The Family That Slays Together

Aren't they sweet?

"She had a corpse under her bed
She had her fun but now he's dead
Her momma said, 'Come feed desire'
Her brother said, 'Hey, throw him on the fire!'"

— Rob Zombie, "House of 1000 Corpses"

...stays together.

While it's not uncommon for some people skilled in a trade to pass it on to their children, sometimes the only thing a parent is skilled at that he can teach to his kids is murder, mayhem, and any other heartless criminal deeds you can think of. This will usually result in raising an evil clan, and when the kids are old enough, the family collectively and regularly adds to a rising body count and a growing criminal file.

Usually, The Family That Slays Together consists of at least one parent (if it is only one parent, it's usually the father), and at least two children of blood relation to the parent. If a mother and father are both present in the story, it's possible for the family to have only one child join them on crime sprees. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, or cousins may be among the ranks as well from time to time, especially when family inbreeding is suggested.

One common variation involves an Outlaw Couple kidnapping a child or a group of children for the duo to raise as they would their own kids (typically, this either results in Stockholm Syndrome, which is rare, to betraying or outright killing their own kidnappers, which would be more common).

Very often, this trope might overlap with Cannibal Clan, especially in the horror genre. Sometimes, they are also Professional Killers or Aristocrats.

Compare Villainous Mother-Son Duo, as well as Overlord Jr./Daddy's Little Villain, where a single descendant of a Big Bad seeks to follow in his footsteps, and Unholy Matrimony which involves two villains being in a loving relationship or marriage. Siblings in Crime can follow, naturally, if there's more than one child in the mix. Villainous Lineage is related if the kids pick up on their parents' evil habits without having been directly exposed to any of their criminal behaviors and/or it's a persistent trend throughout the generations.

Contrast Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal, which involves parents denying that their criminal offspring are really evil, Evil Parents Want Good Kids, where villains take steps to actively keep their children away from all that, and Criminal Found Family, in which the criminal family isn't related by blood at all.

Compare and contrast the Badass Family, who can sometimes be this as well when villains but are usually more heroic, and all forms of the Generic Ethnic Crime Gang, particularly The Mafia and The Irish Mob. Also compare Cop/Criminal Family, when a family has at least one law enforcement official and at least one criminal.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The Kamelot family from D.Gray-Man are an opulent family with good reputation in the upper-class society. However, Sheryl, his adopted daughter, his adopted son and his brother have either caused the death of, killed or driven insane countless people. His wife is not aware of their true nature though.
• Dirty Pair: Exaggerated with the "Lucifer" criminal organization which is an army of crooks and wanna-be galaxy-conquerors, all of them related by blood. Dropping the "Luke, I Am Your Father" card (which is not a lie, either) on some poor unsuspecting fella caught in their very many schemes is a typical recruitment tool.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • Frieza's family. Frieza is a sadist who enjoys torturing his victims and is explicitly responsible for several genocides. His father (King Cold) is likewise a tyrant, and his brother (Cooler) and predecessor (Chilled) are very similar to him.
  • Babidi's family as well. He and his father Bibidi are sociopathic Omnicidal Maniac that sowed destruction in planets, and probably entire galaxies, and the Bibidi's creation (Kid Buu) is a Psycho for Hire creature whose only skill is killing and destroying. ^note Babidi is actually Bibidi's doppelganger and Kid Buu is a primordial force from the dawn of time, but the point still stands.
• In Hunter × Hunter, the Zoldyeck Family are a family of assassins. Even though they have some issues, they usually don't kill innocent or other people unrelated to their jobs. At one point, the Ten Mafia Dons hired Zeno (the grandfather) and Silva (the father) to kill Chrollo Lucilfer, but Chrollo hired the eldest son, Illumi, to kill the dons. Illumi killed them when Zeno and Silva were in the middle of the fight against Chrollo, and after Illumi informed his father, both of them went back to home without any regrets.
• The Hückebein Family from Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force are the adopted variant. Apparently all of them are not blood-related since they adopt other Eclipse Drivers into the family. As infectees of the Eclipse, a virus that turns you into a crazy killing machine (or zombie), they have to kill people to survive or the Eclipse will kill them.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • The Kira family, with Yoshihiro the father and his serial-killer of a son Yoshikage.
  • Likewise the Boom Boom Family participates to the race together to kill other competitors.
  • J. Geil and his mother Enya are also complete monsters.
• The Zabi family from Mobile Suit Gundam are a family of militaristic fascist politicians, with father Degwin as Sovereign and Big Bad, eldest son Gihren as Dragon-in-Chief and CINC of the war effort, daughter Kycilia and son Dozle as fleet commanders, and youngest child Garma as the leader of the Earth Invasion Force. Since they are also a Big, Screwed-Up Family, the situation turns very messy for all of them, especially once Gihren makes his play for power.
• Invoked in Moriarty the Patriot. The Moriarty brothers, William, Louis, and Albert, discuss that their first murder together will bond them as "accomplices, associates, and family."
• One Piece:
  • The Vinsmoke Family are a family of notorious assassins who used to rule the entire North Blue with an iron fist.
  • Also the Trump Siblings from the Clockwork Island Adventure special. Though they don't look like relatives.
  • And then you have the Charlotte family, which is Yonkou Big Mom and her 85 children (plus spouses, plus grandchildren) running a pirate empire.
• Tokyo Ghoul plays this straight and subverts it as a result of the nature of the titular creatures.
  • The second light novel features the Utsumi family, consisting of a wealthy patriarch and his adopted children. The siblings turn out to be ghouls, adopted by a human Serial Killer and used to carry out his crimes. The daughter, Koharu, ends up exposing their crimes when her guilt becomes too much to bear.
  • Though propaganda claims this is the case with all ghouls, many families are shown to actively shield their children from the killing for as long as possible.
  • In a dark twist, this and a huge dose of Stockholm Syndrome are the true reason for Koutarou Amon's guilt. After learning his adoptive father was a ghoul preying on the other children in the orphanage, Amon became an accomplice to his crimes. Eventually, Donato was captured and Amon taken into custody as a "survivor" of the killing spree.

