Due To The Dead / Live-Action Films

Examples of Due to the Dead in Live-Action Films

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• Ad Astra. When someone dies in space, their body gets prayers, then is Thrown Out the Airlock in their space suit. This is in contrast to the Lima crew who have been left floating where they died, a sign of their commander's callousness and Sanity Slippage.
• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: According to Wild West gunslingers, the typically insulting act of kicking dirt over a fallen enemy was a sign of respect. When the Kid does so to the titular character, Buster ascends to Heaven.
• The Black Hole. The robot crew are seen doing a Burial in Space for one of their own, which tips off the Palomino's crew that all is not as it appears aboard the Cygnus.
• In Black Rat, Misato makes a shrine to Asuka on the roof where she jumped to her death. From the amount of flowers around it, it seems she is not the only person in the school who visits it.
• This is the central dilemma for Private Mitsushima in Japanese film The Burmese Harp. While struggling to make his way to the POW camp where the rest of his unit is interned, Mitsushima keeps running across piles of corpses of Japanese soldiers. This so affects him that he elects to stay behind in Burma and bury Japanese dead rather than go home with his comrades.
• Cargo (2013): a couple of survivors from the group that shoot the father are seen digging a grave in the background while the woman in their group plays with Rosie.
• Cry Blood, Apache: When Vittorio returns to the camp and finds his entire tribe slaughtered, he buries all of them before he embarks on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• In Demon Knight, Brayker Dies Wide Open. Jeryline respectfully closes them before taking his blood to refill the Key as its new Guardian. The Collector opens them up again when he finds Brayker's corpse, as if any more proof of his evil was needed.
• In The Dry, Billy's classmates at the primary school plant a tree in his memory after he is killed in a family annihilation. The principal Scott Whitlam says to Aaron that he is not sure how he is going to explain it to the students when the tree inevitably dies due to the ongoing drought.
• Elysium: Frey covers Delacourt's body with a sheet after she dies.
• Enemy Mine. The bodies of the soldiers killed in the war are shown being ejected from a spaceship amid a solemn funeral dirge. Then we Gilligan Cut to what's actually going on, with the corpses on a conveyor belt being briefly paused while a bored technician looks up their religious denomination and plays the appropriate music (until the music machine breaks down). The protagonist is nearly ejected into space himself, but turns out to be Not Quite Dead.
• Female Agents: The last scene is Louise lighting candles in a church for the fallen, as she had promised earlier.
• Gladiator: At the end of the film, Maximus is killed, though not before delivering his final wishes to Quintus. Quintus makes sure to follow through on them, freeing Maximus’ men and reinstating Senator Gracchus. Lucilla, who was in love with Maximus, urges Gracchus to honor Maximus by restoring order and democracy to Rome. Gracchus then begins to carry away the body of Maximus for a proper burial, and is aided in this by all of Maximus’ men. Meanwhile, Commodus, who caused Maximus’ death in the first place, has his body left behind and discarded in the arena where Maximus killed him. At the very end of the film, Juba buries Maximus’ figurines of his wife and son in the spot where Maximus died.
• Greyhound: During an engagement with a U-boat, GREYHOUND takes a hit from the sub's deck gun. Later, Commander Krause is informed three of his crew were killed. Since they don't have room to carry bodies for any length of time, he orders an immediate burial at sea. The three bodies are draped in American flags as the crew gathers on deck, the ship slows to a stop, the bell is rung and one by one the names are read and the bodies are dropped overboard accompanied by a 21-Gun Salute. The event is marred slightly when the body of Mess Mate George Cleveland, Krause's personal steward, gets caught on the flag, and has to be shaken loose.
• In the 1971 Western Hannie Caulder, bounty hunter Price (Robert Culp), whenever he kills his quarry, always gives back part of his reward to pay for the funeral. When Hannie (Raquel Welch) takes up the profession, she does the same thing.
