Drop Dead Gorgeous

Their last words were: "Wait, catch my good side!"

"And now she's dead
Forever dead
Forever dead and lovely now"

— Tom Waits, "Dead and Lovely"

There seems to be nothing more dramatic to crime stories than a dead, naked woman. Whether fully or partially nude, dead women are far more likely to be sexualized than males. Often this is justified by the murdered women being the victims of sexual crimes, while other times the purpose seems purely to titillate the audience.

Add a perverted character to the mix, and naked corpses might lead to I Love the Dead.

The trope is quite likely to be used as a form of Fan Disservice.

Contrast Jacob Marley Apparel.

See also Sex Signals Death, The Murder After, Disposable Sex Worker, and Interplay of Sex and Violence. Often a result of Monster Misogyny.

If the "corpse" is actually a member of The Undead, it's a case of Cute Monster Girl, Attractive Zombie, and/or Seductive Mummy.

For the 1999 film, see Drop Dead Gorgeous.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A darkly humorous TV commercial for Crocker jeans features a coroner undressing an attractive young woman's corpse, only to find the corpse resisting his attempts to remove her Crocker jeans.
• An ad◊ for Duncan Quinn ties wants you to remember that they're also useful for strangling half-naked women on the hood of your European sportscar. Duncan Quinn: for the fashionable psychopath!
• An ad series for Hitman: Blood Money featured assassinated victims of the main character. The two female victims in the series are both sexualized, with one dressed in lingerie and the other naked in her bathtub. As you can imagine, this drew quite a bit of controversy.

