I Love the Dead

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
It's not sick if the feeling is mutual.

"What, you think I'm the only guy in town who likes to crack open a cold one?"

—Ivan Bakunas, Criminal Minds ("Cold Comfort")

This is when someone has a thing for dead bodies, namely necrophilia. Do you really need the details?

Note that while Mummies At the Dinner Table may or may not involve necrophiliac behavior, in Mummies At the Dinner Table the character is attracted to a corpse because it was their beloved while alive and they just can't let go. In this trope, the character is attracted to a corpse because it is a corpse.

If someone has a relationship with a member of The Undead, it's more a case of Boy Meets Ghoul. Compare: Mummies At the Dinner Table, Necromantic.

No real life examples, please; All The Tropes does not care to squick its readers.

Examples of I Love the Dead include:

Anime and Manga

  • Hundred Stories has a case of necrophilia.
  • Angel Sanctuary has a thankfully milder version of this: after she's dead, Kira holds Alexiel up and kisses her corpse passionately.
  • In Full Metal Panic!, in the novels it's outright stated that this was one of Gauron's sick fantasies of what he would do with Sousuke. The idea of killing Sousuke apparently doesn't seem to discourage his idea that they'll still be able to have a sex life. Sousuke is rarely grossed out by things, but even this was too much for him.
    • Also, the male assassin after Kaname had been ordered by Gauron to "shoot her to death, disgrace the body, take a picture and send it to Hong Kong."
    • There's also Gates. He likes to do weird things with people's corpses. Most notably with Yu Lan's. It's also implied that he might have done perverted stuff to it.
  • Lussuria from Katekyo Hitman Reborn. In his own words, his favorite bodies are the "cold, slowly decomposing, unmoving ones" (he then licks his lips). And he spends much of his time eyeing up a shirtless Ryohei, saying that his body is "pretty nice" and going on about how much he wants to "take Ryohei home with him" shortly after he beats the shit out of him and wants to make Ryohei a part of his 'collection'. Gokudera even calls him a pervert.
  • If the way the Doktor talks about SHE in Hellsing: The Dawn isn't enough for you, look at his expression. Either he loves his work, or he loves her bones.
    • In the 7th OVA there's a flashback of Seras's childhood in which a murderer raped her mother's corpse due to it being "still warm" right in front of her.
    • There's also Jan Valentine wanting to rape, kill and rape Integra again (in that order)
  • Prince Ludwig in Ludwig Revolution. In the first chapter he is depicted as a necrophiliac and keeps a room full of female corpses in glass coffins, but by the second story he's given up on dead women and starts looking for a live bride.
    • Also, Julius has no problems with talking to Ludwig's (supposedly) dead body or with making out with it.
  • In the yaoi manga "Under Grand Hotel" the Depraved Bisexual Swordfish warns Sen (whom he's attracted to) that he better make sure he doesn't die while in prison because if he does he'll rape his corpse in full view of everyone.
  • Elegant Gothic Lolita Ashley of Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru plays with this trope in episode 10 when she puts Shusei in a permanent sleep and whispers in his ear "I knew you'd make a beautiful corpse. You're part of my collection now. You'll never wake up again..." while caressing his face and chest.
  • At one point in Black Cat, Creed, Train's Stalker with a Crush, tells Train that he would at least want to have him by his side even as a dead body rather than let Saya have him.
  • Played for laughs in the manga Sankarea by Furuya Chihiro, a Nightmare Fetishist who is obsessed with zombie girls. Fortunately for him, he gets a cute one (the title character Sanka Rea) as his new girlfriend. Although her overprotective father has forbidden any sex before marriage, which is probably for the best.
    • As of chapter 20, he admits that he'd fallen for her while she was still alive, and would have been fine with her even if she wasn't a zombie.
  • Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?? is about a zombie with a supernatural harem.
  • Canaan: Hakko's sex scene with Santana's corpse, after she crosses the Despair Event Horizon when Liang Qi tricks her into killing him.
  • Ninja Scroll: When Kagero resists Tessai's attempts to rape her, he flat-out tells her he wouldn't mind raping her corpse instead.
  • Undead Succu-Girls appeared a few times in Interspecies Reviewers (where the writers' philosophy seems to be that you can do the deed with anything.) Bonita (a skeleton) is limited in what she can offer a customer (but did get a positive review from Brooz); Spirette (a ghost) is more attractive, but similarly limited. Furanpaa (zombie) is somewhat attractive, though Skunk docks her a point because she's undead (giving her a 7), while Menmen (jiangshi) is sort of cute, but the rigor mortis also makes her interaction with a customer limited. Soufu (vampire) subverts this, as only the owner of the brother where she works is allowed to have her, and he is a vampire himself. He does give her a respectable 8, though.
  • In Overlord, Albedo is in love with her master Momonga, who is, more-or-less, a lich. Oddly enough, he finds it far more awkward than she does.