• In Highlander, Connor makes a promise to his first mortal wife Heather to light a candle on her birthday every year after her passing. He honours this promise for four centuries.
• The Hunger Games: Katniss does this with Rue, inspiring a riot in her district 11. The male District 11 tribute Thresh saves and spares Katniss in deference to this as well, and also savagely kills one of the Careers who gloated about it while attempting to kill Katniss moments before.
• In I, Frankenstein, one of the first clues that Adam is more than a soulless monster is that even though he hates Victor Frankenstein for creating him, he still carries his body back to the family cemetery and digs him a grave.
• In the film version of The Indian in the Cupboard, Omri transforms an action figure of an older Native American so he'll release his grip on the tomahawk in his hand and Omri can take the real thing. The older man dies of fright before Omri can do anything to stop it. Little Bear calls Omri out for not only going that far to get the tomahawk and ending the older man's life, but disrupting the life he had back home in the process. He demands that Omri turn the older man back into an action figure so his flesh-and-blood body can be buried in his own world and because "he would want to be back" there. Little Bear wraps and ties up the action figure, and he and Omri release an action-figure-sized deer into Omri's backyard, apparently as compensation for the life lost. They say a few words before Omri buries the action figure with a trough.
• In the Name of the Father: All of the prisoners in the wing, who had come to adore him, protest after Giuseppe dies by burning toilet paper, knowing that being in prison had made his health condition grow fatal. This is the only thing they can do from inside.
• James Bond:
  • Thunderball: Bond attends the funeral of SPECTRE agent Colonel Jacques Bouvar, but it turns out Bouvar was Faking the Dead and attended it as his "widow". After killing Bouvar, Bond mockingly empties a flower pot on his body and flees.
  • You Only Live Twice: Bond is Faking the Dead and gets a fake Royal Navy funeral so he can get onboard a submarine for his assignment.
  • Diamonds Are Forever: Bond nearly ends up victim of Murder by Cremation at the Slumber inc. crematorium.
• The plot of The Karate Kid Part II starts when Miyagi gets a letter from Okinawa telling him his father is dying. When he and Daniel get there, Miyagi is confronted by his lifelong rival, Sato, who years ago had assumed Miyagi fled like a coward to avoid facing him, and still holds a grudge.^note The truth, as Sato eventually figured out, was that Miyagi didn't wish to commit to something one or the other would likely regret later; their grudge wasn't worth a Duel to the Death. However, this confrontation is interrupted by the issue at hand. Miyagi manages to speak to his father briefly together with Sato just before the elder Miyagi finally dies. Sato had regarded the elder Miyagi as a mentor himself, so he sternly tells Miyagi he has three days to mourn before he comes to settle their grudge (unfortunately, Sato's nephew Chozen has quickly taken a dislike to Daniel and gives him a lot of trouble in the meantime).
• Kong: Skull Island:
  • Colonel Packard holds a brief funerary service for the soldiers under his command who were killed by Kong, together with the few survivors he was able to round up, and he vows that their deaths won't go unavenged. This marks an early point in Packard's transformation into the movie's villain as he puts killing Kong before everything else including the potential fate of all humanity.
  • Gunpei Ikari. Aside from getting a weapon tombstone erected within the Iwi's village, Marlow kneels and places a hand on Gunpei's grave, explaining his history with the man to Conrad and Marlow as well as their vow that they would never leave each-other behind, before he takes Gunpei's shin-guntō so that he can fulfil that vow spiritually when he escapes the island.
• Lake Placid: In 3, Brett places his jacket over Charlie's remains. However, he also doesn't hesitate to Speak Ill of the Dead, admitting that he hated Charlie and considered him to be a pervert and an idiot (which is a fair description).