Anime & Manga

• The three Agent Aika series are made up of very sexualized cat fights between the heroine and crowds of hapless henchwomen. It is made crystal-clear how the main draw of their fanservice is the ogling of the piles upon piles of knocked out girls with exposed breasts and panties left in Aika's path. They go out of their way to evoke death and morgue scenes without anyone actually dying, like how ZERO portrays one topless girl getting repeatedly shot up with tranquilizers and another getting impaled butt-to-mouth by an energy spear like something out of a snuff film until they both turn out to be Not Quite Dead.
• Arachnid:
  • The very busty Army Ant Queen is killed by her neck being crushed by a magic wire while she's only wearing underwear. While the scene can be read as eroticized and is framed to poetically mirror the first time she was shown in undies, her servant Sara screams in despair the whole time and sketches by the author show the corpse was supposed to have a really unsightly expression to subvert the trope that the illustrator ignored.
  • In the Choubu no Shinobi spinoff, most of the female ninjas involved in the Iga-Koga clan war are slain while nude, like the seductress Iroha who gets Killed Offscreen and is left ironically less naked than in minutes before or poor Hiyori being sliced in half so brutally that her upper body and the kimono she's wearing are blown into the air. Jokingly or not, the story's illustrator advertised the nudity in those death scenes on his Twitter as bonuses for volume 4.
• The short manga Bestia by Ryoichi Ikegami centers around a poisonous half-demon ronin who euthanizes sickly or suicidal women by consensually fucking them to death, leaving a telltale trail of nude corpses with peaceful expressions and polka dot marks on their skin. One antagonist is a Identical Stranger demon who hates women and has no qualms about violently raping them to death, leaving the corpses beaten with horrified looks on their faces.
• Black Joke:
  • One villain beats a naked prostitute to death while she was talking dirty to him, and when a shocked henchman discovers the corpse, he callously says he didn't like how she was domming him like they were close.
  • Akari is repeatedly knocked down in an embarrassing pose with her butt up in the air like a Running Gag throughout the story. Towards the end, she appears to meet her demise like that by having half of her head chopped off in a nude fight against a female American agent. In truth, that was doctored footage to deceive the Americans, and it was the villainess who got killed by Akari in such a humiliating way.
• One arc in the detective story Fuuto P.I. involves the protagonists investigating murders in a manor where a marriage competition between four women is taking place. The second victim is found floating nude in a pool and both her and the previous one had ecstatic looks on their faces, which is later explained as them having died of alcohol poisoning. The anime version censors the nudity by obscuring the corpse with steam and objects in the room.
• God Mazinger is notorious for having its heroes slaughter a bunch of scantily-clad haughty female mooks in a good chunk of its episodes, but unlike other Go Nagai series it usually goes out of its way to not frame their deaths in this trope's manner. Eventually, though, their leader Yoname is horribly impaled, sliced in half and then she does end up nude on-screen before her body disintegrates.
• Goku: Midnight Eye, pulpy noir cyberpunk detective story by the author of Space Adventure Cobra that it was, had most of its female cast be haughty femme fatales who are killed while naked, like a topless Peacock Girl assassin with a hypnotic tail who's shot dead before she could realize Goku became immune to her powers or a kunoichi who ends up blown in half by her own trap while having sex with Goku. Volume 3 in particular has the corpse of a damsel named Li-Chen Li be found naked and covered in toxic tattoos made out of heroin as a reference to Goldfinger before she is examined in a morgue.
• In Happy Sugar Life, after Satou kills Shouko the next time we see her is her undressed, open eye lifeless body.
• In the original manga version of Hiwou War Chronicles, the villainous kunoichi Nue is ruthlessly shot in the chest by Sakamoto when she tries to kidnap Yuki, causing her to retaliate by bursting several centipede-like machines out of her clothes in desperation. Nue is brutally finished off between pages and is left sprawled topless over a pile of debris, which even Sakamoto feels rotten about as he remarks the pacifist Hiwou would hate him if he ever found out about it. The anime adaptation removes Nue's multiple nude scenes and has her be defeated non-lethally with multiple people including Sakamoto agreeing that killing a Wind Gang henchwoman wouldn't amount to anything.
• Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders presents the first sight of a returned DIO by showing up the scantily-clad corpse of a beautiful girl, who had just served as the vampire's meal. Apparently, while resting at his mansion in Egypt, DIO just feeds off entire harems of young, attractive girls, and he doesn't even bother having his minions take their dead bodies away, because later on, when Hol Horse tries to assassinate him, he stumbles upon the corpses of the girls DIO has sucked blood from.
• You can't throw an amputated ear without hitting one of these in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.
• In the manga adaptation of Kurozuka, a trio of mercenaries sent after the protagonists are all effortlessly killed in a single chapter. The female leader of the group is outright Killed Offscreen by Kuon without a fight and her corpse is later found slumped on a wall in an alluring pose with one breast exposed. This is followed by Kuromitsu brutally beating a female guard to death, stealing her clothes and leaving her naked corpse sprawled over a cell room's bed.
• In Ludwig Revolution, according to Ludwig, Blanche looks more beautiful dead than alive.
• The Gamia Q cyborgs from Mazinger Z and its related series are always killed in gruesome ways that leave their breasts and panties exposed, to the point one of them being sliced vertically in half by a laser is made into a twisted Running Gag.
• My-HiME episode 11, where Orphans (mistakenly called "vampires" by some of the students) randomly searched young females for the mark of the HiME. The one girl at the beginning of the episode who was attacked lived through her injuries. Later in the episode, the same thing happens to Aoi, and everyone thinks Sister Yukariko was the one behind it because she's spotted at the scene with her bow in her hand, and Aoi has a few arrows sticking out of her.
• In Ninja Scroll, Benisato, a nude kunoichi who can create snakes out of tattoos in her body, ends up eletrocuted to death by a magic wire from Yurimaru for her failures and is shown writhing on the floor in agony for a while before finally expiring.
• In Ninja Scroll: The Series, Jubei slices a topless kunoichi named Ubume in half in the first episode. She dramatically collapses already dead and is mourned by her son who's fused to her flesh and crumbles to a puddle right afterwards. This is followed by Jubei killing a scantily-clad cat-girl named Nekome, with multiple shots of her corpse as Jyashi examines her later. The busty kunoichi Nubatama accuses Jyashi of being a necrophile before fighting him. She's also horribly killed later by being stabbed all over her chest, with the camera actually avoiding showing her corpse and instead framing her beautiful face withering to a husk.
• In the manga version of One-Punch Man, a scantily-clad lizard-girl named Raptora falls victim to a poison gas trap set by Child Emperor and is prominently seen dying on the floor while foaming at the mouth. This was later replaced with her technically topless twin sister Raptera being comically knocked out instead, leaving her fate unknown. The same arc also had two versions of the dominatrix Do-S being cruelly Killed Offscreen by Sweet Mask, and later a scene lingers on her motionless head-crushed body for a while before she turns out to be Not Quite Dead and regenerates by consuming monster blood that was dripping from the walls.
• Origin:
  • The story practically opens with Origin fighting a gorgeous female android named Da and slicing her to pieces before placing her over an operation table to harvest parts from her nude remains. The ero-guro scene is framed in a very exploitative fashion that contrasts with how indifferent Origin acts as an android while monologuing about the killer robots and how his father created them. He then hangs Da's corpse to the wall like a trophy until he repurposes it into a simple maid robot... who just gets mutilated even worse by another villain.
  • Mai is killed from out of nowhere by an android who then strips her naked and threatens to mutilate her corpse as Origin watches. After avenging Mai, Origin solemnly gives her a makeshift burial due to having realized, thanks to his now awakened emotions, the importance of such a thing.
• The fight against Metropoli Man in Platinum End just happens to involve a henchwoman named Fuyuko who's provocatively dressed like a dominatrix nurse. She ends up stabbed by a side character's katana between those large, scarred and bandaged breasts of hers and quickly dies with a look of shock on her single eye. Both the manga and anime versions busy themselves with framing her scantily-clad corpse from several angles as the protagonist Mirai rambles about how he doesn't want to kill anyone.
• A manga titled Poison Cat (毒猫‐ポイズンキャット‐) was published for over 20 chapters on the Play Comic anthology between 2009 and 2010 without being compiled into volumes. The only thing ever detailed online about it since then is how the final trio of antagonists included a busty and scantily clad dominatrix fighting with whips and knives. The protagonists manage to knock a pile of crates containing frozen saury fish onto the villains, leaving all of them horribly impaled. The unnamed dominatrix is prominently shown mortally wounded with her left breast exposed and lamenting how she's suffering such an Undignified Death.
• One chapter of Sorcerer Hunters features a henchwoman named Moss Green who suddenly strips naked and starts attacking the heroes with earth spikes. The author sounds real proud of inserting her in an afterword, but of course she only lasts a few pages before being killed by the Misu sisters, who crush her neck with a sneaky magic wire. The story shies away from actually showing its various sexualized villainesses being killed, so the scene only shows a final view of Moss' bare chest while she's in shock with the wire pressing around her neck and cuts away to her screaming in the distance.
• Most of the female cast in Space Adventure Cobra is virtually naked and consists of either disposable damsels or villainous femme fatales. They are sexualized all the way to the grave, by the dozens, on nearly every story arc:
  • The first story arc lampshades the Spy Fiction genre's fixation with this trope when Cobra claims to be James Bond right before he kills a blonde in a sling bikini with a punch to the gut. She kisses him in her dying moments to use her lipstick as a trap, and later some guards find and examine both her corpse and that of her likewise scantily-clad partner that Cobra eletrocuted to death.
  • One short story has Cobra tricking Sheila, a female spy dressed in a Chainmail Bikini, into falling for her own trap and being ravaged by a swarm of bullet-like beetles sensitive to light. The anime adaptation portrays her Multiple Gunshot Death in a very violent fashion while still sticking to Bloodless Carnage and making it seem clearly eroticized as she moans and convulses all over the screen in slow motion for 20 seconds before dying.
  • A distraught Cobra discovers Dominique has been Killed Offscreen when he finds not even a corpse but instead just the ripped skin of her tattooed back and buttocks put on display, in a reference to Goldfinger that's Played for Horror. It actually makes the more eroticized deaths of her sisters Catherine and Jane early in the series seem dignified in comparison.
  • Early in the "Eyes of God" arc, Cobra figures a woman couldn't have commited suicide because "no beauty would shoot herself in the face". The arc also features three practically naked female villains scheming against Cobra. Two of them get overly gruesome and barely offscreen deaths, so to compensate the author gives the Big Bad Papillon a body double pretty much so he could draw as many gratuitous views of her corpse as possible.
  • The "Wandering Women" arc involves a crowd of preserved female corpses barely covered in jewelry drifting in the bottom of the ocean. When the Girl of the Week, who's only dressed in a bikini and is distinctly portrayed with erect nipples, is revealed to be a traitor who attempts to get rid of Cobra to keep the treasure to herself, she's shot dead and sinks alongside the sacrificial women.
  • The "Hell Crusaders" arc has a couple instances of half-naked henchwomen being killed in ways that read as provocative and features a race of frog-like aliens that kidnap naked damsels to eat their brains. Further Monster Misogyny is seen from the Nazi-like Fuhrer Goldman, who decorates his Evil Lair with severed female heads and scantily-clad corpses mounted on the walls because women in that planet have rubies growing out of their heads and he seeks the secret graveyard they are supernaturally drawn to die on.
• Towards the end of Sun-Ken Rock, Yumin faces a squad of female assassins in a sword fight that's just as violent as it is sexualized and ends up practically naked while surrounded by stripped and mutilated corpses. In both this and a previous fight against White Dragon Clan henchwomen, the leaders are Impaled with Extreme Prejudice while framed with the most gratuitous close up of their crotches and spread legs that Boichi could manage to draw.

