Razor Apples

Now they've gone too far.

"How many people out there are doing the old razor blade in the apple trick? Good... kids goin' to the hospital. That's... that's the spirit of Halloween. Hope there's enough room."

— Caligari, American Nightmare (2002)

You just came home from trick-or-treating. You pour out your candy all over the floor, looking over your hoard.

"Now, now, eat something healthy first. How about that apple Mr. Hick gave you?"

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

A trope common in Urban Legends, this is when someone puts something sharp, pointy, or just unpleasant into someone's food. Common objects to put in are pins, needles, and razor blades. Note that this is not just for Halloween candy; this applies to all foods equally, but gifts tend to be prevalent.

Named for one of the major examples: apples filled with razor blades.

Not to be confused with the giant, kid-crushing apples/cherries/some sort of killer fruit of the rose family in I Wanna Be the Guy. When this trope is used to sneak dangerous objects to people with no intention of consuming the food item, it's Jail Bake.

It should be noted that there has never been a recorded straight instance of this happening; the World War II example below aside, it is entirely an Urban Legend. There are documented cases of persons attempting to invoke this trope, however. Compare the Super-Trope, Tampering with Food and Drink, as well as Revenge Is a Dish Best Served, where the altered food is intended for someone specific instead of being distributed For the Evulz.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• One Piece:
  • Zoro and Sanji get into one of their usual fights. In an attempt to prove himself stronger than Sanji, Zoro states that if Sanji (the Team Chef) put blades and poison in his (Zoro's) food, he would be able to eat it without problems. Word of God is that Sanji actually did it, and Zoro did eat it without problems.
  • Much earlier, Doc Q of the Blackbeard Pirates gets his Establishing Character Moment by offering apples to random people... and most of the apples contain a deadly explosive.

Comic Books

• One of the stories in Halloween: 30 Years Of Terror had Michael put razor blades in candy, For the Evulz.
• In Hellblazer, when John gets locked up in prison, an inmate attempts to spike his food with ground glass. Tables get turned, but God only knows how. Results are messy.
• In I Luv Halloween, Finch fills an apple with razor blades after he and his friends were cheated out of their candy. He gives the apple to a cop. The result isn't pretty.
• Conversational Troping in the Halloween Episode of Impulse. The over-100-year-old Max Mercury makes popcorn balls for trick-or-treaters, who freak out that if they aren't proper safety-sealed commercial products, he could have put anything in them.
• Odd Thomas: Odd is on Our Side, a graphic novel based on the Odd Thomas series by Dean Koontz, has a miserly man sick of trick-or-treaters trampling his garden pass out candy laced with corn cockle seeds (a Class IV toxin). One kid dies. The worst part? The candy laced with said seeds: candy hearts, purchased on the cheap after Valentine's Day. He was such a bastard he didn't even poison good candy.
• Parodied in a Sam & Max: Freelance Police comic when the duo find an entire razor sticking out of a kid's apple.

Fan Works

• In My Little Pumpkin, Delia and Professor Oak have a rule that Ash and Gary can't eat any candy until they return to Delia's and have the candy checked. Pallet Town is a small town where it's unlikely sweets will be tampered with, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Film — Live-Action

• In Candyman, during her first exploration of the "shrine" to Candyman at Cabrini Green, Helen finds a small heap of chocolates on the floor; one of them is found to contain a razor blade.
  • In the 2021 sequel, the odd but kindhearted Sherman Fields, who delivers candy to children, is accused of adding razor blades after a white girl becomes a victim of one. Sherman, a Black man, is murdered by the officers who come to arrest him. He's exonerated when the razors continue to be distributed, but Sherman ends up becoming part of the Candyman legend and Candyman takes his form often.
• Halloween:
  • In Halloween II (1981), a trick-or-treater and his mom are shown arriving at the emergency room of the hospital where the action of the film takes place. The boy has a razor blade stuck into his gums between his front teeth; presumably it got there when he bit into an apple.
  • In Halloween Kills, a trick-or-treater rushes to the door of the couple living in the old Myers house, claiming her friend had swallowed a razor blade in a piece of their candy, had vomited it back up and was suffering internal injuries. Turns out the kids were lying to distract the couple while a third kid stole their entire bowl of Halloween candy. They're not amused.
• Kenny & Company: On Halloween afternoon, Mr. Donovan warns the kids to be careful with candy apples and popcorn balls, as those have been known to contain razor blades or rat poison. That night, a creepy-looking guy gives Kenny, Doug, and Sherman each a popcorn ball; once his door is closed, the kids throw the popcorn balls back at it.
• The original Night of the Demons (1988) featured a frame story of this. A cranky old man is angered by children and comes home on Halloween with a bag full of apples and razor blades. The final scene involves the old man sitting down for a breakfast of apple pie made by his wife. He only asks her after taking a few bites where she got the apples...
• In Trick 'r Treat, the Serial Killer principal puts poison in some of his candy. There's also Creepy Child Sam, who uses a razor-chocolate bar as a weapon in one scene. Also, as a nod to this trope, when Mr Kreeg falls down the stairs, they're littered with hypodermic needles, straight pins, shards of glass, razor blades and candy.