Comic Books

  • An X-Statix story revolved around Dead Girl (who can speak to the dead) discovering that the team's official coroner is giving his "guests" the "best treatment possible" (and when the coroner's own daughter commits suicide, it's implied he'll "take good care" of her too). She then uses her powers to raise their ghosts and let them handle his punishment.
  • Almost: A Batman villain, Clayface III (the one with the melty powers), is very devoted to Helena. Only thing is that Helena is a mannequin. Still, he regards her with very human feelings. When their relationship sours, he notes (ironically) that "she can't live forever..."
    • In "Cacophony", The Joker explicitly states that he wants Batman sexually. Although, being the Joker, he wants him sexually only after he's dead.
  • In The Sandman, Dr. Destiny forces a woman to admit that she once, drunkenly, had sex with a corpse at a mortuary. And nothing since then's measured up.
  • As part of his backstory, Green Lantern villain Black Hand was obsessed with death to the point of necrophilia (though it's never been stated if he goes "all the way" or not).
  • The Governor, the creepy-ass villain of several volumes of The Walking Dead, eventually removes the teeth from his zombified daughter. So he can make out with her.
  • Occurs in the Tales Of The Unrefined stories "No Rest" and "Evil is Nuts".
  • One A Nightmare on Elm Street comic by Wildstorm indicates that, while still a mortal serial killer, Freddy Krueger may have molested his victims before and after killing them. Considering Freddy's urban legend status, it's left dubious as to whether or not it's true.
  • In the origin story of Pfaultz from the Vertigo House of Secrets, he's seen shagging a young girl's corpse.
  • Ramba: In "Violent Death", after assassinating her target, Ramba notices his erection is still standing which pleases her and is provoked to have intercourse with the previously dead body.

Fan Works

  • My Immortal: When the author fell out in real life with the friend on whom the character Willow was based, Willow disappeared from the story. Hermione "B'loody Mary Smith" Granger casually announced mid-conversation that "after Willow got expelled I murdered her and den Loopin did it with her cos hes a necphilak". Since Willow reappeared unharmed in the next chapter with no comment, it's unclear if "B'loody Mary" was telling the truth.
  • Sonic in The Search For Love: When Bunnie Rabbot, a cyborg, is killed by a Badnik, he feels up her corpse ... until she orgasms. After being cut in half at the waist, decapitated, and her head cut in half vertically.
  • Several Final Fantasy VII fics had Cloud spending his last tearful moments with Aeris with his pants down.
  • Sweet Apple Massacre. There's just Squick completely, and most of it involves necrophilia, and even Brother-Sister Incest. Except the sister is dead as well. Squick much?
  • Night of the Seance has Agnetha explaining two men on a dare having sex with her corpse, much to the dismay of those listening.