Arts

• More than one painting has depicted Cleopatra as having been naked at the time of her death - or at least topless, since she's portrayed as committing suicide by having a snake bite her breast.
• Death of Sardanapalus◊ depicts Sardanapalus watching his naked concubines get slaughtered on his orders in preparation for his immolation.
• Likewise, many paintings of Dido's suicide show her with at least one breast bared, often both.
• The work of photographers Kaoru Izima and Melanie Pullen.
• Murder in the Seraglio◊ by Fernand Cormon is an 1872 orientalist painting depicting a naked harem girl who has been murdered by a harem guard while her dark rival sneers in triumph.

Comic Books

• The first Blacksad book begins with a murder scene: the victim is a woman, wearing vaporous night clothing, with one breast exposed. In the flashback to her murder, her nightgown was noticeably closed. The writers revealed in a background making-off album that the implication was that the murderer played around with the corpse just for kicks.
• Several EC Comics stories have murder victims depicted lying in alluring poses, particularly when drawn by Jack Kamen or Wally Wood. An in-universe lampshading in the Shock SuspenStories story "Beauty and the Beach," when a jealous husband makes his exhibitionist wife wear her bikini before encasing her in plastic so that "she can be admired...always!"
• DC stirred up controversy by starting a contest asking for amateur artists to draw a series of four panels in which Harley Quinn is attempting suicide. The final panel for the contest is supposed to be Harley sitting naked in a bathtub and about to electrocute herself with appliances. Although the contest is apparently going more for a Harold Lloyd in Never Weaken vibe, online critics felt the company was eroticizing misogyny.
• Kirby's Biggest Case was one of two promotional comics by the German Club Nintendo magazine that portrayed the pink waddling blob as a parody of a hardboiled detective. The story is bizarrely raunchy and violent in tone in comparison to anything else in the franchise, with things like the corpse of the woman who hired Kirby being dropped before him on a table in an attempt to pin the blame for the murder on him. The scene subverts the trope by portraying the corpse as pale and decayed.
• Richard Sala has a thing for nubile action girls being menaced/slain by various pulpy dangers while in a state of undress. In addition to this being a regular occurrence in his comics in general, he also released a pinup book dedicated to the theme.
• In Sin City, it's precisely this that sets Marv on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge to avenge Goldie's death. Notably they actually just had consensual sex, but her murderer killed her while Marv was still sleeping.
• Wonder Woman (1987): After her brutal murder Artemis's body is depicted in an attractive pose with her significant clothing damage evident but not so much the damage to her.

Film — Animation

• In Corpse Bride, Emily is a primary character with an active role in the movie, but she is still dead. Even after having been murdered by Lord Barkis, her fiancé in life and decomposed over several years, she is genuinely pretty.

