A Fête Worse than Death

aka: Fete Worse Than Death

"A Rakdos party is a flop if anyone lives to talk about it."

— Slaughterhouse Bouncer, Magic: The Gathering

Even a Town with a Dark Secret likes a good party now and then. But being the kind of place it is, the town's big annual event probably wouldn't be the sort of thing you'd want to attend. If you're a newcomer, at first you think it's just a Quirky Town's unusual festival, with face painting and songs by firelight out in the forest. That's how it always starts. But then there's running and screaming. And you're the one doing both.

Perhaps you're first on the menu for the bake sale—and it's meat pies, maybe you're the winner of a Lottery of Doom, or maybe—and this one's popular—you're going to be sacrificed in a fertility ritual. Or all of them combined, with liberal arrangements of sequences. Either way, expect your impending horrible death to be offset by a colorful ritual with bunting, may poles, a burning pyre, chanting and dancing. But once the Creepy Children Singing or chanting starts, its almost the grisly end for you...

It's a common trope, of course, and with good reason; the idea of a bizarre town conspiracy that kills outsiders is creepy enough, but to have that turn into a big celebration that you can bring the kids to adds an extra level of twisted terror to the proceedings. It also provides a useful way to get all your creepy village extras in one big scene and emphasize that whatever is going on is happening with the full consent of everyone, except possibly the protagonist.

A variation on the trope is that the killings are performed by a minority and that the rest of the town is oblivious. This, too, has a twisted horror to it — the idea that families are participating in a festival that's tied to horrible murders without realizing is very creepy. If the balance between an innocent veneer and a bone-chilling hidden underside is done effectively, it will be Nightmare Fuel.

Before the torture and murder starts, our characters might have noticed some subtle clues. Perhaps the "friendly hosts" got careless and dropped their cheery act for a second. Perhaps one of the guests gets a sense that they're Being Watched. Or they see or hear something amiss and hosts' deception starts to be revealed.

Not to be confused with Fate Worse than Death, though the two can overlap. Or with Crappy Carnival.

Compare Nasty Party.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Subverted in the second season of Mushishi. A sake brewer gets lost in the mountains, and ends up stumbling on a mysterious gathering in the middle of the forest where strange, glowing sake is being served. Years later his son manages to brew seemingly identical sake and ends up stumbling on the same gathering, where possession of the sake makes people assume he's one of them, until it becomes clear that his sake doesn't have the mystical properties it's supposed to have, and he finds himself chased through the woods by an angry crowd of sinister mystics. It turns out that they were simply Mushishi who were miffed that he unintentionally cheated them with what they considered a fake medicine, and the series' protagonist, Ginko, who is among them, lets him off with a warning and revelation that his sake does have some supernatural qualities that the Mushishi would be willing to pay for as long as he's being honest about it.
• In One Piece, the town of Whiskey Peak seems like a constant pirate boozefest, but it's actually a pirate trap, run by a large group of bounty hunters. They get pirates to pass out drunk, then kill them. Unfortunately for them, they found their match in the Straw Hat Pirates, who had already shown the ability to mop a place clean of mooks. It also didn't help that Zoro Never Gets Drunk.
• In PandoraHearts, Isla Yura throws Oz a second Coming-of-Age party since his initial ceremony was interrupted. At first, the party proceeds as normal with friends, family, and members of high society showing up to congratulate Oz and celebrate the occasion. Cue the discovery of a crazed religious cult that worships the Abyss, a slew of Brainwashed and Crazy Evil Orphans, and the Headhunter who's been killing off members of the Nightray family, all within the mansion where the party is being held, and you get this trope. Turns out, Yura plotted the whole thing as a means to recreate the Tragedy of Sablier by using Alice and Leo as sacrifices and having Oz unwillingly perform the role of the treacherous friend. Suffice to say, it was one of the more tragic and disturbing story arcs in the series.
• The manga Umi no Misaki has this same eerie flavor for a little while, until the main character realizes that it's more a case of A God Am I. The Rising Dragon Festival, which culminates in a Murder-Suicide, is a straight example.