Film

  • In The Devil's Rejects, Otis B. Driftwood is shown sleeping in bed, snuggled beside the corpse of a girl. Later, Otis makes lewd statements about photographs of his murder victims.
  • In the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the sherrif played by R. Lee Ermey admits that he likes to fondle the corpses of pretty girls that he finds at crime scenes.
    • In Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Alfredo practically makes out with a severed head.
  • Perry Farrell (frontman for Jane's Addiction) has sex with real-life wife Casey Niccoli after she OD's in the 1993 vanity project Gift.
  • Played with in House on Haunted Hill remake when Famke Janssen's character dies and Peter Gallagher's character later sneaks back to fondle her corpse. It turns out that the two of them are lovers and conspired to fake her death.
  • In Shoot Em Up, Paul Giamatti's character fondles the bare breast of a murdered woman. He looks a little ashamed of himself afterwards, though it does inspire him to figure out the hero's next move.
  • The Troma film Cry Uncle features the "hero" having sex with a woman he think is passed out, while his interior monologue berates himself for falling so low. It turns out the woman is actually dead. The film was banned in some countries until very recently.
  • Pretty much the entire plot of the obscure 1990 British film Living Doll. You almost certainly haven't seen it. Be grateful for small mercies.
  • In Quills Joaquin Phoenix's character has a dream about sleeping with Kate Winslet's corpse.
  • Part of the emergency broadcast shown in the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead (left on the cutting room floor) showed a bunch of teenagers who had kidnapped a recently zombified hot girl from their school and tied her to a bed so they could have sex with her. Even if they weren't bitten in the process, chances are still likely they'd be infected anyway.
  • The Japanese film Visitor Q has the beleaguered protagonist engage in... relations with a pretty female corpse. Even under those conditions, it. Gets. Worse.
  • In another Japanese movie, EM: Embalming, this is implied. (Please note that until very recently, embalming the dead was an almost unknown practice in Japan, where it's customary for bodies to be cremated, so many Japanese would see something quite creepy about the practice of preserving corpses.)
  • The Andrew Dice Clay film The Adventures of Ford Fairlane had a scene where the body of a pretty girl was seen in a hearse, with the implication that she was going to be the object of necrophilia. It turned out that she was just pretending to be dead.
  • In the 1967 Luis Bunuel film Belle du Jour, Catherine Deneuve pretends to be a corpse, lying in an open coffin, for the delectation of one of her clients.
  • In the 1972 Richard Burton version of Bluebeard, the body of Karin Schubert's character, who had been shot in a hunting accident (she had been shot in the back by Burton's character) is seen laid out in her open coffin for her funeral. Burton takes photographs of the body, then kisses the corpse; the implication is that sex follows. At the climax of the movie, Joey Heatherton's character discovers the bodies of all of Bluebeard's murdered wives preserved in a walk-in freezer. In fact, necrophilia is a frequent subtext in the various versions of the Bluebeard legend.
  • Spoofed in the old Italian film Le Sei Mogli Di Barbablu, starring the famous comedian Toto. Toto's character discovers the bodies of Bluebeard's wives; it turns out all the lovely ladies, including a very young Sophia Loren in one of her first roles, were in suspended animation and are revived.
  • The 1990 horror movie Deadmate had this as its main theme. It was so cheaply produced that only one incident of actual necrophilia was shown.
  • In the 1985 Paul Bartel/Mary Woronov comedy Mortuary Academy, Bartel's character falls in love with the dead body of a cheerleader who's choked to death on popcorn at a movie.
  • In the Danish film Nightwatch and the 1997 American remake starring Ewan McGregor, the main character is framed with a false accusation of this.
  • This is also a theme of the Charlie Sheen thriller Postmortem.
  • The 1980s horror movie Mortuary also had this as a subtext. The villain kidnaps the heroine and attempts to kill and then embalm her so he can keep her as his necrophiliac lover.
  • Tate in the controversial movie Ken Park is a necrophiliac who asphyxiates himself for sexual pleasure and eventually stabs his grandparents and gets an erection while looking at their corpses.
  • The German film Nekromantik and its sequel revolve around this trope.
  • The Canadian film Kissed (based on the Barbara Gowdy story) is also about a woman who is attracted to the dead. In the climax, her boyfriend hangs himself so he can "be with her" forever.
  • Considering that the central plot of the movie Drop Dead Sexy concerns two small-time crooks stealing the body of a beautiful blonde and holding it for ransom, this is a major subtext in the film. In fact, in one scene, the protagonists visit a coroner who is preparing for a romantic evening with the dead body of an attractive woman who has been shot by her husband: the coroner invites one of the protagonists to probe the fatal bullet wound with his finger.
  • Starkweather has Charlie apparently about to perform sexual acts with the body of a female victim, when Caril Ann catches him. When he tries explaining that he was just posing the body (to make it look like the work of "some sex pervert") and voices his disgust at the thought of doing anything to the corpse, Caril Ann asks him "... then why are you hard down there?"
  • Deadgirl revolves around two teenagers finding an undead, feral girl in an abandoned Bedlam House. While Richie wants to rescue her, J.T. wants to keep her existence a secret and make her a sex slave.
  • In The House of Yes, two characters reenact the Kennedy Assassination. The man (as Kennedy) gets shot and "killed" while the girl (as Jackie Onassis) tends to him. This is foreplay.
  • Introduced, Red Herring-style, in The Silence of the Lambs—the police apparently believe Buffalo Bill is taking parts of his victim's bodies to pleasure himself.
  • Dreamaniac: "She fucks men, and then she kills them--not always in that order!"
  • In Rob Zombie's Halloween II remake, there's a particularly disturbing scene where an ambulance driver describes exactly what he would like to do to some of the "hot" female bodies he has to carry in the back of his van.
  • Played with in Once Upon a Time in America. Noodles is picked up from a lengthy prison stay by his friend in a hearse. The friend shows off the beautiful dead woman in the hearse's coffin and makes lewd jokes about her. It turns out that the woman is very much alive and has been hired to take care of Noodles.
  • A Serbian Film has both the protagonist being forced to decapitate the woman he's raping and not stop the assault and at the end a film crew deciding to rape the corpses of the protagonist and his family. Starting with the son. It's disturbing...and apparently made as a protest.
  • The zombies in Shaun of the Dead may ... well, we never know WHAT they are because the only explanation for events in the film is cut off mid sentence. Assuming they're true undead zombies we get one woman on a talk show admitting she's still in love with, and regularly having sex with, her zombie husband.
  • Maggot from August Underground's Mordum is shown having sex with his sister, spilled intestines, and a dead little girl.

