Murder by Cremation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Toasty.

[after sealing Bond in a coffin and conveying him into a crematorium's furnace]
Mr. Wint: Very moving.
Mr. Kidd: Heartwarming, Mr. Wint.
Mr. Wint: A glowing tribute, Mr. Kidd.

—Diamonds Are Forever

A somewhat baroque means of murder, the killer shuts their victim in a coffin (knocking them out first is optional) and feeds the coffin into a crematorium oven. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin.

Note that in Real Life this wouldn't entirely work for the disposing of the body part, since cremation alone is insufficient for fully destroying the bones of the body (this being done later by placing them in a special grinding machine). That doesn't stop the victim from being killed, though.

Useless trivia: a crematory oven is called a "retort".

A subtrope of Kill It with Fire.

As a Death Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Murder by Cremation include:


Anime and Manga

  • A side story of Telepathic Wanderers had the telepathic Nanase nursing an old woman who soon died. After the funeral, Nanase began hearing the old woman's thoughts and realized she wasn't actually dead, but moments away from cremation. Torn between saving the old woman and exposing herself as a telepath, she ends up leaving the woman to die. Rendered Nightmare Fuel by the fact that Nanase can hear the old woman's thoughts as she's burning to death, and made worse by the fact the poor old lady has no idea what's going on when it happens. What the Hell, Hero??
  • Variation: In the first chapter of Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, when Tohma was discovered sneaking into the facility containing Lily and successful gaining a reaction with her, the people in charge of that facility attempts to get rid of both Tohma and Lily by activating the lab's heat sterilization function, burning the entire area at temperatures that could melt metal. Fortunately, the Viral Transformation of Tohma had already completed by then, allowing him to protect both himself and Lily and subsequently escape.

Comic Books

  • Spider-Man was the subject to this in a 70's story, by Vulture of all people.
  • Catwoman almost became a victim to this in Batman: Batman: Dark Victory. Luckily for her, Batman saved her in time.
  • In the last strip in the short lived Spy vs. Spy Sunday strip, Black Spy becomes a victim to this.

Fan Works

Fairy Tales

  • The witch in "Hansel and Gretel" was roasted to death in her own oven. That was self-defense, though.

Film

  • Wint and Kidd attempt to do this to James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. It's one of the few Death Traps that he has to be rescued from.
  • Cremating alive is the standard means of executing sense offenders in Equilibrium. It is so disturbing that witnessing one at close range makes The Stoic Preston suffer a Heroic BSOD, though it may have also had something to do with the fact that the burned person was his potential Love Interest.
    • And the fact that his wife was executed in front of him the same way.
  • Two of Jigsaw's Death Traps in Saw movies burned the trapped person alive; The Oven in Saw II and the Final Trap in Saw: The Final Chapter.
  • In The Haunting In Connecticut, it's revealed that the little boy who's haunting the sickly teen in the present died when the other ghosts of the house locked him into the cremation furnace and turned it on.
  • In Scrooged, when the Scrooge stand-in attends his funeral during the Ghost of Christmas Future's tour, he ends up in the coffin as it goes into the retort.
  • Near the end of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the title character throws Mrs. Lovett into her own oven to be burned alive after finding out that the beggar woman, whom he had recently killed, was none other than his wife Lucy, and that Mrs. Lovett had lied to him about her being dead because she wanted him for herself.
  • Taken to a ridiculous extreme in a deleted scene of Johnny English, where a man who is part of Sauvage's plot to become king threatens to go to the police unless he gets more money, who is then led into Sauvage's private elevator. On the way down, the walls open to reveal several flamethrowers, and the man is burned alive on the way down. At the bottom, one of Sauvage's henchmen shows up with a dustbuster, as the body has been completely reduced to ash in a matter of seconds.
  • In a self-destructive variant, a character in Return of the Living Dead did this to himself, as he'd become a zombie and had no other means of ending his agony that would be certain to work.
  • Flame jets (used to kill bugs on animal carcasses) form part of Lord Blackwood's Death Trap in the slaughterhouse in Sherlock Holmes.
  • Happens in The Grey Zone to a Nazi guard when the Twelth Sonderkommando group launches an uprising in Auschwitz
  • If Death's killings can be classed as murder, there's the tanning bed deaths in Final Destination 3. That specific way was busted by the MythBusters, though.
  • Subverted in Bordello of Blood, as the crematory oven is a secret passage to the titular bordello.
  • Double-Subverted in The A-Team: A character is knowingly put in the oven still-alive, but the goal wasn't to kill him, and in fact his escaping from the oven was all part of the plan.