• The Magnificent Seven opens with a traveling salesman arguing with the town undertaker over the burial of a Native American who died in the street: the salesman is willing to pay for the burial, but no one is willing to drive the hearse up to Boot Hill because a "certain element" in the town objects to having a non-white buried there and is threatening violence. The matter is resolved when Chris and Vin, the first two of the eponymous seven, volunteer to drive the hearse and engage in a brief gunfight with a group of racists who try to stop them from entering the cemetery. The villagers then approach them to ask for help, for men who do that are men who will help them.
• Maria Full of Grace: Colombian teen Maria accepts a risky gig as a drug "mule" to smuggle heroin from Colombia to the United States. One of her fellow drug mules dies on the job after one of the pellets she swallowed ruptures inside of her. After the body is found and identified Maria donates half of her earnings so that her body can be sent back to Colombia instead of buried in an unmarked grave in New Jersey.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • This trope forms a very powerful moment in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. When informed by Rocket of Yondu's Heroic Sacrifice, the ninety-nine remaining tribes of Ravagers turn up for his funerary cremation and, in recognition of his atonement, fly their salute: the Colors of Ogord. Various captains are also seen delivering a Ravager salute in Yondu's honor, as does a jubilant Kraglin, who realizes his captain had earned redemption.
  • Shows up twice in Black Panther (2018). After learning of the circumstances surrounding his uncle's death, T'Challa is upset to learn that his body was just left in his apartment and not given a proper burial. Later in the movie, T'Challa is apparently killed and thrown over a cliff by Killmonger. His younger sister Shuri laments that this means they can't bury him.
  • In Captain Marvel (2019), a Skrull infiltrator posing as the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. takes a moment to pray for a fallen comrade who's been subjected to an Alien Autopsy, even though this risks his cover. It's an early hint that the Skrull-Kree War isn't as black and white as it seems.
  • Spiderman Far From Home opens with a memorial tribute to the Avengers who died during the events of Infinity War and Endgame: Vision, Black Widow, and Iron Man, and a tribute is also paid to Captain America, even though he's still alive. In addition, throughout the movie, there can be seen a number of murals and other art memorializing Tony Stark.
• In Mosul (2020), the Nineveh Province SWAT team takes great care in transporting and offloading their dead whenever they can, even pausing to give prayers for their deceased. Even when pinned down behind enemy lines, they always make a promise to come back for the bodies of their fallen comrades when possible. This respect does not extend to dead ISIS fighters, whom the team either ignore, loot or take selfies with.
• In My Science Project, Cleopatra tosses a flower to Vince. After the protagonists kill a Neanderthal, Vince lays the flower on its chest.
• The Negotiation: At the end of the film heroic crisis negotiators Chae-youn and Hyuk-su make makeshift memorials for the deceased Min siblings.
• In Never Grow Old, Dutch wakes Patrick in the middle of the night and requests two coffins. He takes Patrick to a dugout hole where he kills Bill Crabtree and one other man, and then has Patrick give them a proper burial. Dutch's twisted concepts of friendship and honour demand that he see them properly buried even though he murdered them, because they used to be his friends.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Jack's first scene has him passing by a few pirate skeletons hung outside the harbor, with a sign reading "Pirates: ye be warned" next to them. His response is to remove his hat and cover his heart, presumably out of respect for the dead. This serves to establish that while Jack may be a rogue, he's not a purely evil man.
• Pope Joan: Returning home to find their village had been wiped out by marauding Vikings, Count Gerold and his men make sure to give all the victims proper funerals, including Johanna's brother.
• Prairie Fever: After Blue is shot by Logan, the others bury her: marking her grave with a cross of branches, hung with a sketch of her done by Abigale, while Lettie plays the organ and sings a hymn. Preston then speaks some stumbling words over the grave. It is a surprisingly touching scene.
• In Rats: Night of Terror, the gang take the corpses they find in the town and set them ablaze, with even the comic relief members watching solemnly as they burn. Deus even says a few words, though he's the only one who understands them.
• In Revenge for Jolly!, Harry and Cecil bury Harry's murdered dog in his backyard and light a firecracker in her memory.
