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A death ray causing death.

"It was sweeping around swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat."

The Death Ray is an old Speculative Fiction staple, probably cliché or a Discredited Trope by now, but the little kid in all of us would kill for a Death Ray. In function it's a Ray Gun that causes death (It doesn't actually shoot out Death, awesome as that would be); whatever the ray hits, dies — instantly and without question. It can do this via disintegration, somehow draining the target's life force, rapid calcination or some other method. When scaled up, it becomes a Wave-Motion Gun.

Visually, it's probably going to emit a red beam and look scary compared to a hero's clean chrome Ray Gun (which, of course, just makes you sleep). It can vary from your garden variety Disintegrator Ray because the Death Ray usually causes inanimate things to explode but humans to keel over dead. Why don't humans explode? Probably because it would raise the flick into R or NC-17 status (plus, it costs a ton more in Special Effects compared to a cheap ray effect). In effect, it is the most evil of retro Science Fiction weapons, much worse than its "little brother" the Agony Beam.

Anyone using it is probably a villain with his own villain store discount card, a (Mad) Scientist who just happened to think making a Death Ray would be cool, or space aliens, death bots, or what have you. It's unlikely for an Evil Overlord's henchmen to be armed with these, as he's more likely to keep the only one for himself, despite the fact that making all his minions Instakill Mooks would be useful to his army.

Sci-Fi villains are not the only ones who can use a Death Ray — many an Evil Sorcerer or other Fantasy villain will have a spell, artifact, or other piece of magical phlebotinum that basically amounts to one of these.

A planetary Death Ray will be more akin to the Doomsday Device, clock and all, and will only work twice: once when test fired, to prove it works to the UN member countries; and another to annihilate the Red Shirt Army, before being destroyed/stopped by the heroes.

Has nothing to do with Sinister Stingrays.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • A two-part commercial for Energizer batteries features the fictional Supervolt battery company hiring Ernst Blofeld to destroy the Energizer Bunny. At the end of the first part, Blofeld has a miniature one hidden in his cane, which he uses to zap a picture of the Bunny with. In the second part, Blofeld has a giant one in his mountain lair, set to zap the Bunny when he passes by. Unfortunately for Blofeld, the short life of the Supervolt batteries powering the ray put a stop to that plan.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Several Ki Manipulations in Dragon Ball take this form, most notably with Frieza and Cell's Death Beam. And at another point in a flashback, King Vegeta attempts to use the similar Execution Beam on Broly.
  • Digimon Data Squad: Kurata, the Mad Scientist Big Bad of the series, has invented a laser which can permanently kill Digimon (who normally enjoy Born-Again Immortality). His Gizumon minions are equipped with these lasers, and any Digimon that gets shot by one is dead meat; most will die instantly, though stronger ones like the Mega-level Merukimon can cling to life for several minutes before succumbing to their wounds.

    Comic Books 
  • The alien machines in Wild's End have these as their main weapons. As one characters notes "Fire doesn't burn like that."
  • The Evronians of Paperinik New Adventures have their standard sidearms, the Evronguns. They normally drain someone's emotions, but Grrodon explains they can be set to drain someone's life energy, thus fulfilling the trope.
  • Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Saturnians have death rays, but they seem to much prefer to use their two flavors of Gravity Screw rays instead, which can also prove fatal but in a more delayed fashion when the effect wears off and gravity reasserts itself. They only pull out the death rays when Diana and Steve Trevor have already ruined their earth invasion prep, freed their slaves, stolen a ship and done a massive amount of property damage.

    Fan Works 
  • This trope receives a Shout-Out in The Crimson Badger of the The Urthblood Saga, a Redwall fic, of all places, where Urthblood idly ponders about the possibility of creating a giant focusing lens that could incinerate an enemy army after having seen some children burn insects with a magnifying glass. He never comes around to building one, however.
  • According to the Friendly Four from the Darkwing Duck fanfiction Negaverse Chronicles, the "I Have a Death Ray" plans are one of the top three most common super villain schemes they have to deal with, along with "Take Over The World By Collecting a Resource" plan and "Let's Make a Shrink Ray." Gyro later builds what he calls an "Atomic Death Ray."
  • With This Ring: After the Renegade obtains a copy of Paula von Gunther's purple healing ray, he experiments on it and finds that it's not hard to make the ray disrupt life force instead of strengthening it. Wonder Woman is not amused.
    She puts her hands on her hips and sighs at me. "You made a Purple Death Ray."
    "I made a yes."

    Films — Animation 
  • Hoodwinked! doesn't have a death ray, but, well...this is what happens when the Wolf infiltrates the Big Bad's tramway terminal base by pretending to be a building code inspector:
    The Wolf: Are you thinking about putting in a laser?
    Big Bad: I don't know, I... well, do you think I should?
    The Wolf: Well, it's standard equipment for a cave lair.
  • In Megamind, this is how the titular Villain Protagonist supposedly kills Metro Man.
  • War of the Worlds: Goliath has the heat rays from the original tale (albeit highly visible), used by both sides and capable of quickly and horribly disintegrating organic matter as well as blowing up anything else.

