A dead animal is used to foreshadow that our main characters are in danger or are about to be confronted with horrors of all kinds. This helps set up the tone for the rest of the work to follow. This can happen at the beginning of the work or elsewhere; if it happens almost immediately before things go bad, it qualifies as Five-Second Foreshadowing.
The animal in question will frequently be a deer (or a Sinister Deer Skull), a sheep, or a lamb, as part of Subverted Innocence since both deers and lambs are associated with innocence. Occasionally a dead bird, like doves and pigeons will be used for a similar effect. In terms of birds, this trope usually includes Circling Vultures and Flies Equals Evil, as they're coming to consume the animal corpses. That said, any dead animal will do if it's used to create an ominous and foreboding atmosphere and is followed by the danger or horror manifesting in some way. In addition, the animal used will likely have some metaphorical or symbolic connection to the main characters.
Compare Dead Animal Warning, when a character deliberately sends another an animal carcass as an explicit threat. See also This Way to Certain Death and Ribcage Ridge. Compare Desert Skull, which may overlap if the skull in question belongs to an animal rather than a person. Canary in a Coal Mine is a related supertrope, though, despite the title, it doesn't just refer to animals, and the animal in question is usually not sent to the place deliberately to sense danger as in that trope.
When a character intentionally harming an animal is used to characterize them as being cruel, evil, and antagonistic, that's Bad People Abuse Animals (though sometimes an animal that dies this way may qualify under this trope). If killing the animal itself is what causes problems, see Laser-Guided Karma and Disproportionate Retribution. Compare and contrast Evil-Detecting Dog, though the invocation of this trope may be one reason why the bad guys kill the dog.
Given the spoiler nature of this trope, the page is Spoilers Off. You've been warned.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure into the Underworld: Shortly after Doraemon and gang, with their new friend Miyoko, made it to the Demon Planet, they try navigating their way through the planet's plains to locate Demon Lord Demaon's fortress, passing a skeleton of a random demon at the plains' edge (with Doraemon randomly remarking it's easy to get lost in the plains and that could be their fate). After spending half a day travelling until it's nightfall, they unexpectedly pass the same skeleton again, leading to the gang realizing the plains itself is alive — they've been Going in Circles and utterly failed their search. Then comes the flesh-eating monsters infesting the plains at dusk...
- Ie Naki Ko Remi: When Remi and Capi are searching for Vitalis, they find the corpses of his dogs after they're mauled by Savage Wolves...and then the dying body of Vitalis himself.
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, it's not uncommon for the villain to kill a dog before dealing with the heroes to show how much of a threat they are, especially in Stardust Crusaders. In one instance of the aforementioned part, the gang finds that a dog randomly died in the middle of the night. It was the doing of Mannish Boy, who kills people in their dreams. Of course, Mannish Boy targets the gang next, and when everyone falls asleep, he attacks them.
Comic Books
- Lanfeust: At the start of their journey to Eckmül, the protagonists discover the carcass of a blue Loss whose teeth marks indicate that it was killed by a troll. Naturally, the troll in question attacks them a few scenes later.
Fan Works
- Sonic.exe: Tails comes across animal carcasses scattering the area, and shortly afterwards, he runs into X, who murders him. It's implied that X may have killed all those forest critters.
- Witching Hour: While Gaz is out on one of her hunts, her hunting hounds disappear and are found dead soon after, along with the bodies of multiple cows as a prelude to her being found in the middle of a satanic ritual surrounded by parts of slaughtered cows, which is part of Zim's plan to frame her as a witch.
Film — Live-Action
- The Bay kicks off with a montage of news reports on millions of fish and seabirds turning up dead across the coast. Soon after, the documentarians assembling this footage trace the rash of deaths back to the town of Claridge, which is currently experiencing its own inexplicable plague, with the tension rapidly escalating as the symptoms become more and more concerning.
- The Blair Witch Project: Early in the student filmmakers' journey into the Black Hills woods, Heather happens to get some random footage of a dead mouse and jokingly wonders if it was killed by witchcraft. Soon after, the filmmakers find themselves haunted by strange noises in the middle of the night and end up getting completely lost...