• The Revengers: When Benedict is shot and Left for Dead, Job gives money to the saloon keeper to see that he receives a proper burial. However, after Job leaves, the saloon keeper discovers that Benedict is Not Quite Dead.
• After his partner dies at the start of Revolver (1973), Ruiz carefully buries his body beneath a cairn of stones: reverently placing his partner's revolver in his hand before placing the last few stones atop the body.
• Rhymes for Young Ghouls: Alia and Joe's trauma over losing Anna is only deepened by the fact that she's also been denied proper burial because hers is a death by suicide. In fact, it's happened to many people, all buried close together. They visit her grave out in the forest regularly to make up for this.
• In Rocky Mountain, Lt. Rickey and the Union cavalry ride to the rescue, but they are too late; all the Confederate soldiers have been killed. In their honor, Rickey raises the rebel flag on top of Rocky Mountain and the troops salute it.
• In the 1976 mondo film Savage Man, Savage Beast, a group of Australian Aborigines are depicted hunting kangaroos and giant bats using traditional methods, which they then symbolically bury in the sand to placate the spirits of the animals.
• Subverted in Slipstream (1989). After a Battle Couple from an After the End law enforcement agency kill some smugglers, they build a cairn over their bodies while the man prays for them. Then he insists on filling out an incident report, despite the woman telling him that no-one gives a damn. It's presented more as a sign that he's out of touch and clinging to the idea that reports and proper burials matter because he wants to avoid facing reality.
• Occurs twice in S.O.B.. A group of Felix's friends believe that he would be appalled at the over-the-top Hollywood funeral that is being planned for him, so they steal Felix's body from the funeral parlor in order to give him the funeral that they think he deserves: a Viking funeral where they burn his body at sea on one of Felix's boats. In a subplot that has yet to turn out to be related, a character actor died unknown on the beach in front of Felix's house. The same group all believe this actor never got the respect he deserved, so they substitute his body for Felix's, and they allow the closed casket to be given the previously mentioned over-the-top Hollywood funeral that they think he deserves, with (almost) no one knowing.
• In Son of a Gun, JR and Lynch are preparing to dispose of Sterlo's body. JR, who is obviously uncomfortable with this, asks if they shouldn't say some words or something. Lynch thinks about this for a few moments, then says "Where you're going, there is no parole". He and JR then set fire to truck and push it off the cliff into a flooded mine.
• The main plot of Son of Saul involves Saul, a prisoner at Auschwitz, trying to get a proper Jewish funeral for a guy who might be his son rather than having the boy burned up in the ovens.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock's funeral has his body shot out of the torpedo tube, in a reference to Burial at Sea. The full context (both in the movie itself and over the entire franchise), and especially what happens in the following movie, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, indicate that this is not the traditional Vulcan burial rite. Starfleet has been around long enough to build up its own customs and traditions about burial while serving.^note The novelization of the movie stated that Spock's will specified his remains were not to be returned to Vulcan, and that Admiral Kirk decided Spock's torpedo casket was to be fired at the Genesis Planet with the intent the heat of atmospheric entry would cremate Spock's body. The Search For Spock lends credence to this by having the USS Grissom crew express surprise to find Spock's casket intact on the surface of the planet.
  • Star Trek: Generations manages to deliver an emotional, powerful ending to Captain Kirk, without need to use words. After Kirk eventually dies from injuries in his final act of heroism, Captain Picard takes the time to do things properly, even when he's alone on a barren planet. He buries Captain Kirk in rocks on a nearby mountaintop and holds vigil overnight before setting out to reunite with his crew.
  • Star Trek (2009): Nero and the Narada's crew all have hairless heads. Except the solitary woman. She got to keep her hair, apparently. In the backstory, it's explained that Romulan men shave their heads when grieving and wear facial tattoos. Nero and his crew are in permanent grief, so they're bald forever.
