No Dead Body Poops

Be warned: This page contains some serious Squick material!

"See, say what you like about us British, we're punctual and clean - none of this shitting-out-our-internal-organs-in-a-screaming-blubbering-heap for us. No, we just lay down and die, in neat piles." —Charlie Brooker, commenting on Survivors

"That's what people do after they die - they wet and shit themselves. They never do show you that part in movies but maybe that's because it wouldn't be as poetic. Can you imagine if Simba's father shit himself after he died?" —Ask That Guy With The Glasses

People die, for whatever reason. Some die a natural death, some get killed, some kill themselves, but still dead is dead. A natural occurrence is after all is said and done, is that someone tries to retrieve the body of the dead person. However, biology does not stop at death. Muscles control the retention of wastes in the bladder and the rectum, and these muscles relax soon after death. If the rectum or bladder happens to be occupied at the moment of death, the result in Real Life is the people who find the body wishing the dead person had worn brown trousers (and wishing they had brought a gas mask).

Girls and women are far more likely to soil themselves in death, as females typically urinate using gravity, while males have to use muscle movement.

In fiction, this practically never occurs. Therefore, we have a case of No Dead Body Poops, where the death scene is almost always much much much less nasty than it could be in real life. This is not surprising, given that most people are not aware someone dying can be a crapshoot.

Even rarer than the post-mortem evacuation in fiction is recognizing the fact that serious abdominal injuries - gut shootings/stabbings and the like - can often let out what's supposed to stay in.

For examples of living people whose biological functions of this type aren't shown, see the Super-Trope Nobody Poops.

No examples of this trope being played entirely straight are listed below. We're not interested in having a huge list of every character dying without soiling themselves.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of No Dead Body Poops include:

Anime and Manga

• In Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam novels, a female character is described as losing control of her bowels while suffering a particularly violent death. Interestingly, she also seems to suffer a psychic version of this effect & begins uncontrollably broadcasting her worst memories into Amuro's mind in her death throes.
• Referenced in the Rurouni Kenshin manga when Jin-e tries to kill Kaoru by paralyzing her lungs, talking about how asphyxiation was an "ugly way to go", describing how Kaoru's body would salivate and release her urine and bowels as she died.
• In Yomigaeru Sora Rescue Wings an earthquake victim suffers from crush syndrome and is shown losing control of her bladder as she dies.
• The female characters of Queens Blade are frequently seen wetting themselves in fear and pain, and also when they are killed.
• Both installments of Yoshitora's manga Brain Eater avert this trope; numerous schoolgirls are killed by giant insects which invade a girls' high school, and almost all of the girls urinate upon their deaths, with some of them defecating as well.
• Averted in Blood-C, where beautiful, elegant Kanako is killed via an Impromptu Tracheotomy, and her body is shown twitching and urinating as she dies.

Comic Books

• Empowered, though it's not shown in panel.

I wasn't a superhero back then, okay? I was… I was just a little girl… and watched my daddy fall on the floor and shudder and groan and ████ himself and then die.

• On two separate occasions in Preacher (Comic Book), a man is hanged, and on both of them, the corpse visibly voids its bowels. On one of them, a man who doesn't know better was standing under the body.
• on Johnny the Homicidal Maniac's twitter account he acknowledged it at least three times, one time being about how they pissed themselves though.

Fan Works

• Trivia and AKK's Fanfics will mention this. Not so shocking when you consider the fanfic writers themselves. Both have medical backgrounds and are known for their brutally frank exploration of things floated under the radar...including the obvious.
• There's a Fallout 2 fanfic where Lara (the chick from the Den) goes up to fight against Lo Pan, hand to hand. After Lo Pan defeats her, he pulls out a handgun (which is canon, by the way) and blows off half of Lara's face. As she lies on the ground dying, she releases her urine and bowels "in a stream of semi-solid brown matter".
• Tiberium Wars doesn't shy away from this (War Is Hell being a central theme) with several scenes mentioning the stench of "corpse-shit" from the bodies littering the urban battlefields.

