Dead Man's Chest: Difference between revisions

 

== [[Film]] ==

* The [[Alfred Hitchcock]] film ''[[Rope]]'' (two killers strangle a victim, hide the body in a chest and then serve a cold supper to the victim's friends and family off the lid of the chest)

** This might well have helped inspire the infamous dinner scene in ''[[The Rocky Horror Picture Show]]''.

== [[Literature]] ==

* In ''[[The Day of the Jackal|Day of the Jackal]]'', the Jackal leaves the body of a photographer who tried to blackmail him in a chest. In this case, though, putting the corpse there was less because of being in a hurry and more to ensure that it wasn't likely to ever be found. He even rationalises away the possibility of [[Revealing Coverup]] by noting that the photographer had done work for the underworld before and thus there would be quite the gaggle of possible suspects to run through. In fact, his isn't one of the deaths that gives the Jackal away.

* 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....

** And The Black Cat, wherein a murder is given away by his own pride and a karmic pet he buried with his wife.

* In ''[[Bloodsucking Fiends]]'', a chest freezer serves this purpose, not once, but twice. Our protagonist is stuck with the problem of explaining that not only did he not kill either of the people in the freezer, one of them isn't even dead.

* ''The Warlock's Hairy Heart'' (in JK Rowling's ''Tales of Beedle the Bard'') has a warlock storing away his heart to protect himself from love.

* 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 ''[[Discworld/Thud|Thud]]''. Sam Vimes gets threatened by two trolls from the troll equivalent of the Mafia. When Vimes meets with the boss later, he apologizes to Vimes for his underlings' disrespectful conduct and offers to install a new rock garden in Vimes' home... all the while sitting next to a very suspicious box that Vimes notes is too small to contain a ''whole'' troll...

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* 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.

* The ''[[Fawlty Towers]]'' episode "The Kipper and the Corpse" features Basil stuffing the dead body of a guest into things.

** And some [[Butt Monkey|hapless guest]] into the things the corpse has also been shoved into.

* ''[[NCIS]]'' did pretty much exactly the same thing as the ''[[CSI]]'' example.

** Another episode involves a bouncer stuffing an annoying homeless man inside a duffel bag, and dumping him (to his death) down a hill. The Nevada desert heat, as well as several months of decomposition, give the cadaver the consistency of [[Nightmare Fuel|chunky soup]]. Nevermind the stench, the bag ''sloshes'' when moved.

** And yet another body was disposed of in a sealed barrel, leading to the corpse turning into [[Squick|soapy goo]].

* ''[[Law & Order|Law and Order]]'' has had at least two episodes in which corpses turn up in chest freezers.