• Star Wars:
  • Jedi largely cremate the bodies of their dead on open pyres unless their bodies had disappeared into the Force as had happened with Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Princess Leia, Anakin Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Phantom Menace has Qui-Gon's funeral, and Return of the Jedi has Luke burn the empty armor and cybernetics of Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker.^note It was confirmed in both the Legends and current canon continuity that Skywalker's body disappeared off-screen and all Luke burned was Vader's armor and prosthetics.
  • Padmé's funeral procession is shown at the end of Revenge of the Sith, with several Naboo and Gungan dignitaries, including Boss Nass, attending.
  • In contrast, Vader is fond of strangling people, dumping them on the floor, and storming off in a rage.
• Stone: The movie's iconic scene is a biker funeral escort on the F3 Freeway. During the funeral, the deceased is buried standing up, so he won't have to take anything from the Devil lying down.
• Summerland (2020): Alice tells Frank about how after losing her father, she did a miniature viking funeral on his behalf, launching a toy sea ship that she set on fire. He later does something similar in honor of his own deceased father, expect with a toy wooden plane that flies out over the Atlantic.
• In Taking Chance, American military members who die while serving overseas are kept under a military escort for their entire trip back to their home town. The movie follows a Marine officer who volunteers to escort PFC Chance Phelps for the last few legs of the trip between Dover AFB and Chance's home town.
• The Theatre Bizarre: In "Vision Strains", The Writer thinks she is memorialising the women she murders by writing down their stories in her journals, because otherwise they would be completely forgotten. During her Villainous Breakdown, a voice in her head (which may just her saner self) tells her that she is doing no such thing. All she is doing is stealing other people's stories because she has no creativity of her own.
• Troy: Hector attempts to invoke this for his final duel with Achilles. He asks that they make a pact in which whoever wins the duel will give the loser all the appropriate funeral rights. Achilles, currently pissed beyond belief thanks to Hector killing his cousin Patrocles (whom he thought was Achilles at the time), refuses; after killing Hector, he desecrates his body by dragging it behind his chariot outside Troy’s walls all the way back to the Greeks’ camp. Later that night, the Trojan king Priam sneaks into the Greeks’ camp and manages to get Achilles to come to his senses and return Hector’s body to him for a proper burial. Additionally, Achilles makes an agreement with Priam that no Greek would attack Troy for the next 12 days, as the funeral games in Troy last 12 days. At Hector’s funeral, his body is washed and burned upon a funeral pyre, with two coins placed in his eyes for the boatman Charon. At the end of the film, the same honors are given to the Greeks who died taking Troy, Achilles being among them.
• At one point in U-571, the US Marines who've boarded a U-Boat to recover the Enigma decoder are attempting to convince soldiers manning a German warship that they've been sunk, firing the body of one of their fallen comrades out of a torpedo tube along with whatever junk they can get hold of. The private assigned this task regards it as extremely Dirty Business, and takes the time to recite the prayer used for burial at sea before doing so.
• Ulzana's Raid: DeBuin cares a lot about properly burying the dead, whether they are murdered homesteaders, Apache enemies, or his own men. This is mostly shown in a compassionate light, although it does overlap with a Kick the Dog moment when he specifically orders the Token Enemy Minority Army Scout to bury a man who was tortured to death.

Evil

• In horror films, the classic reason why the mummy stirred was to avenge itself on those who broke into the tomb. Indeed, more generally this trope is a persistent theme in horror films. One example: The Amityville Horror (1979), where the basis for the haunted nature of the house is (eventually) revealed to be the fact it was built on an ancient Indian Burial Ground. Not just an Indian Burial Ground, but one used for Indians who were insane or had some lingering illness. And then later it was used by devil worshipping witches. And then someone built a house there.
• Subverted in Anaconda. Sarone was a former priest, so he holds a eulogy for a recently deceased crew member after the Anaconda devoured him in front of everyone. However, his prayer is so half-hearted and insincere that he just comes off as a prick instead, especially since Sarone is directly responsible for the guy's death and his weeping girlfriend is sitting right next to him.
