15 Movies Featuring a Corpse as a Major Plot Device (2025)

The word "corpse" can be a little scary. It conjures imagery of pestilence and famine, and scary stuff like alleyways and graveyards. But in the movies, we can play pretend. A dead body isn't a loved one, it's an enemy. Or a bad guy. Someone who had it coming. Or maybe it represents innocence, or adulthood, or a game. Sometimes the corpse isn't even really dead. Whatever the case, the movies allow us use an otherwise unpleasant concept and make it into a scene, a joke, even a whole plot. While there's no shortage of dead bodies in movies, these are the movies in which a corpse is used as a major plot device.

Please note, there's a surprising number of comedies on this list. Just prepare yourself, because there's a lot of "this used to be a person, now it's a problem" vibes radiating from most of the movies here.

15 Bullet Train

Bafflingly complex action comedy Bullet Train is so full of easter eggs and visual gags, the fact that it centers around the delivery of a Yakuza boss' son, killed off early by a particularly gruesome form of snake venom, is kind of secondary. There's some fun moments of trying to make it look like he's still alive, via a hoody and some silly anime cat-eye glasses.

Truthfully, he's the middle child of dead bodies left in the wake of contract killers all working against each other on the same train. He's the first body produced in the movie, but many have died to get them all there, and many more die throughout.

The son is also the only one whose body really matters, which is difficult for the living characters when he's clearly bleeding out of his eyes. Check it out, it's hilarious.

14 Very Bad Things

Before The Hangover, there was Very Bad Things, a mid-90s dark cult comedy about a bachelor party gone wrong, featuring performances from Jon Favreau, Cameron Diaz, and Jeremy Piven. Instead of a missing groom, however, one of the guys accidentally kills a stripper during a private moment of over-ecstasy in a Las Vegas hotel suite. Boyd, the charismatic, self-improvement mantra-spewing sociopath of the group (played bewilderingly well by Christian Slater), hatches a plan to dispose of her body, summing up their predicament with chilling detachment:

That 105 pound problem becomes more like 285 when a security guard for the hotel comes to investigate the ruckus, and discovers the stripper's body, forcing the group to double down after Boyd stabs him before he can alert anyone. They wrap them up and bury the bodies in the desert, but it doesn't take long for their guilt to get the better of them. The unforgettable ending is one of the more haunting sequences in a movie that is somehow still a comedy.

13 Sin City

The Big Fat Kill is one of the Frank Miller comics from the Sin City line that made it into the 2005 movie adaptation. Dwight, a red Converse-wearing nice guy, played by Clive Owen, follows ne'er do well Jackie Boy into Old Town, where the sex workers run things. Jackie Boy, played by a perfectly caricatured Benicio Del Toro, oversteps the bounds and gets him and his buddies killed. Only after they search his body do Dwight and the ladies of the night find out he's a cop; a fact which, if it gets out, would disrupt the balance of Sin City and squash the self-governance the women of Old Town have come to rely upon.

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What follows is a madcap game of hot potato for the proof of Jackie Boy's death, winnowing him down from cop to corpse to severed head. The most memorable aspect is a portion of film Guest Directed by Quentin Tarantino, in which Dwight and Jackie Boy have a drawn-out conversation in the front seat of a car. Of course, the talking is all inside Dwight's head, but as he himself points out, that doesn't prove Jackie Boy's doubts wrong.

It's a fun bit of surrealism in a movie that doesn't make much sense anyway, but worth the price of admission to hear watch Benicio chew up the scenery, as usual.

12 Saw

This one's a bit of a toss-up. Yes, it begins with two men shackled to the piping in an industrial type shower room, the corpse of another man inexplicably between them. At its core, Saw is a mystery film, unspooling in a nonlinear narrative, slowly showing us the events leading up to the men's incarceration, telling us more about the Why than the How of their stories.

The possessions of the dead man, a revolver and a tape recorder, become relevant as the two captors navigate this escape room fantasy, well before that was a thing hipsters plunked down a thousand bucks for on a Friday night. The body of the man who shot himself, his congealed blood pool on the floor reminding them of what awaits them if they don't play Jigsaw's game, is the metaphorical key they've been searching for the whole time. That's about as much as can be revealed. We'd hate for you to find yourself forced to saw off your own foot, only for us to have ruined the surprise.

11 Swiss Army Man

Future Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director Oscar winners Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, before the cultural touchstone that was Everything Everywhere All at Once, conceived of and made a controversial little indie picture called Swiss Army Man. The technical and visual aspects are spot on, particularly for the pair's first feature film, and the narrative, surreal at times, is imaginative and original; almost as if in Castaway, instead of a volleyball, Tom Hanks had discovered and befriended a corpse.