Film — Live-Action

• In 2020 Texas Gladiators, the scantily clad henchwoman played by Geretta Geretta is shot down while she's distracted by a boy she was threatening and is blown onto a table, briefly exposing her right nipple as she dies. Her killer briefly stops to admire her spread legs as she lies there. The other recurring henchwoman who's topless is killed right after, but the camera turns away from her right as she is shot.
• In Action Jackson, a coroner laments that most of the beautiful women he sees naked are dead while looking at the corpse of such a woman.
• In After Hours, the protagonist discovers Rosanna Arquette's naked body in her bed after she has committed suicide by sleeping pills. He had rejected her advances out of fear that she had terrible burn scars, so he pulls the blanket off of her and inspects her body, finding only a tattoo.
• In Angel Heart, Mickey Rourke discovers the naked body of Lisa Bonet, and it turns out he murdered her and suppressed the memory. The squicky sex and violence of the film caused quite a stir over Lisa Bonet's involvement, who was known at the time for her role in The Cosby Show.
• In Assassins (1995), Miguel Bain (Antonio Banderas) kills two Interpol agents, one of them an attractive blonde, while they're making out in a hotel hallway (they're supposed to be guarding several other agents who are dealing with Julianne Moore's character Elektra). The blonde's shapely, black-stockinged legs, wearing shoes with very high heels, are prominently displayed as Bain drags her body into an empty room to hide it along with the body of her male partner and that of a hotel maid who inadvertently witnessed the shootings and got shot dead in consequence.
• In Attack Force, Reina spends most of the film wearing a lacy and partially transparent top. She's captured by Marshall, bound to a slab for interrogation and ends up executed for helplessly trying to attack him. It's only at this point that her nipples slip out from the opaque pattern of her lingerie, with the camera continuing to leer onto her corpse for multiple scenes.
• The Autopsy of Jane Doe: Model Olwen Kelly plays the corpse of Jane Doe, which spends the entire film naked.
• A gag in Bad Boys II involves the heroes discovering the corpse of a naked woman with gigantic breasts. Martin Lawrence's character hides underneath the sheet with the body and stares at her breasts while mooks search the area. Negative reviews of the film made particular mention of this scene's poor taste.
• In Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, three topless actresses are killed by birds thanks to the protagonists' hopeless skill with firearms. The guys bother checking the pulses on them, exclaiming "she's dead!" every time, just so there can be gratuitous close-ups of the half-naked corpses.
• The cover for Black Wake shows an unconscious or dead scantily-clad woman wrapped in tentacles. In the film itself, two voluptuous naked corpses are shown being examined in a morgue when a parasite jumps out of them and into one of the doctors, resulting in chaos until guards outside shoot down the awakened zombie women. The film is framed as Found Footage and the scene ends on a prolonged view of the blonde zombie collapsing on her side, meaning a camera just so happened to be recording that particular spot...
• The 1964 Mario Bava film Blood and Black Lace (original Italian title: Sei donne per l'assassino), just as the page image implies, features the dead bodies of the killer's gorgeous victims prominently, starting literally at the beginning of the movie when a fashion model is brutally strangled and beaten to death and then dragged away by her ankles by the murderer, her skirt riding up to reveal her gartered thighs.
• The Richard Burton version of Bluebeard (1972) fairly oozes this trope, since the classic Bluebeard legend is all about the titular character killing off one beautiful wife after another; in this version, Burton's character, Baron Sepper, does away with six lovely wives in six different ways. The most prominent corpses belong to the characters played by Karin Schubert, shot in the back by her husband while hunting (her body is shown afterward laid out for her funeral in a diaphanous evening dress, photographed and then kissed by Burton, in a scene that has strong overtones of I Love the Dead), and Sybil Danning, who is killed by being impaled by a falling chandelier together with her lover (Nathalie Delon); the two bodies, nude except for black stockings, are shown afterward looking very little the worse for wear for having been skewered by a huge ivory tusk. The frozen bodies of all of Bluebeard's victims are shown together when Joey Heatherton (playing the Baron's latest wife) discovers the walk-in freezer where his dead ex-wives are stored, and then again at the end of the movie.
• Invoked in the animated "Lost Scene" segment of Clerks. Dante and Randall go to visit Julie's wake, an old girlfriend of Dante. When they get to the coffin they see she's only wearing a black bikini top on her upper half, and assume she probably requested it. Hilarity Ensues when they drop their keys in her lap.
• In the 1940's B-movie The Corpse Vanishes, the villain, played by Bela Lugosi, drugs high-society brides with a poisonous orchid to send them into a death-like state, then takes the unconscious women to his lair (a funeral home) where he draws their blood for an elixir designed to keep his wife young and beautiful. While the heroine, a plucky newspaper reporter, is investigating Lugosi's lair, she discovers a morgue where the dead bodies of several beautiful young women in wedding gowns are stored in body drawers; these are the missing society brides, who apparently have died from the process. Lugosi's hunchbacked assistant displays a very creepy attraction toward these lovely corpses...
• In the 1997 film Deathline, also known as Redline (not to be confused with multiple other films under those titles), Wade gets randomly attacked by multiple assassins including a topless blonde and a completely nude brunette after entering a gym. Wade and Katya easily kill the two women and scenes of them having sex later on are alternated with the police examining the two naked corpses at the crime scene.
• Dressed to Kill ends with a sequence where the Creepy Crossdresser killer escapes a mental asylum by strangling a nurse and then stripping her nurse uniform to use as a disguise. The dead nurse (played by a former Penthouse playmate) is revealed to be wearing some suspiciously sexy lingerie beneath her work outfit. It's kept ambiguous as to whether this sequence is actually happening or is the fantasy of the imprisoned killer.
• The 2010 film Drop Dead Gorgeous (not the one in the Film namespace) features a model who dies part-way through a fashion shoot, so the crew completes the shoot with her corpse. The dead model's resulting popularity is a satire on the fashion industry for forcing models to lead unhealthy lifestyles and for presenting lifeless expressions and poses as sexy.
• The entire plot of the indie comedy Drop Dead Sexy revolves around the theft of the dead body of a beautiful blonde by two small-time crooks so they can hold it for ransom from her equally crooked husband who had her murdered in the first place. The blonde's body, originally clad in a nightgown when the protagonists remove it from its coffin, spends most of the movie stripped down to bra and panties. In a lengthy scene in a morgue, the nude body of another attractive woman, half-covered by a sheet, is prominently featured.
