Examples of White Shirt of Death from Live-Action Films.
- 22 July. When Anders Breivik enters the campground and starts firing on the fleeing children, the ones we see getting hit are invariably wearing white sweatshirts.
- Alien. The crew is wearing white clothes in preparation for going back into hypersleep, when Kane starts thrashing about and blood appears on his white undershirt before the Dynamic Entry of the Chest Burster showers everyone else with his insides.
- Alien 40th Anniversary Shorts. In Contamination, the pristine white walls of the Escape Pod's airlock contrast with the Used Future look, so naturally they get blood smeared on them as Ward staggers through.
- The ending of Ashes and Diamonds uses a white bedsheet to similar effect.
- Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). As well as the usual version worn by one of the detectives gunned down at the start of the siege, there's also the cholo, a white sheet stained with their own blood that the gangbangers lay out in front of the police station to show their commitment to killing everyone inside.
- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. On returning to the United States after the Superman Cold Open, Lois Lane pauses for a moment when unpacking her clothes and seeing blood on the white shirt she was wearing.
- Blood Red Sky. At the start of the hijacking Eightball stabs an air marshal to death, then proudly displays his blood-splattered white steward's shirt to the passengers to intimidate them. When he gets too close to Nadja, she has to restrain herself from vamping out in response to the smell of blood. When Eightball shoots her, she's wearing a white jumper to make the bloodstains clear to the audience, before she comes back to life in The Reveal that she's a vampire.
- In Bound (1996), a character is shot to death wearing a white shirt and standing in a room-wide puddle of pure white paint.
- In the 2022 South Korean action movie Carter, the title character wakes up in a bed with a red blanket on top of him. When he throws aside the blanket, he finds the white sheets of the bed are stained with blood.
- In Chappie, Yolandi wears a white shirt for the final battle. Guess who of the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits dies.
- The Crazies (1973). Happens with the white Hazmat Suits used by the army.
- The duel at the end of Dangerous Liaisons.
- In Death on the Nile (2022), Hercule Poirot examines the blood splatter pattern on a white bulkhead and realises there was a witness to the crime.
- In the Bollywood film Dil Se.., the song and dance "Satrangi Re" foreshadows the fate of Amar by showing him in a black outfit for most of the song, then in all white at the end. Usually, the dancers in Bollywood song and dance numbers have multiple costume changes in one song. Limiting Amar to the two outfits accentuated the symbolism (his dance partner wore at least seven different outfits in the same song).
- The climax of Equilibrium plays with this trope with Christian Bale's character. Although he doesn't die, he does get some blood on himself during the sword fight at the end.
- In Get Carter, Jack Carter stabs Albert Swift, who is wearing a white shirt. The scene was considered pretty shocking for its time.
- The Big Bad in Gladiator wears a full white suit before his climactic duel with Maximus. Makes his blood readily apparent when Maximus shows that he is completely outclassed.
- Glass Onion: Zigzagged. Andi is wearing a fabulous all-white suit when she is shot to death, and the blood spreads all over the pristine suit. But then it's revealed that "Andi" was her sister Helen, who had survived the gunshot but faked being dead via hot sauce to buy time. Helen survives to the end of the film in the suit, but the flashback that imagines Andi's death by poison shows her in the same all-white outfit.
- Heat. All of the participants in the armored car robbery at the beginning of the movie except for Chris Shiherlis wear white hockey masks. Chris, who wears a black mask, is the only one of them to still be alive at the end of the movie, while everyone who wore a white mask is dead.
- Downplayed in Hussar Ballad. Vincento, the only non-Red Shirt, non-Mook casualty, is in a white shirt during his final battle and death while the rest of the soldiers are in uniform (his uniform having been taken by Shura for her disguise). However, due to the film running on Bloodless Carnage, no blood is shown.
- I Care a Lot: In the last scene, Marla is wearing a white suit when she runs into Feldstrom, who promptly shoots her to death in revenge for what she did to his mother.
