So, the hero has just defeated a horde of mooks. So many mooks, in fact, that their corpses have been piling up under the hero's feet and formed a veritable mountain of bodies. What better way to celebrate this Bad Ass display than to perform a Victory Pose atop said pile.
Frequently (especially in Film Posters) comes with a Leg Cling by the Love Interest in a Go-Go Enslavement bikini, as the hero waves his BFS / BFG (or Cool Sword) in the air triumphantly.
If it's a villain, you can expect them to instead lounge comfortably on their corpse-couch, perhaps off-handedly stabbing any enemies that have a twitch of life still in them. Bad guys with time on their hands and an interest in arts and crafts may turn this pile-o-corpses into a skull throne, with authentic human skin leather for the lining. *shudder*
The PG-13 version of this has the baddies KO'd or too beat up to move. In which case, the hero will usually sit on top of the still moaning mooks and offhandedly thwack any that show signs of resistance. This is especially common if they're waiting to be rescued.
Potential ways to subvert this trope include using the corpseas cover, or surprise attacking anyone who goes over the corpses while you're on the other side of it.
Compare Nothing But Skulls and Hitler Cam.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
One of the chapter title pages in Bleach depicted Nnoitra doing this.
Rob Lucci, who manages this while resolving a situation where a kingdom's entire army were taken hostage. When he wasthirteen. With the corpses consisting of the hostages.
Another example from One Piece occurs when Shiki invaded Marineford single-handedly. Garp and Sengoku find him on top of a pile of Marines.
In Jackals, the first image depicting The Hero's mom shows her on top of a pile of corpses with the BFS she passed on to her son.
For an arguably more family-friendly take, look no further than the oft-parodied pile of mecha from the G Gundam prologue.
The video game Gundam vs. Gundam uses this as the Victory Pose at the end of Arcade Mode, with the player's mecha atop the mountain.
Kitsuchi, the badass general from Iwagakure in Naruto literally stands on top of a pile of White Zetsu Corpses, choking out the last one. He killed them all himself. Note these things are durable enough to take a One-Body Blow from Neji Hyuga, a very strong Jonin, and start regenerating immediately. As well as survive Sakura's Super Strength-twice.
AmagiMiroku of Psyren, shortly after his big massacre TV debut does this after he and his sempai-slash-subordinate Grigori #01 (later known as Commander Grana) take out the Special Defense Force unit sent to hunt them down. Man always has perfect poise.
P.S.: It's his birthday in the scene linked to above.
Sanosuke Sagara had a moment when he went back to his hometown to check on his family only to find his father in trouble with local gangsters. They sent 200 men to fight him. And Sanosuke wiped the floor with every single one of them, grinning madly all the way as he had needed "stress relief."
Art
Frank Frazetta popularized the trope, regularly portraying heroes such as Conan the Barbarian standing atop pyramid shapes to emphasize their heroic stature. Often the pyramid was composed of slain enemies.
Wizard Magazine once did a humorous story on the kill count of Dark Horse's popular characters depicted on top of their own body piles ranging from The Goon, Hellboy, Conan the Barbarian and Miyamoto Usagi having the largest pile.
This actually happens with some frequency in Usagi Yojimbo, though it's often due to a camera angle. Almost invariably, they will give off the Speech Bubble for death (a skull of their species).
The cover of Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, he even manages to get some Leg Cling in there. [1]◊
In a segment of Maus, Art imagines himself drawing the comicbook, while wearing a mouse mask, on top of a pile of anthromorphic mouse corpses, mirroring his guilt and self-doubt related to the publishing of the first half of the book.
One cartoon magazine series had the protagonists filming a Conan the Barbarian rip-off, with the hero eventually "knee-deep in the bodies of his slain enemies". A producer comments: "We wanted it to be waist deep, but we couldn't afford enough extras."
In a Spiderman issue the villain Carnage stands on top of a pile of people he has killed while laughing maniacally.
In the Archie-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, one of the initial scenes in the Dreamland arc features Raphael in this position...right before acid rain burns his skin off, leaving only a laughing skeleton.