Literature

  • One of the earliest comes in The Revenger's Tragedy. When Gloriana won't sleep with him, the Duke poisons her, and then rapes her corpse.
  • Junior Rennie in Under the Dome succumbs to this. Whenever his migraines get too bad, he retreats to the McCain pantry with his "girlfriends" and is obsessed with the smell. But then, he does have a brain tumor driving him steadily more insane as the book goes on, and Stephen King doesn't exactly elaborate as to what happens in the pantry.
  • The maniac Jessie Burlingame encounters in Gerald's Game is actually not a figure of her imagination, but a crazy necrophiliac, Raymond Andrew Joubert, who has been digging up body parts and using them for pleasure. Jessie is especially horrified because she offered the ghostly intruder access to her own hoo-ha: "I would have let him put his cock -- the cock he stuck down the rotting throats of dead men -- into me if only he would have promised [...] to set me free."
  • In Firestarter, a main character reads the minds of one of the "Graduate Assistants" who had been experimenting on him in college, and finds that he has killed four people and raped one of the bodies.
  • In Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, a necrophiliac EMT gains access to a magical "culling song" that will kill anyone who it is sung to. The EMT goes in a killing spree, murdering models to have sex with them. Also, the narrator unwittingly used the song to kill his wife, then had sex with her thinking she was half asleep.
  • Based on Jeffrey Dahmer, below, Quentin, the protagonist of the Joyce Carol Oates novel Zombie attempts to make a mindless sex slave by destroying the frontal lobe of his victims. Things do not go well.
  • Every Necromancer in Clark Ashton Smith seems to be into this, even if the author never gets graphic with it.
    • One of the ways he two Villain Protagonists in The Empire of the Necromancers take advantage of the undisturbed tombs they find is raising beautiful mummified empresses for their personal service.
    • Vacharn in Necromancy in Naat is implied to be into this.
    • The necromancer and his apprentice in The Charnel God raise the dead temporarily for "entertainment".
  • The novel Dreaming Of Babylon features a coroner who admires the bodies of beautiful dead women, though he's insulted when the main character repeatedly implies that he has sex with them.
  • Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore has Jody (a recently turned vampire) found in a freezer, mistaken for a murder victim, and treated by an assistant coroner with a taste for the dead. Then she wakes up...
  • In some of Dean Koontz's early works (The Vision and The Face of Fear among others), the villains are serial rapists as well as murderers, and the police at the crime-scene wonder if the killer raped the victim before or after they were killed.
  • Necrophilia figures into Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow. Glass. Apples.", although maybe not the way you might expect. The story is a retelling of "Snow White" in which Snow White is a vampire and the prince is a necrophiliac, so he's drawn to the coldness of her body rather than repulsed by what she is. The "wicked stepmother" by comparison is a relatively decent person who only ordered her stepdaughter's death because of what she was.
  • George R. R. Martin's short story "Meathouse Man" is centered around the eponymous Meathouse, a brothel with dead prostitutes. They have implants so that they move and react according to the desires of their customers.
    • Technically they're just brain-dead. The bodies themselves are actually alive.
    • Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has the character Reek, who is implied to have been a necrophile. Whether he would take his turn with the corpses before or after his Serial Killer Complete Monster master had skinned them for his own pleasure is not known.
  • Barbara Gowdy's short story "We So Seldom Look On Love".
  • In Bitter Gold Hearts, Garrett must retrieve a murder victim's corpse from a city mortuary before it's cremated. He pays off the crematorium's attendant to let him take it away, knowing that cadaver-selling to this trope's adherents is a regular sideline for the facility's corrupt staff.
  • In Mika Waltari's Sinuhe the Egyptian, the protagonist has to work with body preparers in the House of Death for some time. He makes notice that most of those permanently in the business employ the occasional female corpse in this way, because the deathstench they carry ensures no prostitute will ever touch them, for any price. He also tells that the workers once bought a slave for their needs, but that she became insane because of the place. Some of the workers actually deem necrophilia their duty because of one or two miracles occurrences where a young female corpse woke up during the "procedure" and returned home to live normally. Compare with the Real Life section of this article.
  • In William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily, the title character murders the man she wishes to marry, then lies next to him (it is implied this was long ago, given the dust on the pillow), the corpse is also said to have been in an embracing position.
  • Brian Lumley's Necroscope sequence gives us Johnny Found, a necrophile who is also a necromancer. In Lumley's universe, what this boils down to is that whatever he's doing to the corpse, the soul or spirit of the dead person feels it as if they were still alive. It's so bad that despite seeing, fighting and killing some of the foulest abominations ever to walk the cosmos, Harry Keogh "wished he hadn't bothered" to tap the memories of the after-death experience of the latest victim.