Film

• The Golgothan Shit Demon from the movie Dogma is a demon created from this exact excrement. Golgotha was the place where Christ was crucified so obviously it's made from the build up of hundreds of crucified criminals in a cursed place but on the other hand it was where Christ was crucified too so, while never stated, it might quite literally be "Holy Shit".
• A related example is from the film Point Of No Return, the American Remake of La Femme Nikita, where Maggie urinates after being given a lethal injection.
• In Repo! The Genetic Opera, after finishing disemboweling his latest victim, the victim's waste is emptied onto Nathan Wallace's shoes, as far as we can tell from his expression and the subtle sound effect.
• In Phantasm, after a girl is killed by the silver sphere, a pool of pale urine slowly spreads across the floor from her legs.
• The Takashi Miike film Visitor Q shows the father having sex with the corpse of a young female coworker. The movements cause the dead woman's urine and feces to flow out of her. The father is initially surprised at the moistness of the woman's genitals, commenting on how dead women could still get wet. When he discovers her feces flowing out of her, however, he realizes with mild disgust that her body had released her bowels; doesn't stop him however, as he keeps going.
• In The Human Centipede, which is already teeming with Body Horror, this occurs upon the death of one of the victims. Too bad that victim's anus is sewn to another's mouth.
• In the psychological thriller Jinro Game, the girls who are killed release their urine from their bodies as they die.
• Kate Hudson voids her bladder in The Killer Inside Me after Casey Affleck beats her to death.
• Averted in the 1994 thriller Sensation, where detective Ron Perlson describes a murder scene to Kari and states that the naked young victim released her bowels as she was strangled to death.

Literature

• In Robert A. Heinlein's novel Friday, the heroine explains to her friends in graphic detail exactly why they do not want to drag a dead cop to their secret hiding place (which is accessible only through the hot tub).
• In Salman Rushdie's short story Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship, one of the dirty jobs Isabella gives Columbus is cleaning up the bodies of dead soldiers for burial, and the fact that they're wearing (usually full) diapers under their uniforms is mentioned.
• Tamora Pierce averts this some of the time, such as when one of the teenage gang members is strangled in Street Magic.
  • Also mentioned in Squire, where Kel knows she's fatally wounded a centaur because of the stink that alerts her to damaged (human) intestines. She ends up having to perform a Mercy Kill because no healer can cure a "belly wound".
  • Also the description of the garroting of Luca Brazzi.
  • David Weber also makes reference to this in Safehold, when "the stink of voided bowels" follows a character being killed.
• This is referenced in Mission Earth series by L. Ron Hubbard. It is one of the alien invaders who are attempting to turn the world's population homosexual uses it to argue that this means the sphincter is central to life.
• In Bryce Courtenay's book Tommo And Hawk this is used to confirm a character is dead.
• In The Witcher novel, when Ciri's team gets slaughtered by a Psycho for Hire, he makes her take a look at the bodies "See, that's how people die. In their own piss."
• Averted in the Japanese novel Vivid Creations, when Saeko is drowned in a pool; she defecates upon her death, and her body is discovered with her voided feces floating around her. Haruka is later fatally shot, and as she slumps against a wall and dies, a pool of her yellow urine is mentioned to be spreading across the ground from under her skirt, gradually tingeing red with her blood.
• Averted when Averil dies in the novel Omni, where a group of teenagers control characters in a deadly survival video game via mental link; her character is brutally slain, and Averil herself is killed by the violent neural feedback. When her teammates open the door to her pod, they discover her dead body slumped in a pool of her own excrement.
• Averted when Junior in Under the Dome strangles Angie and Dodee to death; the girls' bodies release their bowels as they die.
• In Making Money Moist von Lipwig has just, for intents and purposes, inherited the Royal Bank after its president passed away. He's trying out the bed in the suite provided, noticing that it feels all warm and squishy, then immediately shoots up and asks where his predecessor died. He's informed she died at her desk, sitting in her chair (which has since been replaced).
• The Ender's Game companion, Ender's Shadow, averts this, as Achilles talks about how Poke voided her bladder and bowels as she died.
• The Gentleman Bastard Sequence features a scene where young Locke and the twins end up buying a corpse from the day's hanging (long story) and Locke is annoyed that he had to be downwind of the corpse because ... well.
• Somewhat averted in BattleTech's Warrior trilogy, where Dr. Lear at one point goes into some detail on just what treating a soldier with abdominal injuries means for both the patient and the medics. No, she's not a fan of war at all.
• In his Island in The Sea of Time and Emberverse series, S. M. Stirling often describes people as "voiding" when they die, and battlefields smelling like sewers.
• In Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers. Divine is described as voiding herself quite graphically after her miserable death from tuberculosis. The author doesn't shy away from the subjects of various bodily functions (even when one might want him to) and it's not a terribly romantic scene.
• In The Dark Sleep, Escott first realized that his acting-troupe colleagues ... all 12 of them had been murdered when he catches the scent of blood, urine and excrement at the crime scene. He recognizes the significance of this, because he'd smelled the same thing during his WWI military service.
• In Chris Ryan's Strikeback, the Hezbollah mention that the reason they're starving their captive Kate is so that she does not defecate when she's executed.
• Averted in the Michael Crichton book Prey, when in the beginning a person in a hospital is dying next to the bed of a small boy. The curtain's are drawn during the dramatic death, but the boy can still smell the bowels being emptied.
• Averted in The Riftwar Cycle; the stink of the bowels being voided is often mentioned when someone dies.
• Not quite dealing with post-mortem defecation, but corpses in The Things They Carried are mentioned as belching as they are loaded onto carts.
• Averted in Spider Robinson's Callahan's Legacy, when a character talks about a knife fight he had when he was younger. He specifically mentions that he knew, intellectually, what was going on, but becomes shocked and physically ill when he gets feces on his hand after stabbing someone in the abdomen.
• Implied aversion in the Xeelee Sequence story Raft. One character sees "a shape hanging from rope" and "a pool of something brown and thick" beneath it.
• One of the CSI: Miami tie-in novels averts it, the corpse is found in a car trunk and a 'number 3' is referred to, then it's explained.
• In George Hutton's Zapotec, a thirteen-year-old virgin girl urinates and defecates as she is killed on an altar as a live sacrifice, forcing the priests to stall the ceremony to clean up her underparts so as to offer a "dignified sacrifice".
• In James Thompson's Lucifer's Tears, when the cops discover the dead body of Iisa Filippov lying on a hotel bed, they also note that she had voided her bowels in her death, as the sheets under her thighs and buttocks were stained with her urine and feces.
• In the novel The Other Side of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon, Noelle is given an enema before her execution to prevent her defecating in death after she is killed. However, she still urinates as she is shot dead by the firing squad.
• Averted in Seishirou Terumi's novels; Etsuko wets herself as she is beaten to death by gang members. Chihiro voids both her bladder and bowels as she is electrocuted; her urine and feces are described as running down her legs as she convulses with the electric shocks.
• In Mark Baker's Cops, the protagonist pulls a dying young girl out of the wreckage of a massive car accident. The girl urinates as she dies, soaking his arms and uniform.