Card Games

• As quoted above, the Cult of Rakdos of Magic: The Gathering are Laughing Mad sadists who are really into this sort of thing. They've become a bit more reasonable about it by the time of Return to Ravnica. The actually deadly parties cater to Rakdos himself (Currently oscillating between asleep and indulging in 24-hour diversions of the sort the early cult loved). Parties and shows that are less lethal (to their audience, anyway) are held more regularly, and provide the bulk of their income.

Comic Books

• A town in Hellblazer accidentally causes one of these when they don't realize the pagan costume festival they're reviving is causing everyone to go insane (example: a man in a baby outfit reveals he's jealous of the attention his infant son gets from his wife and kills them both; a person with a grinning mask makes sure everyone around him is smiling...). Constantine and a friend figure out that loud Punk Rock can disrupt the effects but are too late to prevent the town from being blown up, along with Constantine's friend.
• In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — Cut!, a town's Meat Fest turns out to offer a very special kind of meat.

Fan Works

• A Fête Worse Than Death is the story of Lucius Malfoy being manipulated into allowing Malfoy Manor to be used for the village Fête. Hilarity of a particularly British style ensues.
• In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, the Cloud Horn Parade/Concert on Tipaan, which takes place every 100 days and is beloved of the demihuman Svenjaya, has turned into a periodic firefight because the Cloud Horn could potentially be part of the Nine-part Key if anyone got ahold of it. It's also highly collectible, which means that outworlders with several different goals try to get it during this vulnerable period, and shoot the shit out of the Tipaanese guards and anyone else who tries to protect it. A lot of civilians come just to watch the fight. A lot of civilians also get mowed down because they get too drunk or stoned to get out of the way, though it's not as bad as it sounds because resurrection is available afterwards. The real losers are the Svenjaya, who have seen their happy festival turned into annoying chaos.
• Kage: It's mentioned at one point that when Phobos first came to power, he held a ball for the entirety of Meridian's nobility... and proceeded to kill all the attendees, in order to eliminate any possible rivals to his claim on the throne.
• A Man of Iron: In the third book, A Shield of Man, the final night of Braavos' Unmasking festival is crashed by the Mandarin attempting to stage a coup of the city, enabled by magically bringing to life the wooden Sentinel statues.