Live-Action TV

  • One sketch on The League of Gentlemen had a mortician who put a bit too much of himself into his work.
  • The Criminal Minds episodes "The Last Word" and "Cold Comfort" both feature necrophiliac killers.
    • They don't outright state the original killer from "The Angel Maker" was a necrophiliac, but its implied. He apparently beat his victims to death either before or while raping them.
  • The X-Files episode "Irresistible" features Donnie Pfaster, a necrophiliac with a serious hair and nail fetish. It manages to be one of the creepier episodes, even with a completely mundane villain. Donnie's still highly creepy several years later in "Orison", when he escapes prison and comes after "the one who got away", namely Scully.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had an episode where a woman who'd been in a coma for five years turned out to be pregnant. One of the suspects was a security guard who'd been fired from a funeral home for unclear reasons, though those reasons became a lot more clear when the detectives tracked down a hooker who said the guard had asked her to lie in a tub of ice water before engaging in... relations.
    • A more recent episode had police walk upon what seemed to be a drug rape in the park. The man claimed that he didn't drug her and that he thought she was dead.
  • This is a strongly implied theme in an episode of the old Friday The 13th series, "Epitaph for a Lonely Soul", in which a mortician obsesses over the pretty dead women he takes care of.
  • Played with for laughs in an episode of the 1990s TV series One West Waikiki, starring Cheryl Ladd. A Bookie is trying to recover a valuable key from the body of his girlfriend (killed in a hit-and-run accident), and sends his henchman to the local morgue to do so. The henchman finds the woman's body (nude except for plastic wrapping), and starts to remove the necklace she's wearing (which holds the key), but knocks over the rack on which the body is stored by accident, and finds himself on the floor, holding the woman's corpse. The series' lead characters enter the room at this point. Hilarity Ensues. (The girlfriend had, just before she herself gotten killed, accidentally shot another girl that she found her boyfriend two-timing her with; the young woman's body is later shown having literally been hidden in the bookie's refrigerator, though in this case the motive is not necrophilia, but concealing evidence.) At one point, the body is shown to a client as a threat to compel the client to pay his gambling debts.
  • My Name Is Earl: Patty the Daytime Hooker mentions in "Our Cops Is On" that the reason she has her hand inside a vending machine is because she's getting it nice and cold for a guy who's into dead people (though she was probably just stuck and lying).
  • Tittybangbang had the characters of Parker and Harris, two pathologists who would frequently stop in the middle of an investigation to have sex with the corpse because, in Parker's words, "I can't resist a stiffy"
  • Game of Thrones has a scene where Varys and Littlefinger trade rumors as a way of seeing who knows more. Varys makes mention of the various nobles Littlefinger's brothel caters to... including one who has a taste of fresh cadavers.

Varys: (dripping with sarcasm) Must be enormously difficult to accommodate that inclination. The logistics alone... to find beautiful corpses before they rot.

  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, humans dating or even sleeping with vampires seems uncomfortably common, and often overlaps with Dating Catwoman. Buffy herself has been intimate with both Angel and Spike.

Music

  • Voltaire's "Dead Girls" is sung from the point of view of a necrophiliac defending his dating habits.
    • Also by Voltaire, "Anastasia". Whether he killed her or not is debatable, but it's creepy as all get out.
    • Also, "Zombie Prostitute", which is, well...
    • There's a brief mention of a dead girl being one of the available prostitutes in "Cathouse Tragedy."
  • The Meteors' "Corpse Grinder", which contains the line "See you later / In my refrigerator." It's hilariously monstrous.
  • There is an entire sub-genre of Filk Songs based on necrophilia humor - not a very large one, but big enough to contribute to filk's peculiar reputation. Notable songs include "Dear Departed" by Bob Kanefsky, "Some Girls..." and "Zombie Wedding" by Seanan McGuire, and "Dead Girl Polka" by Frank Hayes. "Mary O'Meara" doesn't quite count, but it seems to have inspired a few that do.
  • Alice Cooper's "'Cold Ethyl".
    • And, of course, the Trope Namer "I Love the Dead".
    • Don't forget "Blue Turk."
  • The video for Tom Petty's "Last Dance for Mary Jane" centers around a mortuary attendant and the corpse of a woman he "borrows".
  • The Geto Boys song "Mind Of A Lunatic" which is about necrophilia of course this is after Bushwick bill brutally rapes and murder her by slitting her throat and watching her choke and bleed to death
  • Nick Cave's "Where the Wild Roses Grow", with Kylie Minogue providing additional vocals. In the song, Cave's character kills Minogue's character to preserve the memory of her beauty forever. In the music video, Cave lusts over and fondles Minogue's corpse.
  • Creature Feature's "Corpse In My Bed".