- The Consultant in The International. Also, the protagonist's white shirt gets a lot of blood splattered on it from those who get shot around him in that scene.
- At the end of Invitation to a Gunfighter, Jules sees Brewster drawing a bead on him and draws his gun. Matt Weaver—thinking Jules is drawing on him—shoots him. The mortally wounded Jules goes through a final confrontation with Brewster with a red stain slowly spreading across the front of his frilly white gambler's shirt. The stain covers almost the entirety of the shirtfront before he finally expires.
- John Wick wears a white shirt under his suit, which is Played for Laughs when he limps back to the Continental Hotel after a gunfight.Wick: How good's your laundry?
Charon: I'm sorry to say that no-one is that good.
Wick: (sighing) No, I thought not.- In the forth entry, Wick wears grey and black shirts for much of the film, only switching to a white shirt for the climax. He has a literal Bulletproof Vest in the form of a lined waistcoat, but it comes off for the final arranged duel between Wick and Caine. The latter is naturally also wearing white in the form of a turtleneck, so the wounds sustained between the pair are more than evident.
- Kate. During a knife fight with several Yakuza in a teahouse, a white shōji screen gets artistically sprayed with blood.
- In Kill Bill, the Bride faces and messily defeats O-Ren Ishii while the latter is clothed in a white kimono and standing in snow.
- Heroic Bloodshed movies do this a lot, and the deaths of people who wear white get quite bloody. Usually, it's the villain wearing white, but at least one heroic example happens with Ah Jong/Jeffrey Chow and Inspector Li Ying from The Killer (1989) during the church shootout. Though then again, Ah Jong, the tragic hero in question, is one of the three main characters to be killed off. And Inspector Li is the one who survives at the end to kill Wong Hoi, which in turn results in his arrest by his fellow officers at the end.
- In the Spanish thriller La sombra de la ley (aka Gun City), Salvador Ortiz is assassinated while wearing a white shirt as he's painting a wall with white paint, leading to both this trope and the blood mixing with the spilled paint. It's also a plot point as the white paint gets on the shoes of the assassin, revealing his identity later.
- In Layer Cake, both the Duke and the protagonist wear neat white outfits when they receive a gunshot to their chest.
- In Lethal Weapon 4, Jet Li's character enters the final showdown dressed entirely in a white version of the black suit he's been wearing for the rest of the movie. They couldn't have made it more clear what was going to happen to him.
- Ninja Assassin. The owner of a laundromat goes to investigate the sounds of a ruckus and finds a white washing machine vibrating erratically before blood starts pouring out of it. Then we Match Cut to someone pouring too much ketchup on takeout meal in a white paper cup.
- In No Time to Die, James Bond removes his black sweater and wraps it around his daughter Mathilde as he sends her and her mother Madeleine to safety. This leaves him in a white sweater when he's shot multiple times by the villain Safin and later dies in a missile strike.
- Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
- Bruce Willis wears a white T in Pulp Fiction that gets a broad swath of blood down the front, particularly from the gash across his nose.
- A Quiet Place. After stepping on a nail, Evelyn hides from a creature in a white porcelain bathtub. Her husband later comes across the bloodstained bathtub and thinks the creature got her, but she turns out to be hiding in a nearby shower stall.
- Razors: The Return of Jack the Ripper: In Ruth's dream, Sadie is wearing a long white nightgown when the Ripper slits her throat from behind (the way Jack is supposed to have killed most of his victims in real life). The blood gushes out of her throat and down her front; staining the front of the nightgown a bright red. Possibly counts as Fridge Brilliance, as Sadie is Asian, thus tying in with the origins of the trope.
- Several characters from Reservoir Dogs, with the special honor going to Mr. Orange, whose shirt, it would seem, does not have a single white spot on it by the end of the movie.
- Saw:
- Saw:
- Adam wears a white T-shirt for the entire movie, which ends up drenched in his and Zep's blood. Played with in that he ends up dying in a bloodless way, as shown in a later flashback in Saw III (namely, Amanda asphyxiating him as a Mercy Kill when he's Locked Up and Left Behind).
