Nothing Is Scarier: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

A [[Horror]] movie trope where fear is not induced by some traumatic visual element or by a physical threat, but by the ''sole lack of event''. This is a case of rampant creepiness, associated not with what is happening, but with the general atmosphere of a sequence. When properly done, it can result in one of the scariest moments. It does so for one simple reason, the author refuses to show us what is causing this scariness but we desperately wish to know what, so our minds fill in the blanks.

 

This trope comes in three flavors:

* The full version is when there is ''really'' nothing happening, but the result can be several orders of magnitude scarier than the classic version, because the audience is left to [[Primal Fear|imagine]] what ''[[Your Worst Nightmare|could]]'' have happened.

* The rarely used third variation is where there's nothing there... nothing there... nothing there... and then you realize there ''is'' something there, and ''[[Fridge Horror|it's been there all along]].''

 

Not to be confused with [[Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here]], [[Empty Room Psych]], or [[It's Quiet... Too Quiet]]. ''Definitely'' not to be confused with the scariest thing possible.

 

* Used chillingly and terrifyingly in ''[[No Country for Old Men]]'' - especially in the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4RnHsV3wIo&fmt=18 buildup to and including the hotel escape scene between Anton Chigurh and Llewynn Moss.]

** Some people said the Coen Brothers would have made [[Alfred Hitchcock]] proud with this film, and that's probably true, when they can make {{spoiler|the sound of a ''LIGHTBULB'' unscrewing}}, [[Hell Is That Noise|the most terrifying sound in the world]].

** Amazingly by accident. Spielberg was so disappointed in the appearance of the shark, he did everything he could to shoot around it, leading to one of the most suspenseful monster movies of all time, not to mention the watershed summer blockbuster.

*** There's a lot of conjecture about the decision not to show the shark in the first half of the movie, but it was actually intentional. The mechanical difficulties with the shark may have reduced its screen time in the second half, but Spielberg always intended to hide it during the first.

** Heck, even ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEVY_lonKf4 the original trailer]'' qualifies.

*** This worked even when the audience saw the monster in full in the same scene, when it was just hanging from a chain, camouflaged from the audience with nothing more than its bio-mechanical appearance. The fact that it was able to hide in plain sight and still sneak up on both Brett and the audience is also pretty scary.

* ''[[The Others (film)|The Others]]'' was much like this. Nine-tenths of the creepy in that movie came from the kids talking and the dark surroundings.

* ''[[The Mist]]'' had the parts where people were fighting in the stores or arguing to go outside rather suspenseful.

'''Masbath''': Nor do I. No crickets or cicadas calling, no bird songs... }}

* The basement scene in [[David Fincher]]'s ''[[Zodiac]]''.

** ''[[Signs]]'' is another [[M. Night Shyamalan]] example. Nothing much out of the ordinary happens in some early scenes in the film, but there's a foreboding mood and a sense that things are subtly off, creating suspense long before {{spoiler|the aliens show up (and making them a bit of a letdown when they do).}}

** Another [[M. Night Shyamalan]] scene was from ''[[The Village]]'' when our protagonist is in the forest, completely blind, not even realizing she's stumbling into a patch of bright, red berries, thinking about the stories of Those Of Which We Do Not Speak. (Red attracts Those Of Which We Do Not Speak.)

* ''[[The Blair Witch Project]]'' relies heavily on this technique.

** Arguably it ''is'' this technique, given that {{spoiler|the killer is never seen}}.

*** Similar in How It Should Have Ended. In it, the cheesy witch is shown and totally breaks the mood.

*** Well, as she admits, it ''is'' her movie!

* The sequence in ''[[28 Days Later]]'' where Jim is walking through a completely abandoned London is made so eerie by the complete silence that one almost has a heart attack when the car alarm goes off.

** The sequence has a soundtrack ("East Hastings" by Godspeed You Black Emperor!) that starts off quietly and slowly builds to a climax when Jim finds out what has happened. The [[DVD Commentary]] says it was added because after a few minutes of silence, the car alarm almost killed viewers.

** And also masterful because the film ''never'' lets you be comfortable, long before the monsters show up. In addition to the claustrophobia and disorientation of the caves, our main character is suffering long-lasting PTSD.

** Even the bloody DVD menu does this. It is not recommended to watch this, fall asleep drunk on someone else's sofa and be woken up in the dead of night by a sudden demonic howl.