Comic Books

• Judge Dredd: Pa, Link, Fink, Mean Machine, and Junior Angel (a.k.a. The Angel Gang). Pa Angel was apparently so committed to making sure that he raised his kids to be nothing short of monsters that when his son Mean turned out to actually be extremely gentle and nice, he got him surgically modified with cybernetic enhancements to give him a more bloodthirsty disposition. After the deaths of Pa, Link, and Junior, Fink and Mean Machine sought vengeance as Siblings in Crime. The movie adaptation with Sylvester Stallone saw The Angel Gang adapted as a Cannibal Clan.
• Franco Belgian Comic Les Cranibales is about a Cannibal Clan living in a modern french city[[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids It's actually an all-ages series where the situation is Played for Laughs.
• from Lucky Luke: The Daltons, with the family matriarch Ma Dalton who occasionally helps her sons escaping the Cardboard Prison du jour and planning some of their crimes. Given that they're in a very family-friendly title, nobody's really at risk of getting killed.
• Evan Dorkin's The Murder Family. A not-so-wholesome sitcom family who do Exactly What It Says on the Tin. To a sitcom audience soundtrack, no less.
• Paperinik New Adventures: The comic has a borderline case in the Deltas, a Badass Family of military officers and intelligence agents who sometimes hunt the hero. They're the nicest possible version of the trope, but they do work for a somewhat sinister Government Conspiracy, and have a propensity for both sneakiness and overwhelming force when it furthers their objectives.
• Robin: The Quintas family had a charming family tradition of competing as serial killers. After Mary Quintas spent years thinking she should be her mother's favorite since she was the only one who managed to avoid getting caught she decided the best way to win would be to kill the rest of the family. While her taking out her brothers could be seen as a type of public service her nephew is completely innocent and had no involvement in the family plot.
• Shazam!: Mad Scientist Doctor Sivana and his children, Georgia and Thaddeus Jr..
• Sin City: The Roarks. Most of them actually hate each other, but Roark Jr. is a pedophile serial killer, his corrupt Senator father covers for him and facilitates many other forms of corruption in the city, while the Senator's brother in turn is a Cardinal who secretively cannibalizes prostitutes with his disciple Kevin. There's a third Roark brother who's an Attorney General, and although he never appears, given his relatives' track record it's hard to believe that he's not probably some sort of Amoral Attorney.
• The Smurfs: Gargamel's family is made of evil wizards and witches. His good brother Gourmelin is considered the family's shame for not been evil.
• Spider-Man:
  • The Kravinoffs in Grim Hunt.
  • The Inheritors, of which Morlun is the eldest sibling, is this in Spider-Verse.
• X-Men: When The Brood attack New Orleans, they target the children of the local thief and assassin clans for assimilation, giving this trope as their reasoning: Since they are preparing an invasion they need soldiers, so hosts with the right instincts are very desirable.

