Nothing Is Scarier/Playing With
Basic Trope: Fear is not induced by some traumatic visual element or by a physical threat, but by the sole lack of event.
- Straight: The scariest scene in a movie is a walk down a hallway where nothing happens.
- Exaggerated: The entire two hour movie is just a walk down a hallway where nothing happens.
- Nobody in the movie is ever show as a victim of anything... People just disappear. No body, no blood, no screams, no nothing. It's incredibly creepy.
- Downplayed: There is only an extremely short sequence where nothing happens.
- Justified: Whatever the director or writer could make wouldn't be as scary as what the audience will imagine.
- The scene has little to no sound, and the camera is on Bob's face the entire time, not showing anything else.
- Inverted: The sequence shows nothing else but the monster.
- Subverted: The protagonists walk down a hallway, but the monster is at the end...
- Double Subverted: ...Only it was a painting (and a trap) and now they have to go back through the possibly monster-infested hall.
- Parodied: There are two monsters in the film. One is a regular monster, out to eat the protagonists. The other monster is named Nothing. It's scarier than the other monster.
- The protagonists are terrified while walking down an empty corridor, but when they get to the end and a monster jumps out, they all breathe a sigh of relief and laugh.
- Deconstructed: The audience realizes that the monster will eventually show up, and so they wait for it without being afraid.
- Reconstructed: But since it takes a long time for the monster to show up, the audience starts to feel scared, knowing it could show up at any time, but not expecting when it would.
- Averted: The monster is clearly presented from the start and shown throughout the sequence.
- Enforced: "Our model designer sucks. Let's just put nothing and let the audience imagine the monster"
- Lampshaded: "I wish the monster would just attack us already."
- Defied: Bob looks down an empty hallway and decides to keep going in another direction.
- Discussed: "If we go down this hallway, the monster's just gonna jump out at us after keeping us in suspense."
- Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste: Even the victims never see what's killing them. Nobody knows what's hunting them, what it looks like, or how it kills. They're understandably terrified. And then it turns out that what's been killing them is either something that's been visible through the whole movie, but never seemed to be a threat, or is something that there's a reason not to see, like a disease.