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • Animorphs: The Dracon beams, used by the Yeerks, which were made from stealing the Andalites' Shredder technology. Both fire a laser that, at the highest setting, vaporizes the target. The difference is that the Andalite Shredder is as quick and efficient as possible, so the target hardly feels a thing, while the Yeerks sadistically made the Dracon beam to allow the target to feel all their cells exploding over the course of a second.
  • For sake of reverence and posterity, the Martian Heat Ray in The War of the Worlds (1898), and all of its subsequent adaptions. Notably, it's a Heat Ray, and victims catch fire and burn to ashes, rather than just dropping to the ground. It's incidentally one of the best descriptions of a directed energy weapon in fiction: a completely invisible (some flickering is occasionally referenced, probably a combination of dust being incinerated and heat mirages) and narrow beam that just dumps its energy on what it hits with no unnecessary flashiness.
  • In Auf zwei Planeten ("On Two Planets", 1897) by Kurd Laßwitz the Martian Telelytenote  ray guns induce a chemical reaction of choice in a target by projecting chemical energy, which enables them e. g. to burn metal. However, in general the Martians try to avoid using them on living beings.
  • The Killing Curse, Avada Kedavra from Harry Potter is a proper Death Ray, which kills a living being without even leaving a burn scar (at one point, a Muggle doctor examing the victims of this curse describes them as appearing to be in perfect physical health, with no visible cause of death whatsoever, as if they just suddenly dropped dead for no reason), but breaks statues. Note that side effects such as this seem to be pretty common in the Potter 'verse, at least in the movie versions — every single aggressive spell throws its target through the air, no matter its actual use. Harry, the title character, is known as the "Boy Who Lived" because he is the only person in the wizarding world to have survived this spell.
  • The Dragonback novels, by Timothy Zahn, feature a Death Ray, appropriately named "the Death," which ignores any defense and leaves anything unliving unharmed, but leaves anything hit by it dead, but not visibly hurt.
  • In Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos:
    • Deathwands, created by the A.I.s of the Technocore and exclusively issued to officers of FORCE, the military of the Hegemony of Man. Nobody quite knows how they work; they kill every human within their effective range, with no visible wounding effect, while leaving everything else in range intact.
    • In the second book the Core ambassador tries to convince the Hegemony leadership to use a new Deathwand bomb, which is supposedly capable of killing anything within several light years, to destroy the Ouster invasion force in Hyperion system.
    • Ship-to-ship Deathbeams exist in the Pax era in addition to the handheld Deathwands.
  • Project X (later named the Thompson Harmonizer) in Atlas Shrugged, which emits sound waves capable of destroying anything within 100 miles.
  • Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story involving a scientist who decided to murder his unfaithful wife with an improvised death ray. The ray was merely a beam of ordinary light, amplified by being projected through an observatory's telescope, with the intent that it'd dazzle her eyes while driving on a mountainside road, causing her to blindly go over the cliff. The narrator told the story to contradict someone who'd argued that any real death ray would be invisible; this one had to be visible to work.
    "It was a ray, and it killed someone. What more do you want?"
  • Elleston Trevor, who usually wrote spy thrillers or mysteries, featured a death ray in the book Rook's Gambit. The hero became aware of a series of mysterious deaths of people who'd been sentenced to execution but simply fell dead before the government could kill them. The weapon was hand-held, with a range "limited only by the curvature of the earth," and made no noise or flash.
  • Subverted in Anathem: Erasmas sees red light shining from the sky on part of his concent and panics, thinking that it is being shot at with death rays... then his scientific training kicks in a few seconds later as he realizes that any such ray would naturally be invisible.
  • John Ringo's Troy Rising series has the main character creating orbital mirrors to collect and concentrate sunlight to use as a mining laser and weapon. Referred to as a "Death Ray" by the main character, it could pump out 170 Petawatts of power by the end of the second book, blowing through even the strongest shielding and armor as if it were tin foil.
  • The fairies' bio-bombs in Artemis Fowl give a flash of blue light, killing every living being in it. All inanimate objects are unharmed. Except from Holly's LEP-helmet, which she uses to absorb the full blast of a bio-bomb meant to kill her.
  • In The Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling Jack’s first invention as a mad scientist is one of these. Extra points for being housed in his wife’s hair dryer, so not only can it convert a kitchen island into ash with a red beam of light, it does so while being pearlescent pink with stylized purple flowers.
  • One hand-held short-range one-shot version appears briefly in 1927 Russian novel by Aleksey Tolstoy (relative of Leo Tolstoy) called The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (AKA The Garin Death Ray), but it is ironically not the titular weapon (which is much more laser-like (or rather, the other way around)), despite the English title. The victim is found covered in unpleasant spots. It is implied that it is powered by radium.
  • In the Star Trek Expanded Universe novel The Last Stand, Riker and Troi infiltrate a Kreen generation ship in order to find out their plans. A Kreen engineer takes a liking to Troi and shows her a "secret project" designed to help them defeat anyone (presumably even the Enterprise). It looks vaguely like a weapon. Troi, in an attempt to get more information, asks if it's some sort of "death ray". However, it turns out that the Kreen leaders have known about Riker and Troi and have deliberately set up the "weapon" (which is nothing more than a telescope with added junk to make it look like a weapon) to convince them and get them to return to the Enterprise. The real weapon is a virus that was meant to infect the Enterprise crew. What the Kreen didn't count on was the transporter bio-filters detecting and removing the virus during the beam-out.
  • In the Magitek world of New Amsterdam, Nicola Tesla has constructed a death ray machine. Somewhat inconveniently, he raises his beloved pigeons atop it, meaning he has to remove the birds before he can use the machine.
  • The Laundry Files by Charles Stross features basilisk guns. Actual basilisks and gorgons in this 'verse are certain creatures or humans with an Eldritch Abomination-linked tumor in their brain; spooky observer-effect magic means that instead of shooting out a beam of death, whatever is observed by them instantly has a percentage of its carbon atoms converted to silicon. The results are invariably lethal to living beings. So naturally, the titular agency figures out a way to duplicate the effect with a pair of ordinary video cameras, linked to some very special software that emulates the effects of the basilisk tumor; a basilisk gun to the face can even kill a shoggoth.
  • Emilio Salgari wrote the nineteenth century version into one of his Sandokan novels, for use against ironclad warships: you fire the beam at the enemy ship, and its munitions blow up with the ship. Fittingly, the guy who invented the device called himself the Demon of War, and was killed when an enemy grenade exploded on his device, right after he proved he deserved the name.
  • World War Z: The US Army invents one after the zombie outbreak, which can cause a zombie to disintegrate in a flash of light. It's immediately written off as Awesome, but Impractical due to the enormous energy requirements, and is never fielded in real combat... but a movie director realizes that it makes for fantastic propaganda footage, and the human race at this point is in desperate need of a morale booster.
  • Magical Daisy from Magical Girl Raising Project Restart can shoot a death beam as her ability, which she calls her Daisy Beam. She can either focus the beam on her finger, or create a wider beam by using the palm of her hand. The beam itself disintegrates things on a molecular level. Due to its lethality, she doesn't normally use it on people.
  • Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory is a tongue-in-cheek sales catalog of Steampunk destructive devices, though it's implied many of their Upper-Class Twit customers are Compensating for Something.
  • Second Apocalypse: The Inchoroi brought with them the Heron Spear, a Magitek weapon of great power that was stolen and used to slay their No-God, but has since been lost. It's implied to be some sort of energy beam weapon.
  • In The Wheel of Time, Balefire is the most powerful offensive magical technique known, and is so dangerous that it was forbidden by both sides of the series' conflict until they got sufficiently desperate. It takes the form of a beam so bright it causes afterimage from even a brief exposure, and instantly destroys whoever and whatever it touches; moreover, it destroys retroactively, meaning that a sufficiently powerful beam can kill someone up to several minutes before it hit them. Overuse can cause a world-destroying temporal paradox, hence its being mutually forbidden. And because it kills people before reaction is possible, it also renders them Deader than Dead and prevents resurrection. A deathier death ray, you won't find.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Shadows' ships in Babylon 5 had a beam that could cut a younger race's warship in half. Lengthwise. And then make it explode.
  • Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory tried to build a "sonic death ray" as a child. Apparently all it did was annoy the dog.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Daleks have Death Rays, which were once most literal instances of this trope — any living being struck by it goes into X-Ray Sparks and dies screaming, then and there, whereas the rays never caused serious damage to property (missing a target results in a minor spark burst.) However, as of "The Stolen Earth", a small group of Daleks showed that they were more than capable of destroying a building, although they did have "Maximum EXTERMINATION" setting on. The result was an impressive boom.
      • The Dalek extermination effect has gradually got more elaborate over time as special effects improved. At first you simply saw an emitter extend from the Dalek gunstick in close-up, followed by a quick cut to the victim as the whole screen goes into negative. Victim screams and drops dead. Things got gradually more elaborate over the years, especially when it became possible to add ray effects to the screen, but the X-Ray Sparks effect wasn't introduced until the last pre-2005 appearance, "Remembrance of the Daleks", where it was quite elaborate for the time and budget.
      • In their very first appearance, the Daleks do shoot to paralyze. Once. This was before they got on their EXTERMINATE kick. But after that one incident in the second serial of Doctor Who ever, Daleks do shoot to kill.
      • There's been mention that the Daleks' weapon could kill instantly and painlessly, but they deliberately dial down the power of their weapons depending on the species encountered so it takes longer for said being to die. Yes, the Daleks are so freakin' evil they have a Death Ray and Agony Beam in one convenient package!
      • They did explain what a Dalek neutralizer ray does, and why nearly everyone hit with this screams in agony as they die. The Doctor called it "internal displacement": Your internal organs are scrambled, literally. Now imagine what would happen if Doctor Who stopped trying to be family friendly with the special effects... Though the fact that the ray can be conducted through water suggests it's actually some kind of electron particle beam.
      • The Daleks do shoot to stun in "Planet of the Daleks".
      • In "Asylum of the Daleks", the Dalek ray, complete with iconic sound effect, is used to stun the Doctor to bring him to, basically, Dalek city hall. The same presumably goes for Amy and Rory.
    • Death Rays are actually extremely common in Doctor Who. Hardly an episode goes by without some innocent being disintegrated or otherwise killed by a bad guy, usually with some type of energy weapon.
    • "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror": Subverted when Graham and Ryan find a prototype death ray while searching for things to defend Tesla's Wardenclyffe lab with, as it fails to work in any way when Graham tries to use it during the climax.
  • Eureka had an episode revolving around one of these where the local genius population referred to it as a "concentration ejection of radioactive isotopes". Sheriff Carter just calls it what it is:
    Carter: It's a ray that causes immediate death! Why can't you just say "death ray"?
    • Interesting the scientist who built it did so believing that it could be used a means of peace through Mutually Assured Destruction...then had a nervous break-drown when he wasn't rewarded a Noble Prize for his work.
  • Although rare, this is how laser pistols work in Firefly. Too bad bullets are still better (and way more common).
  • The Murdoch Mysteries episode "The Tesla Effect" goes full Teslapunk (including an appearance of the man himself), with a Victorian microwave weapon.
  • MythBusters examined whether Archimedes created a death ray using many mirrors focused on a single point. Three separate tests came to the same conclusion: Archimedes didn't. At most, the Greeks likely used the light reflected from the mirrors to dazzle the eyes of the incoming Roman invaders.
    Jamie: Our Death Ray doesn't seem to be working. I'm standing right in it, and... I'm not dead yet.
  • In an episode of "The Saint" a defecting Soviet scientist is murdered with his own weapon for the secrets of the death ray he has just invented; at the end of the episode, the killer runs away with the only working prototype; he trips, falls, drops the device, the beam accidentally activates, and...
  • The Varon-T Disruptors in Star Trek: The Next Generation were a "modern" Death Ray, they disintegrated the target like a normal disruptor... but did so slowly, causing tremendous pain. Only five were ever produced before the Federation banned them.
    • And a small note: even though they don't usually use it as such, the normal hand phaser in Star Trek does have a disintegration setting, which would make it a Death Ray as well.
    • Seen in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" with the Photonic Cannon, a Weapon of Mass Destruction from the Doctor's daydreams powerful enough to take out a Borg Sphere in one shot. This is later successfully used to bluff aliens who thought it was real.
    • In "Future's End", Braxton's got a sweet Disintegrator Ray. Straight out of TOS, anything hit by it just sizzles and is no more, without even the slightest damage to the surroundings.
    • Naturally given that it's a homage to cliched sci-fi, Mad Scientist Dr Chaotica has to have his fiendish Death Ray in the holodeck program The Adventures of Captain Proton.
      Chaotica: But my greatest achievement is there. Behold: the Death Ray.
      Captain Janeway (playing Queen Arachnia) caresses the barrel suggestively.
      Arachnia: Oh, it looks like a formidable weapon.
      Chaotica: The most powerful in the cosmos!
      • Chaotica's Death Ray does prove deadly to other-dimensional photonic beings who assume the holodeck is a real world (they've never heard of biological life).
    • The Klingon version of the disruptor is definitely a Death Ray; the disintegration special effect is pretty horrific, as Star Trek goes. (No, it's not the aforementioned Varon-T.)
    • Additionally, Andorian plasma weapons have no stun setting.
      • Neither do Romulan disruptors.
    • The Psionic Resonator from the two part TNG Gambit episode was an ancient Vulcan weapon that could use telepathic energy from Vulcans to kill others who had aggressive thoughts. It could be defeated by not having aggressive thoughts, which is why its use was discontinued. Vulcans learned to suppress their emotions.
  • A That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch featured a Mad Scientist demonstrating his "Giant Death Ray", along with a "Giant Laser-fitted Armored Scorpion Of Death" - turns out his name is Professor Death, and he's horrified at the President's asking if these (obviously lethal) machines might have military potential. His intention is for the Giant Death Ray to be the world's first bar-code reader — or, with the power turned up, the world's first laser eye surgery device. The scorpion's tail fires only "helpful bullets." They then of course push the idea to silliness: "No! I created the Doomsday Bomb to help mankind, not destroy it!"

