Line #38 Main/MurderIntoMalevolence


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4	[[quoteright:350:[[Film/Thir13enGhosts https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/madden_malevolence_thirteen_ghosts_1.png]]]]
5	[[caption-width-right:350:''When all you have left is a hammer...'']]
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7	->''"When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage… a curse is born. The curse gathers in that place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury."''
8	-->-- ''Film/TheGrudge''
9
10	A theory that crops up often in paranormal studies and stories is that actions and emotions leave a sort of "residue" on locations. This concept is usually used to explain why a place is haunted, suffering from poltergeists, and whatnot: [[EvilTaintedThePlace bad things have "stained" the place]]. And sometimes, it seems, bad things stain souls as well.
11
12	It's an old saw: someone is killed, often in an [[CruelAndUnusualDeath extremely cruel or vicious way]], but they don't stay dead. Unfortunately, they don't stay ''themselves'' either. The actions that led to their demise have completely consumed them; all they want is to lash out at anyone they can, no matter how much or how little the person had to do with their demise. In a deeply tragic sense, they have suffered an even deeper, more final victimization; the murderer's deeds have corrupted them into something else. Sometimes you can reason with these poor — albeit dangerous — souls; sometimes they're just seeking revenge but striking out blindly...but sometimes they just want to keep inflicting pain. MaddenIntoMisanthropy has gone to its final, logical extreme: the person persists despite being dead, and all the entity wishes to do now is evil.
13
14	This trope only applies if the victim was a good or at least neutral person before their death. People who were monsters in life and remain so beyond the grave do not count.
15
16	Compare with the VengefulGhost and the vengeful variant of the RevenantZombie: although they might be monstrous, they focus their anger on their killers. Those entities overlap with this trope if they aren't satisfied with avenging themselves on their killers, but also target innocent victims.
17
18	A SisterTrope to the TorturedMonster and to the MonsterFromBeyondTheVeil. In some works, this makes undeath a form of TheCorruption. Contrast the NonMaliciousMonster. Can overlap with ResurrectionRevenge, which doesn't require the slain person to become malevolent.
19
20	----
21	!!Examples:
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23	%% This section has been alphabetized. Please add new examples in the correct place.
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25	[[foldercontrol]]
26
27	[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
28	* This is Ai Enma's backstory in ''Anime/HellGirl''. Ai originally lived in a village that sacrificed seven children to their mountain god every seven years, which is also implied to be a way of punishing those the village leaders find bothersome. Come year seven, Ai is selected as one of the ritual's victims, narrowly avoiding being buried alive thanks to the timely actions of her cousin Sentaro. When the villagers catch Ai six years later, they bury her alive in the hopes of stopping an ongoing famine, forcing Sentaro to start filling the grave in as punishment for helping her escape. Ai curses them all upon her death, her eyes turning blood-red as she does so. Soon after, she rises from her grave as an onryō that burns down the entire village, killing everyone except Sentaro, who was running away from the village at the time. [[SatanicArchetype The Spider]] catches her in the act and forces her to become the titular Hell Girl, acting as TheFerryman for his [[DealWithTheDevil Hell Correspondence]], as an [[IronicHell ironic punishment]].
29	* ''Manga/{{Mail}}'': The ghost from "The Drive" is lashing out at the poor woman who happened to buy the car he died in.
30	* In Creator/JunjiIto's story ''[[http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/6527013.html#cutid1 The Seashore]]'', a group of schoolchildren tragically drowned [[spoiler:and seem to be spending their afterlife luring in new people to drown for the sake of killing them]].
31	[[/folder]]
32
33	[[folder:Comic Books]]
34	* [[Characters/BatmanJasonTodd Jason Todd]] from ''ComicBook/{{Batman}}'' is always a troubled, aggressive child, but he stands by Batman's ThouShaltNotKill code and fights by his side as Robin[[note]]Notable that before this trope kicked in, Batman had his costume enshrined with the placard "A Good Soldier"[[/note]]. Then the Joker kidnaps and brutally murders him during ''ComicBook/ADeathInTheFamily'', and years after that, the events of ''ComicBook/InfiniteCrisis'' cause him to return to life.[[note]]While it was reality warping that did it technically, in 'real life' his corpse was taken and placed in a Lazarus Pit.[[/note]] Jason then adopts the Joker's original identity, Red Hood, and attempts to take over organized crime in Gotham in a ploy to kill Batman's RoguesGallery while also seeking to get the Caped Crusader to finally break his code against killing, by any means necessary. Unlike most examples, he eventually manages to take a few steps back from the brink, though he remains the most radical and prone to trouble of the Robins.
