As a Death Trope, this naturally involves spoilers.
Times where no body is left behind after death in Live-Action Films.
- In the Blade Trilogy, vampires collapse into ash when killed.
- The Dark Crystal provides the page image. Mystics and Skeksis leave no body behind when they die. Mystics quietly fade away, while Skeksis crumble to dust. They also die in tandem, to reflect their connected past. Later, when a Skeksis falls into the magma under the castle of the Crystal, at the same time far away, a Mystic is instantly incinerated.
- In The Darkest Hour, the main "aliens" can shred a human body into dust in a slightly disturbing manner.
- In Elektra, defeated villains disappear in a puff of green smoke, something unique in Marvel Universe films. They're ninja — it's presumably deliberate so that the Hand's secrets are kept secure.
- In Eragon, Durza disintegrates after Eragon stabs him.
- The two female aliens in Gamera vs. Guiron disappeared after they were killed. Many other science fiction films have self-cleaning aliens of this type.
- Harry Potter:
- This is how Voldemort dies in the film version of Deathly Hallows. After all his horcruxes are destroyed and he finally gets blasted, his body dissolves into something similar to pieces of skin, like dandruff, which blow into the wind.
- The movies apparently like this trope, if the deaths of Professor Quirrell, Nagini, and Bellatrix Lestrange are any indication. Well, at least for villains. Good guys seem to leave behind bodies when they die (well, except for Sirius).
- Identity: One of the major clues that something is off happens when the bodies of the victims up to that point completely vanish. This is because none of the people at the motel are real.
- The standard fate for most Indiana Jones villains. (Temple of Doom is the main exception: Mola Ram didn't disappear but was Eaten Alive by crocodiles).
- Those ritually killed (or "renewed") at Carrousel in Logan's Run explode cleanly, with no blood, ashes, or random body parts falling to spoil the illusion that they've been translated to their next life.
- In The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, well, how else do you expect a giant flaming eye to go once the deathblow is struck?
- It also happens to the Army of the Dead when Aragorn declares that their oaths to Isildur have been fulfilled for helping him defeat the armies of Mordor.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Captain America: The First Avenger has anyone caught within the shots of various Tesseract-powered weaponry disintegrating completely in a blue mist.
- Inverted by Red Skull who was left for dead after disappearing during the movie climax but was revealed to be transported to Vormir to become the guardian of the soul stone.
- The fate of the fifty percent of the universe erased by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, including Bucky Barnes, Mantis, Drax, T’Challa, Falcon, Groot, Wanda Maximoff, Doctor Strange, Peter Quill, Peter Parker, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury, who disintegrate via crumbling into ash.
- In The Stinger for Ant-Man and the Wasp, which occurs concurrently with the events described above, this fate also befalls Hank Pym, Janet Van Dyne, and Hope Van Dyne.
- The Downer Beginning of Avengers: Endgame adds Clint Barton's entire family, minus himself, to the body-less count. Later, after the previously mentioned characters are restored, this fate befalls the 2014 version of Thanos and his army, courtesy of Tony Stark.
- Captain America: The First Avenger has anyone caught within the shots of various Tesseract-powered weaponry disintegrating completely in a blue mist.
- After Alice defeats Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master he disappears, leaving behind only his clothes. Alice kicks away the glove for good measure.
- At the end of The Rock, Sean Connery's character, an Alcatraz inmate, runs off and asks Cage's character to tell the authorities that he was killed. Nicholas Cage's character does so, and when asked about the body, says that this occurred to him as a result of the bioweapon MacGuffin.
- In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, defeated Evil Exes turn into a shower of coins, as they do in the comic. This is particularly amusing considering it not only takes place in Canada, but when Scott slays bystanders their coins take the shape of their bodies on the floor.
- In fact, the comic comments on this when Gideon Graves is killed and those in the audience get hit in the head with the showering coins.
- Star Wars:
- Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope after Darth Vader kills him on the Death Star.
- Yoda's body disappears after he passes away naturally in Return of the Jedi.
- Canonically stated to have happened to the corpse of the redeemed Anakin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. The "body" Luke cremated on Endor was actually just his armour.
- Luke Skywalker at the end of The Last Jedi after channelling an illusion of himself to fool the First Order forces and Kylo Ren long enough for the Resistance remnants to escape from Crait.
- Leia Organa and Ben Solo at the end of The Rise of Skywalker. Leia actually died earlier — in the same manner as her twin Luke, via Force Exhaustion — but her body did not disappear until her son Ben died; the moment Ben's body faded, so did his mother's.
- And almost every Jedi who dies in the Expanded Universe, though this usually only happens to those who become Force Ghosts, the main exception being Qui-Gon Jinn, who (canonically) became a Force Ghost but didn't disappear. Sith and other users of The Dark Side, on the other hand, often explode instead of fading away when they die.
- An exception for the Sith is Darth Nihilus, whose body very visibly crumbles quietly away under his robes once the Exile turns their back.
- Darth Sion from the same game likely crumbled into a pile of decayed flesh and splintered bones when he died, considering which state he lived with.
- Really only one Sith explodes, Darth Maul and Count Dooku's corpses were still intact (although admittedly the former may have died moments after he fell out of our sight). However, this is averted in the new Disney canon as Maul didn't die during the Phantom Menace, rather he gained a set of shiny robot legs and appeared in both Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels. The Expanded Universe has it happen a few other times, but apparently it requires both extreme power and being particularly deep into the Dark Side.
- In This Island Earth, the Mutant dissolves after being killed. This is given a Hand Wave as its body being obliterated by the change in pressure as the ship approaches Earth.
- The probable first appearance of this in film (and the definite first appearance of the Stop Trick that enabled it) was in A Trip to the Moon. It reappears in a lot of other films by Georges Méliès.
- All over the TRON universe. Programs don't leave a corpse behind when they de-resolve, instead fading away as they reach critical failure, or shattering in a messy pile of voxels (that look like cubes of safety glass) that sputter out of existence. Justified in the universe setting due to the trope being part of video games. Of course Disney made use of this to hide scenes of horribly violent death in a way that still warranted a PG rating and a Disney trademark.
- X-Men Film Series:
- Cyclops in X-Men: The Last Stand. All they find are his sunglasses.
- In X-Men: First Class, Darwin is vaporized immediately by the blast he took, and one of his teammates even said, "We can't even bury him."
- In Your Highness, Leezar disintegrates when Fabious stabs him with the Blade of Unicorn.