Fan Fiction

• Lady Tremaine and her daughters are portrayed as this in Bad Alert: The Extreme, with the people they killed include Cinderella's father, the mayor of Blackwater City and an Electroll. They nearly kill Cinderella herself, along with Aqua, but they are stopped by Hades.
• Glimmer of Hope: Cato's Story: On a general note, District 2 victors are paired off in arranged marriages to raise better Tributes.
  • Cato is related to 23 different Victors from District 2; both his parents won a Hunger Games of their own, as did his brother Ajax and his sister-in-law Drizella. His grandfather Marcus was the first ever Victor from District 2. Cato is also part of a Battle Couple with his wife Glimmer from District 1.
  • Clove has three Victors in her family tree, including her father.
• In RWBY: Scars, Roman and his daughter Neo are both criminals. They're usually involved in the illegal dust trade and vaguely mafia-like business, but Roman is blackmailed by Cinder into siding with her on more deadly ventures. In Roman's case, he isn't actually pleased that Neo is as violent as she is and he'd instead prefer to keep her protected.
• Tales of the Hunger Games has the Dalton family - a family with two Hunger Games Victors (an uncle and a nephew), six tributes who made it to the final eight of their respective Hunger Games, another six tributes who fight in their district's 100th Hunger Games, and a handful of academy trainees who partook in their district's reaping games but were unsuccessful in being named tribute.
• Vale's Underground:
  • The Branwens are a mob family. Raven's comments about her and Qrow's parents suggests that they were involved at some point. At the very least, the twins work together. Qrow pretends to be the White Sheep, but it is only to manipulate people.
  • Cinder is the daughter of Salem and Salem raised her to be a mobster. She taught her everything her daughter knows and even took her to perform hits. She is quite proud of what Cinder has become.
  • The Malachite Twins and their mother Jennifer Malachite, aka "Little Miss Malachite", are both very involved in organized crime. The twins work as assassins and Little Miss's activities could best be described as freelance, working for whoever benefits her. She just happened to work with the Branwens more often.

Films — Animation

• The backstory of Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker involves the Joker and Harley Quinn having kidnapped Tim Drake and having had him brainwashed and tortured for the sake of modeling him as their own son, dubbed "Joker, Jr.", and effectively becoming one of these families. It didn't work.

Films — Live-Action

• Comedic example with The Addams Family, whilst in the original show they were eccentric goths but never explicitly shown to kill anyone (though Grandmama says "I haven't used this [axe] since the taxman came!" at one point, and Fester is enthusiastic about the idea of shooting people in the back but doesn't actually get to do it, partly because he's a terrible shot—though apparently he "dealt with" a gas inspector with his blunderbuss off-screen, whether he killed him or just scared him off isn't specified—and partly because Gomez always insists that a fair duel would be more honourable) in the movie they all seem to have true homicidal tendencies and all the adults are at least responsible for one murder, albeit all of them off-camera.
• Aquaman (2018) shows David Kane and his father Jesse leading a gang of Submarine Pirates, with Jesse expressing pride that his son is joining the Family Business.
• In Big Driver, Lester's mother Ramona and his brother Al are both actively involved in his series of rape/murders.
• Zigzagged with the Klopeks in The 'Burbs. At first it seems that the movie wanted to teach An Aesop about tolerance. Then it turns out that, yes, they were a family of murderers.
• The Redneck Zombie Torture Family from The Cabin in the Woods.
• The aptly named The Family which is about a mafia don and his family, who have the same violent tendencies that he does.
• Frailty: A single father tries to raise his two sons to assist him in his mission to kill people who he believes are "demons" that God is instructing him to destroy. However, while their divine calling is suggested to actually be legitimate, one of the two sons who shows skepticism about all this ultimately kills his own father, and the two sons grow up to be serial killers who operate completely independently from one another and with differing motivations.
• The murderous family from Frontier(s) was headed by an insane Nazi war criminal. They are also cannibals, for some reason.
• The Fratellis from The Goonies are never actually seen killing anybody, but have stuffed a corpse in the freezer at their hideout, and Ma Fratelli has no qualms with forcing the kids to walk the plank.
• The premise of the horror film The Hamiltons, and its sequel, The Thompsons.
• The Firefly family from House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel The Devil's Rejects is a strong contender. Also a Cannibal Clan.
• The Angel Family in Judge Dredd.
  Dredd: Cursed Earth pirates, murderers, scavengers. And, of course, scumbags.
  Dredd: [Later, to Fergie] l forgot to mention it. Your new friends, they're cannibals.
• In Minions, on a trip to Orlando, Florida, the titular minions meet a family who are a group of dangerous criminals, and even the baby already wants to kill people with grenades.
• Mother, and her sons Ike and Addley, from Mother's Day. There's also Queenie, Mother's woods dwelling sister who is just as murderously insane as the rest, but hates her relatives. The loose remake drops Queenie, adds a daughter, and upgrades the number of sons to three.
• Subverted in Natural Born Killers where it's hinted that Micky and Mallory end their killing spree after they decide to settle down and have kids.
• Troy and two sons in The Neighbor are complicit in a kidnapping for ransom operation, and are not against murder or rape as well.
• In the Scream films, both Billy Loomis in the first film and his mother in the second become murderers. The fifth film implies that it runs In the Blood for the Final Girl Sam, Billy's biological daughter, given the brutality she displays when fighting Ghostface at the end, complete with her wiping off her knife the way Ghostface often does throughout the series. The killers, in their obsession with "fixing" the Stab series, tried to invoke this by framing her for the murders, believing that, when the massacre became the source material for a new Stab movie (which they always felt worked best when Based on a True Story like the early Stab films were), it would have a ready-made plot of Billy's bastard daughter carrying on his legacy. Scream VI follows it with the father and siblings of one of the killers in the fifth movie becoming murderous to avenge him.
• Seed of Chucky, though Glen(da) isn't really into it like his/her parents are.
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is built on this; they're also a Cannibal Clan.
• Timber Falls had a family of backwoods religious fanatics who abduct couples and force them to conceive, due to the only female member of the group being infertile.
• Wedding Slashers involves a daughter trying to escape one of these and start her own life. Suffice to say, her relatives aren't pleased.
• The inbred killer cannibals in Wrong Turn films are tight-knit community. Especially the family in Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, whose members only known as Pa, Ma and the (incestuous) Twins.