Literature

• Discussed in Blubber: Villain Protagonist Jill mentions that her mother worries about the possibility of razor blades being found in apples given out on Halloween, so Jill and her brother Kenny have to give any apples that they get when trick or treating to their family's housekeeper to cut up (said housekeeper has never found a razor blade in any of the apples).
• In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, third book, Thomas bites into an apple with a razor blade in it.
• In The Ghost Squad and the Halloween Conspiracy, the eponymous group of ghosts has to deal with a man trying to sabotage his brother's political campaign by spiking Halloween chocolates with rusty phonograph needles.
• Lampshaded in Goosebumps book The Haunted Mask: Sabrina's, Carly Beth's friends, mom instructs her every year to throw away any candies that are not in their original wrappers for fear of poisons and sharp objects.
• In the Sven Hassel novels, before they become Fire-Forged Friends Tiny is fed ground glass by the Legionnaire, but it only seems to increase his joie de vivre. This is probably meant to imply the big brute is Made of Iron, rather than because the technique doesn't work.
• In IT, young Henry Bowers kills young Mike Hanlon's dog by feeding it meat laced with antifreeze.
• In one Paddington Bear story, Paddington almost swallows the coin in the Browns' Christmas pudding, as he's not aware of the tradition (see the real-life section).
• In Chuck Palahniuk's novel Rant, the main character's mother puts things like ceramic beads and tacks in all the food she cooks so that the people who are eating it have to eat it very slowly and carefully, and thus actually get a chance to enjoy the flavor, not just wolf it down.
• In Slaughterhouse-Five, Paul Lazzaro boasts about killing a dog by feeding it a steak with razor-sharp pieces of a spring
• Played with in J. R. R. Tolkien's novella Smith of Wootton Major: for the Feast of Good Children, a Great Cake is baked full of toys and prizes (like the "gateau de roi" mentioned below in the Real Life section). One prize is a strange little star. Young Smith gets it in his slice of cake and swallows it, which later allows him to travel to Faery.
• Ground glass is placed in the food at a diner in the horror novel What About The Baby? by Clare Mc Nally. The result is quite bloody.

