Boy Meets Ghoul - Television Tropes & Idioms

And they say romance is dead...

My girlfriend is smart, beautiful, and totally in love with me. The only problem is that she really enjoys the taste of human blood. Should I be at all concerned about this?

— Episode 7, Ask That Guy

The Undead are usually scary, but sometimes they're sexy as well, and sometimes, a guy or a gal falls in love with one. A little bit of stalking-the-night and feasting-off-the-bodies-of-the-living is no impediment to true romance, after all. When Boy Meets Ghoul, or girl meets vampire, or, in general, when a normal person meets an attractive member of the opposite, uh, side of the border between life and death, love can flourish. They say that love conquers all. Maybe it can even conquer undeath?

This probably occurs more often with vampires or ghosts than with any other form of undead creature. Romance with actual ghouls is fairly rare, but the pun was too good for us to resist.

If the love comes first and the (un)death comes later, that's Resurrected Romance.

A subtrope of Interspecies Romance. May be a case of Mayfly-December Romance. See also: Kiss of the Vampire, Lesbian Vampire, Romantic Vampire Boy, Cute Ghost Girl, I Love the Dead. May invoke the Hemo Erotic.

Contrast with Robosexual, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex and Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

In Black Butler, the Undertaker has a case of this. While putting a bunch of zombies on ship just to see what happens is bad enough, admitting that you think they're beautiful while holding one in your arms is just plain creepy.
A possible romantic, or possibly not romantic example kickstarts Bleach: Frowning teenage guy who sees ghosts meets understandably surprised Shinigami who comes in through his window. Hilarity Ensues, along with over 400 chapters.
- Then the Filler did this with the guy's little sister and a certain Taicho who is not an elementary student.
Dance in the Vampire Bund:
- Boy meets vampire, eventually falls in love with her, boy finds out that he's actually a werewolf.
- Also, boy meets babysitter/older sister stand in, she gets turned into vampire, boy eventually decides he'd rather become a vampire than live without her.
Durarara!!: Boy meets Headless Horsewoman and other boy meets Headless Horsewoman's head.
- Boy meets buxom girl symbiotically joined to a demon sword and controlling a pseudo-zombe horde.
A typical Franken Fran story usually doesn't start with this as a premise, but that may be how it ends up.*
Boy Meets Girl, girl gets in a car accident, remainder of girl's body placed in giant bio-reconstructive chrysalis to regenerate while boy helps nurse her back to health, girl emerges seemingly unscathed from chrysalis, boy and girl head to love hotel, girl transforms into monstrous insect creature and eats boy's head, reader is now horrified.
Hellsing: Grizzled mercenary man meets vampire girl.
Karin: a classic girl-meets-boy story where the girl is a cute, shy, vampire (actually, a rare type of what you might call a backwards vampire).
Kore Wa Zombie Desu Ka: Boy meets Necromancer, boy gets murdered by a Serial Killer, boy gets revived by said Necromancer, then boy meets Magical Girl and Vampire Ninjas and accidentally marries one of them. And another one and a Magical Girl with multiple lives who turns out to be the Serial Killer and yet takes a liking into him.
My Lovely Ghost Kana: Boy meets Cute Ghost Girl haunting his new apartment. Boy drowns his sorrows. Boy has long conversation with ghost about life and death. Boy accidentally gropes ghost, somehow. Ghost is surprised, then excited at the implications of a living boy being able to touch her. Boy and ghost make sweet love, then begin a bizarre, surprisingly tender romance in the apartment where the girl brutally killed herself many years ago.
Gosunkugi from Ranma ½ developed a crush on Kogane while they spent time together during an episode. But at the end, he gets over it and continues to stalk Akane.
- She had to return back to the netherworld at the end of the episode, as she can only manifest one day a year, but it's implied that he'll still be waiting for her until then.
Rosario + Vampire: Boy meets vampire; she turns him into a ghoul, albeit accidentally. For some reason this doesn't threaten the relationship at all, despite creating the extreme likelihood of him turning into a mindless berserker.
- And of course, Boy also meets Succubus, Witch (twice!), and Snow Girl. And although Boy makes it clear that he's only interested in meeting Vampire, they make it equally clear they don't care.
Sankarea: Boy obsessed with the undead meets girl, girl falls off cliff and dies, girl becomes zombie, zombie-girl becomes freeloader in boy's house.
3�3 Eyes: Boy meets immortal, boy killed by immortal's pet, immortal absorbs his soul to resurrect him as a zombie—ahem—Wu.
Living Dead: Boy meets girl and develops a crush, but can't work up the nerve to tell her. Girl dies, becomes a zombie, and moves into boy's home.
Tasogare Otome X Amnesia: Boy meets girl. Girl turns out to be amnesiac ghost of a 50 year old corpse in the school basement. Mysteries ensue.
Wirbelwind: girl meets ordinary boy (initially), who then turns into undead, but it's all to the better because she's a Dark Elf and now they don't need to Wangst about their lifespans and incompatible alignments and just adventure together. And fuck, of course, because that's an ecchi adventure manga by the famous H-artist Makoto Fujisaki.