In American Born Chinese, the Monkey King beats up the guests at a celestial party and leaves them in a battered pile. He's too pissed to take a Victory Pose, however.
The Joker invokes the villainous version of trope in a bizarre way in The Killing Joke by using a pile of half-broken kewpie dolls and a tilt-a-whirl cart as a throne. While not strictly a pile of dead bodies, it's pretty damn close...
The cover◊ of Marvel Comics' G.I. Joe #95, the middle issue of the "Snake Eyes Trilogy", has the aforementioned mute ninja commando hunched over a pile of slain Cobra Vipers of various types.
Thrud The Barbarian, a comic strip published in Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine, once had the eponymous main character creating the pile and posing himself on it (with a woman clutching his leg). So he could have his passport picture taken (erh, painted)...
My Brother, My Enemy has Janek "Tank" Sunber, one of Luke Skywalker's childhood friends who became an Imperial officer, has this dream◊ about Luke. It's notable that Tank is an infantry officer, the kind who doesn't see his stormtroopers as Faceless Mooks.
Film
300. Leonidas creates a massive wall to block the Persians with the dead acting as the bricks... and the mortar... and the fill. You get the idea.
And makes another pile of corpses later. And weaponizes it.
Gimli the dwarf from The Lord of the Rings sat on top of orc #43. It still moved because his ax was lodged in the orc's spine.
In Return of the King: the Orcs use a Battering Ram against the gates of Gondor. It proves woefully ineffective, and the defenders kill so many Orcs, that they are soon literally running up a pile of Orc corpses to smash the battering ram into the gate. Their commander yells that them for being stupid, and orders a much larger battering ram to be brought out.
Meng Yi, one of Jackie Chan's characters in the Hong Kong film, The Myth, does the standing version of this during his You Shall Not Pass scene. Unfortunately, he goes beyond his limits before he could kill the last of the attacking rebels and he falls unconscious while standing, allowing one of the remaining rebels to climb up the mountain of corpses and cut off his head.
In Serenity, after River declares that the Reavers shall not pass, the rest of the crew is left believing that she is dead... until the doors slide open to show her very much alive, uneaten, unraped, and un-worn-as-clothing, and standing atop a pile of utterly massacred Reavers.
In Blade II, Novak stands at the top of a staircase that is littered with fallen security guards. Director Guillermo del Toro acknowledges it as an homage to Frazetta in the commentary.
The poster for the teen comedy The New Guy has the titular character standing atop a pile of jocks and bullies with a bunch of hot chicks (two of whom are Eliza Dushku and Zooey Deschanel) at his side.
WALLE features this with robot "corpses" after the berserk spa-bot HAN-S is realased on the Steward-bots. Combined with Offhand Backhand.
Ghostbusters II. "On a mountain of skulls, in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood."
The at least semi-intelligent monsters in Outlander make a large pile of the bodies of the humans they've killed, which is mostly a larder but they also lie on top of it to reinforce how badass they are. (And in a scene which is going to be really hard to deal with in pre-psychotherapy times, they toss the heroine into it while she waits for certain death.)
In the first book of the Wind On Fire trilogy, the protagonists are fleeing back to their home city and being chased by the Zars, an endless army of beautiful boys and girls who kill anything they come across without the slightest hesitation. When they take out the only way of crossing a chasm, the Zars march off the cliff and fall without even slowing down. Since there's an endless supply of them and they seem to be some kind of Hive Mind, they can keep marching until there are so many corpses they can walk across the gap on a mountain of their own dead.
In one of the Discworld books, it's noted that Death met heroes frequently, generally surrounded by, and this was important, the dead bodies of very nearly all their enemies and saying, "Vot the hell shust happened?"
Its also mentioned in Interesting Times. The Silver Horde are informed that the proper means of conquering the empire is through rivers of blood or over a mountain of skulls. They discuss how in their experience skulls are quite hard to pile up, so they'll need a lot of them. When faced with 100,000-to-1 odds, they remain confident that even after they've gotten tired killing the first few thousand, that the remaining soldiers will be tired too, because by then the soldiers will have to run uphill just to get to them.