35	* ''ComicBook/HackSlash'': A basic part of Slashers. While they are rarely kind and are often at least somewhat unstable, it takes being murdered for many to come back as {{Revenant Zombie}}s with a bent toward a SerialKiller. [[spoiler:This is an oversimplification. Instead, it's the [[VillainousLineage Black Ambrosia residue in their bloodline]] that brings them back, and [[PsychoSerum turns them toward being more malicious than most people in the first place]].]]
36	[[/folder]]
37
38	[[folder:Fan Fiction]]
39	* ''Fanfic/CodexEquus'': {{Defied\|Trope}} by Ruby Heart. Despite experiencing a horrible death at the hooves of her own neighbors for something as innocent as earning a Cutie Mark, she couldn't bring herself to hate her killers, since some of them actually started [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone regretting doing it]]. She also understands why her family stood by and did nothing to protect her. Her desire to help them achieve redemption for their sins was what led to her becoming a Confessor.
40	* ''Fanfic/{{Foxfire\|RaharMoonfire}}'': The Woman in White was a beautiful woman who fell in love with a much wealthier upper-class man and started a family with him. However, he wanted to marry wealthier women, so he drove her to commit suicide to get rid of her. At first, she only killed people who cheated on their loved ones. When her children are murdered, she starts killing anyone that crosses her path.
41	* ''Fanfic/AGameOfCatAndCat'': According to legend, the Ghost of Mikado Castle was once an innocent boy from an enemy city who tried to follow his adopted mother to her homeland, but was caught and executed. He rose from the dead and killed the Samurai indiscriminately until his body was sealed in a well. In truth, [[spoiler:the boy was [[VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIVApocalypse Nanashi]], an [[ResurrectiveImmortality immortal]] demon hunter who already despised Mikado. He allowed himself to be caught so he could enact a sabotage operation [[ScoobyDooHoax disguised as a haunting]]]].
42	* In [[https://bludhavens.livejournal.com/38756.html?thread=12812644#t12812644 "I've Got My Eye on You",]] an ''Franchise/AceAttorney'' fanfic, Miles Edgeworth is murdered by [[spoiler:Kristoph Gavin]] and comes back as a malevolent ghost who haunts and attacks his former friends.
43	* The ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys'' fanfic ''Webcomic/SpringTrapped'' [[JustifiedTrope justifies it]]. Being undead causes major SanitySlippage (in the words of Springtrap himself, "turns out being undead makes you really pissed off") and drives the [[HauntedTechnology haunted animatronics]] to kill, even though their possessing spirits weren't like that in life.
44	[[/folder]]
45
46	[[folder:Film]]
47	* ''Film/TheAutopsyOfJaneDoe'' reveals that the titular Jane Doe was a victim of the witch trial hysteria and was horrifically tortured/murdered. Her rage over this and the baseless, hypocritical reasons for it happening seemingly turn her into a "witch": a powerful malevolent entity that haunts (and preserves) her corpse, who is still killing innocent people generations after her actual murderers died.
48	* In the ''Film/{{Candyman}}'' horror trilogy:
49	** Daniel Robitaille was a freedman raised in "polite society", i.e. white society, who fell in love with a plantation owner's daughter while painting her portrait. When she became pregnant, her father [[TorchesAndPitchforks had a mob chase him down]] and brutally murder him. End result: Robitaille becomes the Candyman, a murderous spirit who now only cares to "empower his myth" by hunting down anyone who chants his name five times into a mirror and gutting them with a hook.
50	** Candyman {{invoke\|dTrope}}s this trope himself in the first film: he torments and ultimately causes the violent death of the female protagonist. The twist ending reveals she too becomes a murderous spirit.
