Lightning Reveal



It's a dark and stormy night. The main character(s) are surrounded by darkness. A sense of foreboding wavers in the air, and the tension is so thick, a knife isn't fit to cut it, and you would instead require a heavy-duty chainsaw.

This is the perfect concoction for the Empathic Environment to whip up a good old Lightning Reveal. There's something sinister lurking in the shadows that the character(s) and perhaps audience is unaware of until lightning strikes. In that flash of lightning something is revealed hence, well, the Lightning Reveal.

Bonus points if the flash is so quick, the audience/characters are unsure if they saw anything at all.

Compare Dramatic Thunder, Stop Motion Lighting, Emerging From the Shadows.

Anime And Manga

 * Used in the anime version of Hellsing while half of Alucard's face is in shadow. The lightning flash reveals the other half to look like Vlad the Impaler when his opponent asks him who he really is.
 * In Death Note, Light first sees Ryuk in this way.
 * In Naruto, The Reveal of  is done this way.
 * Also, in Naruto Shippuden 167, thunderclouds envelop the sky, and a large mass of the Kyuubi's chakra rains from the heavens as Naruto begins his transformation from a 4-tailed to a never-before-seen 6-tailed fox form.
 * Oda Nobunaga in Sengoku Basara's anime adaptation is so evil that, wherever he goes, evil red-glowing thunderstorms follow. Naturally, he gets an introduction through Lightning Reveal.
 * In Yu-Gi-Oh, when Bakura appears wearing a black trench coat in front of Rex and Weevil, we get our first glimpse of his face (well, the first in a while) when lightning flashes.

Comic Books

 * Done beautifully in book three of Bone when Fone Bone, Thorn and Gran'ma Ben are on the run from the rat creatures in the middle of a storm. Lighting flashes light up the otherwise pitch black backgrounds, giving brief glimpses of the rat creature horde closing in, as well as

Film

 * In the 2nd adaption of Lord of the Flies, a lightning strike gives the viewer a better glimpse of Simon's bloody corpse in the water after Jack's tribe stabs him to death
 * In the opening scene of Van Helsing, Dracula's demonic visage is briefly visible when lightning strikes.
 * Happens during the climax of The Lion King when Simba reveals himself to Scar before the final confrontation.
 * Tarzan: When Clayton

Literature

 * In The Dresden Files: Storm Front, Morgan's appearance at the bar is revealed by lightning.
 * In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Reaper Man, Death knows that his replacement is not going to arrive until midnight because he stood on a hill while lightning flashed. He reasons that someone who does that would not arrive at 11:55 if he could make a dramatic entrance at the stroke of midnight.
 * In Lee Lightner's Warhammer 40000 Space Wolf novel Wolf' Honour, when Ragnor and his company meet up with strange, wolf-like creatures, lightning flashes let them see the faces. (Much to Ragnor's horror. These creatures had haunted his dreams.)
 * Found in JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion. After being captured by Orcs, the hero Túrin accidentally kills his friend whom he mistakes for an Orc coming to torture him (in reality, he was trying to free him). Túrin realizes his mistake immediately when a flash of lightning illuminates the scene.
 * In David Weber's Safehold series, at one point the Royal Guard is desperately fighting assassins in the rain. One moment, there is one Guardsman standing. The next, there is a flash of lightning, a roll of thunder (from the wrong direction) and there are two...
 * Done in Queste, where Tertius Fume's ghost reveals itself to the crowd in the Wizard Tower in a flash of lightning.
 * In the H. P. Lovecraft short story The Lurking Fear, the first chapter ends with the narrator realizing that something other than one of his human companions was snuggled up to him on a cot in a reputedly haunted house when it gets up suddenly and a flash of lightning casts its shadow on the wall he's facing.