• Feeding Frenzy: There's a long sequence played under the opening credits of Mr. Plinkett dragging the corpse of a murdered prostitute in her underwear, played by Z-movie scream queen Tina Krause in a Dead Star Walking appearance.
• In Frenzy, a naked victim of the killer floats in the river in the film's first minutes.
• In The General's Daughter, the woman of the title is found naked, strangled, and bound to the earth. It turns out she was recreating a previous sexual assault when a psycho soldier found her and killed her.
• Gotham, (aka The Dead Can't Lie) features Virginia Madsen playing the ghost of a murdered woman who makes several appearances to Tommy Lee Jones as a naked corpse.
• In Interview with the Vampire, Kirsten Dunst's character hides the naked body of a woman with her dolls, reflecting her inability to ever grow into an adult. In another scene, a theatrical vampire troupe kills a naked woman onstage before an unwitting audience.
• Several James Bond films feature the trope:
  • One of cinema's most enduring images is the naked body of a murdered woman painted gold in Goldfinger. Of course, the murder method is pure pseudoscience.
  • In Thunderball, Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) tries to maneuver Bond (Sean Connery) into a position where he can be shot by a hidden assassin while they're dancing together at an outdoor street festival. 007 realizes what's going on, however, and turns her so that she gets a bullet in her back (leading to a close-up of his fingers on her back as blood seeps between them from the fatal wound). He deposits her body in a chair next to two surprised tourists with the casual explanation, "She's dead on her feet."
  • Quantum of Solace has a Shout-Out to the Goldfinger body when Agent Fields is discovered to have drowned in oil and her apparently naked body laid out across a bed.
  • In Casino Royale (2006) Vesper Lynd's corpse has a Sexy Soaked Shirt.
• Played for Hypocritical Humor in Kill Bill. On seeing the Bride, Sheriff McGraw proceeds to go on about how beautiful she is and just what kind of person would kill a pregnant woman. Then the comatose Bride involuntarily spits in his eye and McGraw grumbles, "This tall drink of cocksucker ain't dead."
• In the beginning of Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, the Chosen One is attacked by a crowd of martial artists. There's a random busty blonde in a bikini among them, and the only thing seen of her after the initial shot is an eroticized slow motion closeup of her falling unconscious onto the ground after being defeated offscreen.
• In Lady in Cement, Sandra Lomax's body is found nude, with camera angles being used to avoid showing explicit nudity.
• The first victim in the first Lethal Weapon movie had on just a skimpy robe which was worn open and fluttered around her otherwise nude body.
• A pretty sizable number of beautiful female spies and secret agents become Drop Dead Gorgeous in the Matt Helm series: Nancy Kovack, Cyd Charisse and Daliah Lavi in The Silencers, Nadia Sanders and Camilla Sparv in Murderers' Row, Senta Berger in The Ambushers, and Tina Louise, Elke Sommer and Nancy Kwan in The Wrecking Crew.
• The female body count gets pretty outrageous in the 1967 flick The Million Eyes Of Su Muru, starring Frankie Avalon; at one point, the villains kill a woman and put her nude body in Avalon's bed in an attempt to frame him, and the climactic battle has the Hong Kong police storming the villainess' lair and engaging in a fierce firefight with her band of beautiful henchwomen, killing most of them in the process and leaving their bodies, clad in tight black outfits, strewn all over the place.
• This happens in Munich to Jeanette, the Dutch assassin. The protagonist even made a point of pushing aside the front of her bathrobe to expose her body, an act he later regrets.
• A downplayed male example: the blind butler in Murder by Death is discovered sitting at a desk, naked (the scene is not set up to look sexy; he's just there, bare). When Dora Charleston wonders aloud what anyone would want with a naked body, her husband whispers into her ear. She smirks incredulously and exclaims, "Oh, that's... tacky!"
• Campily Exaggerated at the beginning of The Nice Guys — a woman's car goes off the road and she crashes in the garden of a young boy who's up sneaking a peek at his dad's magazines. He goes to investigate and finds her sprawled naked on the hood of the car in the exact same pose as the centerfold model, "Misty Mountains"... for it is she. She has just enough time to mutter "how do I look?" before dying of her (presumably internal) injuries. In a sweet ending to such a deliberately exploitative scene, the boy covers her body before anyone else can see her like that.
• Nocturnal Animals: The corpses of Laura and India are left naked and posed in each other's arms on a red sofa by the band of psychos after what was presumably a rape and murder. The Spoiler Cover of the soundtrack depicts the scene, with a tear through the image to censor a corpse's bare ass.
• The schlock "horror" film Deadmate features this primarily on its cover, depicting a beautiful, naked, dead woman held in the arms of an amorous coroner in a perverted twist on a classic romance novel pose. The film is about a woman who unwittingly marries a necropheliac coroner, though nothing like the scene depicted in the cover happens in the film. It seems intended purely to titillate the audience.
• Perfume features a lengthy montage of the naked corpses of virgin girls who have been dumped around the city by the Villain Protagonist, who kills them to steal their scent.
• In Psycho, Janet Leigh's character is slashed to death while taking a shower. Camera angles and fast cutting give the impression of a naked body, though no actual nudity is shown.
• Joaquin Phoenix gets a little too excited by naked, dead Kate Winslet in Quills.
• Rising Sun revolves around a murdered prostitute splayed across a boardroom table in a Little Black Dress. Her corpse and post-coital murder are given a great deal of attention throughout the film as well as on the movie posters.
• In River's Edge, a teenager leaves the naked body of his murdered girlfriend at the titular river's edge and shows it to his group of friends, who then swear to silence.
• In The Secret in Their Eyes, Liliana Colotto is found naked on her bedroom floor after being brutally raped and murdered.
• Student Bodies, possibly the first parody of the Slasher genre, has an example in its poster◊, which features a dead, buxom girl sprawled across her classroom desk, with her bare legs prominently displayed.
• In Underworld: Evolution, Selene kills Andreas Tanis' vampire concubines. After she leaves, he dumps their naked bodies in the dungeon.
• In the campy comedy Vampire U, some college students stake a seductive vampiress, and one of the students says "Nice side-boob!" as he admires his handiwork.
• What Have You Done to Solange?: Elizabeth is drowned while bathing naked in her bathtub. Her nude body is later carried out by police.
• Whispers In The Dark: Deborah Kara Unger is killed by Alan Alda and her naked body is later discovered hanging from the ceiling.

