History Main / RazorApples

Sighing, you take a bite into the apple, only to discover that there's something painful in your bite! You spit it out to discover that the apple's full of razor blades!

Not to be confused with the giant, kid-crushing apples[=/=]cherries[=/=]some sort of killer fruit of the rose family in ''VideoGame/IWannaBeTheGuy''. For when this trope is used to sneak dangerous objects to people with no intention of consuming the food item, it's JailBake.

** Much earlier, Doc Q of the Blackbeard Pirates gets his EstablishingCharacterMoment by offering apples to random people... and most of the apples contains a deadly explosive.

* ConversationalTroping in the HalloweenEpisode of ''ComicBook/{{Impulse}}''. The over-100-years-old Max Mercury makes popcorn balls for trick-or-treaters, who freak out that if they aren't proper safety-sealed commercial products, he could have put anything in them.
* ''ComicBook/OddThomas'': ''Odd is on Our Side'', a graphic novel based off the ''Literature/OddThomas'' series by Dean Koontz, has a miserly man sick of trick-or-treaters trampling his garden pass out candy laced with corn cockle seeds (a Class IV toxin). One kid dies. The worst part? The candy laced with said seeds: candy hearts, purchased on the cheap after Valentine's Day. He was such a bastard he didn't even poison ''good'' candy.

** In [[Film/Candyman2021 the 2021 sequel]], the odd but kindhearted Sherman Fields, who delivers candy to children, is accused of adding razorblades after a white girl becomes a victim of one. Sherman, a Black man, is [[PoliceBrutality murdered by the officers who come to arrest him]]. He's exonerated when the razors continue to be distributed, but Sherman ends up becoming part of the Candyman legend and Candyman takes his form often.

* The original ''Film/NightOfTheDemons1988'' featured a frame story of this. A cranky old man is angered by children, and comes home on Halloween with a bag full of apples and razor blades. The final scene involves the old man sitting down for a breakfast of apple pie made by his wife. He only asks her after taking a few bites where she got the apples...

* In one ''Literature/PaddingtonBear'' story, Paddington [[spoiler: almost]] swallows the coin in the Browns' Christmas pudding, as he's not aware of the tradition (see the real life section).

* In the second episode of ''Series/{{Chucky}}'', a flashback shows a young Charles Lee Ray finding an apple with a very obvious razor blade in it among his Halloween treats. [[SelfHarm He takes a bite out of it anyway]] [[TroublingUnchildlikeBehavior and smiles as blood pours from his mouth]]. Later on, Chucky gives a clueless lady another such apple as "thanks" for giving him the information he needed. Next time we see her, she is bleeding profusely from her mouth as she reports the "horrible red-haired child" to the cops.

* A ''Series/CriminalMinds'' episodes had the psycho of the week place LSD and Rohypnol laced sweets into the bank candy bowl. Victims had psychotics episodes of rage, which they would subsequently have completely no memory of.
* In the beginning of the ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' episode "War Stories", the crew is indulging in a box of fresh apples Jayne bought for them, when Kaylee asks Zoe why she always cuts them with a knife instead of biting in. She relates a story from the war, where the Alliance and Independent armies had a standoff, got to talking, and the Independents mentioned they had no food. The Alliance soldiers tossed over apples--which had "Griswold" grenades in them and before anyone realized it, "[[YourHeadAsplode there's three guys just kind of end at the ribcage]]."

* In the ''Series/{{Monk}}'' episode "[[Recap/MonkS4E2MrMonkGoesHomeAgain Mr. Monk Goes Home Again]]", Paul Gilstrap planned to use poisoned Neptune candy bars to [[SerialKillingsSpecificTarget cover the murder of his wife]]. Unfortunately, his employer caught him putting the poison back, which meant that the police would connect him to any tetrachlorodrine poisoning deaths, and he had to get all of the candy bars he had poisoned out of circulation. He failed to get one from an armored car driver who had purchased it and already taken a bite. Since Gilstrap knew that the poison was quick-acting, he caught up to the driver just before he collapsed from the poisoning. Gilstrap then grabbed the dying driver's gun and shot him five times at point-blank range, thinking the police would not do a toxicology on a shooting victim. Except Adrian finds a dead pigeon outside Gilstrap's house hours later while trick-or-treating with Julie.
* ''[[Series/Adam12 The New Adam-12]]'' {{Revival}} series had a Halloween episode where someone was handing out caramel apples with razors stuck in them, but only to children of Asian descent. The officers trace it back to an bigoted old man who sees them as YellowPeril taking over "his" country.