51	* In ''Film/DarknessFalls'', Matilda Dixon was a kindly widow who gave the children of her town gifts in exchange for their teeth. However, the fact she wore a mask and only came out at night (due to suffering severe burns somehow that left her sensitive to light) made the adults suspicious, and when two children disappeared, they blamed her and promptly lynched her… before the kids returned on their own, unharmed. As she died, Matilda swore vengeance, and afterwards haunts the town of Darkness Falls as a murderous ghost, killing anyone who sees her, seemingly at whim.
52	* ''Film/TheGhostOfYotsuya'': After Iemon murders his wife Oiwa and her friend Takuetsu, they come back and haunt him, bent on his destruction. Oiwa is a StringyHairedGhostGirl with a horrific facial disfiguration caused by the poison Iemon used to kill her, just to up the creepy. It's an adaptation of the stage play ''Yotsuya Kaidan'' (see Theatre below).
53	* ''Film/GodzillaMothraKingGhidorahGiantMonstersAllOutAttack:'' A non-human version of the trope comes from this film’s Godzilla possessed by the souls of UsefulNotes/ImperialJapan's victims in WWII. He's shown to take sadistic glee in the destruction he causes and deliberately target humans during his rampages. A far cry from the original Godzilla, a TragicMonster lashing out in revenge for his mutation. Considering that he’s the vessel of some [[https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n22/chalmers-johnson/the-looting-of-asia thirty million pissed-off Americans, Chinese, New Zealanders, Koreans, British, Australians and South-East Asians]] who died in atrocities that even horrified the Nazis, can you really blame him?
54	* In both ''Film/{{Juon}}'' and its western remake ''Film/TheGrudge'', Kayako Saeki is an innocent woman with NoSocialSkills, who is [[PaterFamilicide killed alongside her son]] by her jealous husband and returns as a [[StringyHairedGhostGirl vengeful ghost]]. One of her first victims is her murderer, but she'll gladly kill absolutely anybody over as little as merely stepping into her house. You even don't have to live there — most victims in fact didn't.
55	* {{Downplayed}} in ''Film/LaLlorona''. La Llorona isn’t evil per se, but she wants vengeance and is willing to traumatize her victim’s family to get it.
56	* ''Film/TheLordOfTheRingsTheTwoTowers'': {{Implied\|Trope}} regarding the Dead Marshes, where the waters hold spectral images of the men and elves who died in a long-ago battle against Sauron's armies. Frodo falls in and has a vision of rotting corpses trying to drag him down, but his mental state is a bit unreliable at the time.
57	-->'''Gollum:''' Don't follow the lights. Careful now, or hobbits go down to join the dead ones… and light little candles of their own!
58	* Subverted in ''Film/ManiacCop''. The eponymous character was LawfulGood before being framed, sent to jail, and subsequently attacked in prison. In this case, it's implied that he's a RevenantZombie (which the sequel confirms and runs with), but his more brutal behavior is down to brain damage changing his personality rather than being undead.
59	* In ''Film/TheMummy1999'', Imhotep is a fairly shady character in life — murdering his liege lord [[LoveMakesYouEvil for the sake of his lover]], who is strongly hinted not to have had a choice in her relationship with said lord — but then gets ThePunishment of a terrible curse that makes him [[AndIMustScream suffer for eternity]] in undeath. When his sarcophagus is disturbed, he rises from the grave with horrific powers and a ''long'' list of grievances against the world.
60	* In ''Film/{{Necronomicon}}'', "The Cold" segment features a journalist being told the story of a young woman named Emily fleeing an abusive home by her daughter. It's revealed that the "daughter" is actually [[spoiler:Emily]], resurrected in the same way as Dr. Madden after being fatally shot by a rival for his affections. She's been coldly (no pun intended) killing people for their spinal fluid in order to [[spoiler:[[SomeoneToRememberHimBy still feel Madden's baby kicking inside her]]]].
61	* The Driver from the ''Film/RestStop'' duology was a random motorist who was torture-murdered by a family of deranged, inbred Christian fundamentalists. His spirit now haunts the lonely stretch of highway where he was killed, torture-murdering anyone who passes through it.
