"They say a dog's supposed to be man's best friend..."
Where the Dead Go to Die is a surreal Psychological Horror CGI animated film by James "Jimmy ScreamerClauz" Creamer, and produced by Unearthed Films, with a cast and aide from individuals such as musician Passenger of Shit and animator Emily Youcis.
It is an anthology of three short films:
- Tainted Milk, meant to be a disturbing Homage to Lassie, centers around a boy living in an abusive household who meets up with a strange talking dog with glowing red eyes who tells him to do some very disturbing things to his parents.
- Liquid Memories is about a depressed Serial Killer who murders people in order to steal a strange blue liquid from their brains to gain their memories. However, once he enters into the minds of these people, their nightmares become his reality.
- The third and final short The Masks That The Monsters Wear is about a disfigured boy who must wear a mask to cover his stillborn brother's face attached to his head. Living with his horribly abusive parents, he finds friendship with a sweet little girl in his class, but once he meets her father and discovers the horrors that he puts her through, things begin to go From Bad to Worse.
The film has become somewhat... notorious for its subject matter and the plethora of horrific imagery the film is plastered from start to finish. It contains disturbing amounts of Gorn, nudity, and controversial topics such as child pornography, sometimes all at once. If you are easily offended, watch this film at your own risk.
Where the Dead Go to Trope:
- Abusive Parents: The only person who had anything resembling a good family life was the Killer, and even so, that life may not have even been his.
- Acid-Trip Dimension: A prominent and recurring location through each short.
- Animalistic Abomination: Labby the hellhound, who manipulates Tommy into doing horrible things under the guise that it's what God wanted.
- The Antichrist: Labby tries to convince Tommy that his stillborn sibling (and earlier than that, his grandfather's sheep) is this in Tainted Milk.
- Ate His Gun: How the serial killer in Liquid Memories dies.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Invoked on a more-or-less case-by-case basis — when it's averted, there's usually some effect in mind.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: Played for Horror in Tainted Milk, when Labby takes advantage of Tommy with the promise of bringing his family back.
- Blood-Splattered Innocents: Happens to Tommy over the course of the first short, thanks to the atrocities he is Forced to Watch or commit.
- Call-Back: Tommy and the Lady In The Well have the same conversation in Tainted Milk and The Masks That The Monsters Wear.
- Captain Obvious: The hooker and Tommy's dad both vocally point out that they're being killed.
- Central Theme: If God exists, He hates the world. Why else would it suck?
- Conjoined Twins: Ralph has the infant face of his stillborn brother attached to the side of his head, which forces him to wear a mask to cover it.
- Crapsack World: The world depicted in the film is depressingly bleak and hopeless — the only decent people are children, and the inverse isn't necessarily true.
- Creepy Child: Tommy, Ralph, and Johnny. Sophia may count as well.
- Cyclops: A strange recurring set of shadowing humanoid monsters with toothy grins and one eye make constant appearances through each short. It should be noted that each of their one eyes are a live-action shot of an actual eye.
- Dark Parody: The first segment was meant to be a parody of Lassie where the dog is demonic. When it didn't work without the laugh track, the rest of the short was played for straight-up horror.
- Deep South: Sophia's abusive redneck father has this vibe to him. Which also plays up another unflattering stereotype about the deep south.
- Depraved Bisexual: Labby the demon dog, who has sexual interactions (or expresses lustful statements) on both genders. Though somewhat more commonly with male characters.
- Deranged Animation: TO HELL AND BACK! It's an animated horror film and it doesn't hold back on making you feel uncomfortable or creeped out.
- Downer Ending: All the shorts end badly for the protagonists and anyone else involved, especially the first two.
- Driven to Suicide:
- In Tainted Milk, Tommy mentions that his grandfather committed suicide after he, on Labby's orders, killed all of his sheep.
- This is how the Serial Killer goes out, via eating his gun.
- Eldritch Abomination: In the truest sense of the trope, since the horrific supernatural beings couldn't possibly be more alien and inexplicable if they tried.
- Exploitation Film: The horrifying imagery alone is enough to make this film a rare animated example of this trope.
- Eye Scream: Happens to the Hooker as the result of a John's war flashback.
- Fan Disservice: Any instance of eroticism in any of the shorts is packed to the gills with this, thanks to the animation and the fact that it's horror.
- Gorn: Each short contains various scenes involving graphically bloody violence. Tainted Milk, for example, has one notorious moment where Labby rips out Tommy's unborn brother from his mother's stomach and then proceeds to tear off his father's penis afterwards.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The Keeper of Man's Fears and the Creator of His Woes, the Humanoid Abomination who created evil.
- Groin Attack: In one of the more iconic scenes from Tainted Milk, Labby does this to both of Tommy's parents.