Legends & Mythology

• While it turns out that Real Life Kate "Ma" Barker wasn't actually the leader of her sons' criminal gang, she still carries reputation in a lot of (fictional) stories about her life and serves as the popular inspiration for nearly every fictional portrayal of family gangs led by the maternal figure.
• Sawny Bean, the leader of the Scottish Cannibal Clan of legend, who is believed by some to have been executed for the mass murder and cannibalization of over 1,000 people sometime around the 14/1500's.
• Loki's family in Norse Mythology, which includes Loki, god of mischief, chaos, and destruction; Fenrir, giant wolf and harbinger of the apocalypse; Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent; Hel; and Fenrir's sons, Skoll and Hati. Come Ragnarok Skoll and Hati devour the Sun and the Moon, Loki dies battling Heimdall, Asgard's watchman, and Fenrir and Jormungandr lead the assault on Heaven, killing Odin and Thor and bringing about the end of the world.

Literature

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn includes two Feuding Families who routinely kill members of the other family and teach their children to do so, too.
• In A Brother's Price, families are so close-knit that this is the normal, expected case, which is why, if one sister is involved in a crime, the whole family will be punished. It is possible to get out of it if you can prove that you have nothing to do at all with that family member, but you have to prove innocence rather than it being assumed. The main villains who are behind all the problems are revealed to be a family.
• Dexter: The book series has Dexter (a serial killer who hunts criminals that escaped justice; he was trained by his foster father and police officer Harry Morgan) training his step-children Cody and Astor in the ways of serial killer killing.
• Invoked in the Discworld series in regard to the Agatean Empire royalty—one has to be a murderous bastard to survive the court intrigues and as a result, some features get reinforced every generation.
  • In Hogfather, Medium Dave and Banjo were apparently brought up to be criminals by their mother, who is fondly remembered for her ruthlessness by other criminals.
  • Although a bit more civilized about it than most examples, the Selachii noble family of Ankh-Morpork have a long-standing tradition as Assassins. The Boggis family is equally well-embedded in the Thieves' Guild, though Ankh-Morpork thieves generally avoid killing their victims (because the Assassins' Guild considers that to be trespassing on their bailiwick, and because it's hard to rob someone again in the future once they're dead).
• The Grissoms from Friday the 13th: Carnival Of Maniacs kill for fun, and sometimes food.
• The Hardy Boys Casefiles, Blood Relations: Frank Hardy says this verbatim as the phony detective is greeted as the father of the Rawley brothers (who in turn exposed themselves as the bad guys).
• In The Silmarillion, the Fëanorians. Justified, since they were driven by their father's oath to recover the stolen Silmarils.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Oberyn and his eldest four daughters. Other family members are also sometimes included. Oberyn and his brother Doran work together, and Ariane recounts a time her uncle took her and her cousins — the above mentioned daughters — and taught them about snake poison.
• In The Stainless Steel Rat, the title character falls for a Dark Action Girl and they get married as an Outlaw Couple who commit crimes for fun when they're not working for the Special Corps. They have two twin boys who are also educated in the criminal arts. The Rat believes in Thou Shalt Not Kill however (his wife, not so much).
• Un grito en las tinieblas: La vida de Zárate Arkham has the Arkham family, with the exception of the protagonist Zarate and some few other relatives, her family is comprised of psychopathic Satanists, including her sexually abusive father and cult leader, an uncle that sacrificed teen girls to the Devil, and the homicidal branch of the family living in the Eldritch Location of Hill Road.
• Tigerstar and his son Hawkfrost in Warrior Cats. For a while it looked like Tigerstar's other son Brambleclaw was going to join them, but he decided against it.
• There are a number of examples of this in the Whateley Universe, as well as examples of the opposite. Most notable of these include the Wilkins family (who may be a pack of weaselly, self-serving Jerkasses with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, but are extremely effective and highly dangerous when they do work together) and the Harrow family (who are in their third generation as Affably Evil wizards, supervillains, Mad Scientists, and Con Artists).