So, the Devil walks into a bar...

  • Played for laughs in The Addams Family. For his brother's wedding, Gomez orders a huge cake with a stripper inside. However, when the cake is delivered, it turns out that the unwitting butler put the girl inside before he put it into the oven. Nobody is too upset, though.
  • The T-1000 in Terminator 2. Arnold's death was more "assisted suicide" than murder, but yeah.
  • Suicide by cremation occurs in Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes.
  • Happens to the father of one of the college kids in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.
  • In The Street Fighter's Last Revenge, Terry deals with a Yakuza Mook in a mariachi costume in this manner after a fight that leaves one table knocked over, a brick wall mildly crumbled, a casket's lid shattered, and the casket itself in poor condition by the time the mariachi finds himself inside the oven.

Literature

  • Ray Bradbury's short story "Pillar of Fire". In a future society all horror literature has been burned for reasons of mental health (a la Fahrenheit 451) and all corpses in graveyards are being excavated and burned for hygienic reasons. A corpse reanimates and goes on a rampage to stop the burning; he's cremated at the end of the story.
  • A supernaturally-strong killer in Wolf In The Fold cuts out the middleman of a coffin or a full crematorium, and simply shoves a living victim's face into the fireplace until he's dead. While this doesn't destroy the whole body, it burns the corpse's face beyond recognition, which allows the illusion-casting killer to impersonate the dead man.
  • In the Doc Savage novel The Mountain Monster, gangsters attempt to feed Doc, Monk and Ham into a crematorium furnace. They fail due to Doc being Crazy Prepared.
  • Used in John C. Wright's Count to a Trillion: when the mutineers murder Captain Grimaldi. A token attempt is made to claim it was suicide, Grimaldi being a Hindu. The hero accurately points out that no starship captain would endanger his ship in that way.

Live Action TV

  • The killer attempts to dispose of one victim this way in the Midsomer Murders episode "Secrets and Spies".
  • One of the pranks in Scare Tactics would have a cremation worker "accidentally" (as in, he wasn't aware he was "alive") try to perform this trope. When the cremator and a few staff in on the joke turn it out, a severely burned actor would leap out, screaming bloody murder. Of course, that's where the prank usually ends.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 1, episode 5, "Never Kill A Boy On The First Date." Buffy kills a particularly tough vampire by shoving it into the cremation oven; they were at a morgue because that's where he woke up.
  • The X-Files, "Hell Money." A gambling ring among Chinese immigrants claims organs as collateral; if you can't pay up (or if you rat), you're disposed of in a crematorium. Alive.
  • In the Millennium episode "Gehenna", a cult leader disposes of troublemakers by cremating them alive in an industrial microwave.
  • The killer from the Criminal Minds episode "Mosley Lane" disposed of the children she abducted in her crematorium... she at least sedated them first.
  • Early in Season 2 of Fringe Charlie is killed off-screen by a shape-shifter and disposed of in a hospital incinerator.
  • Xena: Warrior Princess, 2x18 "Blind Faith". Gabrielle is fed into a crematorium while in a coffin.
  • Done by the government to first the immortal trapped in their death agony, but then anyone inconvenient, in Torchwood: Miracle Day.
    • And nobody brings up that this is highly unconstitutional, in the US at least.
  • An episode of The Outer Limits involves a scientist working in a sealed lab with a gas meant to be used to pacify riots. As a side effect, the latest batch ends up turning the lab monkey immortal. When the scientist's assistant attempts to steal the monkey's biological culture, the scientist's Corrupt Corporate Executive brother traps him in the lab. The angry assistant slams the door with his fist, which results in a bloody fist. The culture in his blood triggers the decontamination system, which "flashes" the lab, killing the guy. The brother later tries the same with the scientist and his girlfriend, who have discovered that the culture makes you temporarily invincible, only to kill you in a few days.
  • Fire is particularly dangerous to vampires in Moonlight, as any physical contact with it results in the exposed body part turning to ash. In the episode "Doctor Feelgood", a newly-turned vampire goes rabid and kills a lot of random people (including his wife). Being a doctor, he goes back to his hospital, where Mick tracks him down and stakes him (which on paralyses vampires). He then feeds him to the cremation oven at the morgue downstairs. Unlike a human, there will be nothing but ashes remaining. Additionally, the Cleaners execute a vampire who has betrayed the vampire community in LA with flamethrowers in the final episode. This is telling when an old vampire shows up for whom fire is a Won't Work On Me. Additionally, Coraline is not only able to move when staked but somehow survives being locked in a room on fire. Of course, this is likely because she is the other vampire's sister and is just as old.