Live Action TV

 * Used brilliantly during the opening of an episode of CSI, showcasing the killer lurking in his victim's bedroom.
 * Parodied in an episode of Friends where Phoebe, suffering from chickenpox, is revealed to her long distance relationship boyfriend by a flash of lightning, causing him to jump. When she asks if she really looks that bad, he replies that he was just surprised by the lightning.
 * Happens in an episode of Only Fools and Horses where the trio are staying in Boycie's cottage. Of course, the escaped serial killer only gets shown when Del turns around, so the whole thing also ends up being a case of a Cassandra Truth.

Theater

 * According to William Goldman's book The Season, there was a Broadway play in 1967 called "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg." The show centers around the toll that taking care of a severely disabled daughter - a girl with cerebral palsy so bad she cannot even communicate - is taking on her parents. In one scene, the mother gives a despairing monologue, and at the end, there's a flash of lightning to show, just for an instant,  (You can imagine it being both scary and heartbreaking.)

Video Games

 * Occurs in the bonus case of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney.
 * In Jagged Alliance 2 troops may be revealed by lightning.
 * Not natural lightning, but in The Lost Crown, crackling energies from a mystic energy rift provide a similar Reveal of.
 * Done with "Flying-Neo," one of the Mini Bosses in Alien Soldier. Your character fights this alien dragon zombie helicopter on the top of an airplane. Once you get it to about a quarter of its health, it turns invisible... only the background lightning will reveal its silhouette.
 * The Attract Mode for Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter shows off the fighters, ending with the final boss Apocalypse. The True Final Boss appears for a frame thanks to a lightning reveal.

Web Comics

 * Played with in this strip from Order of the Stick.
 * Killroy and Tina, a sadly unfinished webcomic from Justin "The Non Adventures of Wonderella" Pierce, has a scene with quite effective use of the trope.
 * Subverted in Freefall. A secondary character answers a knock on his door on a dark and stormy night (While watching a werewolf movie!) and sees a bipedal wolf with large fangs. She's got severe hypothermia and is going into shock from the gash on her leg.
 * Used in Parallel Dementia here and then lampshaded by Visage.
 * In No Rest for The Wicked, the one bright panel when November's going through the storm, and leads to her meeting Red during another one.

Western Animation
"Marge: What he's typed will be a window into his madness. [reads it] "Feelin' fine." Woah! That's a relief.
 * Occurred in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror V":

[lightning strikes, revealing "No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy" scribbled all over the walls]

Marge: Mmm... this is less encouraging."


 * Family Guy plays with this in the episode where the kids find the money clip.
 * The opening theme to Batman the Animated Series. Batman fights crooks in darkness, and the police wonder who it could be. The theme ends with the crooks tied up and a silhouette of Batman, standing on the roof of a building. A flash of lightning confirms his presence, before he disappears. Take a look at the opening, it's pretty awesome.
 * In the first part of "Two-Face," Harvey Dent is sitting in the psychiatrist's office, discussing his mental problems, with his Face Framed in Shadow. Suddenly, lightning strikes, and the dark half of his face lights up... as Two Face.
 * Hilariously subverted in one scene from Gary Larson's Tales from the Far Side. In a dark, candle lit room a woman walks up to a man with his arms out, they embrace and start slow waltzing to Patsy Cline's Crazy. As they spin throughout the room lightning keeps flashing, revealing all sorts of large dangerous predators surrounding them ready to tear them to pieces, suddenly the lights come on and policemen pour into the room... Whereupon they grab and handcuff the woman then pull her away from the man who is revealed to be frozen in the arms out position and stood on a little board with wheels, as the woman is lead out the building we see the sign 'Bob's Taxidermy' over the door.]]
 * Crazy for/Crazy for/Crazy for/Crazy

Real Life

 * Tornadoes at nighttime can sometimes fall under this trope. A flash of lightning can sometimes illuminate an otherwise invisible funnel cloud or debris circulation, and storm spotters are trained to look on the horizon and under cloud bases for something that is not lightning but might be confused for it and that is far more indicative of tornado danger - power flashes from the tornado itself snapping power lines and blowing transformers.