    Music 
  • "Doe Deer" by Crystal Castles consists solely of Alice Glass screeching "Death Ray" over and over. The sound of the song, with its harsh, rapid synths, fits the imagery.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Slime Creatures From Outer Space" will "zap you with their death ray eyes / blow you up real good!"

    Newspaper Comics 
  • Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin's imaginary alter ego Spaceman Spiff wields one of these. However, it's utterly useless against anything because in reality it's something harmless and mundane like a suction-cup dart gun or a rubber band.

    Print Media 
  • A cartoon Charles Addams did for The New Yorker shows two men standing at the upper-story window of a patent office, one of them holding a futuristic gun which is plugged into a wall socket. The caption reads: "Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn't even slow them up."

    Roleplay 
  • In the first Destroy the Godmodder this was used many times against the godmodder.
    • By newbies, and needless to say, not a single death ray made connection with its intended target.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Gammaworld has the Black Ray weapons. These guns fire a beam of black light which can instantly kill anything that fails its saving throw and inflicts lots of damage on those that aren't automatically dead.
  • Warhammer 40,000
  • Members of Task Force: VALKYRIE in Hunter: The Vigil can requisition a weapon that is, essentially, the Medusa Particle Beam Cannon (see below). It takes a lot of energy to run, but does a hell of a lot of damage.
    • Also from World Of Darkness, we have the fanmade game Genius: The Transgression. Since it's about Mad Scientists, it's only to be expected that death rays are an easy-to-make, commonly occurring Wonder.
  • The Finger of Death spell from Dungeons & Dragons is essentially the magical version of this.
    • Save vs. Death Ray!
    • Not to mention Disintegrate, a ray spell that deals a truly ridiculous amount of damage for its level.
    • Beholders, catoblepae, and many other monsters produce their own death rays naturally. And the traditional pistol-shaped kind show up in the 1e AD&D module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and the D&D Blackmoor adventures.
  • Pathfinder justifies this by using Nano Machines suspended in a harmless yellow laser. Once the nanobots strike a living target, however, they start eating their host, reducing him to a puddle of Grey Goo. It also has a "radiation blaster", which is a miniature nuclear reactor stuck to a rifle stock. The trigger opens a lens on the front, causing the target to get "flashlighted" with nuclear radiation.
  • GURPS Ultra-Tech has a slew of these, from a half dozen weapons that disintegrate the enemy to Mind Disruptors that make the target's body want to die.
  • Disintegrator Guns from Rocket Age will usually straight up kill a target unless the user rolls badly. The same holds true for Ancient Martian Ray, Heat and Freeze weapons AND Ancient Erisian Ray weapons.
  • Mad Bomber Blade, the promo version of Baron Blade from Sentinels of the Multiverse uses one when he Turns Red. On each turn afterward, he does one hero damage equal to however many cards are in his trash, and can burn through several cards a round — in a game where hero HP tops out at 34, he can be deadly when not taken down quick.

