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Dead Man's Chest: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''If you were looking for the movie, see'' [[Pirates of the Caribbean]].}}▼
What do you do if you have a dead body on your hands and somebody snooping around that you don't want to see it? Why, stuff it the body into a convenient empty chest or trunk until that busybody goes away, of course. This is only a temporary solution and you will still have to move the body later, but what could possibly go wrong?
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Not to be confused with the real, original Dead Man's Chest, which was the name of one of the Virgin Islands.
{{deathtrope}}
{{examples}}
▲== [[Comics]] ==
* [[Sin City]] plays with this trope.
** In ''The Big Fat Kill'', Dwight has a dead body in his passenger seat. A cop pulls him over and he has no room to stash it. He quickly pretends that the body is his drunk friend.
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== [[Literature]] ==
* In ''[[The
* [[Cornell Woolrich]]'s ''The Dilemma of the Dead Lady'' is a fine example. A jewel thief murders his unwitting accomplice, but because she's kind of wearing the stolen jewels, he needs to take her along on his ocean voyage—and things get worse from there.
* In [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s "The Tell-Tale Heart", the body is dismembered and hidden under the floorboards. There's no ''actual'' clue that would give the location away to the police, who are about to leave on peaceful terms when the narrator begins to hallucinate that he can hear the corpse's heart beating....
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* In "The Muddle of the Woad" (one of Randall Garrett's [[Lord Darcy]] stories), the men who are delivering the Duke's coffin discover that there's already a body hidden in it. And before that, the corpse had been hidden inside a "preservator"—a [[Stuffed in The Fridge|large chest enchanted to keep foodstuffs preserved]].
* The [[Hercule Poirot]] short story "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook" by [[Agatha Christie]], a killer gets rid of a body by stuffing it in a trunk and having the trunk set to a railway station marked 'to be collected'. He later sends to trunk on to Glasgow in an attempt to lose it. This story was later adapted for small screen as part of the ''[[Poirot]]'' television series.
* Played with in ''[[
* In the [[Ellery Queen]] short story "The Three Rs" (in the ''Calendar of Crime'' collection), it is made to appear that the victim's body has been placed in his trunk, covered in quicklime and shipped off to his summer cabin.
== [[Live
* There is an ''[[Alfred Hitchcock Presents]]'' episode where a guy kills someone and uses the bathtub and some strong acid to get rid of the body; stupidly, he uses a chainsaw to dismember the body first. Needless to say, when he finally gets down to the head, company comes calling, and he has to hide the head in a bowl of ice.
** A dismemberment wouldn't be inherently stupid—smaller pieces have a larger surface area to volume ratio and thus are more permeable by the acid.
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** ''[[NCIS]]'' does that quite a bit too. One episode involved—eww—bodies in barrels. They sloshed, at best, and they'd been out in the sun for quite a while.
** And yet another body was disposed of in a sealed barrel, leading to the corpse turning into [[Squick|soapy goo]].
* ''[[Law &
** ''[[Law and Order Special Victims Unit]]'' has also had at least one case of Dead Baby In a Cooler.
* ''[[Psychoville]]'' did this in an episode which parodies Hitchcock's ''Rope''. Minutes after serial killers David and Maureen have dispatched their latest victim, a man claiming to be a police inspector shows up at the door. He's really an actor auditioning for a role in one of the "murder mystery" acts the victim ran. [[Hilarity Ensues]] as they hide the corpse in various places around the room while trying to keep the inspector off their tail (and David having to pretend to be the victim so as not to give away that the man is dead)
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* In ''[[The Mentalist]]'' epsiode "Redline", the killer stuffs the body into the trunk of a sports car when security shows up unexpectedly. The killer is unable to retrieve the body and the car ends up on the showroom floor.
== [[Music]] ==
* In the video for [[Golden Earring]]'s "Twilight Zone", the spy protagonist hangs up the phone, then leaves his hotel room, pausing to shove the hand that's protruding lifelessly from a footlocker down into it and out of sight.
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* In ''[[The Last Express]]'' one of the ways to stop anyone from finding the body is to stash it in your bed, this is only a temporary solution though. You can also just chuck it out the window, but then the police will find it and search the train at the next stop.
* An important technique in ''[[Hitman]]: Blood Money''... leaving bodies just lying around is asking for trouble, and unless somebody actually sees you do it, stuffing it into a handy container will ensure that it isn't discovered 'till well after you've vacated the premises.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Death Tropes]]
[[Category:Comedy Tropes]]
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[[Category:Murder Tropes]]
[[Category:Crime and Punishment Tropes]]
▲[[Category:Dead Man's Chest]]
[[Category:Contained People]]
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