Live-Action TV

• Batman (1966): One of the villains in series one was Ma Parker (played by Shelley Winters), a villainous mob boss based on Ma Barker. Ma Parker along with her three sons and one daughter almost manage to defeat the Dynamic Duo.
• The Salamanca Family from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. All the males shown are utterly psychotic, cold-blooded cartel gangsters (although they range from Ax-Crazy to Faux Affably Evil) whose only redeeming factor is that they are utterly devoted to one another, above all else.
• Criminal Minds:
  • "Open Season" has brothers who hunt people for sport, having been taught to so by their uncle, a paranoid psychotic who had died some time before the events of the episode, leaving them continuing as Siblings in Crime.
  • The episode "Bloodline" is about a family (a mother, father, and young son) who kill a family to abduct their daughter as a future mate for the son. Gets very creepy when it turns out that this is how the family continues; they've been doing this for generations. And then at the very end of the episode, it turns out that the family has other branches, and the last shot of the episode is another similar set (mother, father and young son) preparing to kill some other people.
  • Another episode had an elderly father and former serial killer come out of retirement over 20 years later. His son assisted him by bringing home women for him to brutally torture and murder. Later in the episode, it's revealed that the first victim he helped his father kill was his mother, though he never realized it until this episode. Another episode has a young boy pretend to be lost in order to lure women into his home as victims for his father.
  • In yet another, a couple facilitate their paraplegic war-veteran son's crimes, bringing him women to murder out of frustration that his injuries make sex impossible for him.
• The Jukes, a family of thieves and con artists, attempts to take the T&T Circus for everything they can in the Frontier Circus episode "Mighty Like Rogues".
• An episode of the original Hawaii Five-O had a killer family coming to Hawaii. They are generally presented as dumb, inbred Southern hillbilly types (Slim Pickens was the patriarch). When they are caught, the old lady of the group calmly explains they weren't thieves because they only took money and valuables from people they already killed, who didn't need it any more. It also wasn't murder because their victims "weren't kin".
• An episode of the reboot Hawaii Five-0 features a young man caring for his aging grandmother who kidnaps two people for a pair of sequential Satanic rituals. When the killer leaves the house, the remaining victim escapes his cage in the basement, only to be stabbed in the back with a knitting needle by the killer's grandmother.
  Grandmother: I'm tired of cleaning up your messes. Take care of this.
  Grandson: Yes, Nanna.
• Justified runs on this trope. The series sports several crime families, including the Crowders, Bennetts, Tonins, Reyes, Truths. and Crowes.
• The 1994 Australian Law Procedural Janus centred around attempts to convict the Hennessys, a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Melbourne's Pettingill crime family.
• Midsomer Murders: The Fielding School in "Master Class" turns out to be an entire extended family of murderous Evilutionary Biologists hell-bent on selectively breeding the perfect pianist. This includes a character who pretends to not be related, only to reveal themselves in the climax.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Rita Repulsa, her brother Rito Revolto, and their father Master Vile during part of the third season. Much campier than most examples on this page.
• Peaky Blinders is all about a street gang lead by the Shelby family. To start out, you've got the Brothers in Crime, Tommy, Arthur, and John, and their consigliere aunt, Polly. Then add their long lost cousin Michael, their littlest bother, Finn, as he grows up, and the brothers' wives as they get married. They're quite The Clan. And it's not a new thing in their family either.