62	* ''They're Watching'' takes place in an isolated European villa where the nearby town [[BurnTheWitch burned a witch at the stake]] due to a plague. TheReveal is that the witch both foresaw her death and the events that would allow her return and upon returning/reawakening/reincarnating (it's unclear), she promptly kills the whole village in a storm of terrible black magic. Assuming that the original witch did not cause the plague, it's a terrible case of RevengeByProxy, since the townsfolk who killed her are all long dead.
63	* In ''Film/Thir13enGhosts'', some of the titular 13 ghosts weren't violent in life, but the events leading up to their demise have made them vengeful in death.
64	** The Hammer: George Markeley was a blacksmith and family man. He became a {{Crusading Widow}}er when his family was lynched and he later killed their murderers. However, the racist townsfolk responded by turning into a mob, chaining him to a tree, driving iron spikes into his body, cutting off his hand and replacing it with his hammer. His ghost is one of the three most violent, dangerous and deadly of the 13, second only to the ghost of a serial killer and an insane asylum patient.
65	** The Torn Prince: Royce Clayton. He was a greaser who loved to race, and died to cut brake lines. He sports a baseball bat as a ghost and is very aggressive with it.
66	** The Angry Princess: Dana Newman. She committed suicide due to perceived imperfections, and though she's not as overly aggressive as others in the movie, she becomes threatening when in the vicinity of beautiful women, perhaps out of jealousy.
67	[[/folder]]
68
69	[[folder:Literature]]
70	* ''Literature/AkataWitch'' has a [[NonHumanUndead non-human version]]: the spirits of swatted insects manifest in the SpiritWorld as [[BigCreepyCrawlies much larger]], much nastier entities with [[TheParalyzer paralytic venom]]. According to Orlu, this is common for creatures killed by acts of thoughtless cruelty.
71	* In the Creator/StephenKing novel ''Literature/BagOfBones'', Sara Tidwell was a (black) blues musician who watched her son be viciously murdered due to racism, and then was raped and murdered herself. Her lingering spirit decides that it's not enough for the men responsible to pay for this crime: their descendants, including young children, all have to die as well. There's a vague line that outside forces ''might'' have caused Sara's ghost to become so nasty, but this is never confirmed in any way.
72	* In ''Literature/LockwoodAndCo'', murder victims generally are extremely likely to become violent and dangerous ghosts, because they're so furious and bitter about what has been done to them and desire revenge. In the first book, Lucy weaponises this by [[spoiler:releasing the ghost of Annabelle Ward and letting her [[VengefulGhost destroy her murderer]] (who was attempting to kill the main cast at the time.)]]
73	* ''Literature/NightWorld'': Suzanne, a witch ghost who's the BigBad of ''Spellbinder'', wants to kill any human she finds because human witch hunters wrongfully [[VanHelsingHateCrimes tortured and executed her and her family]].
74	* ''Literature/{{Pact}}'': this is how ghosts get created; they're an imprint on reality of a traumatic event left behind by a dying soul. The ghost endlessly repeats the circumstances of its death, and tries to inflict those same circumstances on people who come near. It is noted, however, that ghosts are ''not'' the actual soul of the deceased. They're just an afterimage. The real soul passed on, and the ghost is just the leftover imprint of their death.
75	* ''Literature/TheRing'' has Sadako Yamamura. Born with immense psychic powers she couldn't control, she attempted to lead a normal life before she was raped and tossed into a well to die. Only then did she decide she wanted to bring harm to the whole world.
76	* In ''Literature/PetSematary'', it's strongly {{implied\|Trope}} the cursed burial ground has [[GeniusLoci a will of its own]] and arranges Gage's death (hence murdering him), before reviving him as a monstrous parody of a child. In this case, it's the killer (force) that provides the malevolence but is only able to do that once Gage is dead.
77	[[/folder]]
78
79	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
80	* This happens to [[spoiler:Chet]] in ''Series/AmericanHorrorStory1984''. He was drowned by Margaret in the series proper, and upon his rebirth as a ghost who is doomed to suck in water when he gasps for air, he wants nothing more than [[spoiler:Margaret]] dead.
81	* This gets applied to the titular Doctor of ''Series/DoctorWho'' in the episode "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E12HellBent Hell Bent]]" after the events of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E11HeavenSent Heaven Sent]]". [[spoiler:After being killed and cloned in a cycle for several billion years, the Doctor deposes the government responsible and begins to abuse time travel technology to try and prevent a friend's death in a way that threatens the entire space-time continuum.]]