    Video Games 
  • In Broken Age, Vella ends up reforming a downed spaceship into one of these to battle Mog Chothra. It turns out that the reason Mog Chothra was so hard to kill was that it was really Shay's spaceship.
  • In Master of Orion series, the Death Ray is the signature armament of the Guardian of Orion, and can only be obtained by beating the Guardian and looting the ruins on the planet below. (Or trading with/stealing from/conquering someone who has.)
    • In the second game, successfully capturing an Antaran battleship and researching its equipment can also yield Death Ray tech.
  • And of course the alien ship in Fallout 3. Its Death Ray can be fired towards Earth and cause a massive mushroom cloud. Not to mention that the Lone Wanderer used it to blow away the other alien ship.
  • In the Destroy All Humans! series, the Death Ray is the basic weapon of your Flying Saucer. Fantastic against human targets due to averting Convection, Schmonvection, as it can vaporize humans by just sweeping the beam within a couple meters of them, and deals steady damage to everything else, and unlike the saucer's more destructive weapons, the Death Ray doesn't require ammo. In the remake, the Death Ray loses the ability to kill humans outside the actual beam, but its damage was improved against most other things and it sets the ground ablaze for further damage over time, leaving scorched earth in its wake.
  • NetHack's wand of death sends a ray of death towards an enemy who will instantly die except under a few extenuating circumstances (the ray misses, the target has magic resistance or reflects the ray, or is polymorphed into an undead or demonic creature, or is Death). The wand of disintegration has similar results if the target isn't immune. (Important safety tip: don't shoot either of these wands at yourself or at a wall near you.)
  • Scribblenauts, being a game series that lets the player create almost anything they write down, naturally gives them the option to create a working death ray.
  • A death ray appears in the final mission in Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. Ironically, it can't kill units, only reduce them to 1HP, making it more of a "Near Death Ray" than anything.
  • The enemy spell "Calmness" ("Repose" in the Updated Re-release) in Final Fantasy VI is a beam of pale blue light that descends on a character, and kills him instantaneously regardless of defenses.
  • You can buy and mount one of these on your plane in Raptor: Call of the Shadows. It's one of three laser weapons with instantaneous blast (the others are a laser turret and a twin laser).
  • Mother:
  • The Marathon trilogy features the Trih Xeem, the 'early nova device' actually used by the Pfhor at the end of Marathon 2. It seems to do what the name implies, cause a star to go nova which would wipe out pretty much anything of consequence in the surrounding system (the planets, moons etc would probably still be there, just with their surfaces pretty much scoured and then left uninhabitable). It is implied that the Pfhor, being the nice caring slavers they are, give this weapon to all their main battle fleets for use as a last resort in hopeless military situations.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, you can steal from stores if you're nimble enough. If you dare set foot in that shop again, however, the shopkeeper will hit you with a death ray and kill you on the spot.
  • In World of Warcraft players who learn the engineering skill can make a 'Gnomish Death Ray', which drains the user's health before firing. It's not a guaranteed kill, but being hit by it hurts, to say the least.
  • Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has one example. When the Vardrag-Noah alliance invented the fortress shieldnote  to protect their supply ships, the Gorg answered with the Siege Laser: a giant Wave-Motion Gun affixed onto a battleship. It requires three other ships to assume a triangular formation around the battleship and provide power but when it does fire, the results are very painful for the target.
    • The Gorg later give the technology to the Noah colonists, when the true culprits of the Cataclysm are revealed. It proves to be the only weapon capable of damaging the Locust Queen.
  • Being based on, well, The War of the Worlds, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds has the Martians using plenty of these, from classic heat rays to masers to x-ray versions.
  • Unreal Tournament
    • The mod Unreal4Ever has a comparatively small laser pistol that shoots a continuous, hitscan stream of energy. Killing an enemy with it will cause their flesh to boil instantly, leaving behind only a charred skeleton. It can do this near instantly even at its weakest power if it hits the head. Can be upgraded by picking up more of the same gun; at its most powerful it really embodies this trope, as casually moving the beam across an enemy will kill them almost instantly.
    • On the canon side, from Unreal Tournament 2003 and on there's the Link Gun, a reworked Pulse Gun whose Secondary Fire energy beam vaporizes the soft tissue of any non-robotic victim on kill and leaves only a skeleton. Interestingly, if an ally is also holding a Link Gun, the energy beam connects to the ally like a tether and boosts the power of their Link Gun; it can also repair vehicles and structures, with linked Link Guns repairing faster.
  • In Sunrider, Veniczar Arcadius' flagship, the Legion, comes equipped with one of these.
  • Blood II: The Chosen features a secret weapon with this exact name. It looks a lot like a rifle carried by Little Green Men in 50's Science Fiction stories, and it fires hitscan green laser beams that reflect off most surfaces. Its Secondary Fire is nothing to write home about, but the very efficient primary fire makes this a substitute for the Tesla Cannon (whose primary consumes 2 chemical battery units for a slower projectile that deals less damage than a Death Ray beam, which costs one) all the same. You just have to explore very carefully to find it.
  • Starcraft II's Colossi fire these in pairs, sweeping them in a line of damage for all biological units. It's called a Thermal Lance, but come on, the Colossus is a four-legged strider so tall it can be targeted by both ground and air units, we know what it is. They were sealed away in asteroids after they were used in a colonial revolt by the Protoss in a My God, What Have I Done? moment.
    • The Stone Zealot, a giant stone statue of a Zealot, fires the exact same thing, though now called Eye Beams.
  • The Squiggoth in Dawn of War has a Zzap gun mounted on its back that does huge damage to any unit including vehicles. It's a shame that like all orks, you stand a better chance of hitting something with by grabbing it by the barrel and taking a swing.
  • Planescape: Torment has the Mechanus Cannon, which is a huge extraplanar gun that fires through a portal to vaporize enemies near you.
  • The Castles of Doctor Creep has the Ray Gun, one of the titular doctor's inventions. It's trying to get a bead on you and will try and shoot you if you're at the same level as it. Most of the time it's something you have to avoid, but often you'll use it to kill some of the monsters chasing you.
  • Splatoon gives us the Killer Wail, a sonic-based weapon that annihilates any hostile foolish enough to be where it's pointing when it's done charging with the scream of a wailing guitar. In single player, the Final Boss gets one among his many other toys.
  • Azmodan in Heroes of the Storm retains disintegration beam (affectionately referred to as "All Shall Burn") ability from Diablo 3.
  • The Dispersion Pistol from Unreal qualifies in certain ways. It fires blasts of what can be only classified as pure harmful energy (the game never states what it actually is that it fires), and the fully upgraded version, with the Energy Amplifier item active, was a One-Hit Kill on everything including the Final Boss before an Obvious Rule Patch was released for it.
  • The Anti-Bio Beam from FTL: Faster Than Light causes crew to die without harming the ship, leading to a higher amount of goodies salvaged.
  • Dungeons of Dredmor has an Aetheric Death Ray as the capstone perk of the Rogue Scientist skill path. It does a lot of aetherial and voltaic damage and disintegrates the corpses of any enemies it kills.
  • In Space Tyrant, the Death Ray is a Support Power usable on the galaxy map. It is a psychic weapon powered by the galaxy's hate and fear of you, and costs Tyranny to fire. While it sounds impressive on paper, in practice it only destroys a few ships in a single enemy fleet.
  • The Auger from Resistance fires a blast of radiation that can pierce cover, and induces Acute Radiation Sickness in its targets.
  • The Romanov Attack Satellite from Heavy Weapon has this. It will try to keep near your tank's horizontal position before firing their laser weapon downwards that instantly vaporizes your tank regardless of shields. You must shoot at them to push them away, so they won't fire their lasers over you.
    • The Secret Weapon boss also have these curvy deathrays. They randomly change patterns, and touching them is also a One-Hit Kill. Good luck trying to fight the boss without dying, because you lose your smart bombs on death!