  Tommy: I think you're the first Shelby in history to have a legal license for anything. What would our granddad say, eh? He'd turning in his grave—"Honest bloody money? Eh? In this house? Here?"
• Averted in Scoundrels, which is about a family of criminals who decide to go clean after the father gets a long prison sentence.
• The Luthors of Smallville. Patriarch Lionel Luthor is a Corrupt Corporate Executive version of the Rags to Riches story, and tries to raise his son, Lex, to be every bit as devious, cunning, and unethical. Lex in turn mentors his illegitimate sister, Tess Mercer, who he successfully transforms into The Baroness. And that's without taking into account their bastard brother, Lucas, who managed to become a sociopath even without daddy's involvement, or Lex's numerous clones, who cover the board from Enfant Terrible (Lx-15) to Ax-Crazy Evil Old Folks (Lx-3). In the Alternate Universe of Earth-2, the family stayed together, and by adding adoptive son Clark "Ultraman" Luthor to the family, transformed LuthorCorp into a MegaCorp version of The Empire.
• Supernatural:
  • In "The Benders", Sam and Dean are investigating a murder, and they discover that it's the doing of a crazy redneck family that has been hunting people for the ultimate hunting experience. This extends to the little girl, and once the dead wife is mentioned there is a distinct note of 'this is you guys if you were evil cannibal rednecks who didn't know there were real monsters to hunt.'
  • Also true for the Winchesters, and other hunter families like the Campbells, although less with the homicide. Special Agent Henriksen, who spends a season and a half on a quest to catch Dean and Sam, thinks they are this, straight-out. A hunter mentions this phrase in episode 3x01, just before kissing his wife.
• Teen Wolf:
  • The Argents are a large family of werewolf hunters. It's strongly implied that werewolf hunting is often a family trade, so there are probably several other hunter families out there as well.
  • At the beginning of Season 4, Sean Walcott is distraught over the grisly deaths of his parents, who seem to have been completely normal people. By the end of the episode, Lydia has found a freezer full of dead bodies in the Walcott's house: they're all murderous man-eating wendigos.
• Titans (2018): The Nuclear Family are the brainwashed mooks of an Ancient Conspiracy who are hunting for Rachel at the start of Season One. They engage in brutal torture and murder while acting like a family from a 1950's sitcom.
• The Torchwood episode "Countrycide" has an entire rural Welsh clan of vicious cannibals.
• The Untouchables: "Ma Barker and Her Boys" pits Federal Agent Eliot Ness against the Barker clan, and depicts Ness as leading the assault on Ma Barker and her sons at their Florida hide-out. In this version, Lloyd, Fred and Doc are all present at the final shootout.
• In one episode of The Unusuals, an extended family (all the way to third cousins) go on a crime spree together. It turns out they're raising money for the patriarch of the family to get a kidney transplant.
• The Walking Dead (2010): Rick's group is this, particularly during major events like the taking of the prison, the final prison battle, or the escape from Terminus.
• Wild Cards (2024): Max is a con artist and her father turns out to also be a criminal who's in prison. It's strongly implied that she learned from him, and is planning to bust him out. It turns out that she learned grifting from her mom as well.

Music

• The Eminem song "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" is about a father playing with his toddler and trying to help her not be too distressed as they dispose of the corpses of her murdered mother, her new husband, and their tiny son.

Professional Wrestling

• The Wrestling Family Los Guerreros have as their motto, "We lie, we cheat, we steal. It's a family tradition."

Theatre

• The White Sheep of the Family, by L. du Garde Peach and Ian Hay, is a comic play about a family of master thieves (father, mother, daughter and son) whose life of crime is threatened when the son falls for a police chief's daughter and decides to reform his ways.