Films — Live-Action

• Gotham's 200th Anniversary celebration in Batman (1989), where the Joker hosts the party — and then releases the Smilex gas.
• The Cars That Ate Paris, by Peter Weir, is a classic example. Outsiders may want to give Paris' annual 'Car Gymkhana' a miss.
• In the 2007 movie Cthulhu (also loosely based on The Shadow over Innsmouth) the May Festival is both mentioned and seen, but plays little apparent role in the apocalyptic events and Human Sacrifice that follow.
• In Dagon, a Spanish town looks to be harmless enough... until its populace comes to drag you to their temple for a ritual sacrifice in the form of breeding if you're female, or being skinned alive if male... props for the "God" being actually there to savor the sacrifice.
• 1966 film Eye of the Devil has a quite similar plot to The Wicker Man (which came out seven years later). It too involves a Town with a Dark Secret that conducts a seemingly innocuous fair, which is actually the prelude to a human sacrifice.
• Get Out (2017) involves an annual celebration held by the Armitage family in which the daughter brings home a black boyfriend, or girlfriend in one instance, to auction off their body to use as a vessel for a white person's mind.
• In Hot Fuzz, someone is murdered at the village fete by having part of the church tower land on their head and tear it apart. The headline? "A Fête Worse Than Death." The person killed was in charge of the local newspaper and very frequently made spelling mistakes.
• Averted in Joe Versus the Volcano, where the eponymous Joe knows about his fate going in; he volunteers to go anyway because he thinks he's going to die of a "brain cloud" anyway. While the volcano wanted a willing sacrifice, the volcano spitting Joe out, with the ensuing destruction of the island showed that it apparently didn't want a deceived sacrifice.
• In the James Bond flick Live and Let Die, there's a scene in the opening where a British agent is watching a New Orleans jazz funeral. When he asks a stranger who's funeral it is, the stranger says "Yours," then stabs him right in the middle of the street. The procession casually walks over to the body and places it in the coffin, just before the part where the somber funeral music gives way to the much more upbeat jazz. It later happens again to an American agent.
• In the future depicted in Logan's Run everyone looks forward to their renewal in a celebration known as Carousel. Unfortunately Carousel is actually a brutal form of population control, where you obliviously sacrifice yourself as your friends and neighbours cheer you on.
• And then there's Jack Sparrow in the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, where he's being honored by a primitive tribe as a god who they intend to "free"... by roasting and eating his corporeal "prison".
• Inverted in Population 436. In that movie, the founder of the town decided that everything was fine and there were no problems in the town as long as the population remained at 436 exactly, but if it ever went higher or lower, disaster would strike; also, punishment would fall on anyone who deliberately messed with the status quo. To that end, when the census taker sent to investigate gets there, they won't let him leave...and they have a big sendoff party for a woman from the town (who goes to the gallows happily!) to balance him out. Near the end, the census taker escapes town with a young woman who was being held captive. In an unexpected twist, the rule proves correct, as he and the girl are killed when they're hit by an oncoming truck.
• In the 1990 black comedy Quick Change, three bank robbers are trying to flee the seemingly infinite sprawl of New York City, while pondering their next move, they suddenly realize that they're in a very poor and squalid Hispanic neighborhood, where two men are staging a barbaric "jousting match" for the entertainment of an unsmiling audience. It gives one of our anti-heroes the heebie-jeebies.
  "It's bad luck to even see somethin' like that!"
• Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Han is spared this ONLY because Luke sets up C-3PO as a shiny, flying, wrathful god-being of his own (much to C-3PO's surprise) with a little help from Force-levitation and Force-shoves. It is noted that the Ewoks do get their feast at the end of the movie. After all, what do you think were the original contents of their "drums" that they're playing?
• In the film and musical of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street:
  • The entire number "God, That's Good!" is a celebration of this trope. Slicing up the odd barbershop customer for meat pies is bad enough, but watching the patrons of the pie shop devour the delectables with insatiable mirth is very eerie, no matter how cheery the music.
  • The masked ball in "Poor Thing" might also qualify. Nobody gets killed, but everyone has a good laugh over the rape of Lucy Barker.
• Two Thousand Maniacs! is based on this; the murderous celebration in question is an instrument of revenge for a Southern town's destruction in the Civil War a century earlier.
• A classic example is the original version of The Wicker Man (1973), in which a policeman investigating a girl's disappearance finds out that she is going to be sacrificed by pagan villagers on May Day. But the truth is even worse... The remake does much the same thing, although much less believably. Don't watch it without the RiffTrax!