It's the content that got the pair, affectionately referred to as The Daniels, onto some bad taste lists. Much like an actual dead body, one of Daniel Radcliffe's main contributions to the plot are flatulent in nature. He farts. He's a farter. This gets him and Paul Dano's Hank both in and out of jams, and makes us all thankful that smell-o-vision never became an actual thing, because their friendship lasts long enough that Radcliffe is almost certainly beginning to rot.

One of the few films, though not the only one, in which the corpse is actually a character, rather than a prop. Manny, as Radcliffe is named, communicates with his new friend, learning helpful things about humanity along the way, and teaching his lonely, abandoned friend Hank a few things himself along the way.

10 Operation Mincemeat

This is a movie for anyone who saw the episode of Silicon Valley episode where they co-opt a World War II strategy known as Meinertzhagen's Haversack, a fun phrase you can repeat out loud in the shower if you get lonely. Operation Mincemeat was a separate mission, but with a similar thrust.

Essentially, the Allies were planning an invasion of Italy via the island of Sicily, but wanted the Axis high command to think they were landing anywhere but, such as Greece. A special branch of British intelligence, which included none other than future James Bond author Ian Fleming, proposed packing a dead soldier's rucksack with misinformation and floating that dead body off the coast of neutral Spain, then ensuring their spy network carefully allows that misinformation to flow upwards while doing their best to appear to desperately want it back.

In order for the operation to work, the intelligence team does their best to make their cadaver as realistic as possible, developing an entire backstory, mission, cause of death, and even a fabricated love story to really sell it. It works, and the invasion, the biggest of the war before D-Day, proceeds smoothly. For a more macabre use of a corpse as a ploy in wartime, check out what they do to one of the submariners in U-571, or the movie they took the idea from, Run Silent, Run Deep.

9 Clue

It's difficult to give anything away, given the fact that Clue is based off the classic Hasbro game about a solving a murder mystery. What could have been a hacky commercial tie-in has become a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the peculiarities of trying to adapt a narrative out of a child's game, and a statement on the talents of some of the best comedic actors of the 1980s. Mel Brooks standby Madeline Kahn steals the show, but Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, and Tim Curry all bluster, slapstick, and silly their way across the conservatory, the dining room, the study, the ballroom, the — oh hell, you get the point.

The obvious victim here is Mr. Boddy, the apparent host of the mysterious alias-only dinner party, and their collective blackmailer, giving every player a motive. His body (see what they did there?) is the catalyst for the entire rest of the film, though the archetypal nature of the characters beg for a victim each. Of course, that's what they get by the end: six dead bodies, and only one perpetrator. That's the game, right? Only one of them could have done it? Short answer with no follow up? It depends.

8 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Here's another reanimated corpse flick; just don't call it a zombie movie. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness doesn't disappoint when it comes to the weirdness quotient. If you watched the first Doctor Strange and marveled at how simple to follow the plot was, this is the film for you. Joined by a teenaged sage-trainee and fleeing the I-just-want-my-kids-back motivation of former Avenger the Scarlett Witch, Dr. Strange and company warp between different hairstyles, er, universes to gain the advantage, although some the Stranges don't make it.

One Strange in particular bites the magical dust on a rooftop and is given a dingy burial under some cobblestones for a few years. When that universe turns out to be important later on, a living Strange from another universe must inhabit the dead one through a feat called dreamwalking.

Lightening strikes, jaundiced eyes open, and a hand punches through its tomb, clawing its way out before a bellowing a cry of the damned. This movie easily could have been directed by Sam Raimi, which if you didn't know, is 100% the case. If that reference is lost on you, find the lonely guy in your college dorm with the Army of Darkness poster on his wall and he'll happily explain everything. And remember: Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that!?

7 Little Miss Sunshine

The concept of "elderly relative died on a roadtrip, but the destination is too important to bury him" is actually a trope, if you can believe it. It was coined with the death of Aunt Edna in National Lampoon's Vacation in 1983, where the MacGuffin is the thinly veiled Disneyland imitation Walley World. Given that the late Alan Arkin won an Oscar for his role, we've decided instead to feature Little Miss Sunshine.

Grandpa Edwin, the heroin snorting horndog with a heart of gold, spends the first half of the film getting under the skin of everyone in his family, while charming the audience into loving his filter-less outbursts.

When the heroin inevitably takes his life, the family smuggles his body out of a hospital and soldiers on the final two hours to get their daughter, Olive, to her beauty pageant, with dad Greg Kinnear only calling the mortuary once they arrive.

Rest in peace, Alan Arkin.

6 Se7en

Common sense says that any movie with a serial killer could have made this list. While that certainly wasn't the point, Se7enstands out among thrillers as giving particular resonance to the dead bodies left in the wake of John Doe, the killer with a higher calling.