- The Descent: The women see a dead deer as they're approaching the cavern from where they're about to go caving, in which they will become trapped and all likely die. There's also a dead bear in the cave itself. The Descent Part 2 revealed the dead deer has plot significance, as one of the sacrifices made for the Crawlers by the villagers. Whether this is canon or not to the first film is ambiguous.
- Evil Dead (2013): While David and Eric are searching in the basement to find out what smells down there, they come across some dead cats hanging from the ceiling. This shows that the people from the prologue had been here. The men saw the book wrapped in a trash bag and barbed wire. Eric is tempted to find out.
- Get Out (2017): The first major jump scare in the film is Chris accidentally hitting a deer that jumped into the middle of the road with his car on the way to his girlfriend Rose's parent's house, killing it. When he leaves his car to check on the deer, the camera lingers, panning between Chris and the deer. What Chris thought was just going to be a potentially uncomfortable first-time meeting with his girlfriend's family (he's black, she's white) turns into Chris fighting for his life as he uncovers the Armitages' cabal, who kidnap black people to Brain Transplant white people's consciousnesses into their bodies.
- Godzilla Minus One: What heralds Godzilla's appearance are several decompressed and bloated schools of deep sea fish. Koichi experiences this first-hand when Godzilla arrives on Odo Island, and later, he sees several decompressed fishes on the surface that indicated that Godzilla is nearby.
- Hereditary:
- Early in the movie, a bird flies into the window while Charlie is sitting in class in a Jump Scare and presumably breaks its neck. Charlie then goes down and cuts its head off, which has a more literal role in Foreshadowing the involvement of the cult, as Paimon is symbolized by a bird and Charlie makes a Paimon figurine with the bird's head.
- A Five-Second Foreshadowing version occurs when, stoned and rushing to get Charlie to the hospital as she suffers from a severe allergic reaction to nuts, Peter swerves his car to avoid hitting a dead deer in the middle of the road. This leads to Charlie, who had her head hanging out the window to get some fresh air, being decapitated by a light pole. The family proceeds to break down and spiral because of the tragedy, and then strange, horrific, and supernatural happenings begin to plague the family, including Demonic Possession and Cults.
- Re-Animator: Dan finds his poor cat Rufus dead in a refrigerator. Later, Rufus becomes the first creature we see re-animated by Herbert West's re-agent, foreshadowing the further escalation of Herbert West's experiments.
- Slither: Starla goes down the basement to see what her husband Grant was hiding. She finds a bunch of dead animals there and learns that Grant was infected by an alien parasite in an attempt to become his breeder.
- Sissy (2022): After a first act where everything seems to be looking up for Cecilia (she reunites with Emma, she gets on well with Fran and Emma's new friends, she gets invited to Emma's hen), the camera lingers on a dead animal in the road as Cecilia drives past with a happy car. It's Five-Second Foreshadowing in a way because things immediately turn bad for Cecilia as Fran announces that Alex - Cecilia's enemy who Cecilia stabbed in the face - is going to the hen, too But things get a lot worse from there, and everybody but Cecilia dies.
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974: One of the first shots of the movie is a dead armadillo before the audience is introduced to Sally Hardesty, her brother Franklin, and their friends Kirk, Pam, and Jerry. They are going to visit the grave of Sally and Franklin's deceased grandfather when they encounter Leatherface and his brothers Drayton and Nubbins Sawyer who are all murderous cannibals.
- Train to Busan: The film opens with a deer getting run over, presumably to death. The deer then proceeds to stand, obviously undead. This hints at the Zombie Apocalypse that ravages South Korea for the rest of the film.
- The Village: The discovery of a dead, skinned animal sets in motion a series of events that will cause Ivy Walker to learn the secret of the remote village she lives in, that it is not the early 1700s, and that the creatures they fear who keep them from straying from the village are a fiction by the elders.
- The VVitch:
- After Caleb and Thomasin are separated in the woods when the family dog chases after a hare (which is heavily implied to be the witch or a familiar), Caleb comes upon the dog's disemboweled body. Shortly thereafter, he finds the witch's hovel, where she proceeds to seduce him...and probably more.