Literature

• In the Ambergris trilogy, the title town's Festival of the Freshwater Squid, which degenerates into mayhem with surprising frequency due to mindwarping spores released by the Gray Caps, and later to full-blown fungal monsters created by them.
• In American Gods, the protagonist visits a small town in which, every year, a child goes missing. At roughly the same time, the people of the town play a game in which an old car is left on a nearby frozen lake and they bet how soon into Spring it will be before it sinks. The protagonist puts two and two together and opens the trunk of the car to find a murdered girl inside. Even worse, he's swum to the bottom of the lake to do this and can see all the other cars down there. The killer is a small god who sacrifices the children to himself in exchange for keeping the town prosperous.
  • An extra dark example, because the townsfolk don't know the significance of their own ritual.
• Hartenham from The Beyonders is a permanent party, arranged as a Luxury Prison Suite for Maldor's most dangerous opponents. It contains every indulgence under the sun, and slowly kills or renders inert most of its occupants through addiction.
• Book of Judges: Samson is chained to a Philistine temple's pillars for his Philistine oppressors to Come to Gawk at the Israelite who'd given them so much trouble (thousands slain with a jawbone of an ass, etc.) YHWH grants him just enough strength at the end to tear the pillars down, collapsing the temple on everyone in it and killing them all.
• The auto-da-fé in Candide is depicted as one of these.
• In Richard Matheson's short story "Children of Noah", a man gets arrested in a speed trap in a small town which displays a large banner "BBQ Tonight". Oh, yeah.
• In Robin Jarvis' Deptford Mouselets book Fleabee's Fortune, the rats have their Festival of the First Blood. There is feasting and merriment, but the main event involves the young rats committing their first murders. If they fail, they are killed themselves.
• Inverted in the Discworld novel Soul Music: the Band with Rocks In is seemingly about to get eaten in the sinister town of Scrote, but avoids this fate by performing a rock concert.
  • Used straight in Faust Eric, where Rincewind and Eric visit the Tezuman Empire (a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Aztecs), are first welcomed with a tribute, but then the trouble starts.
• The epnymous winter solstice rite beneath the town of Kingsport in H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Festival". The town is made up of monstrous worm creatures posing as human who, yearly, go beneath the earth to engage in various unspeakable rites. However, it is never made clear whether or not the protagonist was dreaming.
• The Seth Fried short story collection The Great Frustration contains "Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre", a meditation on an annual town picnic that remains popular despite repeatedly and assuredly ending in disaster and mass casualties:
  "Last year, the people in charge of the picnic blew us up. Every year it gets worse. That is, more people die. The Frost Mountain Picnic has always been a matter of uncertainty in our town and the massacre is the worst part. Even the people whose picnic blankets were not laid out directly upon the bombline were knocked unconscious by the airborne limbs of their neighbors, or at least had the black earth at the foot of Frost Mountain driven under their eyelids and fingernails and up into their sinuses. [...] The few people along the bombline who survived the blast were at the very least blown into the trees."
• Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon features a quaint little New England town called Cornwall Coombe that celebrates a harvest festival involving fun activities that will insure the life of the corn crop. Attending this particular festival uninvited carries a pretty steep penalty.
• In Robert R. McCammon's short story, residents of a certain small town are all prosperous and successful. But a few days before Hallowe'en they receive a list from the Devil, requesting various treats from each house. A few of the treats are small pieces of their bodies, toes and the like. Refuse to provide them, and "He'll Come Knocking On Your Door".
• Invoked in The Hunger Games, where the Capital forces the districts to treat two of their children being forced to fight to the death as a festival.
• Also, the Mirocaw slum denizens' "inner festival" in Thomas Ligotti's "The Last Feast Of Harlequin", which is a direct homage to the aforementioned. Possibly even more nightmarish, by dint of involving the sacrifice of selected female townsfolk, as well as being indisputably real.
  • Semi-subverted by the main festival in the latter story; their own "scary festival" is a frightened mimicry of the actual ritual.
• The Global Gala in the Left Behind book Assassins was purposely arranged to take place in Jerusalem around the same time that the Two Witnesses in the Book of Revelation were supposed to end their prophesying, with Nicolae Carpathia making a public spectacle of killing the Two Witnesses by his own hand to enforce the law of the Global Community. (It also served as an opportunity for Nicolae to quietly dispose of Pontifex Maximus Peter Mathews through a private little Nasty Party held in his honor.) In fulfillment of what the Word of God says, the bodies of the Two Witnesses were left in the street unburied for 3 1/2 days while the people celebrated their demise, but then they were dramatically resurrected and brought up to heaven in a cloud. At the same time, an earthquake caused a tenth of Jerusalem to fall and seven thousand people have died.
• In Stephen King's The Long Walk, not just one but 99 teenage boys will eventually meet their brutal deaths in the titular annual competition; Fridge Horror abounds here when you realize that the boys enter this contest eagerly and of their own free will, and thousands line the roadsides cheering the Long Walkers on and hoping to see one of them "get his ticket punched."
• In Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery", a village holds a village event in which families draw straws to see which family—and which family member—is the winner. That member is then stoned to death by everyone else.
  • This was parodied at the end of the South Park episode "Britney's New Look", where a headless Britney Spears is photographed to death by the locals.
    • In fact that's what celebrities are for: SACRIFICES, which makes sense.
• "Quezalcon" by Kim Newman is a short story in the style of the events programme for the eponymous sf convention, organised by Derek Leech, which is strongly implied to be some kind of ritual in which the guest of honour is sacrificed so another writer can gain his abilities. All we're told is that dinner is "healthy heart", but has no vegetarian option.
• A Storm of Swords (the third book in A Song of Ice and Fire) has the infamous Red Wedding. What appears to be a wedding celebration for Walder Frey's daughter to Edmure Tully is in fact a planned slaughter of Robb Stark and his bannermen. Catelyn ends up killed too, but she was planned to just be taken as a hostage^note After seeing Robb murdered, she became distressed and started clawing at her face - which leads to a Mercy Kill.In the Game of Thrones adaptation, it's even worse. Robb's wife is present too and stabbed through her pregnant belly (she didn't attend and lived in the book), and the murder of Catelyn is more straightforward. The musicians at the wedding even turn out to be soldiers in disguise.
• In Stephen King's Wizard and Glass, the people of Mejis celebrate a harvest festival which culminates with the burning of an effigy. Until, that is, The Dragon convinces the townspeople to substitute Roland's girlfriend...
• The novel Wringer by Jerry Spinelli is about a town who's big annual festival centers on the slaughter of pigeons. The protagonist is a young boy who has reached the age where he gets the privilege of becoming a "wringer," wringing the necks of pigeons who are wounded by shooters. He's less delighted about it than most boys his age.