Live-Action TV

• In the Bottom episode "Terror", Eddie and Richie get razor apples while out trick or treating. When Eddie questions why the razor blades are there, Richie tells him it's a "Halloween tradition".
• Non-Halloween example: in the "Prophecy" episode of Chiller, Edward picks a plum for Frannie to taste-test, only for a wasp hidden inside the fruit to sting her in the mouth. It's unclear whether the boy (who has both Creepy Child and psychic tendencies) deliberately chose an infested plum to harm Frannie, if he foresaw the wasp's attack and merely facilitated what he felt was inevitable, if the spirit of Edward's evil ancestor arranged for it, or if the whole incident was an accident meant to build up viewers' suspicions of Edward.
• In the second episode of Chucky, a flashback shows a young Charles Lee Ray finding an apple with a very obvious razor blade in it among his Halloween treats. He takes a bite out of it anyway and smiles as blood pours from his mouth. Later on, Chucky gives a clueless lady another apple as "thanks" for giving him the information he needed. Next time we see her, she is bleeding profusely from her mouth as she reports the "horrible red-haired child" to the cops.
• There was an episode of The Commish where someone was giving out poisoned candy, so the title Commish had his son go out trick-or-treating, which they then tested one piece at a time as it was gotten. Turned out it was a neighbor of the Commish's.
• A Criminal Minds episode had the psycho of the week place LSD and Rohypnol-laced sweets into the bank candy bowl. Victims had psychotic episodes of rage, which they would subsequently have completely no memory of.
• At the beginning of the Firefly episode "War Stories", the crew is indulging in a box of fresh apples Jayne bought for them when Kaylee asks Zoe why she always cuts them with a knife instead of biting in. She relates a story from the war, where the Alliance and Independent armies had a standoff, got to talking, and the Independents mentioned they had no food. The Alliance soldiers tossed over apples—which had "Griswold" grenades in them and before anyone realized it, "there's three guys just kind of end at the ribcage."
• In the Freaks and Geeks Halloween episode, the geeks discuss some of the foreign objects rumored to be hidden in the candy, including razors and pins, heroin, rat hair, and excrement. Later in the episode, Mrs. Weir attempts to hand out homemade cookies and is angrily rebuffed by another mom, who refuses to let her kids accept unwrapped treats due to the possibility of tampering.
• In an episode of Leverage, Sophie and Elliot are attempting to teach Parker the art of persuasion. She is told to persuade Elliot to give up his apple for her orange. She does so by claiming to have put a razor blade in the apple, just as Elliot takes a bite out of it, causing him to spit it out.
• In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again", Paul Gilstrap planned to use poisoned Neptune candy bars to cover the murder of his wife. Unfortunately, his employer caught him putting the poison back, which meant that the police would connect him to any tetrachlorodrine poisoning deaths, and he had to get all of the candy bars he had poisoned out of circulation. He failed to get one from an armored car driver who had purchased it and had already taken a bite. Since Gilstrap knew that the poison was quick-acting, he caught up to the driver just before he collapsed from the poisoning. Gilstrap then grabbed the dying driver's gun and shot him five times at point-blank range, thinking the police would not do a toxicology on a shooting victim. Except Adrian finds a dead pigeon outside Gilstrap's house hours later while trick-or-treating with Julie.
• The New Adam-12 Revival series had a Halloween episode where someone was handing out caramel apples with razors stuck in them, but only to children of Asian descent. The officers trace it back to a bigoted old man who sees them as Yellow Peril taking over "his" country.
• Oz had a member of The Mafia killed by ground glass slipped in his food over a long period. The problem with this technique in real life is that any glass fragments large enough to cause damage would be noticed when the victim ate it. Even if he didn't, he would seek medical help long before the damage became fatal.
• Supernatural: In the episode "It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester" a man dies from razor blades in Halloween candy, in a supremely gory fashion.

Music

• Insane Clown Posse seem to love this trope when mentioning Halloween. Check out "Mr. Rotten Treats" and "Halloween on Military Street" to name a couple.
• In Tommy one of the many abuses Cousin Kevin heaps on the title character includes putting broken glass in his dinner.

Theatre

• In Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, a little girl is found dead after having an apple filled with razor blades shoved down her throat. Unfortunately for the protagonist, an author living in an unidentified totalitarian state, this is ripped from the text of one of his stories.

Video Games

• The Binding of Isaac: The "Apple!" item - added in the Afterbirth† DLC for the remake - is one of these. It stains Isaac's mouth a clear blood-red, gives him a tears up from the injury, and occasionally lets him spit out an extra-damaging razor instead of a tear. Besides this, one of the between floor nightmare intermissions involves Isaac eating a piece of candy, only to vomit up a large amount of blood and a razor.
• Dungeonmans: During The Tale of the Horseless Headsman, enemies will drop Spooky Baskets filled with loot, as well as holiday-exclusive candy corn skulls. Normally the candy corn skulls heal you, but rarely, one will have a razor blade in it, causing you to bleed for several turns.
• Ib: The storybook Carrie Careless and the Galette des Rois tells of one particularly nasty subversion, where it isn't the eponymous Carrie swallowing/biting down on the object that is painful or deadly, but rather Carrie's best friend having to cut the object - actually a misplaced key - out of her stomach as the story's horrific conclusion. It's even creepier than it sounds.
• Improbable Island: The October 2019 Monthly Memento is a lifetime supply of Razor Daves, created by a mishap with two poorly-programmed AIs at the razor blade and candy factories and an inspector so overworked that the only possible solution he actually had time to implement was to repackage them all with bright yellow labels reading "free bonus razor (caution: contains razor)".
• Kingdom of Loathing's All-Hallow's Steve is that world's Anthropomorphic Personification of this trope. Naturally, you can only fight him on Halloween, during the trick-or-treating event.
• Mother 3: After Flint is arrested during the first chapter, Claus leaves him an apple right outside his cell. Flint takes a few bites only to discover a hand file, which he promptly uses to cut his way through the cell bars.

Visual Novels

• In the first arc of Higurashi: When They Cry, Rena and Mion give Keiichi a box of rice balls. The first one he bites into contains a sewing needle which draws a small amount of blood. The sixth arc reveals some more about this: There wasn't really a needle, and the "blood" was Tabasco sauce. Keiichi's escalating paranoia has started screwing with his (and the viewer's) perceptions, causing a hallucination based on a horror movie he saw.