- William boards up Thomasin and the twins in the goat pen, but the witch enters the pen that night. When William wakes up the next morning, he discovers that the boards have been torn away, Thomasin is outside unconscious, the twins have disappeared, and the goats are mangled and dead. Shortly thereafter, he's gored by the goat Black Phillip and dies. Thomasin kills her mother Katherine soon after in self-defense when she snaps, accuses Thomasin of being the witch, and tries to kill her.
Literature
- American Gods: After getting separated from Mr. Wednesday in the woods, Shadow stumbles upon a raven eating a deer carcass. The raven then tells him to go to Cairo, Illinois. It's one of Mr. Wednesday's (aka Odin's) ravens and the dead deer foreshadows Odin's plans for a war between the gods, which includes sacrificing Shadow in the process.
- Making Money: Discussed. Moist von Lipwig is mentioned to always be uneasy around skulls, and that this is hardwired into human beings, "because a) whatever turned that skull into a skull might still be around and you should head for a tree now, and b) skulls look like they're having a laugh at one's expense."
- Early in the Dead Space novel Martyr, a young boy in Chicxulub is walking along the beach when he discovers a strange carcass washing up on the shore. And then the carcass starts moving. This marks humanity's first encounter with the Necromorphs.
- Slade House: Early in the novel, young Nathan Bishop stumbles upon the body of a dead cat in the alleyway outside Slade House. Soon after, he and his mother are ushered inside the House and into the clutches of the Grayer Twins, the chapter ending with Nathan's soul being devoured to keep the twins from aging for another nine years.
- Early in A Song of Ice and Fire, the Stark family comes across a direwolf (which happens to be the symbol of their family) that has been stabbed by an antler. This foretells Ned Stark's death at the hands of King Joffrey, the heir of the Baratheon family, whose sigil is a stag, and the war that follows that separates, kills, and brings chaos and destruction to several members of the Stark family.
- The Thrawn Trilogy: Han isn't exactly displeased to find that one of the vicious claw-birds that have been harassing them is dead. But it hasn't been eaten, meaning it was killed by something intelligent rather than a mere predator, and Chewbacca finds the lethal wound under one wing, which could only have been inflicted while its wings were open; it was killed in flight by a single stab. Which adds up to the native inhabitants being very dangerous indeed. Although it turns out not to have been them, but instead a concealed force of Noghri bodyguards protecting Han's party.
Han: You're right, they're not going to need reinforcements.
- The Twisted Ones: The narrator's first sign that there's true danger in the woods is when she finds a crucified, mutilated deer carcass with wind chimes in its chest cavity and an inverted skull for a head. She reports it to the police and later has nightmares about it, and then she sees it walking...
Live-Action TV
- The Brittas Empire:
- In "We All Fall Down", Brittas' attempts to rush the World Peace and Hunger ceremony lead to a flock of doves being burned to death by a pilot light in front of a line of children. Mere seconds later, the pilot light burns through a power line, which ends managing to electrocute the children severely enough that they end up in intensive care.
- In "Surviving Christmas", whilst the staff are out in the wilderness of Wales, Colin mentions passing by a dead sheep three times. This incident precedes the staff getting properly lost in the wilderness and the eventual deaths of Kipper "B" Brown and Warwick Newmark.
- In "Curse of the Tiger Women", a Gypsy Curse placed on Brittas' cooking leads to a mass flock of birds dropping dead outside of the leisure centre. Not only does it precede the centre's final destruction to marsh gas, but a dying goose knocking Brittas unconscious turns out to be the action that both snaps him out of and reveals the true setting of the series.
- Chernobyl: At the end of the first episode, as the town of Pripyat goes about its usual business, unaware of the contamination in the air from the destroyed nuclear reactor core nearby, a bird drops out of the sky, gasping for its last breath. This foreshadows all the illness and death that will be caused by exposure to the radiation, including for main characters Legasov and Shcherbina.
- Dark (2017): Birds falling from the sky is a regular occurrence in the series, and in one episode, a flock of 33 dead sheep has been found. These mysterious animal deaths began to happen in October of 1953, 1986 and 2019, a few weeks before the events of season 1 and before the lives of most characters generally go downhill. As it turns out, the animal deaths are caused by opening a time travel passage.