82	* Two different episodes of ''Series/MastersOfHorror'' revolve around a vengeful female ghost who came back from the dead due to some past injustice in their lives.
83	** In "[[Recap/MastersOfHorrorS2E9RightToDie Right to Die]]", Cliff sabotages his car so that his wife Abbey [[spoiler:(who is actually pregnant)]] will go into a coma, then he performs euthanasia on her. Suffice to say, she is friggin' ''pissed'' and refuses to move on.
84	** In "[[Recap/MastersOfHorrorS2E13DreamCruise Dream Cruise]]", a Japanese ghost is haunting a specific sea area and attacking any ships who come near as a result of having been murdered by her unfaithful husband.
85	* In ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'':
86	** "[[Recap/SupernaturalS01E03DeadInTheWater Dead in the Water]]" has Peter Sweeney, who was accidentally drowned by two of his childhood bullies. Over the next 35 years, his VengefulGhost enacted a brutal RevengeByProxy, killing those bullies' loved ones until the last surviving bully offers his life to lay the ghost to rest.
87	** Ghosts usually succumb to SanitySlippage, especially since UnstoppableRage helps them affect the physical world. After [[spoiler:Bobby]] is murdered, he slowly becomes more driven to attack his killer and less concerned about the well-being of others, until he has his HauntedFetter destroyed to stop him from "going vengeful".
88	[[/folder]]
89
90	[[folder:Myth and Folklore]]
91	* In Japanese folklore, ''[[StringyHairedGhostGirl onryō]]'' could be formed from a person who dies a particularly violent death.
92	** The most famous example of this aside from Oiwa is Okiku, the servant of a samurai who tried to blackmail her into sleeping with him by framing her for losing one of his family's priceless plates. When she continued to refuse him, he threw her down a well to her death, but her vengeful ghost haunted him until being exorcised by a priest.
93	** The [[AsianFoxSpirit kitsune]] Tamamo-no-Mae became an ''onryō'' called Hoji after she was slain by Kazusa-no-suke and Miura-no-suke, manifesting a cursed stone called the Sesshoseki that killed anyone who touched it.
94	** The Kuchisake-onna is a woman who was given a GlasgowSmile by her husband and was DrivenToSuicide. She returned as a malicious ghost who baits people by asking them "Am I pretty?", then revealing her mouth and asking again, inflicting the same mutilation on them whether they answer "Yes" or "No".
95	* ''Literature/TamCam'', the Vietnamese take on Cinderella, is this. Tấm starts out as a naïve, gentle, sweet girl who, with the help of the Buddha, gets the king. She then goes through a TraumaCongaLine where she's murdered by her stepmother and stepsister Cám and then {{Reincarnat\|ion}}ed ''four times'', all violently. After the last time, she boils Cám to death and tricks the stepmother into eating her corpse, which causes the stepmother to die of shock when the AwfulTruth is revealed. There is [[AlternativeCharacterInterpretation considerable debate]] over whether this grisly ending is justifiably [[PayEvilUntoEvil Paying Evil Unto Evil]] for the repeated horrible murders or whether it turns the kind-hearted heroine into an unredeemable monster, and several {{Bowdlerize}}d versions reduce or omit Tấm's {{Revenge}}.
96	[[/folder]]
97
98	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
99	* ''TabletopGame/ArsMagica'': Moros are {{undead child}}ren whose [[OffingTheOffspring parents murdered them]] by exposure. They especially want to target their killers with their powers to [[VampiricDraining drain life energy]] and create HostileWeather, but prey on any of the living, even to the extent of [[EatsBabies draining other infants to death]].
100	* ''TabletopGame/{{Atmosfear}}'': Anne de Chantraine was an innocent burned to death after being accused of witchcraft. She comes back wanting to burn all of humanity for her suffering.
101	* ''TabletopGame/BladesInTheDark'': "Specters" are a category of ghosts that most commonly results from the dying person being wronged somehow, but especially if they are violently murdered. All specters are inherently evil, seeking to harm and drain the living, with a special hatred towards those they see responsible for their misfortune.