Literature

• The Dresden Files Book One, Storm Front, begins with Harry called to a crime scene involving a naked dead woman - who died in intercourse with an equally naked man, for good measure. It's not particularly erotic, since both victims had their hearts exploded out of their chests with magic.
• In the Len Deighton novel An Expensive Place to Die, the narrator is visiting a shady "sex clinic"/brothel when a naked woman suddenly runs out of one of the rooms, bleeding profusely from multiple wounds (the result of having been put in an Iron Maiden). The woman runs out into the street before finally collapsing and dying, and passersby respond to the sight with catcalls and wolf-whistles, apparently more attentive to her nudity than to her wounds.
• Edgar Allan Poe famously said, "There is nothing more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman."
• Hyperion Cantos: When Kassad kills an Ouster and strips off the soldier's space suit, he's surprised that the Ouster inside is a naked woman. The narration gives a rather detailed description of the woman's nude corpse as it floats away. This is only one of many examples of the Interplay of Sex and Violence in Kassad's storyline.
• The ending of the 1947 Mike Hammer novel I, the Jury was the quintessential example of a ruthless male detective or secret agent killing a dangerous nude seductress in cold blood. This was more faithfully adapted by the 1982 film of the book than the 1953 one.
• This Is It, Michael Shayne: A pretty gross scene in this pulp fiction detective story has PI Michael Shayne finding the corpse of Sara Morton. She was wearing a gown with a "plunging neckline", and the blood from her slashed throat ran between her "firm breasts."
• The fully illustrated Who Killed Amanda Palmer by Neil Gaiman, "starring" his wife, Amanda Palmer.