Comic

The main plot of Tokyo Pop's original English language manga My Dead Girlfriend.
Madman has a normal girl in love with a dead guy who looks weird enough in the costume he almost always wears, but beneath that mask is a person who looks very much like a corpse.
In the Cherry Comics parody of Anne Rice, Cherry and Ellie have sex with a vampire, a mummy and a ghost.

Fanworks

Novembersmith's RPS fan-novel The Anatomy Of A Fall is based on a boy meets ghost scenario.
In The Amazing World of Gumball fan art, Gumball/Carrie is a popular pairing.
Hivefled: Gamzee has exchanged flirtatious comments with Laneen, the ghost of a troll who is probably his half-sister. Trolls lack an incest taboo, which doesn't help much, especially since both of them were sexually abused by the troll who turned out to be their mother (or as close as one can get to one with troll reproduction) and said mother killed Laneen.

Film

Original Underworld: Boy meets vampire and turns into a werewolf himself.
In Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, the boy meets a dead girl, and ends up accidentally married to her.
Tim Burton must like it a lot - Beetlejuice tries to marry the 16-year-old Lydia in the movie. And while the series avoids actual romance between a dead guy and a 12-year-old, the level to which he is obsessed with her shows exactly what Tim had in mind for the two of them.
- In one early episode, we see Beetlejuice has a huge shrine devoted to Lydia in his head. In another he gets split in two and starts fighting himself to impress her - he stops when he realises he's upsetting her. In another he gives Prince Vince excellent advice on how to court her, and then becomes incredibly jealous when it works very well.
Casper: has a Puppy Love version of girl meets ghost.
Let The Right One In. Another Puppy Love version, though a very dark one. Boy meets a strange young girl who turns out to be a vampire. Childhood love / violent deaths ensue.
Innocent Blood. Undercover detective meets... vampire (no points for guessing that).
"I take lives."
"Ya well, if you were perfect you wouldn't still be single."
Prom Night III The Last Kiss. The fact that Mary Lou is a ghost doesn't turn Alex off, it's her... antisocial behavior.
The Lost Boys. Boy meets (half) vampire and the gang of gothy biker punk vampires who turned her. Hilarity--and carnage ensues.
Near Dark. Boy meets vampire and her family of psychotic hillbilly bloodsuckers. Carnage ensues.
Mavis Dracula and Token Human Jonathan in Hotel Transylvania. Their romance goes on to become the central premise of that movie.

Literature

Twilight: Girl meets vampire and werewolf and love triangle ensues.
Bloodsucking Fiends: Boy meets freshly turned vampire on the rebound.
Let The Right One In: Young boy meets apparently-young vampire, and, as with the movie version, puppy love + carnage ensues.
The Vampire's Beautiful Daughter: Rebecca is a half-vampire, and has to choose between undeath with her father and vampire friends or a human life with her human boyfriend Johnny. The story is told from Johnny's point of view.
Demon In My View by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes features girl-meets-vampire, like Twilight.
- Somewhat different, as well, in that it is also boy-meets-something. His fascination with her arises from his inability to understand what exactly she is, since she appears to have some level of psychic abilities and intimate knowledge of a world she has never personally experienced, as evident through the accuracy of the novel she has had published about Aubrey himself.
The Peony Lantern: Boy meets ghost. She takes him with her. Although it may have just been an elaborate hoax made up by his servant so he can steal a solid gold talisman from the local temple.
The Immortal Rules has as its protagonist a newly turned vampire struggling with her new life in a post-apocalyptic world. This trope comes to the fore when she meets and eventually falls in love with the adopted son of a priest leading a small group of survivors to find a legendary city. Unfortunately both the priest and his son believe that vampires are unholy demons that must be destroyed without hesitation, so it makes the reveal a little awkward to say the least. though by the end, he has at least accepted her vampirism once he knows the story behind it.
The Gravesavers by Canadian author Sheree Fitch had a girl met a boy, who turned out to be a ghost from the wreck of the RMS Atlantic.
Warm Bodies: Zombie eats boy, gains his memories, falls for his girlfriend. Then it gets weird.
Anna Dressed In Blood: A ghost-hunting teenage boy travels to a new town to dispatch a particularly troublesome ghost. They fall in love instead.

Live Action TV

Bewitched focused on a man not only married to a witch, but attracted many supernatural women (including a nymph, a Vain Sorceress, and a demon Cat Girl)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a number of these, most notably Buffy and Angel.
- And pretty much every single girl Xander's ever dated. It was even lampshaded at times.
  - And even Cordelia, in hindsight.
The ABC/BBC co-production Dead Gorgeous plays with this by having "Living Ghost" Rebecca fall for living boy David. However, he seems to not be particularly interested.
The vampire detective show Moonlight features the romance between the main character and his human love interest.
In Vampire Diaries, Stefan and Damon both meet Katherine. A few hundred years later, Stefan meets Elena. Then, Jeremy and Vicki, after she becomes a vampire. And then Jeremy meets Anna, though initially she was just using him.
The Masters of Horror episode "Jenifer" is a quite brutal deconstruction. Boy warms to Ghoul first out of pity, then becomes sexually obsessed with it. Ghoul pretends to love Boy to provide for it while Ghoul keeps murdering people.