102	* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons''
103	** This is built into the rules for making a ghost in some editions; their CharacterAlignment becomes NeutralEvil regardless of who they were in life.
104	** Victims of undead with the "create spawn" ability (such as wights and ghouls) always fit this trope: they return as AlwaysChaoticEvil shadows of their former selves (literally in the case of {{Living Shadow}}s), which must be slain to resurrect them or allow them to pass on to the afterlife.
105	** 1[[superscript:st]] Edition ''AD&D'' ''Fiend Folio'': the revenant is an undead that can be created when a humanoid creature dies a violent death. It is dedicated to hunting down the creature that killed it, as well as any creatures that helped in the killing. Once it finds them, it will try to strangle its killer(s) to death.
106	* ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'':
107	** The game has similar rules regarding ghosts as ''D&D'', but doesn't necessarily include an alignment change; it only notes that this trope is likely because the inherent trauma that would cause a spirit to linger could also cause an alignment shift to ChaoticEvil.
108	** Spectres are incorporeal undead created from the souls of murdered humanoids. Unlike ghosts, they are inevitably turned evil by their impotent fury at the violent act that cut their life short.
109	** The Pale Stranger is a RevenantZombie which arises when a gunslinger is killed by a hated foe, or [[VengeanceDenied before they can take their revenge]] on said foe. The immense, frustrated rage these people feel as they die corrupts them and raises them as an undead horror, which will always be NeutralEvil regardless of their alignment in life. The rage that corrupted a Pale Stranger will stay with it forever, and after taking their revenge it will take to wandering the wastes, venting its unending anger on anyone it finds.
110	[[/folder]]
111
112	[[folder:Theatre]]
113	* ''Theatre/TheGuyWhoDidntLikeMusicals'': The assimilated [[spoiler:Alice]] presents herself as this, seeking only to hurt Bill and drive him to suicide to get {{Revenge}} for his failure [[spoiler:to save her from the HiveMind]]. Of course, it soon transpires that this was just the HiveMind being a {{Sadist}} ForTheEvulz.
114	* In ''Theatre/YotsuyaKaidan'', Oiwa is horribly disfigured and DrivenToSuicide so that her husband can replace her with a younger woman and, [[DyingCurse with her dying breath]], curses her husband's name. She comes back as an ''onryo'', or vengeful ghost, and drives her husband to madness.
115	[[/folder]]
116
117	[[folder:Video Games]]
118	* The main gimmick of [[spoiler: Tainted Jacob]] in the latest expansion of ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac''. After 30 seconds of starting the level, the ghost of [[spoiler: His brother, Esau]] comes out of Hell and starts chasing him. This means that you have to constantly evade him while fighting across the level. However, the ghost is also perfecly able to damage or kill any enemy that stands between you and him.
119	* The Girl In Red, a.k.a. [[spoiler:Sachiko Shinozaki]], in ''VideoGame/CorpseParty''. Just a normal little girl in life, who [[spoiler:saw her mother murdered for no reason, and then was chased down and killed by the murderer, who might have also later returned and mutilated her corpse based on his own gnawing guilt.]] End result: a spirit so angry and vengeful that it creates a wholly separate reality to pull in and cruelly murder hundreds of victims.
120	* ''VideoGame/DeadByDaylight'': Yamaoka "The Spirit" Rin, a ghost of hateful rage in the vein of the classic onryo. Her origin, unlike all of her 'peer killers', was that of a normal young woman who was brutally murdered by her father. Her father had been the intended 'target' of the 'Entity' that 'recruits' killers into its 'game', having helped drive him over the edge to murder (family annihilator style), but Rin's anger over her cruel death was so great that it changed its mind and took her instead, to stalk and kill victims that had absolutely nothing to do with her death in classic shrieking, spectral fury.[[note]]Hell, technically her 'BOSS' is responsible for her death, but whether she can even recognize that or not is unknown.[[/note]]
121	* ''VideoGame/DivinityOriginalSinII'': The [[spoiler:Godwoken who aren't chosen as party members]] are [[DroppedABridgeOnHim abruptly murdered]] at the end of Act I, then reappear at the end of Act III as malevolent skeletal undead and try to kill the player characters. In between, their spirits [[YourSoulIsMine swear a covenant]] with the [[GreaterScopeVillain God-King]] for a chance to resolve their UnfinishedBusiness, but [[TheDarkSideWillMakeYouForget lose their original selves]] in the bargain.