Detectives Mills and Somerset must investigate each murder scene carefully in order to reconstruct not just who killed, but why, in order to prevent him from doing so again. The meticulousness of Doe's crimes, and the varied methods by which he dispatches his victims, make the bodies he leaves behind less a crime and more a creative outlet; a heinous art piece meant to somehow endear himself to God by punishing those guilty of the seven deadly sins with Sysyphisian purpose.

The dead bodies in Se7en are integral to the movie, disturbing though it may be, in addition to putting it in the running for greatest crime thrillers of all time.

5 Pulp Fiction

Poor Phil LaMarr. The Yale grad has had a remarkable career, from original cast member on Mad TV to a staple of voice acting roles, most notably Hermes Conrad from Futurama, although it takes a good fifteen seconds to scroll through his, to date, 544 acting roles on IMDb. Yet he'll probably always be best known as Marvin, the guy who gets his head blown off by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.

The fact that he was killed by an (accidental) headshot in the backseat of Samuel L. Jackson's car provides the premise for a full act of the film, sending them to Jimmy's house and requiring intervention from Harvey Keitel's The Wolf, one of the classically cool, morning tuxedo-wearing characters from the 90s.

Director Quentin Tarantino has relayed that, at the time, he didn't realize he was writing a comedy. But exchanges like the one above, solidifying the ubiquitous vocabulary of a certain Kangol-wearing movie star, based around the rarely-shown corpse cleanup scene, make LaMarr's sacrifice to the comedy gods a worthy one.

4 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Here's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in a nushell: after accidentally peeing on a corpse left in his hotel shower (he discovered it mid-urination), Robert Downey's Jr.'s small-time-crook-turned-actor Harry calls up Gay Perry, the private eye tasked with giving him lessons for his next role. Perry's old hand seems practiced for all occasions, and tells Harry to put on some gloves and wrap up the body to prepare it for disposal.

This leads to them throwing the body off the roof of The Standard Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, and making out in an alleyway to throw off the beat cops who happen upon them. Still at a loss for what "Doris and Lucinda" is a reference to, but watching Tony Stark getting sexually harassed by Iceman has to be the premise of some bizarre rule 34 fan art somewhere on the internet.

3 Stand by Me

Among the classic coming of age tales that continue to inspire the likes of The Sandlot and Stranger Things, is Stand by Me. Early career-makers for Kiefer Sutherland and River Phoenix, and the basis for director Rob Reiner's Castle Rock company name, as the fictional Oregon town in which four boys decide to go on a hike to find a dead body.

Related: 20 Most Beloved Coming-of-Age Films of All Time

At the end of all the classic scenes that make this movie memorable — jumping from the bridge to miss the train, the leeches from the swamp, staring down Ace — in the end, the group of four young friends find the body of Ray Brower just off the tracks near the back Harlow Road, like they'd heard. The reality of the situation hits Gordie especially hard, and for the first time, he takes the time to mourn the loss of his older brother, Denny.

Stand by Me may be the only movie on this list that shows a dead body, but doesn't play it for laughs, for frights, or for gore. Ray Brower is the only honest corpse on this list. He was alive, and now he isn't. That's the only part he plays; it's up to each of the kids where inside themselves to pack that.

2 Weekend at Bernie's

The O.G. The one and only. The alpha and omega, there have been imitators, but this is the originator: Weekend at Bernie's.

It was the heyday of the Don LaFontaine trailer voice and buttoning the top button of your shirt without a tie. Larry and Richard are invited to their boss' place on the beach. Gangsters kill him, because. They tie a dead man's leg to their legs because it makes more sense than going to the cops. Then just think of every silly place they could drag a dead body to. The rest of the movie is waiting with bated breath to spot Bernie, like a Dr. Suess story: this is Bernie water-skiing. This is Bernie hot-air ballooning. This is Bernie's gymnastics routine.

Somehow the two stars, Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman ooze strong Ross and Chandler energy, but some five years before Friends even aired. It also legitimately, no irony, totally earnestly has like one or two good laughs.

1 Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock's best known feature, resplendent with some of the most iconic images of filmmaking, is the classic horror film Psycho. Perfectly executed, the disjointed plot moves from character to character, giving even the narrative a frenetic jumpiness, completely devoid of comfort.

While there are several dead bodies throughout the film, it's the reveal at the end that Mrs. Bates, the suspected executioner of beautiful Marion Crane and Arbogast, the detective sent to investigate, has actually been dead the entire time, and her body is nothing more than a rotted skeleton in a frock and a wig. Norman, her shy, obsequious son, has been the culprit all along, though he acts out the killings in a perverse fantasy while dressed up like his mother.

The movie's visuals are haunting, from the knife stabbing in the shower, to the swaying, bare light bulb on Mrs. Bates' body, to the disturbing final shot of Norman looking into camera, his mind lost, evil and completely Psycho.

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