My only complaint's the perfume she wears
A mix of rancid milk and mouldy pears

  • The song "Bleached Bones" by Marduk is about a man's love affair with a corpse:

Your naked corpse is as beautiful
As the dawn when it comes with the first sunray.
But it was your peeled bleached bones
That really took my breath away.

  • "Dead Girls Are Easy" by The 69 Eyes.
  • "Cemetery" by The Headstones:

Went down to the cemetery looking for love
Got there and my baby was buried, I had to dig her up

The resurrection men took their sweet time
Cross-dressed fruit; what a way to die!
Now he's ours, the apple of our eye
Fetch the dead sphincter, cold green meat
How did his ass taste? Tender and sweet!
And then we fucked it

  • "Burn Sinister" by Killing Miranda is an interesting example, since it seems to be told from the point of view of the corpse:

I am forever yours, my sweet: romance this rotten meat
Is this stiffness rigor mortis? You'll be with me soon
Smell of formaldehyde and perfume: well, I feel the earth move
Come take me now, my love, among the cerements
Come kiss my ice-blue lips, my cold dead flesh.

  • Jimmy Cross's "I Want My Baby Back", a parody of Teenage Death Songs, ends with the protagonist digging up his girlfriend's grave and climbing into the coffin with her. What he does then is left fortunately ambiguous.
  • "Dead Girls Can't Break Up With You," by the Flaming Tsunamis.
  • "A Month Dead," by Stephen Lynch.

Sure, she's a little cold to the touch,
But that doesn't bother me much,
Because the embalmer did such,
A lovely job. A lovely job.
She's a month dead and she's starting to smell,
But if loving a corpse is a sin...
I'll see you in hell.

  • Lordi's Night of the Loving Dead

On the Night of the Loving Dead
Love the Unliving
No skins attached

  • Frequently occurs in Insane Clown Posse songs, including "Cemetery Girl", "Dead Body Man" and "In My Room". ("Dead Body Man" is covered by Psychopathic Records artist Blaze Ya Dead Homie.)
  • Cannibal Corpse has much to say on the subject. The most controversial of which is probably the song Necropedophile, which is exactly what it sounds like and spares not even the most unholy details.
  • "A Little Piece of Heaven" by Avenged Sevenfold involves both necrophilia between a live man and his love interest he murdered, the rising as a zombie of said love interest, the subsequent killing of the man by the woman, and their final marriage by an undead priest.
  • "Evil" by Mercyful Fate drifts into this trope:

And when you're down
Beyond the ground
I'll dig up your body again
And make love to shame

  • Witchery's "Dead, Hot & Ready"
  • Worm Quartet's "I Love You Even More Now That You're Dead"
  • T.S.O.L.'s "Code Blue". Specifically, the narrator has turned to necrophilia because he "never got along with the girls at my school, filling me up with all their morals and their rules".
  • "Black Dress" by Kisschasy. And very pretty it is too.
  • The opening lines of DMX's "Bring Your Whole Crew"

I got blood on my hands, and there's no remorse / I got blood on my dick 'cause I fucked a corpse!

  • "Garasu No Hitsugi De Nemuru Himegimi" from Sound Horizon's Märchen implies that the Blue Prince has a thing for dead girls, both through Märchen's comments on his "peculiar preferences" and the Prince's own comments about how he's tried and failed to love "all the living women." His dismayed reaction to Snow White's revival in the live performances only serves to make the implication stronger.
  • Opeth's "The Leper Affinity".
  • Rammstein's "Heirate Mich."
  • "Nachtwatche" by E Nomine

New Media

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • In the Aethiopis, the ancient Greek epic that came after Homer's Iliad in the Trojan Cycle, Achilles, after he killed the Amazon queen Penthesilea in single combat, is said to have fallen in love with her as she died. Whether he actually committed necrophilia with her dead body is unknown; several commentators say he did, but many others say that he treated the body with respect, and indeed, the Iliad mentions that he later killed the Greek Thersites who mutilated Penthesilea's corpse. Other versions say he killed Thersites for sneering at the act.