- Averted with Lawrence, who wears a white T-shirt identical to Adam's in the Bathroom, but never gets covered in blood and survives the game.
- Saw II:
- Xavier wears a white tank top that gets progressively covered in the blood of the other Nerve Gas House victims (including the ones he directly murders). His own blood eventually gets to the tank top when he cuts out part of his nape's skin and Daniel then slashes his throat.
- Gus dies when his left eye is shot by the Magnum Eyehole, with the ensuing blood getting his white shirt drenched in the process.
- Saw III:
- Lynn wears a white shirt when she's abducted and tested, and receives a bloody shot from the back by Amanda in the climax. The Shotgun Collar then seals her fate with Ludicrous Gibs when John flatlines.
- Saw IV:
- Rigg wears a white T-shirt during his trial, which gets a good amount of blood stains, though it mostly receives dirt-related ones. While he doesn't die onscreen at the end of the film (he only gets a shot from Eric attempting to prevent him from entering the Ice Block Trap's room), he's declared dead at the beginning of the next one.
- Saw V:
- Subverted and inverted with Strahm.
- The subversion happens at the beginning of the film when Strahm gets abducted by Hoffman and is put in a trap meant to be inescapable. His white shirt at the time gets stained in blood, but he survives the trap long enough to be rescued afterwards.
- The inversion happens at the end of the film, where Strahm, with the black T-shirt that he wore for most of the movie, suffers one of the series' most gruesome deaths in the Glass Coffin's room.
- Saw VI:
- William wears a white shirt during his trial, which is stained in blood from the beginning due to him having had a key surgically placed inside him. He's eventually killed in the Acid Room.
- Allen is always seen wearing a white shirt, and is hanged bloodily in the Gallows.
- Inverted with Sachi, who wears a black shirt in the only scene where she appears, and dies when she's gunned to death by Perez while Hoffman uses her as a meat shield towards the latter, leaving a visible trail of blood when Hoffman drops her into a wall.
- Jigsaw:
- Subverted with Logan. He's wearing a white shirt when Halloran seemingly gets him killed in the Laser Collars, but it quickly turns out that his collar was actually harmless, with his shirt drenched in fake blood.
- Spiral:
- Zeke wears a white shirt when he's abducted by the Spiral killer for a trial of his own. He doesn't die, but his shirt gets stained with blood from his wounds and other victims throughout the trial.
- Saw:
- In Scare Campaign, Abby is dressed in a white shift when she playing a ghost in the Abandoned Hospital. When she is stabbed and thrown out of the window, she is left with multiple red stains blooming on the front of the shift and lying in a spreading pool of her own blood.
- Shaun in Shaun of the Dead never changes his white office shirt throughout the Zombie Apocalypse. "You've got red on you" becomes a Running Gag because of it.
- The titular character of The Stoning of Soraya M. wears a bright white dress for her stoning.
- Aptly enough, "Man in White Shirt" from Tampopo.
- Titanic: Jack wears a white shirt and suspenders during the sinking, and ends up freezing to death.
- Two of the protagonists in Triangle wear light shirts which later get drenched in blood effectively.
- The final battle in Ultraviolet (2006).
- John Woo was inspired by Chang Cheh and his masterpiece, Vengeance! (1970), which had its avenging antihero fighting the final battle against the evil triads responsible for his brother's murder in white, in contrast with the black suit with white accents that he wears for most of the movie. He doesn't survive, but he does manage to take a whole lot of bad guys with him, including the Big Bad behind the whole thing.
- William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: Mercutio is wearing an unbuttoned white shirt when fatally stabbed by Tybalt. Juliet is also wearing a white dress when she kills herself at the end, having been dressed in the gown by her relatives who believed she was already dead.
- Played for Horror in The Wolfman (2010) when Lawrence wakes up after his first transformation. The white shirt he was wearing is quite messy.
- X2: X-Men United. The prison guard who gets his iron-contaminated blood ripped from his body by Magneto during his escape is wearing a white uniform shirt.
