Stuffed Into The Fridge - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Stuffed In The Fridge; Fridged

St. Peter: (To Arrival #1) How did you end up in Heaven?

Arrival #1: I was walking along the sidewalk when a refrigerator fell on me.

St. Peter: Okay, go on through. You, how did you get here?

Arrival #2: I came home early and thought my wife was having an affair. I yelled at her, then got so mad, I picked up the refrigerator and threw it out the window of our fifth-floor apartment. I had a heart attack and died.

St. Peter: Okay, you can go. You, how did you get here?

Arrival #3: Well, I was in bed with this woman, when I heard someone coming. I was scared it was her husband, so I hid in the refrigerator...

When a character is killed off in a particularly gruesome, sadistic and - most importantly - pointless manner. They are left for the main character to find, just to give the lead a motive for revenge, but otherwise get forgotten quite quickly by the story. Essentially, an attempt at injecting drama into a series without actually having to write dramatically, which was very common in the Darker And Edgier 1990s.

The usual victims are those who matter to the hero, specifically best buddies, love interests, Sidekicks, and C List Fodder. This fueled the creation of a protest site

by comic-fan-turned-writer Gail Simone, who pointed out that these roles are not only common to female characters but they even include female stars, making for an especially disproportionate representation.

The actual name of the trope comes from a particularly egregious storyline in Green Lantern, in which the minor villain Major Force left the corpse of Kyle Rayner's girlfriend literally stuffed into his refrigerator for him to find. Years later, Major Force repeated the gimmick with Kyle's mother in an oven. It was just a trick with a mannequin this time, but it still left a bad taste in some readers' mouths.

This trope appears in many media. The Throw Away Country is an extreme example, and the Doomed Hometown is in many ways the RPG Video Game equivalent.

See also Disposable Woman, Luca Brazzi Sleeps With The Fishes, Mary Kellys Kidney. If it happens to multiple love interests of the same character, said character likely suffers from the Cartwright Curse.

Examples

Anime and Manga

In the manga "MPD Psycho" Amamiya Kazuhiko's multiple personality disorder is triggered when the serial killer he's tracking mutilates his wife and delivers her limbless but barely alive body to the police station in an ice chest.
In Dragonball Z, Krillin's gruesome second (and pseudo definitive) death at the hands of Frieza led Goku to become a Super Saiyan.
In Code Geass, the deaths of the characters Princess Euphemia (season 1) and Shirley (season 2) fall into this, with Suzaku seemingly remembering Euphemia existed, and that Lelouch accidentally caused her death depending on whether the needed Wham for the episode needs Suzaku to do something evil or not. By episode 19 Lelouch has seemingly forgotten that Rolo killed Shirley, in cold blood, and the only reason her death happened was to cause Lelouch to Rape The Dog, and add one more reason for the Black Knights to abandon him.
While she's never actually killed outright (because hey, the show wouldn't be the same without her), Amelia of The Slayers has a tendency to be badly injured by a given villain in order to establish that villain as dangerous. This is done, of course, because she's incredibly cute and likable as well as stubborn enough to not give up anyway and seeing her get hurt invokes a certain feeling in people. It's still a little off-putting once you realize just how often she loses half her blood or has something try to rip her soul from her body, though.

Comic Books

The original Stuffed Into The Fridge incident was fueled by Executive Meddling: The original scene, as originally drawn, showed Kyle Rayner's girlfriend completely intact, but still dead. DC editors thought this was too gruesome, so mandated a redraw, that showed the partially open door with the arm sticking out of it, suggesting dismemberment.
- Suggested dismemberment is less gruesome?
  - Suggested dismemberment was accidental. The intent was to show less of her body "on camera". But since only a few parts of her body were visible, it looked to many fans like her body must have been dismembered. An example of attempted censorship actually creating something more gruesome.
Gwen Stacey's death in Ultimate Spider-Man from the monster Carnage was as shocking as it was abrupt. Peter Parker blamed himself for what happened, partly because he had a hand in Carnage's creation. Peter wasn't the same afterwards. The death scene was so disturbing that this troper still flinches when he sees Carnage, and it's been over three years since the story was published.
Parodied in the new Ambush Bug series. Ambush Bug is shopping:
Ambush Bug: Do you have any major appliances that don't come with a dead body in it?
Saleslady: It's a standard feature. Have you checked out our compact fridge with built-in pygmy?
She's not dead—at least, not yet—but recently, Hush cut out Catwoman's heart. She was somehow gotten to a machine in time.
- That was actually an Invoked Trope; Hush was deliberately looking for the most traumatic thing he could do to Batman.
A character named Lucy Cervantes (notice the ethnic name...), a.k.a. Gadget, was introduced in a recent issue of Iron Man. She was inspired by Tony and built her own high-tech gadgets in her garage to join the Initiative. Graviton, a villain with gravity powers crushed her into a sphere the size of a billiard ball.