    Web Animation 
  • RWBY Chibi has Neo own a comedically large Death Ray that is more than twice her size. It first appears in episode 20 where Neo and Roman plan to use it on team RWBY but are interrupted by Zwei. It returns next episode with Neo aiming it at Sun and Neptune in the background with Mercury egging her on and Emerald trying to stop her.

    Webcomics 
  • Girl Genius:
    • It's almost a rite of passage for an evil Spark (and a number of non-evil ones) to make a Death Ray, like the following exchange shows from this strip shows.
      Agatha: What about a good death ray? That'd be perfect!
      Gil: I don't have a death ray! [...]
      Agatha: So what you're telling me is that you—Gilgamesh Wulfenbach—the person next-in-line to the despotic, iron-fisted rule of the Wulfenbach empire—have got no weapons powerful enough to destroy those things. That's just great. What kind of an evil overlord are you going to be, anyway?
      Gil: Apparently a better one than I'd thought...
    • So he started with his lighning generator project and scaled it up. And then, yes, built a big death ray.
    • Agatha herself seems to have a fascination with death rays if going by the number of times she can be cited using her immediate materials wishing for/building one. Her current one shown here...well, if you're looking at the damage to the wall, you're not looking far enough.
    • Sparks seem to compare death rays as a courtship ritual; the zappier their zap guns, the more attractive they're considered. "He has a magnificent death ray" is not an amusing euphamism.
  • One strip of Casey and Andy features a ray gun called the Kill-O-Mat. While this one doesn't work, the Casey Vaporiso-Annihilatomat does wonders.
  • Gunnerkrigg Court: The Enigmarons from Dr. Disaster's space battle simulator possess a Death Ray that's somehow able to target every capital city on Earth simultaneously. It also explodes spectacularly when Annie knocks it over.
  • Neglected Mario Characters mainstay Fred the Spanyard (sic) uses the attacks "Deathray", "Ray of Death", & "Deathly Deathray of Deathly Deathness".
  • The "Is There In Roof No Beauty?" story arc in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! involved Space Pirates trying to obtain some Unobtainium called borfomite to power their unstoppable Death Ray. They hit a small delay when they finally got the borfomite but realized it needed to be combined with caramel, which they didn't have.
  • Narbonic has Dave get killed by one. Why did you do that, Dr. Narbon? "I had a death ray." But it's more complicated than that...
  • In S.S.D.D. the Tower of Babel almost counts as the planetary version, as it's a skyscraper sized maser cannon that can roast everyone in an anti-missile defense base (though the base itself appeared intact). The way things are going it's likely to be destroyed before it's used to destroy another country.
  • One Packrat strip features the MAD-Ray (Memorymoog Acoustic Death Ray).
  • In Schlock Mercenary, LOTA gains control of one of these (which was formerly known as Credomar). It shoots a beam of gravitationally braided anti-protons through a wormhole with one end located right in front of the muzzle and the other end located literally anywhere else in the galaxy, unblockable no matter how strong your shields are since it can simply bypass them and fire within the hull of your ship, impossible to run away from, and very deadly. It's also immune to Teraport-Area-Denial. Pi is the first one to figure it out.
    Pi: "Hyperspace death ray" is completely logical! Credomar was built before teraports, and is too big for wormgates. That means it had to be fired where it was built. Now...since it's not sharing the system with anything worth attacking or defending, it was never meant to be fired at local targets.
    Ebby: Okay...I guess firing through hyperspace makes sense, assuming it's even possible. But...death ray?
    Pi: It sure isn't gonna launch prayer beads.
  • Norman of Dragon Tails at one point attempts to use an ion cannon apparently capable of wiping out an entire city to destroy Enigma. It, of course, does not go as planned.
  • The Neutron Daisy Cutter weapon from Drive (Dave Kellett) requires the crew that fires it to be on a specially shielded deck (up until the Empire started using drones instead). It instantly disintegrates the Vinn Puppeteer Parasite while leaving the host alive (in theory, at least. In practice, the host usually dies as well from neural shock).
  • xkcd subverts this in Tattoo, where, with precise alignment, the death ray will only kill the parts of the person that are holding said person back (i.e. tumor cells). See the entry on radiation therapy in the Real Life folder below.
  • Flaky Pastry has the Omega Death Ray spell, and its flashier cousin the aptly named Omega Murder Blast.