- Hate Sink:
- Ralph's parents, while understandably sad that one of their sons died before birth, put the blame on Ralph himself and force him to keep his brother's face on his head, despite the mental issues it causes him, and shave his head so that the twin can be seen. The father also beats Ralph frequently and the mother doesn't do anything to stop it. Even worse, it turns out Ralph's father had starred in one of Sophie's child porn movies and congratulates his son for doing the same thing and even proposes to fuck her both together. Their deaths feel very deserved.
- Sophie's father seems like a nice guy on the outside, but he's actually a horrible abuser, who forces his daughter to star in child porn movies and hangs her up to the ceiling with a mask if she pisses him for the pettiest reasons. He also sold one of the mentioned movies to Ralph, who is also underage, and convinced him to star in a movie with Sophie, telling him that he's making her happy by raping her. Considering how his son is like, it's quite possible that he's neglectful towards him. Nobody feels sorry when he dies.
- Harmful to Minors: Two of the shorts have bad things happen to some poor kids. That's not to say plenty of adults won't find it harmful to themselves, either.
- Hellhound: Labby, very much so; other than being a Labrador, he fulfills the criteria in every other way. What exactly he is is not made very clear, but based on the imagery, he is either a demon or some sort of Animalistic Abomination. Uniquely for a hellhound, he does seem to mention God a lot, and at least claims that serving the Lord is his primary motivation.
- Hillbilly Horrors: Sophia's father is a disgusting abusive redneck who forces her to strip down and star in his own homemade child porn of her. Whenever she misbehaves, he hangs her from the ceiling wearing a muzzle tied to a chain. He even gets his hillbilly son to beat her with a stick while she is tied up there.
- Humanoid Abomination: The Keeper Of Man's Fears and the Creator Of His Woes, and many other monsters.
- Implausible Deniability: Labby encourages this in Tainted Milk, suggesting that Tommy scratch himself up with his stillborn sibling's fingernails to make it look as though the sibling struck first.
- Intelligible Unintelligible: The Lady in the Well in Tainted Milk "speaks" with some echoy voice that's incomprehensible, yet Tommy appears to understand her just fine. We hear what she was saying in The Masks That The Monsters Wear, however.
- Karmic Death: Ralph delivers them to both his abusive parents and the horrible pedophile father of his love interest, Sophia.
- Light Is Not Good: The Keeper Of Man's Fears and the Creator Of His Woes is a Humanoid Abomination with a fireball for a head.
- Limited Animation: The whole film was done from the director's home, with hobbyist-level software and jerry-rigged, consumer-grade hardware.
- Manipulative Bastard: Labby the hell-hound, who easily manipulates a vulnerable young boy to do heinous acts.
- Mind Screw: Many of the characters tend to randomly experience what appear to be extremely horrific hallucinations and many of the demons don't have any sort of explanation as to what they even are.
- My God, What Have I Done?:Ralph: I did things I didn't know I was capable of doing...
- Nothing Is Scarier: None of the recurring characters, or any of the supernatural horrors for that matter, are given any sort of overt explanation as to what they are. The most obvious interpretation would be that they're demons, but the bizarrely pro-Christian imagery and their sheer bizarreness seems to imply something else altogether.
- Pædo Hunt: A major focus of the third short.
- Please Wake Up: Taken to rather disturbing lengths in Tainted Milk.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Ralph's father is homophobic, as evidenced when he tells Ralph he doesn't want a "faggot" for a son.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: To really nail in that Labby's not to be trusted and is also a hellhound.
- The Reveal: The ending of the third short reveals the identity of the Smiling Man, as well as the symbolic roles of the other characters throughout the film. A lot is left to interpretation, though.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Labby convinces Ralph to brutally murder both of his parents, and anybody else he felt was getting between him and Sophia.
- Satan: Makes an appearance during one of Labby's monologues in "Tainted Milk". The freaked-out animation works in the film's favor there, as this movie's depiction of Satan is terrifying.
- Scenery Porn: Admittedly, there are quite a few lovingly-detailed scene shots, especially in The Masks That The Monsters Wear. A few of them are of rather grotesque or ruinous locations...
- Serial Killer: The main protagonist of Liquid Memories, as his main MO is to kill people and well take their liquid memories.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: One appears in Liquid Memories. It's the reason he goes nuts and assaults the Hooker — he had a war flashback.
- Slasher Smile: Those creepy yellow Smiley faced monsters in the war veteran's flashback sport these.
- Stalker with a Crush: Ralph, although his crush does like him back.
- Suddenly Speaking: The Keeper Of Man's Fears and the Creator Of His Woes speaks in The Masks That The Monsters Wear.
- Surreal Horror: And overkill on both counts!
- Synchro-Vox: Done on the eyes of the shadowy Cyclops monsters that appear throughout the film.
- The Unfavorite: Ralph is this to his parasitic twin. His parents despise him for being born while his brother didn't survive birth, constantly guilt-trip him over it, and shave his head to keep his hair from covering the twin's face.
- Unnamed Parent: None of the children's parents in the film are given names.
- Unreliable Narrator: Save for a few moments, it's hard to tell how lucid (if indeed at all) the protagonist of Liquid Memories is.