122	* The ghostlike [[OurGhostsAreDifferent Screamers]] in ''VideoGame/FableI'' are described as victims of the BigBad, who are trapped as {{Tortured Monster}}s between life and death and can only find relief by [[VampiricDraining devouring their victims' life force]].
123	* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'', fiends are the souls of humans whose [[GhostlyGoals unfinished business]] kept them on earth until they became bitter, angry monsters with no other purpose than to attack the living. Sin's attacks often leave huge numbers of souls that will quickly become monsters if they aren't sent on by a summoner.
124	* In the first ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys1'', it's implied that the [[PerversePuppet animatronics]] are haunted by the ghosts of murdered children, and one of the possible reasons they're targeting the player is that they can't tell the difference between their killer and Mike Schmidt.
125	* In ''VideoGame/PillarsOfEternity'', Lord Raedric is not the nicest person around, going KnightTemplar about his misguided attempt to cure the Hollowborn plague in his domain. Still, if you help him secure his power base, he will ease his draconic measures after the plague is actually cured (by unrelated efforts), and prove himself a capable, if harsh ruler who will rebuild the Gilded Vale back to glory. However, if you kill him to stop his brutal ways, he will come back as a BlackKnight and, if you don't kill him ''again'', lay waste to his own old domain until nothing remains alive in it.
126	* Downplayed with Charlie as of ''VideoGame/StreetFighterV''. Back in ''VideoGame/StreetFighterAlpha'', he was murdered by getting shoved off his helicopter by one of his fellow Air Force comrades... who turned out to be a disguised Shadaloo member. Then Urien and Helen, members of Illuminati, brought him back to life (albeit LivingOnBorrowedTime) with a single mission: to stop M. Bison, leader of Shadaloo. Charlie, who's filled with rage and grudge due to what happened to him, simply obliges; he also becomes a cold and dead serious guy who won't hesitate in killing people if they hinder him and has nothing good to say for his old friend Guile. Despite all that, however, he's still one of the good guys and later come to the realization that he can't do all this alone.
127	* ''VideoGame/{{Terraria}}'': All of the Polterghasts in ''Calamity'' were victims of Yharim's conquest. As spirits clinging to reality through little more than ThePowerOfHate, they held no loyalty to their fellow dead. Many swiftly turned on each other -- [[MonstrousCannibalism souls devouring souls]] in an instinctual [[CannibalismSuperpower bid for power.]]
128	* ''VideoGame/{{Warcraft}}'':
129	** Banshees are ghosts of elven women slain during Arthas' conquest of Silvermoon, with only their voices left to express their hatred and suffering.
130	** The first banshee was Sylvannas Windrunner, the honorable ForestRanger who leads Silvermoon's defense. Arthas ignores her [[GetItOverWith request for a quick death]] and instead consigns her to the eternal suffering of undeath; when freed from his domination, she becomes a cruel and spiteful creature who eventually leads the independent splinter faction of the undead known as the Forsaken.
131	* ''VideoGame/TheWitcher3WildHunt'': Most of the ghosts the player encounters are generic mooks with no individual backstory (though it is implied that all of them have one), though specific sidequests often involves finding out what sort of spirit it is and how it ended up in its current situation, giving them more characterisation. All of them tend to be hostile to everyone they encounter, though, rather than focussing their rage on the people who wronged them.