Live-Action TV

• Angel
  • In "Bachelor Party", Doyle attends his ex-wife's fiance's bachelor party. He knows in advance that the man is a demon, but his family has assimilated into human society. Then he finds out that they have a custom whereby they eat the brains of the previous spouse to ensure a happy marriage.
  • In another episode, a wealthy man forcibly gets Wesley posing as Angel to be a bodyguard to his daughter before his milestone birthday party—where he'll get massive supernatural power in turn for using her for a virgin sacrifice, which gets cut short when the offering is found to be... spoiled.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Daemons", the Third Doctor is captured in a tangle of maypole ribbons, clubbed into unconsciousness by Morris Dancers, and wakes up to ye olde stake/kindling combination. In the village pub, Sergeant Benton engages in hand-to-hand combat with a rampaging Morris Man, and is only saved when local white witch Miss Hawthorne batters his attacker into unconsciousness with the crystal ball stashed in her reticule. Absolute mayhem.
  • "The Awakening": A small village's celebrations of an historic anniversary incorporate ritual prompted by the evil being sleeping beneath the village church. The Doctor's companion, Tegan, is offered the Guest of Honor's place—on top of a pile of kindling, tied to a stake.
• London's Burning had at least two accidental examples: A School Festival that turned into a four-engine callout for Blue Watch when someone tried to refuel a generator while it was still running, and a season finale Major Incident at a literal carnival caused by a collapsing Ferris Wheel. And then there's the Very Special Episode that took place on Guy Fawkes Night, which had relatively few total fatalities by series standards but was depicted the one night of the year when (as Station Officer Tate bitterly observes) otherwise upstanding British citizens cheerfully indulge their latent urges to let off explosives and set stuff on fire.
• The Longest Day in Chang'an: The terrorists get into the city just before the Lantern Festival, one of the biggest festivals in China, and plan to assassinate the emperor by blowing up half the city during the festival.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • The series pays homage to The Wicker Man in "The Straw Woman" where The Vicar is burned alive inside a straw effigy during a village festival.
  • There's quite a lot of this in Midsomer. The wannabe-druid expy in "The Fisher King", the (hilarious) Illuminati expies, so on and so forth...
• In "A Man of Substance", an episode of the 2000 remake of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Randall goes to a small village where visitors are killed and cannibalised as part of a ritual to stop the village from being sucked into Hell.
• The Smallville episode "Harvest" has Lois Lane invited to share dinner with a very nice family in a small town—which plans to sacrifice her in a ritual to insure a bountiful harvest.
• In the Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons", Landru's mind-controlled followers have a regularly-scheduled Festival where they really blow off some steam.
• In the Torchwood episode "Countrycide", we meet a Village of Cannibals that seasonally prey on people passing by. The episode has been described as "The Hills Have Eyes with fat Welsh people".
• In True Blood, the maenad Maryann tries to sacrifice Sam's heart to Dionysus, the Greek god of intoxication and drunken raves. The sacrifice ritual itself plays out like a white wedding/orgy combo.
• In "Our Town", an episode of The X-Files, Mulder and Scully's investigation into a series of murders in a small town reveals that the residents engage in a cannibalistic ritual borrowed from primitive tribes.
  • And then they ate someone infected with CJD. Karma's a bitch.
• In Young Dracula, the Count threw a traditional Hunt Ball in which the Branaughs were invited to a party where all of the other guests were vampires. At midnight, the vampires would reveal themselves to the 'breathers' and hunt them down.