Myth and Legend

  • Legend has it that Carthage used to sacrifice children in a furnace within a bronze statue of their god Moloch.
  • The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Adbenago from The Bible.

Newspaper Comics

  • A Mother Goose and Grimm comic strip had Grimm's Too Dumb to Live friend, Ralph the Boston Terrier, giving a testimony of the death of a possum who had apparently died, so they cremated him and placed his ashes in an urn. However, the possum's wife shows up, demanding to know where her husband is. When Ralph explains to her what happened, the female possum becomes angry, saying that her husband did not die, but was actually played possum, like all possums are wont to do, then starts ranting that her husband is dead and questions about what she'll do now.

Radio

  • In the Doctor Who audio adventure "The Three Companions", the Doctor, Polly, Ben and Jamie are trapped on a doomed world that is scheduled for cremation.

Video Games

  • In The Godfather: The Game, you can toss people into large ovens at funeral homes or (ugh) bakeries for the Overcooked Execution Style.
  • In Resident Evil 5; to kill the first Uroboros, the player needs to lure it into a walk in furnace and have their partner power it up. The first player runs out before the doors close, leaving the Uroboros to fry.
    • Later, the pair must activate a conveyor to move a box, which dumps several half-dead test subjects into the furnace at the end.
  • In Psi Ops the Mindgate Conspiracy you can either use telekinesis or Mind Control to kill enemies in incinerators.
  • In Hitman: Blood Money, this is how the Big Bad tries to get rid of 47 in the final chapter. It works if you do nothing during the credits, or, if you spin the joystick enough during them, 47 springs up for one last stage consisting of gunning down everyone at the funeral.
  • Both GLaDOS and the Companion Cube are killed this way in Portal. Both are Still Alive.
  • In Dead to Rights, you defeat the Final Boss by knocking him into a furnace.

Web Comics

Western Animation

Joker: But those dreams were dashed by the weaselly little gunsel sitting there in our midst. The cowardly insignificant gonif who probably got lucky when Batman slipped on the slime trail this loser left behind him. This mound of DISEASED hyena filth who's not fit to lick the dirt from my spats!!... But I digress. The time for sorrow has passed. It's time to look to a future filled with smiles. And I'll be smiling again just as soon as we take that man there, and slap him in that box there, and roll it into that vat of acid there!
The coffin rolls into the acid as Sid screams for mercy and bangs on the lid and Harley Quinn plays Amazing Grace on a kazoo.
Joker: Well, that was fun. Who's for Chinese?

Real Life

  • Viktor Suvorov claims that when he was recruited into the GRU, he was shown a film of this being done to a traitor. This is often presumed to be GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was discovered passing secrets to the CIA, but Suvorov doesn't specify.
  • Unintentional example, but some accounts of Rasputin's death say he was only in a deep coma when he was taken to the crematorium. He allegedly sat up during the procedure, though that may have simply been an involuntary response caused by the fire destroying the ligaments in his legs.
  • The Nazis did this to some.
    • Supposedly, during a prisoner revolt in Auschwitz, one of the camp guards was killed this way. See The Grey Zone under the movie entries.
  • The Brazen Bull.
    • This happened to Resistance member Andree Borell.
  • This accidentally almost happened to an old woman in China who sat up straight while on the conveyor belt. A worker noticed and the line was stopped.
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