- Medium: In the Cold Open of "An Everlasting Love", the serial killer's next victim finds her dog dead. She's then called by a guy who slowly reveals that he knew about her dog's death; she then finds a corpse in her closet and is kidnapped by the Serial Killer.
- Moon Knight (2022): During a flashback to Marc Spector's childhood, he and his younger brother Randall find the skeleton of a bird shortly before Randall drowns in a flash flood.
- Yellowjackets:
- On the morning they go to Nationals, Misty watches a rat drown in her swimming pool. Her Lack of Empathy and dispassionate response foreshadow that she's about to become one of the brutal cultists when they get stranded in the wilderness.
- When the team hikes through the woods early in their stranding, they see a dead animal. Taissa asks Coach Ben how it could've happened and he tells her that "wolves can kill anything if the pack's big enough." This serves as foreshadowing for Van getting mauled by a wolf, maimed, and nearly killed shortly thereafter, the team easily overpowering, sexually assaulting, and nearly killing Travis while tripping at Doomcoming, and their later ritualistic hunts.
- Though it happens at the end of Season 1, the disappearance of Taissa's dog Biscuit, and Simone's discovery of his head on a makeshift altar in her home on the night of the election victory, sets up the Cliffhanger that Taissa is still involved in some sort of black magic that allowed her to succeed. In Season 2, Simone uses Biscuit's death and decapitation as a reason that Taissa shouldn't be around Sammy and tries to force her to get psychiatric help. Taissa (or the Bad One) responds by causing a car accident that places Simone in a coma throughout the rest of Season 2.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition adventure OA7 Test of the Samurai. One of the Random Encounters for the Player Characters is the corpse of a bird. Its bill is stained with yellow powder, residue of the yun ch'i being released into the atmosphere. If not stopped, the yun ch'i will kill all life on the planet.
Video Games
- Bendy and the Ink Machine: The first major scare in the game is when you come across the vivisected corpse of the Goofy Expy Boris The Wolf.
- Dino Crisis 2: On the way to the Research Facility Lounge, Dylan stumbles upon the corpse of a Velociraptor that is covered in several bite marks. As he gets closer to the corpse to figure out the identity of what could have killed the dinosaur, a group of Oviraptors enters the facility and attempts to Zerg Rush Dylan. This also doubles as an Establishing Character Moment: Oviraptor may be the weakest foes in the game, but they make up for their frailness with their numerical superiority and agility.
- Final Fantasy VII: Shortly after the party leaves Midgar, they find a swamp inhabited by giant snakes called Midgar Zoloms that are too powerful for them to fight, and the only way to cross the swamp is to catch a wild chocobo (that can outrun a Zolom) in the nearby grasslands and ride it across. As they reach the other side of the swamp, they find the corpse of a Zolom impaled on a tree - Cloud assumes it must have been killed by Sephiroth, who is strong enough to have killed one without much effort.
- Infection Free Zone: Downplayed. When the player's scavengers approach a library, they may discover the corpse of a deer that was torn into shreds. On the next night, the Zone is attacked by infected dogs.
- Metroid:
- Metroid Fusion: One point in the game has A.D.A.M. sending Samus to track down and eliminate a creature called Serris that is supposedly rampaging through Sector 4 due to the SA-X releasing it from captivity. Upon reaching the room containing Serris' breeding tank, however, there is nothing but its skeleton sitting at the bottom of the tank, confirming it to have already been killed and mimicked by the X.
- Metroid: Other M: In one area of Sector 2 (the Cryosphere), you come across the corpse of a creature that appears to have died from having its life force drained by a Metroid, which Samus notes should be impossible, because 1) Metroids cannot survive cold temperatures, and 2) they went extinct before the events of the game. It turns out that the Galactic Federation had been secretly cloning Metroids that have been genetically modified so that they cannot be frozen, eliminating their one weakness and making them infinitely more dangerous than regular ones.