Roleplay

• The play-by-post game Red Rover takes place following a mass slaughter at a child's birthday party.

Tabletop Games

• In the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the city of Neverwinter (in the already magically wrecked Forgotten Realms campaign setting) was half leveled by a volcano some thirty or so years before the in-game present. But good news! There are still great feasts, dances and other galas within Castle Never! Those are held by packs of Thayan-made ghouls who were trapped while exploring the ruined castle for their lich lords, and are now whiling away the hours by playing dress-up in the long-dead nobles' finery. They thank adventuring groups that dig them out about how you'd expect starving, half-intelligent zombies to...
• Exalted features the Republic of Chaya, a country where this holds sway. The people of Chaya have what may be the closest thing to a truly representative democracy in the game, and there's a heavy emphasis on community and celebration. But when the fire-trees are in the bloom, the citizens go into an orgiastic fury and tear any outsiders to shreds.
• Played for laughs in Kobolds Ate My Baby. Kobolds love parties and are gourmet cooks. King Torg (all hail King Torg) has decided to throw a party tomorrow. Kobolds are terrible planners and the tastiest meat for parties — human babies — is not in the pantry. The second tastiest thing in the world to a fresh baby is a fresh kobold. End result: the player characters, also known as the runtiest, weakest, and stupidest members of the tribe, better go round up dinner or become dinner.
• Lamentations of the Flame Princess: The module No Dignity in Death features a joyful celebration... where six young couples engage into violent sporting games until one of the grooms is killed and his bride is to be sacrified to the mountain spirits.

Theatre

• In Pippin, the spectacular grand finale promised by the Players turns out to be a glorified act of Self-Immolation. When Pippin refuses to go through with it despite their encouragement, they stop the show and appeal to the audience for someone to go on instead.
• This was the plot of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, at least the second part, which involved one of a circle of virgins being selected for Virgin Sacrifice to a pagan god. Though Stravinsky's music is more often heard as a concert piece than a ballet, the violence musically embodied in such sections as "Glorification of the Chosen One" is obvious.
• The Midnight Ball will be this for you in Tanz Der Vampire, if you happen to be a mortal, and thus on the menu. Alfred and Professor Abronisus are normal humans, so when they become trapped in the ballroom they steal vampire costumes and desperately try to dance along to escape detection, though they're always two steps behind. It works... for a while.