Music

"Date With A Vampire" by the Screaming Tribesmen.
"Little Ghost" by the White Stripes.
"I Walked with a Zombie" by Wednesday 13 and "She was the Teenage Zombie" by Murder Dolls. A lot of their other stuff qualifies, too.
"A Boy, A Girl, And a Graveyard" by Jeremy Messersmith, though the ghost in this case is male.
"The Zombie Song" by Stephanie Mabey. "I'd never eat your brain, I just want your heart."
"A Romance with the Grave" by The Vision Bleak. Literal example. 'Ruthless lust without disgust, dirt and dust, a romance with the grave'
Alice Cooper loves this trope. "Cold Ethyl" is a more "subtle" example, while "I Love the Dead" drops any pretense.

Tabletop Games

A possibility for characters in Promethean: The Created, especially Galateids. On some occasions, it might help with a Promethean's Pilgrimage, but more than likely it will end very badly, thanks to their Disquiet.

Video Games

Neverwinter Nights has Boy meets Ghost Paladin. Somehow, none of the issues that would create ever come up in the game, though it is implied that she gets a new body after you return to the world of the living.
Tsukihime features boy meets vampire princess among its many flavors of Interspecies Romance.
A possibility in one of the endings of Mana Khemia, in which Vayne walks the earth with Pamela as a travelling doctor.
One minor sidequest in Skyrim has you searching for the journals of the necromancer Arondil. As you search the barrow he is currently squatting in, it's impossible to ignore the fact that it's populated entirely by female Draugr and ghosts. As you read his journals, it becomes clear that Arondil's interest in the female undead wasn't entirely scholarly. Apparently he finds the feel of ghostly ectoplasm arousing. Eventually you get to the end of the dungeon and find a double bed... with a female ghost "sleeping" in it.
Probably the only reason the Konpaku family in Touhou can consist of half-human-half-ghosts.
I Saw Her Standing There has this as its premise. You have to lure a zombie girl to a cage in each level, with each "act" introducing a new gameplay twist. All the while, there is narrative text describing the love between the main characters.
Taiga in Duel Savior Destiny is initially thrilled to receive the confession of love from the cute Nanashi, but this turns sour when her arm falls off and she invites him back into her crypt. Despite the bad beginning, they actually get along decently well. She also has a route, where it seems that half the reason Taiga isn't willing to sleep with her like he would anyone else isn't just because she's cold and dead, but rather because she lacks much in the way of a sense of touch and wouldn't enjoy it. But hey, that can be fixed. And it turns out she's not a zombie, she's a homunculus.

Western Animation

Danny Phantom: Apart from the gender-flip this is played straight, in this case Danny is (obviously) the ghoul and Sam is the Boy. I mean girl.

Webcomics

The webcomic Ghost Friend was based on this trope.
xkcd has this little comic, where the boy's love interest seems to be a bit deader than most.
In The Repository of Dangerous Things Davis meets Wanderin' Laurie, the Pirate Girl Ghost.
Davis: (thinks) She was hot. But dead. But hot.
Undead Friend: One of the more bizarre example, as the only reason for meeting said boy is for an Inevitable Tournament, and they can witch places at the cost of his life for Superpowers.
Homestuck: Kanaya became a lot more popular with the girls after she came back as a Rainbow Drinker.
Sluggy Freelance: Torg doesn't initially know that Valerie is a vampire, and even after finding out, he initially thinks that un-living with her forever wouldn't be that bad. But by the best guess, it isn't real love in either direction, and in any case he chooses to destroy her rather than turn against his friends.
Unlife Is Unfair is about the other way around, a nice zombie (nando) meets a girl and falls in love of her. She only wants to be his friend though. Later on she discovers feelings for him, which can be kind of harring.
Tsukiko of The Order of the Stick is a weird mixture of this and I Love the Dead. As a necromancer with necrophilia who believes the undead are sweet, gentle beings because they are the opposite of the living and the living are bastards, she has a habit of raising corpses as undead minions and then sleeping with them. For an extra dosage of squick, she also manages to combine these already unsavory cocktail with Parental Incest, because she also treats herself as their mother.
- Strictly speaking, she is never shown to have any romantic or coital interests in her own creations (whom she IS shown to regard as her children). She is only shown to have romantic designs for Xykon. And mentioned "that crypt thing" she didn't know was female, so presumable not her either.
In Rusty and Co., the Princess's knight and lover is a wight.
In Negamaki Chief Buffalo Jerky's friend Maize spends a lot of time dwelling on this. Despite both of them being dead, she's interested in pairing the Chief off with Negamaki and asks Tamago to call her if he survives being attacked by the hell-moose.