- A Plague Tale: Innocence: In the first chapter, Amicia de Rune and her father are exploring the nearby fields, when they suddenly see a wild boar that they can hunt. Amicia, eager to prove herself, has her dog Lion track down its scent, both in hot pursuit. However, the forest suddenly starts becoming more foreboding, with darkness creeping in and the plant life being less colorful as she goes in further. As the music shifts to something more unsettling, Amicia eventually finds the boar, now a rotting skeleton. Concerned about what happened to her dog, she begins calling out for him, only to find him also injured and groaning weakly. Before she can do anything, however, Lion is suddenly taken underground by an unknown force, setting up for the threat that would plague her and her companions for the rest of the game.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 4 (Remake): Leon is tasked with finding the president's daughter who has been kidnapped in a rural Spanish village. As soon as you gain control of Leon and begin to walk around the surrounding forest, you encounter the decaying carcass of a deer. When Leon reaches the village, he quickly learns that the village is run by a cult that is infecting the locals with the Las Plagas virus, creating a horde of controllable zombie-like people hellbent on killing you. Leon is stuck fighting for his life against horrors and monsters of all kinds, trying to save the president's daughter and escape.
- Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: Early in his search for Mia in the bayou, Ethan Winters stumbles upon a hideous-looking sculpture made of decomposing animal carcasses and has to crawl through it in order to reach the Bakers' house, and it's an early sign that several twisted minds are at work within the building.
- Resident Evil Village: While Ethan Winters is walking in the forest at night, he comes across a bunch of dead crows hanging by strings. One of them is still alive and trying to get free. This foreshadows the presence of Mother Miranda who kidnapped baby Rose to be part of the ritual.
- In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Nate and his new Tibetan friend Tenzin are exploring an icy cave in the Himalayas to find the remnants of a search party that came looking for Shambhala decades ago. While searching, they come across the bleeding bodies of two dead wolves, which shortly afterwards are revealed to have been the work of the Guardians of Shambhala, violent, Ax-Crazy pseudo-Yetis who have been patrolling the mountain to kill any attempted intruders of their territory.
- Until Dawn: During Mike and Jessica's journey to the guest cabin, the mood is largely light-hearted and romantic apart from the occasional Cat Scare or prank. As such, when the pair stumble upon a dying stag with its throat ripped open, it's the first hint for both the characters and the player that something more serious is in play. Moments later, the stag's body is yanked away by something lurking in the shadows, prompting Mike and Jessica to run for their lives.
- The Witch's House: There's a talking black cat who appears several times across the house and acts as a save point. Right before the Witch's room, the black cat's dead body is found...and you can still use it as a save point. Getting the secret ending by never saving reveals the black cat's true identity as a demon, who in the other endings, simply discarded his body since he knew the Witch's power was about to fade and claim everything within the house once it did.
Web Video
- Critical Role: Campaign Two: Downplayed and Played for Laughs. The characters happen upon some dead crabs that have been picked clean, hinting that Kylre has been on the hunt nearby and the group is approaching their first boss battle. However, the message that "the shells have been devoured" quickly gets mangled into "the veils are covered in flour" when they try to relay it to the whole party, making the moment more comedic than ominous.
- There is a video on YouTube where the protagonist runs into a mutilated deer corpse in a tree and is weirded out. Minutes later, he runs into the Red Ghost himself. The man books it for his life, becoming a shut-in due to his fears that the Red Ghost wants to kill him. Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eG3HWDeIkk
Western Animation
- Parodied in the first Christmas episode of Futurama. When approaching Robot Santa's workshop, a bird flies into an electric fence and dies in front of everyone. One of the elves nervously says "...an omen?", but another immediately replies "Dinner!" and pockets the carcass.
- The Owl House: "Thanks To Them" has several deer carcasses around the town. It turns out this is Belos' doing as those poor creatures suffered Possession Burnout. Hunter ends up possessed by Belos for a brief moment.
- Primal: In "Plague of Madness", Spear and Fang come across a whole herd of dead dinosaurs. Fang sniffs a body but recoils in disgust; this indicates something is very wrong. In the prior scenes, it was shown that the herd was killed by a member infected by the titular disease, with the corpses signifying that Spear and Fang are about to be confronted by a monstrous creature they can't fight.