• El Camino: After murdering his cleaning lady, Todd praises her for her honesty and hard work, planning to bury her in a nice spot. This just serves to show his Moral Sociopathy.
• Charade plays this for laughs: Audrey Hepburn is attending the lying-in-state of her husband when three former associates show up, one by one. One begins sneezing violently, causing the widow's best friend to remark that he must've known the dead man very well: he's allergic to him. Another holds a mirror to the corpse's nostrils to check for breathing. And the third slams open the church door, strides in fiercely, and jabs a pin into the dead man's hand. Audrey's wide-eyed look is hilarious.
• High Plains Drifter. The federal marshal whose death was arranged by the townspeople is buried in an unmarked grave, and the idea that such a man can't rest without a marker is lampshaded. At the end of the movie the Stranger (who may or may not be the marshal's avenging spirit) arranges for a gravestone to be made before vanishing into the distance.
• Highlander: Continuing the aforementioned example, after Connor lights a candle for Heather in the church and then sits down, the Kurgan walks in and shows contempt for the gesture by crushing Heather's candle under his hand.
• Kingdom of Heaven: Balian's wife is denied Christian burial as a suicide. She's buried at the crossroads and beheaded. Truth in Television for the time. However, the priest really shouldn't have rubbed this in his face.
• The eponymous Predator prizes the skulls of worthy prey as valuable trophies, like a human game hunter mounting the heads of animals he's killed on his wall.
  • In the Expanded Universe, Predators without honor are hunted, their bodies dismembered and desecrated, and their heads disposed of, as opposed to being kept as a trophy. It seems that the Predators see keeping a skull as an honor not just for prey but for themselves as well.
• In The Searchers, one of the big clues that Ethan Edwards is not John Wayne's usual role is the scene where he uncovers a dead Comanche warrior and shoots his eyes. As he explains, the Comanche believe that you need your eyes to enter the spirit world — by shooting the eyes out, he'd just condemned that warrior to wander the Earth as a ghost.
• In the 1943 Film Serial Secret Service in Darkest Africa a German naval vessel is given permission to bury their dead on neutral soil. Instead they dump the bodies overboard and fill the coffins with explosives which their agent can pick up later. Sailors are buried at sea of course, but it's clearly meant to show the callousness of the evil Nazis even to their own.
• In Serenity, the crew comes across the village where Book has been living peacefully having been completely slaughtered by The Operative's forces. Mal decides to use the bodies to camouflage Serenity to sneak past the Reavers orbiting the planet Miranda, which (naturally), his crew finds completely disgusting. Mal probably didn't feel especially good about it either, but it does enable the crew to bring the man chiefly responsible for their murder to something like justice, ( not to mention start the ball rolling on doing the same for thirty million more innocent victims) so there's that.
• In 13 Assassins, Lord Naritsugu kicks the severed head of the most loyal of his own subjects, who just gave out his life to defend Naritsugu. When the hero calls him out for it, Naritsugu shrugs it off.
• Troy: Achilles, after killing Hector, drags Hector’s body behind his chariot, in full view of his family and then all the way back to the Greeks’ camp. This is a Downplayed example, however; rather than out of evil intent or petty spite, Achilles desecrated Hector’s body out of grief, revenge, and blinding anger for the death of his cousin Patrocles, whom Hector had killed. When Priam confronts him to retrieve Hector’s body, the old king snaps Achilles back to his senses by reminding him of how much bloodshed and sadness he’s spread among people throughout his life as a warrior. Achilles, affected by Priam’s words, agrees to return Hector’s body to be properly honored, but not before he breaks down crying upon Hector’s corpse, regretting what he’d done and saddened by how far he’s let himself fall. When he allows Priam and Briseis to leave with the body, his enmity towards Hector is gone, and he tells his father that his son was the best man he’d ever fought.