Live Action TV

• The League of Gentlemen does this with a bunch of people who died when the air supply to their bondage suits was cut off. When the suits are opened... eugh!
• Actually played for humor in Supernatural, believe it or not. Sam is stuck in a Groundhog Day Loop where Dean dies (in various, hilarious ways) every day. Sam is aware of the repeating days; Dean is not. Sam tries to explain that in another version of that day, Dean got hit by a car and killed:

Dean: And? Sam: And what? Dean: Did it look cool like in the movies? Sam: You peed yourself. Dean (defensively): Of course I peed myself. Man gets hit by a car, you think he has full control over his bladder? Come on!

• One episode of Twin Peaks had Agent Cooper mention this fact, but never actually depicted it.
• Happens in Six Feet Under when a character is transporting a corpse back to the morgue and has to clean it up later.
• In the House episode "97 Seconds", a clinic patient (and later, House himself) poops after deliberately electrocuting himself in order to have a Near Death Experience.
• On NCIS, the presence of urine on a carpet provided the first confirmation of an eyewitness's claim she'd seen a murder through her window. McGee explains this trope to account for it.
• In an episode of Action, director Titus Scroad drowns face down in his pool. When Peter and Uncle Lonny go to investigate, Lonny muses on the possibility that he might not be dead, because "people usually shit their pants when they die". Then he sees "the turd in question".
• Discussed in an episode of Game of Thrones: King Robert mentions how "they don't put that in the songs" during a conversation with Ser Barristan. Robert himself is nearly disemboweled a few episodes later and while lying on his deathbed mentions how it "stinks like death".
• Mentioned in the pilot episode of Tales from the Crypt. A prison executioner (William Sadler) muses on the impending end of a death-row inmate's life and decides that the man will probably soil himself when he dies in the electric chair.
• Not involving death, but still extremely egregious. In one episode of The Job, Mike is suffering a severe Potty Emergency when a criminal body-checks him into the bathroom wall, knocking him on his ass and unconscious. By all reasonable logic, this should have caused him to shit his pants.

Theatre

• Referenced (sort of) in Waiting for Godot, except it's about the penile sphincter rather than the anal one.

Vladimir: What do we do now? Estragon: Wait. Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting. Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection. Estragon: (highly excited). An erection! Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that? Estragon: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

• • Postmortem erections, by the way, are known as "angel lust," and occur when a body dies in an upright position. Gravity causes the person's blood to pool in his lower extremities, which causes the feet and legs to swell along with... the obvious.