132	** One quest takes the protagonist Geralt to a cursed and haunted island, where he finds the ghost of a young woman pleading to help her spirit leave the island. It turns out that she's a nobleman's daughter and, during a peasant uprising, her entire family was slaughtered and the invaders had planned to rape and murder her. [[spoiler:Instead, she drank a sleeping potion which [[PlayingPossum put her in a death-like state that fooled everyone]]... including her boyfriend, who ran away and wished that everyone would die. Eventually, everyone DID die and she was stuck in her fake death, unable to move as the rats in the tower ate her warm body alive. The combination of the boyfriend's curses, her CruelAndUnusualDeath, and the plague the rats carried (which is a long story in itself) turned the young woman's spirit into a Petra--a Plague Maiden that cursed the entire island.]] An unusual example in that this ghost is still semi-intelligent; capable of conversing with the protagonist (and deceiving him if the player doesn't SpotTheThread,) while still being totally consumed with the instinct to take targeted vengeance on specific people, and then wreak indiscriminate harm upon the world. The options the game presents are [[spoiler: failing to realise the spirit is trying to manipulate you into unleashing it, and doing what it says (resulting in it killing the innocent boyfriend before disappearing out into the world to continue spreading disease) or calling it out, fighting it, then convincing the boyfriend to come to the island and reconcile with her (resulting in her demanding a kiss from him while in her monstrous form, and when he obliges, both of them disappear into a presumably peaceful afterlife, killing the innocent boyfriend but laying her to rest)]].
133	** A Baron and his wife were in an unhappy marriage [[spoiler:where he beat her constantly and she found herself pregnant with a child she couldn't bear the thought of carrying. The wife was eventually visited by three evil witch spirits who offered to get rid of the unborn child if the wife agreed to serve them for a year. She agreed, and not long afterward, her husband beat her so badly that she miscarried. The wife and her other daughter decided to escape from the Baron that night and left the dead fetus on the bed. The Baron found his dead child and, in his grief, buried it in an unmarked grave without giving it a name]]. The dead child transformed into a Botchling -- a malevolent and murderous spirit created from babies that died unwanted or unloved. The game offers the option of either provoking the monstrous baby corpse into taking on a more aggressive form and fighting it, or of performing a ritual in which the parent begs the spirit's forgiveness, names it and embraces it as their child, then buries it properly, which transforms it into a benevolent protective spirit.
134	[[/folder]]
135
136	[[folder:Visual Novels]]
137	* Most of the spirits in ''VisualNovel/SpiritHunterDeathMark'' and its sequel ''VisualNovel/SpiritHunterNG'' were all good people in life - or at least had good intentions, in the case of Kubitarou. However, their painful and grisly deaths caused them to be brought back as murderous spirits with a grudge against humans.
138	[[/folder]]
139
140	[[folder:Webcomics]]
141	* Parodied in ''Webcomic/{{chainsawsuit}}'' where a malevolent ghost kills anyone who wanders into the house where she was murdered. A man {{Lampshade\|Hanging}}s how ridiculous this is, pointing out that her killer is long dead and the whole thing is an exercise in futility. The ghost obviously doesn't listen and kills him anyway.
142	* ''Webcomic/{{Daniel}}'': After the shy, genial title character [[spoiler:is tortured and BuriedAlive]], he rises as a monstrous [[OurVampiresAreDifferent vampire]] who can manage only the barest veneer of civility over his predatory nature, murders entire households without a second thought, and [[spoiler:slowly [[ColdBloodedTorture tortures]] his killers to death]]. Once he [[spoiler:stops [[ResistTheBeast Resisting the Beast]], he starts specifically targeting his former friends and loved ones]].
143	* Invoked in ''Webcomic/GunnerkriggCourt'': the Court's founders [[http://gunnerkrigg.com/?p=654 sacrificed]] a woman [[spoiler:and murdered her lover in front of her]], which caused her to rise as a [[http://gunnerkrigg.com/?p=777 furious ghost]] with ThePowerOfHate. They then magically bound her spirit to an eternity wandering the river that surrounds the Court, killing anyone who tries to cross over.
144	[[/folder]]
145
146	[[folder:Web Original]]
147	* ''WebAnimation/MysterySkullsAnimated'': Lewis Pepper is repeatedly stated to have been kind and gentle in life; the introduction to the Peppers went so far as to call him "quite the blessing". Decidedly less so after death, where he's a vengeful spirit with [[PlayingWithFire control over flames]] who antagonizes the Mystery Skulls.
148	* ''Website/SCPFoundation'': [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1337 SCP-1337]] was initially just a harmless [[BewareOfHitchhikingGhosts Hitchhiking Ghost]] after her murder... until a Foundation researcher decided (without permission) to have her parents killed and gravesite destroyed, in the hopes that she'd "have nothing to come back to" and vanish. Instead, she became an indiscriminate killer.
149	[[/folder]]

Context Main / MurderIntoMalevolence