Live-Action TV

• An ill-advised episode of America's Next Top Model had the contestants made up as "sexy" corpses who had each been murdered in a different way "by a jealous model," complete with fake wounds, bruises, etc.
• Boardwalk Empire:
  • In the premiere episode, Mickey's gang of bootleggers put their distillery beneath a morgue to hide the smell. The only body we see is a fully nude young woman.
  • Gyp Rosetti uses a waitress he was just having sex with as a naked Bulletproof Human Shield when Benny Siegel starts shooting at him.
• CSI episodes often feature young, attractive, female victims in very limited states of dress.
• Dexter has done this multiple times, maybe most notably when the Trinity Killer murders a very attractive naked woman in a bathtub in the Season 4 premiere. This is paralleled in the season five premiere when the main characters see Rita's dead body in a bathtub, and Masuka says that he's often pictured her naked "but never like this."
• Game of Thrones:
  • An episode ends on the dead body of Ros the prostitute who has been shot to death with a crossbow. The camera pans across her body, and somewhere between her tousled red hair and the soft lighting, she ends up looking like a martyr in a Renaissance painting. She was also scantily clad, a former sex worker, and killed whilst sitting tied to the end of a bed.
  • Ygritte makes a similarly beautiful corpse on her pyre in "The Children".
• A number of episodes of Law & Order and its spin-offs. Of course, given that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit partially involves sex crimes, there's a slight justification for it.
• The infamous Loving murders storyline kicked off with the first victim being discovered lying on her bed, clad in a beautiful negligee (she was preparing for a romantic evening and the final touch was to dab herself with fragrant powder, which turned out to be poisoned).
• Murder One: The first season's murder victim, Jessica Costello, is shown completely naked and strangled to death, which is even more alarming considering that the character is supposed to be 15 years old.
• This trope is mentioned though not depicted in Penny Dreadful, in which Vanessa (possessed by a demon at the time) monologues about how dead women were photographed and the pictures circulated to titillate their male audience.
• In a rare male example, the Poirot episode "Five Little Pigs" features the very sexualised corpse of Amyas Crale. More than once.
• It's also mentioned though not depicted in Salem in which Sebastian briefly mentions how much he enjoys the beauty of a woman drained of all her blood.
• In an early episode from The Shield, Detective Wagenbach can't help but stare at a naked dead woman's breasts. He justifies himself by saying something about how remarkably firm they are, to which detective Claudette Wyms sarcastically replies 'That's called rigor mortis'.
• This trope shows up occasionally in Silent Witness, but the vast majority of dead bodies look like murder victims, and thus are not sexualised. Additionally, both male and female victims are usually naked during autopsy scenes (with censorship from conveniently placed lab equipment), and this is treated as part of the process rather than Fanservice.
• The early-1990s cable-TV detective series Silk Stalkings, which centered on two detectives investigating murders among the high-society set of Palm Beach, Florida, featured numerous episodes with beautiful, glamorous women being violently done to death, often with their bodies being shown afterwards either at the crime scene or in the morgue.
• In Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer's body is found naked and wrapped in a sheet of plastic.
• Utopia (US): Samantha dies wearing a fetishy goth outfit of a little black dress and torn fishnet stockings. When her friends cover her body with some drapes, Becky tells Wilson to leave her head uncovered because "she's too pretty."
• The White Queen: A Rare Male Example occurs when King Richard III's corpse is stripped naked after the Battle of Bosworth, and there's a close-up of his face, bare neck, and shoulder. As he is a Raven Hair, Ivory Skin Pretty Boy, he looks like a porcelain doll stained with blood and dirt despite the violence that has been inflicted upon him. Richard was given the Mr. Fanservice treatment in a sex scene ^note featured in the Starz telecast that took place the night before the battle (the image is therefore still fresh in the audience's minds), so the underlying sensuality of his nude dead body is unmistakable.
• The Wire:
  • Bunk and McNulty investigate the scene of an old crime where a woman was murdered while delivering a Cluster F-Bomb. They reference crime scene photos showing the victim wearing only an open bathrobe at the scene. In another episode, drug dealers discover that a naked woman has overdosed at their party, so they dump her body in the trash.
  • In the fifth season, McNulty and another character have a conversation at the morgue regarding a male corpse, which is laying there completely uncovered the whole time.