Video Games

• In World of Warcraft, one of the bosses alludes to this as he dies:

Forgemaster Garfrost yells: Garfrost hope giant underpants clean. Save boss great shame. For later.

• In the online flash game Don't Shit Your Pants, the goal is to... well... If you kill yourself, you appear to succeed at first, but then this trope comes into play.
• Averted in Yume Miru Kusuri, of all games. This occurs when Aeka and Kouhei strangle Kyoka to death...or try to. Considering Kyoka actually survives (if barely, and thanks to this trope), it might not count.
• When investigating a murder victim in LA Noire the coroner will refer to the usual evacuation smell.
• Some of the shown deaths in Kara no Shoujo, particularly those of Tsuzuriko and Orihime, avert this (though only for the latter if Reiji dies alongside her).
• The patient in Trauma Center doesn't die, but one of them has a hole in her intestines that is, essentially, leaking shit into her blood and poisoning her to death; you have to remove some of it from the liver and then patch the hole.
• The three female protagonists of the shooting game CrackleCradle often soil themselves when they are killed. Nana and Yuki, in particular, are almost always seen urinating and defecating when they die.
• In the horror survival game Demonophobia, the protagonist Sakuri is often shown urinating after she is killed by the numerous brutal enemies and traps in the levels.
• It's mentioned in Laura Bow and the Dagger of Amon Ra that several victims have "additional wet marks", which Laura declines to touch.
• Many of the female characters in the fighting game engine MUGEN urinate upon their deaths.

Web Original

• Also referenced in Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure Abridged, when Dio considers removing Jotaro's pants to see if he's really dead because "After all, they say after you die, you do sh*t yourself."
• VG Cats example here.
• A fan-edit for Puella Magi Madoka Magica crossed over with Hidamari Sketch showed this happening to Mami/Miyako. Note that this did not happen in the actual episode.

Western Animation

• Averted in South Park as a Running Gag in Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes.
  • In another episode, specifically as a Call Back to the above, it was an indication that a major character, Chef, had been Killed Off for Real. Cartman says "The last thing you do before you die is crap your.."- cue poop. Also see, Crosses the Line Twice.
  • To the point where it's now become a running gag to show a dead body unceremoniously letting out loud fart sounds to purposely ruin the drama going on.
• Refered to in one episode of Family Guy. When Quagmire is playing dead to be rid of a woman, Peter attempts to confirm it by shouting "You know what'll prove it? When people die, they void their bowels. I said, when people die they void their bowels!" Quagmire sells it. Peter then makes fun of him for it.
  • In the season 3 episode, "Death Lives", Death told Peter he soiled himself when lightning struck him.
  • Also, when Peter takes first aid, he runs to assist someone (who's perfectly fine), freaking them out when he insists he has to check if they've soiled themselves.
  • Brian comments that Bertram voided his bowels upon being killed by Stewie.

Real Life

• Some Samurai would fast before a battle so that "their bodies would not pass dirt upon death" in order to avert this trope.
• Any mother who ever used the Stock Phrase "Always wear clean underwear, because it'll be shameful if you get run over by a car and are found to have been wearing dirty undies when you died". Er, hate to break this to you Mom, but, as Bill Cosby said in reference to mothers insisting that their children wear clean underwear in case they get in a car accident: "First you think it, then you say it, then you do it." He did come up with a workaround in that most mothers say "Have a clean pair of undies" when invoking this phrase, all he needs is to have them stored in the glove compartment.
• The classic joke where the condemned orders fiber muffins for their last meal. Think about it...
• Not death, but one of the (several) reasons patients scheduled to undergo surgery are often instructed to fast beforehand is if their operation requires the administration of a muscle-relaxant that will affect the anal sphincter. This is also cause to pity obstetricians, since the baby's head emerging from the birth canal compresses the lower intestine, like a tube of toothpaste (squeezed from the bottom, no less.)
  • More likely reasons are to avoid regurgitation/inhalation of vomit, and to have the operating zone reasonably clean in cases of intestinal surgery.
• Some places in the United States where capital punishment is still practiced place the condemned in an adult diaper.
• When the killers were about to be hanged for the Clutter family murders in Truman Capote's non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, one of them kept asking to use the bathroom because they wanted to avoid this. They had to be told no matter how much you get out before you die, it will still happen.
• When a programmer says that their computer, program, or operating system "shit the bed," they mean that the computer/program/operating system crashed horribly. The phrase comes from this trope.