Film

In Serenity, the Operative sends warships to kill pretty much everyone the crew has associated with, so they have no place to run. He acknowledges the fact that this was a horrible, horrible thing to do.
- The death of Wash is often (mistakenly) cited as an example; Joss Whedon says on the commentary he was subverting the frick outta Nominal Importance, just to make sure the audience knew that he might very well kill everyone.
Something like this occured in the film and comic 300, in which the main heroes discover an entire village pinned to a tree due to the ruthless and barbaric nature of the opposing army.
The climax of the film Se7en is an example.
In the film Tombstone, the villain Johnny Ringo tempts the heroes into a duel by torturing and killing one of the protagonists and sending his body to the heroes.
This rather bitter troper thinks that in the third X-Men movie, Cyclops pretty much encapsulates this category.
More for the audience's benefit than any of the other characters, Ofelia's stepfather-to-be in Pan's Labyrinth often stuffs characters in refrigerators just to illustrate that he's not really a character in his own right, he's just a machine for the rebels to rage against. Especially made apparent in the beginning, when he makes a particular point of killing a pair of men BEFORE verifying that their alibi was, in fact, true, and then blaming his men for not searching their bag more thoroughly before bothering him. And then later he exhibits every appearance of enjoyment when he tells a rebel with a speech impediment that he can go free, alive, if he can count to three without stuttering. And these are some of his endearing aspects.
In The Dark Knight, this was apparently the entire purpose of Rachel Dawes. After being a notoriously underwritten character in Batman Begins, she had roughly the same amount of character development plus an engagement to Harvey Dent. All so that the Joker (or the mob) could tie her up in a basement filled with oil drums in a building separate from her fiance and hooked up to a phone with him so they could hear each other die. Harvey lived. Rachel didn't. Thus, an extra motivation for Harvey to become Two Face.
- Given Joker's Xanatos Gambit-prone nature, this may be an in-universe fridging.
Countless examples in slasher films. Randy, after suffering Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome is found stuffed into a van in Scream 2, Charlie in Halloween: H20 is stuffed into a dumb waiter, Sarah in the same movie is strung up with a lightbulb in the pantry, and one victim in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is stuffed into a clothes dryer.

Literature

A classic example is in the play Macbeth, by Shakespeare. In a stroke of stupidity, Macbeth kills Macduff's entire family, which gives Macduff a reason to take an army of 10,000 men given to him by the King of England to go and kill Macbeth, making this trope Older Than Steam.

