Necrophilia in Popular Culture - Necrophilia in Fiction

Necrophilia in Fiction

Romantic connections between love and death are a frequent theme in Western artistic expression.

• In the Greek legend of the Trojan War, the Greek hero Achilles slays the Amazon queen Penthesilea in a duel. Upon removing her helmet and seeing her face, Achilles falls in love with her and mourns her death. The soldier Thersites openly ridicules Achilles and accuses him of necrophilia. Achilles responds by promptly killing Thersites with a single blow. (In some traditions, Thersites' accusation is not unfounded — Achilles was so stricken by Penthesilea's beauty that he could not control his lust for her, even after her death.)
• In Cormac McCarthy's Child of God (1973), protagonist Lester Ballard finds a dead couple in a car, and carries the female corpse back to his cabin to have sex with it. After losing the corpse in a fire, he begins murdering women to create dead female sex partners for himself.
• In James Welch's novel Fools Crow, the character Yellow Kidney has sex with a young girl's corpse before realizing that the girl is dead.
• In Stephen King's novel Under the Dome, Junior Rennie murders a woman whom he hates and has intercourse with her dead body.
• Georges Bataille's novella Story of the Eye ends with the main characters performing perverse and sacrilegious sexual acts on a passive priest, who is raped and strangled to death as he climaxes. After murdering him, the characters continue to perform sexual acts with his dismembered eyeball.
• In Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, the protagonist has intercourse with his wife, though unbeknownst to him, she is dead. Another character in this novel is a necrophile paramedic.
• Edgar Allan Poe once described the death of a beautiful young woman to be one of the most beautiful images. (By this, he was not saying that it is a good thing for young women to die; to him melancholy and pain were sources of beauty.) Also, his poem "Annabel Lee" includes, towards the end, possible necrophilic imagery.
• Algernon Swinburne wrote a frankly necrophilic poem, "The Leper", in which a man keeps the body of his former lover in his house: "Love bites and stings me through, to see/Her keen face made of sunken bones./Her worn-off eyelids madden me,/That were shot through with purple once."
• Oscar Wilde's play, Salome is based on the Biblical story of a Judean princess who performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for the Tetrarch, Herod, in exchange for the head of John the Baptist. When Salome finally receives the Christian prophet's head, she addresses it in an erotic monologue that has highly suggestive necrophiliac overtones. Various artistic depictions of the story, particularly in the work of Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley, also hint at this subtext.
• In Christopher Moore's novel, Bloodsucking Fiends, when the police find the vampire Jody in Tommy's freezer, they think it's a dead body he's hiding so they send her to the morgue. The man working there is a necrophile and nearly molests her before she wakes up, giving him a heart attack that leads to his death. (She tucks his erection away so when he's found no one will suspect his dirty secret.)
• In C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s short story "The Loved Dead", the protagonist's actions revolve around his misunderstood feelings towards dead people. It starts with his own grandfather and progresses on toward necrophilia and becoming a serial killer to satisfy his desires.
• In Poppy Z. Brite's novel, Exquisite Corpse, the protagonist is a necrophile and serial killer. He explains his behavior as a compensation for loneliness.
• Richard Brautigan's novel Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 features a coroner who speaks openly of his attraction to female corpses, though he denies having intercourse with them.
• In the video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, there is a mission in which the player must anger a creature called a Dremora into attacking. When the creature finally snaps, it threatens to rape the player's remains, mockingly promising that it will "be gentle." In the sequel, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, there is a character named Falanu Hlaalu, an alchemist in the city of Skingrad who rather suspiciously asks if you know the fine for necrophilia in Cyrodiil. If you choose to tell her the fine, the character asks if it is a first offense, and Falanu answers "Let's assume, no." When she hears the fine itself, which is 500 gold, she says enthusiastically: "That's nothing compared to Morrowind. Thanks." Other characters living in the city note that they have seen her in the graveyard with an odd smile on her face.
• In The Secret Texts Trilogy by Holly Lisle, Andrew Sabir of the Hellspawn Trinity often rapes the corpses of the dead before his cousin, Crispin, buries them in his famous garden. Crispin and Anwyn, who are the other members of the Trinity, find this habit of his disgusting, and make that known even in their introduction. Often, Andrew's victims are children, as the energy of children, especially little girls, is considered by those who practice both Wolf and Dragon magic to be the purest.
• A character in the video games Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, the real estate mogul Donald Love, is a cannibal and most likely a necrophile. The player has do various tasks for Love, including fetching corpses for him. He is also said to attend so-called "morgue parties". In "Grand Theft Auto IV" the player meets a character named "Eddie Low" who is a serial killer, cannibal and necrophiliac, twice. The first time, he asks for a ride to the docks, where he disposes of a victim. The second time, the player character insults him, and Eddie attacks with a knife, intending to have sex with the player character's remains. The player is forced to kill Eddie.
• In Hideo Yamamoto's original Manga of Ichi the Killer, the crime scene cleaner Inoue is depicted as a necrophile, and shown in silhouette having sex with the corpse of a 17-year-old girl whilst his coworkers prepare to bury her.
• In the Quantic Dream game Fahrenheit (also known as The Indigo Prophecy), a sex scene between Lucas Kane and Carla Valenti occurs after Kane's resurrection, albeit before his death. Valenti remarks that he is very cold.
• In the webcomic The Order of the Stick (#446, Hell of a Job), minion Tsukiko informs the undead lich Xykon that, "I love the undead... I mean I really LOVE the undead." Tsukiko is met with repulsion from Xykon, who protests that he is "not one of those disgusting biophiliacs". Nevertheless, Tsukiko continues her attempts to seduce him.
• Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of the novel and film American Psycho, is depicted as engaging in acts of necrophilia, with bodies and parts of them.
• In Japanese manga and anime, the topic is many times present in the Ero guro sub-genre.
• In the first chapter of Kaori Yuki's manga, Ludwig Revolution, Blanche discovers Prince Ludwig is a necrophile when she finds all the corpses in his bedroom.
• In F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, the ending actually involves a case of "reverse necrophilia" with Sgt. Becket being sexually assaulted by the technically dead Alma's corporeal body, glimpses of which he gets flashes of while hallucinating a battle with an apparition of a squadmate gone mad.
• In Barbara Gowdy's short story "We Seldom Look on Love", a main character is depeicted as a necrophile. Her lover is forced to take his life to be involved with her.
• Under writer Geoff Johns, Green Lantern villain Black Hand was reimagined as a necrophile.
• In Angela Carter's short story "The Snow Child" (published in The Bloody Chamber), the Count rapes the corpse of the girl.
• In William Falkner's "A Rose for Emily" suggests possible necrophilia with Homer.
• The 2011 video game L.A. Noire features a fictional necrophiliac named John Ferdinand Jamison. In the case "The Studio Secretary Murder," Ferdinand confesses to kissing and putting lipstick on the corpse of murder victim Evelyn Summers, much to the disgust of the player, Cole Phelps', partner, Rusty Galloway, who punches Jamison in the face two separate times.