There's a short story by Timothy Zahn and Micheal A. Stackpole where Corran Horn works briefly with a disguised Grand Admiral Thrawn, and the subject of art comes up when Corran says the graffiti on walls they're passing isn't the work of Venthan Chassu, but it's more interesting than peeling Star Destroyer White. Pressed for his opinion, Corran mentions that he liked the early and middle works by Chassu, but the man's final work, Palpatine Triumphant, was of Palpatine on a throne of mutilated bodies, and in the narration Corran adds that the most disturbing thing about it was the Emperor's expression of homicidal joy. Thrawn dryly says that his loss was a pity, thus implying that Chassu was killed for this depiction.
Inheritance Cycle: A scene in the third book has Roran, characterised up to that point as a Badass Normal, standing atop a pile of 193 dead mooks. All of which he killed himself. He managed to do this since they were funneled into a position where they could only fight him one-to-three at a time.
Warcraft. War of the Ancients series. Broxigar pulled this one on the Burning Legion, slaughtering demons and standing on a pile of their bodies until they were to scared to continue.
In Blue Moon Rising, the last army of the Forest Kingdom slay so many of their demonic attackers that they're shielded, for a time, by the mounded corpses of their enemies. At one point, Rupert climbs over the pile to rush to Julia's assistance.
John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows books tend to have large fights end in the Mount Corpse scenario. In the first story, the hero (well, protagonist,) Ghost, is fighting off a series of human wave attacks. Between waves, he builds a defensive position out of the bodies of the previous wave. (When the people he's protecting express disgust, he says he doesn't have any sandbags and what do they want him to do?) When help arrives, they note that they can't climb down the stairs to the underground room where Ghost is holed up without standing on bodies two or three deep. Also, the burial mound of the Keldara, which is a literal mountain (or at least a respectable hill) of corpses.
Live Action TV
The final shot of Blackadder II shows a pile of the corpses of all the major characters (Blackadder, Queen Elizabeth, Melchitt, etc.) with Prince Ludwig the Indistructible in disguise as the queen standing atop them.
This is a disguise I'm really going to enjoy! Now, if I could just get the voice right.
QI made fun of this Trope in a discussion about prejudice against people over their height, and idle wonderings if short people are more likely to be power-hungry. Stephen Fry then informs the panel that historically, rulers and despots are no more likely to be short than any other figure, and that even Napoleon was of above-average height for his time.
Sean Locke: It's probably the one thing that short people have to cling on to- one day they might be a dictator. Now we've just taken that away from them.
David Mitchell: All this not being able to reach things from shelves one day will be made up for when I kill millions of people. I will stand on their bodies to reach the jam.
The X-Filesplayed with this trope twice. In "Teso Dos Bichos", a hoard of sewer killer pussy cats were filling an Absurdly Spacious Sewer with dead bodies but the cats were not seen triumphantly sitting on top of them. In "Detour", Mulder and Scully fell into a pit full of dead and injured people that were dragged there by the monsters of the week. They tried to stack them so that they could get out of the pit.
Music
It occasionally happens on Manowar's album covers.
Cannibal Corpse has a song called Rotten Body Landslide about someone being crushed to death in a landslide of bodies while trying to climb a mountain of corpses.
Lemon Demon's "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" ends like this. The guy on top? Mr. Rogers.
The cover◊ of Samson's Survivors features the band standing atop a pile of corpses which contains numerous famous figures, ranging from Cleopatra to Jimi Hendrix to Adolf Hitler.
Mythology
Cú Chullain is said to have killed so many men in one battle that he "built walls from their corpses".
And several other, marginally less epic examples as well, in both Warhammer and Warhammer 40000. In particular, there are several iconic◊ images of Crimson Fists Space Marines making defiant last stands from atop a mound of their own battle brothers.