Webcomics

• A Halloween special for Clarissa had Clarissa go trick or treating as an apple with a razor in it. She makes up a sob story about a (nonexistent) sister getting seriously hurt from eating an apple with a razor in it to get more candy for her brother.
• Subverted in The Perry Bible Fellowship. A syringe in a trick-or-treater's bag turns out to be insulin, saving the family a great deal of money on medical bills.
• Unsurprisingly, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal got in on the act.

Web Original

• Rooster Teeth Shorts: Geoff finds one in Haunted Tales of Mystery. Jack spots it and warns him in time, only for Geoff to turn the apple over and take a bite out of an actual shaving razor.
• The Creepypasta I Did Something Bad Last Halloween involves the protagonist, an abused girl, being force-fed Halloween candy by her mother in the hopes that she will eat a poisoned one. She survives, but this inspires her to start poisoning Halloween candy, but only if the victim deserves it, ex. a boy who copped a feel. It helps that she reverse-pickpockets the tampered candy into their trick-or-treat bags.
• Ross's Game Dungeon gave each game in The Last Stand series a rating based on Halloween candy. The Allegedly Free Game The Last Stand: Dead Zone got a rating of "apples with razor blades inside".
• At the beginning of his review of Trick 'r Treat, Count Jackula is busy preparing for Halloween by jamming razor-blades into fun-sized chocolate bars, citing that he is forgoing the usual partying he does on Halloween in favor of passing out candy to trick-or-treaters due to not having a costume.
• Played for Laughs in You Suck at Cooking: In an episode about chicken soup without noodles, the host jokes that chicken needle soup is best saved for Halloween.

Western Animation

• Bob's Burgers: In season 4's Halloween Episode "Fort Night", the Store Next Door in the opening is "Johnny Razor's Totally Normal Candy Store".
• Although the objects were intended to be helpful, sometimes Burger Beagle of DuckTales (1987) would eat Ma Beagle's cooking before checking it for nail files or grenades.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Treehouse of Horror X" has the police x-raying the kids' Halloween candy and finding razors, syringes, and...white chocolate, to which Chief Wiggum cringes at in disgust.
  • "Round Springfield" has a metallic piece of cereal (which also has sharp, jagged edges) in Bart's Krusty-Os. A particularly nasty case of appendicitis results.
  • The opening segment of "Treehouse of Horror XXVIII" has the Simpsons as living candy waiting to be eaten for Halloween. Lisa (who's an apple) complains nobody picks her because there might be a razor blade in her. Bart agrees that's the only reason an apple is left in a candy bowl.
• Downplayed in Ed, Edd n Eddy; Eddy finds a metal gear in a burger made by the Kanker Sisters, but it's never explained how it got there in the first place.

Real Life

• The WWII POW autobiography The Colditz Story relates how the clique of prisoners referred to as the "Men of Spirit" spent the little time they didn't devote to escape attempts stuffing the rotten vegetables in the kitchen waste full of old razor blades since it was taken out of the camp to be used as pigswill in the surrounding farms. Since the German authorities regarded this as sabotage, punishable by death, this was a risky pastime.
• Snopes has discussed various permutations of this Urban Legend. Many are proven hoaxes, although one Minneapolis man was charged with felony adulteration for putting needles in Snickers bars and handing them out on Halloween. One teenager was pricked, but no one was seriously injured.
• A Taiwanese fanartist known as Avimedes was offered homemade cookies at a convention, only to find out too late that they had needles inside. It's believed that she may have been given the cookies because she draws Sans/Frisk art, which a fellow fan really didn't like.
• In fall 2018, Australia saw a rash of needles in strawberries. A farm supervisor was arrested for the tampering, but charges were ultimately dropped due to lack of evidence. This also led to copycat cases and hoaxes, including one man who was arrested and charged with making a false report after faking a contamination.
• A real-life Subversion was the death of Timothy O'Bryan of Pasadena, Texas in 1974. It turned out that he and four other children (including his sister) had been given poisoned Pixy Sticks while trick-or-treating. Thankfully none of the other children ate their poisoned candy. While this trope was initially suspected, the culprit turned out to be none other than Ronald O'Bryan, Timothy's father, who had poisoned one of his children and attempted to poison the other in order to collect on their life insurance by invoking this trope. He ended up being sentenced to death for his son's murder.
• It was rumored that a fan of Voltron: Legendary Defender who was upset with main ship in the fandom not becoming canon gave a cupcake filled with broken glass to one of the voice actors.

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