty.
  • "Holden's Manifesto": Though Holden does much, much worse acts of violence, we learn that he was fired from a job for pouring ice water on a guy's groin on Valentine's Day.

Podcasts

• The first season of the podcast Batman: The Audio Adventures follows Batman on the lead-up to Valentine's Day, when Joker plans a massive attack on Gotham involving a dangerous love potion.
• Welcome to Night Vale: An episode set on Valentine's Day treats the holiday as a nightmarish Lovecraftian disaster where Valentines are basically bombs and being selected to be someone's Valentine is an agonizing fate.

Professional Wrestling

• WWE's "St. Valentine's Day Massacre: In Your House" pay-per-view event, whose title alludes to the 1929 Chicago massacre. The event was the debut of Big Show, then known as The Giant.

Video Games

• Batman: Arkham City: Visiting Calendar Man on Valentine's Day has him recall a moment where he stalks and chases a girl to her apartment and slowly but horribly smothered her, loudly proclaiming his love and drowning out her screams.
• A variation: the DLC Mad Moxxi's Wedding Day Massacre for Borderlands 2 is themed around St. Valentine, and has the titular Moxxi and her daughter Ellie trying to put an end to the Hodunks-Zafords blood feud by marrying two of their members. In the process, they steal valuable things from both clans (with grunts from said clans reacting accordingly) in order to create a love potion. During the namesake wedding, it's revealed both members of the couple were Goliaths, and upon losing their helmets, they start rampaging on the Vault Hunters, with their families backing them up. Cue the massacre and the promise of both clans, now united under a single cause, to destroy both Moxxi, Ellie and the Vault Hunters.
• Persona 5: Played for laughs. If Joker chooses to date multiple women in the game, they'll become aware of each other when they all show up to see him on Valentine's Day simultaneously. This results in them beating him up in retaliation for being a two-timer.

Web Video

• David Near's "Laughing Jack's Story Time (Valentine Surprise)" has Laughing Jack narrate the time he killed an entire family on Valentine's Day. While the parents go out for a romantic dinner, LJ murders the children by drowning some of them in their own pool and cutting out their hearts to leave on the windowsill. When the parents return, they too suffer similarly grisly fates.

Western Animation

• Class of the Titans: Cronus is inspired by the fact it's Valentine's Day to kidnap Cupid and use his arrows of love to wreak havoc, even managing to nail Herry and convince him he's in love with Theresa (who is not happy that her attempt to deliver Valentine's Day balloonagrams to Jay goes awry as a result).
• At the climax of Ed, Edd n Eddy's Valentines Day Special, "Hanky Panky Hullabaloo", Ed and Eddy, and Lee and Marie Kanker confront each other over Edd and May Kanker's Crack Pairing, culminating in a heated Food Fight all over the Peach Creek Jr. High School cafeteria.
• The Fairly OddParents!: On the episode "Love Struck!", after Timmy gets fed up by Trixie's refusals and Tootie's advances, he wishes for the men and women to be separated. After enjoying the pleasures of manhood and womanhood respectively, and them experiencing a void, Timmy goes to a wall that separates them, and smashes it with a giant steak. As the men and women approach each other and perceive mistrust of one another, they go for a literal battle of the sexes. Timmy is then called by Cupid to fix this and provides him with love-themed weapons to mend the relationships.
• The Simpsons: In "I'm With Cupid", after Apu and his wife Manjula get into an argument, Apu promises to make things up with displays of love on each day leading to Valentine's Day. Feeling inadequate by Apu's gestures, Homer leads a group of Springfield men to stop Apu's last act, a love note written by a skywriter, and gets into a fistfight with the pilot mid-flight.
• South Park: "Cupid Ye" takes place on Valentine's Day, and features Cartman's angel, who is now a raging antisemitic lunatic, going on a rampage and turning everyone in the school into antisemitic zombies.
• In The Spectacular Spiderman, on the episode "Gangland", a seemingly peaceful Valentine's Day summit between New York's three top crime lords (Tombstone, Doc Ock, and Silvermane) quickly (and predictably) erupts into a three-way brawl for control of the criminal underworld, with Spidey himself stepping in to try to protect civilians from being caught in the crossfire.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants "Valentine's Day" episode, Patrick becomes enraged when he thinks Spongebob has forgotten his Valentine's Day gift, and causes mayhem at a local carnival, taking it out on random passersby. When his gift, a massive heart-shaped chocolate balloon, finally does arrive, he bites into it, covering the entire carnival in melted chocolate.

Real Life

• Wikipedia has a list of notable events that occurred on February 14, many of which are violent.
  • The British explorer James Cook was killed in Hawai'i on this day in 1779 after a failed attempt to kidnap the island's chieftain in exchange for a longboat.
  • At least two high-profile school shootings occurred on Valentine's Day: the Northern Illinois University shooting in 2008, which left 5 students and the shooter dead, and the Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School shooting in Parkland, Florida ten years later, which claimed 17 lives and sparked a large youth-driven pro-gun control movement.
  • The St. Valentine's Day Massacre is perhaps the most infamous act of violence in Prohibition-era Chicago. On 14 February 1929, seven men associated with the North Side Gang were tied up and lined up against a warehouse wall where they were shot and killed execution-style by four men, two of whom were dressed as police officers. It is widely believed that Al Capone was behind the killings but he was never charged with the crimes. The fact that Capone was in Florida when it happened provided him with an alibi.
• Even Mother Nature takes part in the chaos. Woe betide a Valentine's Day celebration if the weather forecast predict strong, cold winds and several inches of snow, like this blizzard in 2007, which peaked at the 14th.

---