    Web Original 
  • In Mortasheen, the creature Golgotha has a literal version of this, with its stare being able to kill other creatures, albeit somewhat slowly.
  • The Salvation War has an AEGIS cruiser using its radar as an improvised Death Ray against Uriel. The results are quite messy. He survives, but he doesn't have much skin left afterwards.

    Web Videos 
  • Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Dr. Horrible converts a Stun Ray into a Death Ray to use against Captain Hammer. In the end it is damaged after Captain Hammer punches him and it ends up exploding, causing Captain Hammer great pain and killing the Wide-Eyed Idealist Love Interest Penny. Earlier, he takes umbrage at Johnny Snow calling it a Death Ray.

    Western Animation 
  • Buzz Lightyear of Star Command does this trope one better with the HYPER DEATH RAY!!!
    Commander Nebula: What's the difference between that and a normal death ray?
    LGM: More death.
    Commander Nebula: We can't get there in time to stop it! What're we gonna do?
    LGM: Hyper die?
  • An episode of The Simpsons showed Frink with a death ray he was developing, although it was only capable of generating a beam which felt pleasantly warm (plus he gave up on it when he failed to secure funding).
    • ...He shouldn't have admitted that "well, the ray only has evil applications..."
  • The Venture Bros.:
    • The brothers have a lot of these, but in the episode "The Lepidopterists" we find Jonas Jr. has inherited a very nice one. Brock and the OSI guys are all very impressed. "If that [death ray] was a woman, I'd marry her." "And I'd jeopardize our friendship by nailing your wife."
    • Dr. Venture has accumulated more than he needs - Brock is worried he's too unconcerned about the security problems at a yard sale, pointing out he put up a 'Laser Death Ray Bargain Bin'.
  • One of the unproduced episodes of Invader Zim had Zim instruct GIR to activate a Death Ray (or a Doom Ray, to proceed with his latest plan. It works, and GIR takes over the Earth while Zim is having his existence evaluated.
  • Varrick accidentally creates one in Season 4 of The Legend of Korra when experimenting on some spirit vines. It's capable of punching clean through the rear of the train he's on, and even does major damage to a nearby hill. This freaks him out so badly that he immediately shuts down the project, but unfortunately for him Kuvira has other plans. Those plans involve mounting the resulting railway cannon onto a Humongous Mecha, then using that to put Republic City under siege.
  • On Rocko's Modern Life, Ed is shown to have a lab under his house where he's developing a death ray specifically to destroy Rocko.