Tabletop Games

  • In Vampire: The Requiem, the signature weakness of the Sangiovanni bloodline of vampires is that, not only do they vaguely resemble fresh cadavers themselves, as time goes on, they literally fall in love with corpses in general, and treat them exactly like this, to the point of necrophilia (although technically, both parties are already dead). What makes this even more disturbing is that the Sangiovanni are necromancers, and they can raise said corpses as predatory zombie slaves, which return the affection. Corpse Bride, indeed!
    • It doesn't help that the bloodline draws their members exclusively from an extremely depraved and inbred Venetian family of faux-Catholics. Strangely enough, they tend to be rather rich and well-educated... in the occult.
    • To make matters worse, Word of God says that they allied with a legacy of wizards known as the Tremere Liches, a group of mortal necromancers who steal the souls of others to prolong their own lives. It's easy to see why they make such wonderful music together.
    • By the standards of the World of Darkness, all of this is rather tame.
    • In the original Vampire: The Masquerade, the Giovanni control the spirits of the dead and one example character has discovered that necrophilia can improve her ability to influence souls while they are enraged by her disrespect.
  • And, of course, how could we (no matter how hard we try to) forget FATAL and its spell to make the corpse feel alive?
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • The "Lichloved" feat in The Book of Vile Darkness causes the undead to treat you like an undead creature (in other words, they won't even consider attacking you) and makes it easier for you to command them. The book explicitly states you got to that state through repeated acts of sexual congress with the undead. Also, you start to look like one (judging by a picture of a character with that feat later in the book).
    • This is also very common with Thralls of Orcus, who actually overlap this Trope with Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, as they often do it to the corpses of fallen enemies.
    • The infamous third-party supplement The Book of Erotic Fantasy makes reference to sex with undead, noting that having sex with intelligent undead (vampires being presented as a prime example) isn't that far off having sex with a living person, but sex with mindless undead is just necrophilia.

Video Games

  • In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, an NPC in Skingrad mentions that she can't return to her homeland... and then casually asks what the fine for necrophilia is. When you tell her, she reacts with enthusiasm at how lenient the fine is compared with what she's accustomed to.
  • One dungeon in its sequel, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, involves a necromancer fleeing his home town for various reasons - who is overjoyed to find a tomb filled with only female undead.
  • Some of the 'pissed quotes' from repeatedly clicking on the necromancer unit in Warcraft 3 included "I Love the Dead...frequently" and "Right click for hot undead action".
  • In F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, the ending actually involves a case of "reverse necrophilia" with Sgt. Becket being sexually assaulted by the technically-dead Alma's corporeal body, glimpses of which he gets flashes of while hallucinating a battle with an apparition of a squadmate gone mad.
  • In The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, ex-mercenary Athena inmate Jaylor states in no uncertain terms that he intends to do this to Sarah Silverman after first killing her as soon as the prisoner riot starts. Riddick ensures he doesn't.
  • The Legend of Zelda series has the recurring enemy known as ReDeads, animated corpse things who's primary attack is to jump on Link's back and hump him.
  • In Red Dead Redemption, it's implied that along with grave-robbing, Seth does...other things to the bodies he digs up.
    • As good ol' John Marston put it, ever so delicately:

John: I've met lots of fucked up people in my life Seth. But you're somethin' special.

  • In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, the atrocities committed by the Ultimate Despair are laid out, including a claim that one member "tried to have Junko's children". The English translation of this dialogue suggests that member actually had sex with Junko's corpse, and given how mad the cult members are, it would make sense. However, the original Japanese makes it clear that what this meant was, one of them transplanted Junko's uterus into their own body, much like two others did with her arm and eye.
    • That... might be even worse...
  • Played for Laughs in Monster Prom, a Dating Sim that takes place at an All Ghouls School, one of the prospective dates being a ghost. Fail to impress her and she says, "You'd bore me to death," and then wonders what she might become if that actually happened.

Web Comics

  • The trope was played for laughs for a while in the "adult" webcomic Sexy Losers... then a fairy that brings sex dolls to life mistook her for a sex doll and resurrected her, and things started getting really weird.
    • A lot of the jokes in Sexy Losers revolve around Necrophilia; including one character who's just "following the family tradition", likes to talk pretty girls into suicide, and gets a "dream job" at a mortuary. Oh, and he finds that (WARNING don't read this, it's disgusting!) maggots tickle. (Told ya.)
    • Also, after Mrs. S kills her son's girlfriend by exhaustion, she's shown attending her funeral and stealing her urn shaped like a giant dildo. Later, her husband complains of her thing tasting like ash.
  • Played with (what isn't?) in The Order of the Stick.

Tsukiko: I love the undead. And I mean I really love the undead!
Xykon (a skeletal lich): Hey, now, let's keep things professional. I'm not one of those disgusting biophiliacs!

    • Played with even further recently:

Monster in the Darkness: I don't think he [Xykon] has any love to earn.
Tsukiko: Sure he does, he just hides it beneath that tough bony exterior.
MitD: He doesn't hide anything beneath his bones. I've seen.

  • Similarly played with in Something*Positive, when Jason buys Davan a sex doll—which turns out to be a murder victim with a voice chip. The ruse is discovered when her head falls off, though things hadn't gotten very far, as the original purchase was pretty much a gag gift.
  • Black Mage of 8-Bit Theater once announced that this was his backup plan for the case that his plan to drug White Mage with alcohol (which might not be paint thinner), so he can rape her, fails. To Red Mage, this was the most horrible thing he ever said. And that's saying something.
  • Butch of Chopping Block seems to consider killing a woman equivalent to deflowering her, and usually avoids having sex with (and/or cannibalizing) her body until she's already dead.