Video Games

• Ace Attorney features a spirit medium version of this in the form of Morgan Fey and her estranged daughter Dahlia Hawthorne, two members of the Fey clan's branch family. After Dahlia and her twin sister Iris were abandoned by their mother and taken by their neglectful father, Dahlia had grown to resent her parents and committed a string of murders stemming from her original revenge plot on her father, before she was exposed in court by her older cousin Mia Fey, which led to Dahlia receiving the death penalty for her crimes. Morgan, who plotted to remove Maya, her niece and Mia's younger sister, from the line of succession for the seat of the Master of Kurain, asks her youngest daughter Pearl to channel a certain spirit at a certain time, trusting Pearl to obey without asking. The spirit in question was Dahlia after her execution, who would have used Pearl's body to murder her younger cousin Maya Fey; Dahlia sought revenge on Mia for putting her away, but after Mia had passed away while she was sitting on death row, she agreed to her mother's plan to kill Maya solely so she could spite Mia from beyond the grave. Dahlia would be at fault as the evil spirit possessing her innocent half-sister... but legally, Pearl would still be a murderer. Did we mention Pearl is nine?
• The Barrows family from Clock Tower. Matriarch Mary adopts several orphans to essentially serve as target practice for her Ax-Crazy sons Bobby and Dan who promptly continues mass-murdering once both his mother and brother kick the bucket, whilst the father Simon has been reduced to a Madman in the Attic who will eat people.
• The Ax-Crazy Hall clan from Dead Rising are a trio of zealous survivalist snipers, a father and two sons.
• The Fallout series contains a wide variety of examples. In the third installment, the Lone Wanderer can discover an inbred Cannibal Clan as well as an example of the Outlaw Couple variation, called "The Family" that gets their nourishment from human blood; they can be convinced to drink it only from blood packs and cease killing other people, if so desired.
• In Grand Theft Auto games, the leadership structure for a number of the Generic Ethnic Crime Gangs are rooted in family ties, especially in GTA IV. Unsurprisingly, a lot of them murder people. The most notable example being the McReary Family, the backbone of Liberty City's Irish Mob. Both the family matriarch and patriarch have had ties in running the gangs criminal activities, and their sons Derrick, Gerry, and Packie are all violent criminals. It seems the only people serving as an exception to the family violence are Kate and Francis, and yet Francis is a Dirty Cop and asks the player to kill Derrick. Kate is the only one in the family without a criminal record.
• A reoccurring theme in Lakeview Cabin Collection is that the Rogue Protagonist of the first game's family have become murderers and serve as the primary antagonists of the third and fifth installments.
• Juliet from Lollipop Chainsaw comes from a family of zombie hunters.
• While Mr. Zurkon of the Ratchet & Clank series has been around since Tools of Destruction, this trope appears whenever Zurkon Jr. joins him in battle.
  • Zurkon Jr. first showed up in Into the Nexus after upgrading his father. At V3, Mrs. Zurkon joins them to complete the trio. Mrs. Zurkon even quotes the Trope directly:
    Mrs. Zurkon: The family that slays together, stays together!
  • The little scamp also shows up in Ratchet & Clank (2016), but this time his mother is absent from the team; she is now a decidedly unhelpful giant boss character able to summon her own Mr. Zurkons upon Ratchet.
• The Baker family in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, with the exception of their daughter Zoe, are this mixed with the series trademark Implacable Man and Body Horror. It turns out that the Bakers were once a normal, loving family before Eveline infected and brainwashed them, twisting Jack and Marguerite into sadistic, murderous cannibals and giving their already psychopathic son Lucas an outlet for his violent fantasies, all operating under Eveline's command.

Web Animation

• The first episode of Helluva Boss after the pilot episode has the imps hired to assassinate a woman who survived a murder-suicide and was treated as a hero for her survival even though she was committing adultery. Moxie is hesitant to kill the woman because she has a family. His hesitation nearly gets the imps all killed because it turns out that the woman along with her husband and two kids are Satan-worshiping serial killers. As a bonus, there is a human head on display on their wall even before the reveal, when they're still looking all wholesome — which is really easy to miss at that point even though though it's right there in plain sight.

Webcomics

• The Frummagem family in Unsounded have a monopoly on criminal enterprise in New Tawhoque and usually pass on leadership of the gang when one of the boss' kids manages to murder their father. Daddy's Little Villain Sette is fiercely loyal to her Da', though she's a bit thrown off by the experience of Duane caring for her without asking anything in return.