Live Action TV

In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Jenny Calendar is killed by Angelus and left in her lover Rupert Giles' bedroom, along with a number of things to make the latter initially believe that she has arrived in his home for a romantic rendezvous. It is debatable whether this is a case of schlock or effective writing in line with Whedon's usual tropes, as her planned death had been merely delayed due to fan popularity.
- While this troper was devastated by the character's death, in this case one must give him some credit for continuing to reference her throughout the season and then obliquely in the next. The murder of Ms. Calendar is a significant point of contention between the members of the Scooby Gang, one that threatens to destroy Buffy's friendship with Xander and relationship with Giles, particularly when it is revealed that Angel is alive and back on Earth. The character's final appearance as a disguise of the First Evil in "Amends" is disappointing, however, and faintly disrespectful. It's no surprise that Robia LaMorte was unhappy with it.
- Now, for an unambiguous example, just look at the many, many Potential Slayers killed off in season 7. Young Female? Check. Killed off by the Big Bad to show how evil they are? Check. Serves the main purpose of giving the hero something to wangst over? Oh, you better bet that's a check.
- Arguable semi-inversion with Tara. She acts as a valued member of the team and a Lipstick Lesbian love interest for Willow—then Glory drives her insane and Willow goes on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge. The following season, it happens again: Warren shoots and kills her, and Willow's Roaring Rampage Of Revenge is so severe it causes a Face Heel Turn. Unlike many Women In Refrigerators, her memory remains a palpable presence through the end of the series.
This unfortunately happens quite a bit on Heroes due to their Anyone Can Die policy, but the saddest loss, in this editor's opinion, was of Ted Sprague, who had his scalp removed while dangling upside down in a flipped-over truck just to have his brain and power stolen by Sylar so that there could be built up tension towards the finale as to who will end up blowing up New York. Heck, Sylar ended up never even using the power. Isaac didn't really have to go either. Or Niki, stuffed into a burning warehouse.. There's a fine line between story-enhancing drama and simple shock value, but the second season left no question which side of the line Heroes occupied. Hell, even in season 1, Simone was an egregious example. Instead of anything like characterization or consistent motivations, she got a fridge.
- Bob's off screen death in The Butterfly Effect probably counts too.
Early episodes of MacGyver would often introduce an old friend of the title character, who would be killed off in close proximity to him by the bad guys. This would set the stage for the rest of the episode, where MacGyver will then foil the greater plan that necessitated the killing. These characters were almost never mentioned or alluded to ever again.
Walker Texas Ranger uses it that way quite often. Many episodes open off with an "old friend" showing up. By the end of the episode, you can guess they'll end up dead, and in the rare cases they don't, something bad will happen to them if they ever show up again (which is itself incredibly rare, normally they're never mentioned again). Most of these deaths take place when the friend stumbles upon the villains plot, and get intercepted by them on the way to telling the rangers. It also makes it seem like Walker and company are "good friends" with pretty much everyone in the city with the frequency it happens, but that's another story.
This is a common occurrence on the FOX series "Prison Break". Whether it's Veronica Donovan being stuffed (literally) into multiple Hefty bags, L.J.'s mother and her husband being killed by government agents, or Sara Tancredi's head getting sent to Michael in prison, there aren't many happy endings on the series.
- Sara got better, though.
This happens literally in the Millennium episode 'Walkabout', when the police find a body stuffed into a fridge.
Law And Order has an episode without a crime (Aftershock), it's just watching the characters deal with seeing an execution. The whole episode is based on putting every character into a less centered place. Claire Kincaid is killed by a Drunk Driver at the end of the episode. Now, why does Law And Order need more drama? Nobody can say. It has a few in show mentions after the event by Briscoe and Mc Coy due to how they were involved with the character or the accident.
- And they hit the fridge again with ADA Alexandra Borgia kidnapped, beaten, stuffed in a car trunk, and abandoned to choke to death on her own vomit. Rumor has it that her brutal exit was due to Annie Parisse (Borgia's actress) rebuffing the advances of one of the show's head writers.
- This Editor suspects that these Law And Order examples - particularly the first - stem partly from the writers and producers aiming to give their actors more 'personal' material to deal with; more than one regular actor on the show has complained how the show's standard template makes it very difficult to engage with the dialogue after a while, as it tends to degenerate into a repetitive and formulaic series of standard police / prosecutorial questioning techniques ("Did you get a good look at his face? What car was he driving?" and such).
The writers' stated purpose for Shannon being "gut-shot" and killed on Lost was to create tension between the original cast and the tailsection survivors. They later acknowledged in a podcast the large number of female characters who've been "gut-shot."
The opening episode of the second season of War of the Worlds. The military general who has been giving the team missions throughout the first season has been kidnapped and presumably killed by alien beings. The military lieutenant leading the main characters is kidnapped, cloned, found by his former comrade (who swears vengeance), then shoots himself in the head out of desperation to save a little girl (who is being held hostage by the clone). The wheelchair-bound tech support character is shot multiple times, then shot AGAIN when he activates a panic button. And then they both get blown to bits in an exploding mansion. Only the wheelchair-bound character is ever mentioned again.
Male example: Sydney Bristow's original fiancé. She found him in the tub with his throat slit, after which she turned on her evil employers.
In an episode of Inspector Rex, Moser and Rex manage to save a guy who was actually stuffed into a fridge in the attic.

Video Games

The rather Nightmare Fuel-errific death of Lucien Lachance in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
A trailer for the upcoming Resident Evil 5 ends with a shot of Jill Valentine's tombstone, with death dated 2006, suggesting the possibility that Jill died two years before the events of the game (and four years after Umbrella Chronicles).
Your entire party in Planescape Torment. In the best ending, though, the Nameless One resurrects them.

Webcomics

Completely subverted, with a lampshade thrown in for good measure in this Something*Positive strip.
The Green Lantern case was lampshaded in this Casstoons strip.

Web Original

This occurs in Survival Of The Fittest with the death of Adam Dodd's girlfriend, Amanda Jones, at the hands of Cody Jenson. Arguably, it was overshadowed by the simultaneous death (and rape) of Madelaine Shirohara.
"Sailor Nothing" is not immune from dipping into this trope either. Not only is the after-story fate of Argon's 'work of art' barely touched upon, that event very badly misses the boat in trying to subvert the 'no one deserves that' routine. This is through no fault of the author. Very few people are That Good, and punishing the beautiful bitchy woman for being bitchy is a common-as-grass revenge fantasy cliche.
- Let us not forget Himei's sexual assault. Not much grasp on forensics or on psychology in there, which detracts badly from the story.

Western Animation

In an episode of Samurai Jack assassin robots destroy several villages and kill their inhabitants (surprisingly unsettling, considering the only onscreen victims are robots) solely to draw the title character to them.
- Probably the horrific brutality with which it's done, which had they been human would have bumped up the rating two or three notches.

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