Video Games

• BioShock Infinite starts with Booker arriving in Columbia and attending a raffle, which he wins. The prize is first throw in the public stoning of an interracial couple.
• In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, one of the most frenetic and phobia inducing moments is when you're unarmed and asleep in your hotel room in a mysterious village and the townsfolk come in for a visit... tearing the wall of your room with an axe in order to kill/torture/sacrifice you.
• CarnEvil uses the trope as an underlying theme. Every event is meant to make you the main attraction. Whatever it is, though, the aim is to turn down the invitation.
• Elden Ring: The Celebrants of Dominula endlessly dance as part of a mysterious festival. Environmental clues hint towards said festival involving skinning people and giving their hides to the Godskin Apostle that lurks nearby.
• The fete in Final Fantasy XII is just a show designed to draw the attention of the Insurgence.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has the full moon festival in Belinsk. There will be music, dancing, food, brightly-colored furries, and any human prisoners will be subjected to death by boiling for entertainment. The one you actually attend gets even worse— the player characters rescue the doomed prisoners by activating a Pointless Doomsday Device, which decimates half the continent.
• The final mission in Rainbow Six 3 Raven Shield has a Grim Reaper-shaped parade float carrying a blister gas bomb about to enter the Festa Junina parade in Rio de Janeiro.

Visual Novels

• When They Cry:
  • Higurashi: When They Cry: A young boy discovers that the village he has just moved to suffers mysterious deaths and disappearances after every Watanagashi Festival. Watanagashi apparently was originally celebrated this way. Wata can mean "cotton" or "intestines".
  • The Creator-Driven Successor, Umineko: When They Cry, tries hard to follow in its predecessor's footsteps. During the ending of the second arc, Beatrice throws a ball and gets her new slave, Battler, to dress her up for it, then brings him down to the ball to show off to all of her mook guests. After that, he and his grandfather become the main course.

Western Animation

• In The Fairly OddParents!, Mark Chang has F.L.A.R.G., a five-day Yugopotamian ritual of flatulence, lying, amnesia, retching, and "saying goodbye", because if Mark does not have the joy of an authentic FLARG, then his APPendix (not appENdix), which is a nuke, will explode.
• The Owl House: In "Enchanting Grom Fright", Luz discovers that Hexside is holding a High-School Dance called "Grom". In addition to the traditional trappings of a high school prom, the "Grom Royalty" has to face Grometheus the Fear-Bringer, a horrifying monster that can morph into someone's worst fear, in single combat (although the "Grom Royalty" is expected to win the fight).
• South Park:
  • An episode has this as the underlying motive for the entire country (world?) and its obsession with celebrity. It's gonna be a good harvest, indeed.
  • "The Wacky Molestation Adventure", a parody of movies such as Children of the Corn (1984) and Lord of the Flies, features a version of "Carousel" from Logan's Run.

Real Life

• The lynchings in the Southeastern U.S. of the 19th-to-mid-20th centuries frequently had a celebratory, carnival atmosphere, attended by dozens of people. The often drawn-out tortures, commemorative photos and subsequent retrieval of "souvenirs" from the corpse had all the fervency of passionate social ritual.
  
  Via this, the trope inspired a hoax email widely circulated around 1999-2000. The "public service announcement" claimed that these sorts of lynchings gave birth to the word picnic: The original, utterly offensive phrase was "pick a nigger". Although the true etymology is well-known to be from the whimsical French piquenique, the notion gained enough traction that SUNY/Albany refused to use the word to describe a celebration even after their own faculty pointed out the error. (For bonus points, when they tried to call it an "outing" instead, homosexuals protested.)
• Pogroms against the Jewish community in Eastern Europe often coincided with the dates of Christian holidays. This likely is due to a combination of revelry making people more willing to act violently and the fact that often local churches stoked anti-Semitism in sermons on these holidays.
• In 1853, before the Civil War and only five years after its admission as a state to the union, Wisconsin abolished capital punishment, in part because of how the state's single execution, that of John McCaffary for drowning his wife, became a spontaneous celebratory spectacle.
• Many nations across the world made public executions into a popular day out for all the family, complete with a carnival atmosphere and large, poorly constructed viewing platforms to ensure that no-one missed the fun. They were especially hyped for high-profile criminals, or if the crime was of the sort reviled by the community. This was encouraged by governments to show their authority and deter crime.

---