Music

• This is a recurring theme in Serbian artist Dead Body Collection's works. Heck, instances of such have shown up on his covers, such as "Throat," "Catoptrophobia," "She Is Like Winter" and "I Slice Her Body, Over And Over."
• The famous music video for Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance" features Kim Basinger's corpse receiving quite a lot of Male Gaze before Petty's character takes it on an actual date.
• "Can't Go Back" by Primal Scream made this trope central to the video, as three professional models met their demise. Bobby Gillespie, on the other hand, meets his death the old-fashioned (and more gruesome) way: an axe.
• Kanye West's video for "Monster" features quite a few scantily clad corpses, most of them young women in lingerie.

Video Games

• Among the antagonists in the PC Engine Action RPG Basted, the female sorcerer Miriam is mortally beaten out of her monster form and is prominently shown lying covered in bruises, with her clothes in tatters, as she laments her failure to serve Largryme and dies.
• In Battle Skin Panic by Studio Gainax, the protagonist Mimi confronts a race of insectoid monster girls in fights that involve stripping them to lower their defenses from shame. Most of them are Killed Offscreen except for their queen Mothylsu, who is shown lying naked on the ground before her corpse Disappears into Light.
• Castlevania: Rondo of Blood opens with the sacrifice of a naked young woman (presumably a virgin).
• Anna from Deadly Premonition, to the point that she is often remarked to be a "goddess of the forest" by the more off-kilter characters.
• When Arclight is defeated in Deadpool (2013), she and Deadpool fall off a platform into a pit. Deadpool wakes up to find the woman impaled on a pipe, suspended in a pose that emphasizes her chest as if she was still sticking it out in death like she had been doing in several previous scenes. Deadpool mockingly gestures at her breasts and says his "pipe" would've given her way more pleasure.
• Golden Axe: Beast Rider starts with a cult of priestesses being slaughtered by monsters and their naked corpses can be found sprawled all over the early areas until their leader is seen hanging from a tree. One of the game's developers mentioned on Twitter that part of its Troubled Production involved those scenes being implemented in secret against the wishes of a portion of the team, who felt that it, at minimum, clashed with the relatively lighter tone of the rest of the game. The game also features one scantily clad villainess being beheaded by Tyris with a lot of focus on her bouncing chest as her corpse falls onto the ground.
• I=MGCM: In the intro of Demon's Tower dungeon, the heroines stumble upon a corpse of a naked woman, splattered with pink blood and with her lewder parts covered by Demon World's fungi and plants.
• L.A. Noire includes a crime wave of murders leaving behind the corpses of naked women. Not surprising as the murders were based off of the murder, and in universe committed by killer, of Elizabeth Short aka The Black Dahlia.
• In Snatcher, Lisa is found to have been killed and replaced by one of the titular androids. The impostor is shot down and falls backward with one breast exposed... and most of her face bloodily torn apart, revealing a metallic skull. The nudity was removed from the Sega CD and later versions.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: When Geralt finally tracks down Whoreson Junior, he finds the gang boss surrounded by dead prostitutes. Three of the corpses are naked and slumped in a bath.

Web Original

• 4chan's "Perfection Girl" is a series of photographs that circulated around the internet of an attractive blonde woman lying in a bed. A block of text linked with the photos claimed that the girl was actually dead, "tricking" people who see the photos into lustful thoughts about a corpse. It's highly dubious that the girl is actually dead, making it sort of an inverse prank.

Western Animation

• Cartoon short Special Delivery is a doubly rare example in that it's both animated and male. When a mailman falls on an icy porch and dies, the man who lives there realizes that he has to get rid of the body, but not before completing the mailman's route. He strips the mailman's corpse; many full-frontal shots follow.

Real Life

• Evelyn McHale, photographed minutes after committing suicide by leaping from the Empire State Building in 1947. Called "the most beautiful suicide" by some.
• Austrian coroner and author of quite dark-humoured popular science books, Hans Bankl, stated once that he hardly ever had any cases in his long career. However, as a young doctor, he was confronted with the body of a 16-year-old trick shot performer, who had killed herself in an unbelievable manner. According to him, she was extraordinarily beautiful, even in death.
• One of the most enduring mysteries of the Battle of Waterloo is the strange incident of the body of a "strikingly beautiful" young woman, dressed in the uniform of a French officer of cuiraissers, which was found by several British officers inspecting the battlefield on the morning of June 19, 1815, the day following the battle. The woman's body was found near the hamlet of La Haye Sainte, where some of the fiercest fighting (including the climactic charge by Napoleon's Imperial Guard) occurred. While she has never been identified, the prevailing theory among students of the battle is that she was a camp follower, possibly the mistress of a French cavalry officer, who went forward in a charge alongside her lover and was killed.
• L'Inconnue de la Seine ("the unknown woman of the Seine"), a death mask of an anonymous young woman whose body was supposedly recovered from the river Seine in Paris, was an incredibly popular artistic and erotic icon in early 20th-century Europe (and, eventually, the model for the Rescusci-Annie CPR dummy).

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