The iconic full page illustration from the first Dark Eldar codex has a random Dark Eldar warrior standing atop a hill of skulls. The bonus? An attached poem that set the theme for the entire army:
We are not creatures of shadow But it serves us well As an ally in battle and a refuge for rest.
in the table top game many hoard armies can end up with a rather impressive "dead pile" at the end of a game even more impressive if things go badly for them
The PathfinderSourcebookDragons Revisited features a picture of a colossal black dragon crouched atop a pile of corpses.
Video Games
During the intermission in Quest for Glory II, the hero's caravan is attacked by brigands. Just when you think the game is going to make you fight them, cut to the hero standing atop a pile of brigand and saurus corpses in the victory pose (pictured above).
Legault of Fire Emblem Elibe claims this is where the assassin Jaffar was found as an infant, sleeping on the corpses of everyone else in his destroyed village.
Seen in the box art of Serious Sam - The First Encounter HD. Also seen one of the cutscenes in Serious Sam II.
The Flash game Body Ladder is actually based on this trope - the object of the game is to climb as high as possible on top of the dead bodies of countless enemies as they walk (and later, climb) towards you.
The final battle of Cave Story's best ending is fought in a room with a floor made out of hundreds of skeletons.
The Dreaded Red Arremer is first seen sitting atop a mountain of skulls in Ghouls n Ghosts which it throws at at the player. This is the Red Arremer character's fight intro in Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3.
Hades from Kid Icarus: Uprising said he was going to destroy a county or two and invoke this trope before meeting Pit again during their Final Battle. Fortunately, Pit managed to catch up to him.
Weaponlord has the final boss fight take place upon a hill of skeletons with a freakish multi-horned demon in the background and the moon appearing after the battle ends, turning red and getting grabbed by a demon's hand.
Web Comics
In Buck Godot, Hyraxx de Mofiti does this in one panel, standing on top of a pile of assassins she fought to get to Buck.
Well, she's a tabloid reporter. People are afraid of her for good reason.
A man sits atop a pile of defeated zombies in the third volume of The Living Dead.
The trope is used practically in another moment - A death knight has his hobgoblin troopsswarm Azure City's walls, until they die in such numbers that the other troops may walk over their corpses as a ramp to go over the walls.
Wonderella makes a pile of the bodies of other superheroes in this comic after killing them (though that wasn't actually required). Don't worry, they'll be back in a month.
The flash video The Ultimate Showdown ends with Mr. Rogers standing triumphantly atop a pile of corpses brandishing a sword.
Subverted/inverted/played with in a Flash game (I forget the name) which is basically you facing hordes of men coming at you from both sides of the screen. The bodies never fade and pile on top of each other, and it's soon revealed that it's actually quite hard to make a mountain of corpses that you stand atop of. Standing in one place you find yourself standing in a pit between two WALLS of corpses, with sword-wielding crazies coming on you from above. And if you work to make the hill, the sword-wielding crazies are too low for you to hit. You have to basically make a PLAIN of corpses to survive too long here.
During the fight at the gate of the Old World in the Escapist's Doraleous and Associates the Old Master Testecles manages to get quite the impressive kill count, having a literal mountain of bodies.
Western Animation
Subverted in an episode of Daredevil: Daredevil neutralizes a roomful of mobsters, but when the light is turned back on, the one sitting on the pile of unconscious bodies is Foggy Nelson, who really thinks he defeated them all on his own.
The Powerpuff Girls, being the ultra super-powered heroines they are, play the PG-13 example of this trope straight and end up standing atop a mountain of their foes' brutally KO'd bodies at the end of the show's opening.
In The Simpsons episode "Itchy and Scratchy Land" Homer arises on top of a pile of defunct robots he "killed" by taking flash light photographs of them.
In the Futurama episode where Fry/Professor/Bender go forward in time, Bender wants to stay in a Terminator-like era and build a home atop a mountain of skulls.
In the Transformers Generation One episode "Triple Takeover", Blitzwing defeats several Autobots and makes a throne from their bodies. They are rescued and repaired later.
In the original version of The Thief and the Cobbler The Mighty One Eye stands on top of the corpses of the king's soldiers near the beginning.