    Real Life 
  • In a case of real-world science eventually outpacing fiction, just about any beam of energy or particles could kill an individual if it delivered enough energy. Some kinds of energy are better at killing things than others, for example X-rays or gamma rays, but if somebody had the power materials and built a laser pointer (usually built to deliver energy a single digit of milliwatts) capable of delivering a Megawatt of energy, it would be capable of either powering a thousand homes or creating a pretty spot on rendition of this trope. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you're not a murderous mad scientist), the high energy requirements and the heat production for this sort of weapon currently makes it Awesome, but Impractical.
  • It is said that Nikola Tesla actually built a prototype of a tower that could kill anything within a certain radius. For some strange reason, the military wasn't at all interested when he pitched it to them. He called it a Peace Ray, rather than a Death Ray, of course. Despite the name, it was actually closer to Some Kind of Force Field. It was supposed to create an electromagnetic bubble around an area and anyone that tried to pass through would be electrocuted to death. Tesla noted that a literal "death ray" (that is, projecting radiation) was impossible, because the rays would inherently disperse over distance. Thus, his "ray" was actually meant to be a particle beam. The idea was to deploy them around every country to create world peace by making it impossible for anybody to invade anybody else's land. Also, like nearly all of Tesla's ideas post-1914 or thereabouts, it didn't work.
  • The Medusa Particle Beam Cannon, which is currently in the late stages of development and is going to be used in a field test soon, if successful, will result in the creation of what is essentially a real-life portable Death Ray.
  • The MTHEL, on the other hand, has already had functional prototypes built, capable of shooting down not only missiles but artillery shells and mortar shells, feats almost no other weapon can do. Because of the precise details of how high-energy lasers work, the MTHEL wouldn't be able to kill a person easily (though it would cause serious harm) - but it can destroy small, fast-moving explosive projectiles more accurately, and less expensively per shot, than any other current weapon.
  • Neutron Bombs are essentially nukes that emit more Death Rays and slightly less Kaboom than their more conventional cousins.
    • For the technically minded: about 50% of the yield is in the form of high energy (20MeV) neutrons, compared to about 5% of a standard thermonuclear blast which produces about 5% of its yield as thermal (2MeV) neutrons.
    • Often misunderstood as an antipersonnel weapon that would kill humans but leave buildings standing, the basic 1kT neutron bomb design would destroy non-hardened structures in a mile-wide blast. All unshielded humans within a two mile wide area would receive a lethal radiation dose. A conventional nuke of the same size would still kill everyone in a two mile wide area, but by crushing and incinerating them. An airburst neutron bomb might not level a city, but would still do a vast amount of property damage.
    • The original use for the neutron bomb was against neither cities nor people but tanks. Tank crew were well shielded from nuclear blasts and radiation (thus, a tank not caught in the direct blast of a nuke would likely survive, and the crew would likely survive as well, especially if the tank were quickly hosed down to wash off the irradiated dirt and dust that would've landed on it), but a sufficiently high dose of highly penetrating radiation (such as high energy fast neutrons) would both incapacitate and fatally irradiate the crew, but also render the tank shell dangerously radioactive and therefore unusable. This radiation effect from a neutron bomb would be wider than the blast radius of a normal nuclear bomb, and thus would be able to knock out a larger formation of enemy tanks. Modern tanks are far better protected than those of the 60s, and a neutron bomb would have to be detonated so close to them that using conventional nuclear explosives would be just as effective, if not more so.
      • The Pentagon's nuclear warfare strategy moved away from nuking tank formations some time before tanks became largely immune to these weapons, simply because herding an armour column into a nuclear killing zone is pretty impractical even if it were politically and ethically acceptable to make use of battlefield nukes.
    • For a more traditional variant, there such a thing called a neutron gun. It's no where near as instantly lethal as Neutron bomb, because the amount of neutrons is no where near as high. But instantly is the key word there, the point of a neutron gun is to transmute isotopes by hitting them with neutrons. Basically everything it hit's becomes radioactive after enough exposure. These haven't been considered for use in war as of yet, as they simply kill far too slowly for a directed weapon (or any weapon you don't want on the Geneva naughty list).
  • Large particle accelerators can generate some impressively powerful beams, which would act like death rays if anyone wandered into the path. Luckily for them, the beams are usually kept in vacuum chambers, confined by powerful magnets. The only exception is when it comes time to turn off the beam, when it gets "dumped" into something so that it doesn't ravage the accelerator when the magnets come down. For the Large Hadron Collider, each of two beam dumps must be able to absorb 362 MJ of energy in 90 microseconds, for 4 TW of power. Since that would blow a hole clean through the tens of meters of metal usually used for that purpose at lesser facilities, engineering the LHC beam dumps was something of a challenge.
  • Who the hell hasn't tried to invent a death ray? Pretty much no one, it seems. Tesla! Archimedes! A bunch of crackpots!
    • Two French chemists named Pierre Joseph Macquer and Antoine Baume made a "solar death ray" in the 1750s, using a concave mirror of mercury-coated glass to melt grains of platinum in 1758 (which has later been duplicated with large lenses). This shows that while Archimedes couldn't have created a solar death ray using the materials available in the 3rd century BC, the underlying physical concept behind what had (probably falselynote ) been attributed to him was sound.
  • During World War 2, when German communications concerning the V-weapons were intercepted, British scientists viewed with deep suspicion Hitler's references to a "devastating weapon with which we ourselves cannot be attacked". The actual weapons referred to - early pulse-jet cruise missiles and ballistic rocket missiles - were several guesses below "death rays" on the scientists' list of suspects. In the late phase of World War II, a Nazi research group actually considered utopian plans for a "sun gun", an orbital weapon intended to reflect sunlight capable of burning down a city.
  • Another ray-weapon of World War II vintage which can and will kill something which is organic is the ubiquitous radar. If the radar waves (which are actually microwaves) can be focused on an organic target, they can fry it quickly. In normal conditions, radar waves are less focused and do not penetrate metal due to the way they work and do not have enough energy to kill, but very large radar installations may be very dangerous for their crews and anyone in close proximity.
    • Strangely enough the development of radar in Britain was spurred by this trope. In the 1930's the Air Ministry was bombarded with crackpot ideas for developing death rays that could be used to destroy planes or at least kill the pilot. Eventually the Air Ministry offered a public reward of 1000 pounds for anyone who could invent a death ray that could kill a sheep at 100 yards. At the same time discreet inquiries were made to two scientists, Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold Wilkins, as to whether such a weapon was indeed possible. The scientists easily proved otherwise, but in order to be helpful to the Ministry said that using radio waves to detect approaching aircraft was theoretically possible. Their paper arrived just in time to be considered by a committee on the subject of air defense, and the rest is history.
  • Lasers. Most aren't powerful enough to really count as death rays, but you really wouldn't want to stand in front of something like the National Ignition Facility's 2 megajoule laser system.
  • Project Excalibur, a Cold-War era X-ray laser satellite design which would have been powered by a detonating small nuclear bomb within its core. Nuclear bombs put out a lot of X-rays, so the Excalibur was simply a sphere of mirrors which could individually aimed to take out dozens of Soviet nuclear missiles in one fell swoop with copious amounts of Beam Spam.
  • Even architects can get in on the fun, usually by accident. Certain buildings with reflective surfaces can bend sunlight into a concentrated heat ray, ranging from "hair-singing" to "car-melting" levels of intensity.
  • In 2015, two extremists associated with the Ku Klux Klan were convicted of plotting to murder Barack Obama and random Muslims using a home-made X-ray weapon. If not for those meddling ki- I mean, the FBI's involvement, they would have succeeded too.
  • This is basically how radiotherapy works. By bombarding a tumor with death rays, it mutates to the point that it can't produce any more aberrant cells. Add in some poor engineering decisions and you get the Therac-25, a radiotherapy device that would occasionally malfunction and deliver 100 times the normal dose, leading to several fatalities and a costly lesson in proper quality control procedures that is still studied in collegiate engineering classes.


 
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Harry Potter

Alastor 'Mad-Eye' Moody demonstrates to the students the three Unforgivable Curses: Imperio (the Imperius Curse), Crucio (the Cruciatus Curse), and Avada Kedavra (the Killing Curse). These three spells are known as such for being the most dangerous and sinister spells ever known to the wizarding world, and their usage on another human being often warrant a life sentence to Azkaban.

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