Western Animation

• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog introduces Mama Robotnik, Robotnik's mother who is a far more effective and dangerous villain than her son, and constantly belittles him for NOT taking over the planet. It seems her major morals she tried to teach him are to never tell the truth, never play fair, steal, and try to destroy Sonic. She even beats Robotnik up when he admits he was kidnapped and forced to marry an intergalactic bounty hunter against his will. Her reason? He told the truth.
• Batman Beyond:
  • The Royal Flush Gang are a family that makes their living on crime; however, they prefer theft to murder, although they don't mind bloodying their hands when they have to. Their daughter, Melanie eventually walks away from the life.
  • The Mayhems, another family of robbers, from "The Eggbaby".
• The Slaughters, a family of poachers, from Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
• In one episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, "Adventures in Squirrelsitting", Fat Cat ponders the possibility of raising Tammy and Bink as his own criminal successors... but then decides it'd be too much trouble and tosses them into his Death Trap.
• Inverted with Dotty and Pepper, sisters on Clue Club, in that they're on the heroes' side.
• The Beagle Boys in DuckTales (1987), a family of criminals, mainly a parody of Ma Barker's gang. Several branches of the family are shown with different characteristics including Upper-Class Twits, swamp rednecks, and one made only of women. All of the branches are criminals.
  • Continued in the reboot DuckTales (2017), albeit it seems that they are divided into groups of three and each trio has a specific theme for their attires from 70s Disco dancers to killer clowns.
• Gargoyles: The Canmore family, aka the Hunters, who are descended from the medieval Scottish king Canmore, wear masks with a slashed face motif, and obsessively try to hunt down the immortal gargoyle Demona, either singly or in groups. Which wouldn't be too bad a goal in and of itself, since Demona is evil and wants to destroy mankind, but unfortunately they suffer from Fantastic Racism and assume all other gargoyles are evil, too, which almost none of them are - the main protagonists of the show are gargoyles and are thoroughly opposed to Demona, and most other gargoyles seen are good guys/gals as well. This makes the Hunters a menace to our heroes. Also, Canmore himself became the Hunter for less than noble reasons before Demona was well and truly evil, simply because she was an ally of his rival Macbeth, and he had her relatively innocent clan slaughtered during stone sleep. (The original Hunter was another man, Gillecomgain, whose face had been impulsively scarred by Demona when he was a child and found her stealing food from his barn, and Canmore took up his identity after his death as a tool of fear against the gargoyles.)
• An episode of Martin Mystery featured a family (consisting of a father, mother and daughter) who made routine sacrifices to a dragon since 1962, and in exchange, they received immortality and a comfy home in the being's realm.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • In the episode "Powerprof.", Utonium joins the girls in crime fighting, and the narrator names this trope.
    Narrator: Looks like the family that slays together, stays together.
  • The Smiths next door also become this after they collectively snap in sheer envy of the Utonium household's perceived flawlessness.
• This is what happens in The Simpsons with Sideshow Bob in "The Italian Bob"; rather than shun him, his wife and toddler son help him try to kill the Simpsons. Exaggerated in "Funeral for a Fiend" when even Bob's brother and parents help him try to kill Bart, too.
  Bob: Revenge is a dish best served family style.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series: The Red Skull, his son Rheinholdt, who would later become Electro, and the Chameleon, who is the foster son of the Red Skull. The Red Skull is a Nazi spymaster, the Chameleon is a Master of Disguise, and Rheinholdt is a Nazi sympathizer turned supervillain.

Real Life

• In medieval times of war, particularly bad ass families not only slay and stay together, they often manage to climb up the social ladder all the way to becoming Kings/Queens over the bodies of their fallen enemies and establishing empires. Empires they keep within their family's possession by slaying and staying together.
• The Bloody Benders were a family (supposedly) of serial killers who murdered at least 11 people between 1872 and 1873 before going into hiding and never being seen again. However, if and how they were actually related is unclear; they are popularly seen as a nuclear family (middle-aged couple and two adult children), but at the time some neighbors were under the impression that the "daughter" was actually the son's common-law wife. Nowadays some believe that the mother and daughter were related, but not the others, or that they were all just a villainous example of Family of Choice.
• The Loomis Gang was formed around the family unit of George Washington Loomis and his children, and managed to keep most of Central New York State in a state of fear for much of the first half of the nineteenth century.
• The Maslenko-Ivanytina-Matsybora family was a clan of serial poisoners in the late Soviet Union. Sociopathic and raised in the belief that the material wealth is everything in this life, the elderly parents and their two daughters used thallium salts obtained under the guise of the rat poison to murder everyone who perceivably slighted them or was on the road to being rich.
• From August 1971 until February 1972, the McCrary family was responsible of several abductions, robberies, rapes and murders from Florida to California.
• While the Benders became subjects of legend, The McVees may never have existed at all.
• The Meraz family, headed by Silvia Meraz Moreno, committed three murders together due to their belief that the deaths would garner them favor with Mexican deity Santa Muerte.
• Gordon Stewart Northcott, his mother Sarah Louise Northcott, and his heavily abused nephew Sanford Clark, perpetrators of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. These murders were dramatized in the Clint Eastwood film Changeling, which excluded Sarah Louise.

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