Web Original

<Pwnz0rz> What do you guys do after sex?
<D3v1lm4n> i like to cuddle with her
<Haxorz> i leave
<Dragneel> i Bury her again

  • When asked what to stock its harem with, the godly being known as Inglip replied, "THE NONALIVE".

Western Animation

  • Referenced disturbingly often in Family Guy:
    • When Death (as in, the Grim Reaper) is in a car and about to have sex with a girl, he says "Oh no not again! I'm going to be a virgin forever." Implying that he just touched her and she died. Then he says "or am I..." and the car starts rocking again.
    • Death himself claims that he developed the skill to swallow the meat off a turkey leg in one gulp from "some films I'm... not especially proud of". Draw your own conclusions there.
    • It's also hinted that Quagmire engages in necrophilia; for example, when Death killed Joan (a maid Quagmire was briefly married to that turned out to be a Yandere) in "I Take Thee Quagmire", he asked Death if he could leave the body with him "for another 5 minutes". He is shown jumping out of a coffin half-naked in a DVD-only scene in "Airport '07."
    • Seen again at the end of "And Then There Were Fewer", when Stephanie's body falls from the trunk of his car.
    • In the episode "Petarded", Peter accidentally hits Tom Tucker and a prostitute with his car:

Lois: Oh, my God! Your hooker's dead!
Tom: Well, she was already dead, but that doesn't excuse...

  • Played for laughs - and subverted - in an episode's side joke which starts with Dr. Frankenstein flipping the switch that brings his Monster to life:

Dr. Frankenstein: Igor! I did it!
Igor: Wait, hold on. You discovered the power to create new life, and created a guy?
Dr. Frankenstein: So, I should have made a woman so I could have sex with a corpse?
Igor: I dunno man, you just shouldn’t have made a guy.

  • Also played for laughs in one episode where Meg is driving Peter, Joe, Cleveland, and Quagmire home due to Peter's license being suspended, and the four of them are playing their "Would You Rather" game, a Running Gag on the show. Peter's question to Cleveland is, "Would you rather sleep with Queen Latifa, or Halle Berry after she's been dead for six hours. Cleveland actually has to think about this and ask for more info before they answer, the humor being whether Halle is hot enough to actually consider necrophilia. Of course, all of them are drunk at the time, and Meg tells them to shut up before Cleveland can answer.
  • This deleted scene, where Quagmire is about to pay a prostitute, and Stewie shoots her. Quagmire at first seems to think he lucked out, but then changes his mind, shouting, "Oh, what is wrong with me? Am I just sick?"
  • Captain Hero of Drawn Together really has a thing for dead bodies. In The Movie, he even carries a girl's corpse around for almost the entire duration of the movie, calling her his girlfriend.
  • In Slacker Cats Tabitha falls in love with Mr Flatman (who was hit by a car) and later a mouse (who was apparently a better kisser). Buckley has also had sex with run over cats.
  • Two examples in one family, with Irwin's dad in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy; his wife - Irwin's mother - is a mummy (as in an undead human of Egyptian origins; that kind of mummy). His dad simple claims, "no one can tell you who you'll fall in love with". When Billy tries to ask how it's physically possible, Irwin's dad purposely dodges the question. The second example comes later, where it's revealed that Irwin's dad is himself a Dhampir, his father being Dracula himself.
  • The Simpsons; in the episode "Days of Future Future", which takes place 30 years in the future - where a Zombie Apocalypse seems to have been averted, but zombies are still a problem - Milhouse has been infected and converted by one of them. It actually seems to have improved his relationship with his wife, Lisa. Not that this is stranger than Lisa's parents, seeing as Homer's consciousness is now in a robot's body, which again, has been a boon for his relationship with Marge.

Other

  • Various jokes:
    • One such joke:

My grandmother has a necrophiliac suitor.
What's he doing?
Waiting.

    • Another: What's the difference between incest and necrophilia? Incest is relatively boring; necrophilia is dead boring.
    • A guy who's down on his luck walks into a whorehouse. He says that he's broke and miserable and could really use some cheering up, but he only has $2. The owner takes pity and says that they have a dead hooker upstairs that he can have a go at for his $2. When he finishes up and gets back downstairs, he says "That was great! But there was one problem. Her nose kept running." The owner shrugs and says "Eh, she's probably just full."
    • "I wouldn't be caught dead with a necrophiliac!"
    • (Person being mocked) used to be into sadomasochistic necrophiliac bestiality . But then he realised he was just flogging a dead horse.