* ''Videogame/TheBindingOfIsaac'': The "Apple!" item - added in the ''Afterbirth†'' DLC for the remake - is one of these. It stains Isaac's mouth a clear blood-red, gives him a tears up from the injury and occasionally lets him spit out an extra-damaging razor instead of a tear. Besides this, one of the between floor nightmare intermissions involves Isaac eating a piece of candy, only to vomit up a large amount of blood and a razor.
* ''VideoGame/{{Ib}}'': The story book ''Carrie Careless and the Galette des Rois'' tells of one particularly nasty ''subversion'', where it isn't the eponymous Carrie swallowing/biting down on the object that is painful or deadly, but rather [[spoiler:Carrie's best friend having to ''cut the object - actually a misplaced key - out of her stomach'']] as the story's horrific conclusion. [[DerangedAnimation It's even creepier than it sounds]].

* The CreepyPasta ''I Did Something Bad Last Halloween'' involves the protagonist, [[MiseryLit an abused girl,]] being force-fed halloween candy by her mother in the hopes that she will eat a poisoned one. She survives, but this inspires her to start poisoning halloween candy, [[AssholeVictim but only if the victim deserves it]], ex. a boy who copped a feel. It helps that she reverse-pickpockets the tampered candy into their trick-or-treat bags.

** "Treehouse of Horror X" has the police x-raying the kids Halloween candy and finding [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking razors, syringes, and...white chocolate]], to which Chief Wiggum cringes at in disgust.

* The WWII [=POW=] autobiography ''The Colditz Story'' relates how the clique of prisoners referred to as the "[[{{Determinator}} Men of Spirit]]" spent the little time they didn't devote to escape attempts stuffing the rotten vegetables in the kitchen waste full of old razor blades, since it was taken out of the camp to be used as pigswill in the surrounding farms. Since the German authorities regarded this as sabotage, punishable by death, this was a risky pastime.

* A real-life {{Subversion}} was the death of Timothy O'Bryan of Pasadena, Texas in 1974. It turned out that he and four other children (including his sister) had been given poisoned Pixy Sticks while trick-or-treating. Thankfully none of the other children ate their poisoned candy. While this trope was initially suspected, the culprit turned out to be none other than [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan Ronald O'Bryan]], Timothy's father, who had poisoned one of his children and attempted to poison the other in order to collect on their life insurance by [[SerialKillingsSpecificTarget invoking this trope]]. He ended up being sentenced to death for his son's murder.

* At the beginning of his review of ''Film/TrickRTreat'', Creator/CountJackula is busy preparing for Halloween by jamming razor-blades into fun-sized chocolate bars, citing that he is forgoing the usual partying he does on Halloween in favor of passing out candy to trick-or-treaters due to not having a costume.
* Sniffles is forced to eat one in ''WebAnimation/HappyTreeFriends''.

* The CreepyPasta ''I Did Something Bad Last Halloween'' involves the protagonist, [[MiseryLit an abused girl,]] being force-fed halloween candy by her mother in the hopes that she will eat a poisoned one. She survives, but this inspires her to start poisoning halloween candy, [[AssholeVictim but only if the victim deserves it]], ex. a boy who copped a feel. It helps that she reverse-pickpockets the tampered candy into their trick-or-treat bags

-->-- '''Caligari''', ''Film/AmericanNightmare''

* Lampshaded in ''Series/{{Goosebumps}}''' ''The Haunted Mask'': Sabrina's, Carly Beth's friends, mom instructs her every year to throw away any candies that are not in their original wrappers for fear of poisons and sharp objects.

* A real-life {{Subversion}} was the death of Timothy O'Bryan of Pasadena, Texas in 1974. It turned out that he and four other children (including his sister) had been given poisoned Pixy Sticks while trick-or-treating. Thankfully none of the other children ate their poisoned candy. While this trope was initially suspected, the culprit turned out to be none other than [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan Ronald O'Bryan]], Timothy's father, who had poisoned one of his children and attempted to poison the other in order to collect on their life insurance by [[SerialKillingsSpecificTarget invoking this trope]].

* ''Videogame/TheBindingOfIsaac'': The "Apple!" item is one of these. It stains Isaac's mouth a clear blood-red, gives him a tears up from the injury and occasionally lets him spit out an extra-damaging razor instead of a tear.