** The third variaton of this trope is also used, and highlighted in one of the Special Features. In numerous scenes prior to the group actually ''seeing'' one of the monsters, they'd had one camouflaged in the background, stalking them.

** In the book it's specified he used to lure women down there, switch the lights off and watch them try to escape, before shooting them in the legs. He stopped because when he was done the pelts were useless.

* This is the reason everything takes so long to happen in ''[[Nosferatu]]''. Especially aboard the ship.

* The aftermath of Godzilla's attack on Tokyo in the original ''[[Godzilla|Gojira]]'' is full of this. Everything from the images of the destroyed buildings to the crowded hospitals to the haunting music makes the scene very creepy as well as [[Tear Jerker|very sad to watch]].

** It's made even MORE terrifying when you realize that the filmmakers had the scene look [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|eerily similar to the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]].

** For that matter, later we see what is believed (and noted in the film) to be Treadwell's actual video footage of the bear that would kill him and his girlfriend not long thereafter. It's quite unnerving to watch these scenes with that knowledge in mind, even though nothing frightening is actually happening.

* [[John Carpenter]]'s ''[[Prince of Darkness]]'' is a genuinely scary movie with creepy voices, the walking dead, cockroach swarms, [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|Alice Cooper]], ancient runes, and so on. But the creepiest moment in the film happens when Jamison Parker's character... an amateur magician who is constantly practicing a "make the card disappear behind the magician's hand" sleight of hand trick... suddenly, and quite accidentally makes the card disappear ''for real''. It sounds like nothing, but when you watch it?

* There are differing opinions on Jacques Tourneur's ''[[Night of the Demon]]'' as to whether they should have shown the title demon at the beginning of the film - or at all - but the general consensus is that for or despite its spare appearances, it is a superb horror movie where ''nothing'' often lurks in the darkness.

* This is the reason why the original ''[[Night of the Living Dead]]'' is much more powerful than its remake. The original had you waiting for half an hour looking at people scared enough to piss in their pants and trying to figure out what to do. The remake had constant zombie attacks and fast-paced action.

** The original ''[[Dawn of the Dead (film)|Dawn of the Dead]]'' features a truly terrifying 20 seconds at the beginning, before someone taps the heroine on the shoulder in the TV studio. Nothing scary is happening, but it's unsettling as billy-o

* In interviews, [[Clive Barker]] has spoke of his intent to avert this trope, due to its overuse in horror films growing up, and so the titular ''Rawhead Rex'' was revealed early in the movie. All ''[[Hellraiser]]'' films have followed the convention of showing the Cenobites in their full, gruesome glory.

* 1980's ''[[The Changeling (film)|The Changeling]]'' is made completely on this concept: it's a ghost story where you never see the ghosts. Very scary.

* The first half of ''[[Pontypool]]'' is terrific, the audience and characters are being fed by information about the chaos happening outside through phone calls, and no one knows exactly what is happening.

* In The [[Alfred Hitchcock]] movie ''[[The Trouble with Harry]]'', which is for the most part a comedy, there is one scary part. [[Paranoia Fuel|It is never explained who or what keeps opening that closet door...]]

* The horror film ''[[Absentia]]'' relies heavily on build-up and not showing anything for much of the film to horrifying results.

 

* The book version of ''[[The Princess Bride (novel)|The Princess Bride]]'' has a Zoo of Death instead of the Pit of Despair. It has multiple levels of basement, and as you go down the enemies get scarier. One level has absolutely nothing in it. Just a long, black tunnel with the exit door at the other end. For Inigo and Fezzik this is doggone ''scary''. ''Something'' should be happening! This is the level of the Enemies of Fear. The idea is that you panic, run for the opposite door {{spoiler|and let the venomous spider under the handle kill you}}.

* ''The Red Room'' by [[H. G. Wells]].

* ''The Curious Sofa'' by [[Edward Gorey]].

** Worth mentioning that the sofa's function is strongly implied to be of an erotic nature, so Alice may not have been [[The Immodest Orgasm|screaming in]] ''[[The Immodest Orgasm|fear]]''.

* This trope is pretty much the bread and butter of ''[[House of Leaves]]''.

* In ''[[Coraline (novel)|Coraline]]'', the protagonist faces this when facing down the {{spoiler|cocoon with something unseen inside.}} She gets through it by realizing this trope: logically, that nothing can be worse than the moment of staring at it, terrified.

** In a previous scene, she was walking down a hallway, hearing tapping sounds from a nearby room, which is either water dripping from the tap, or the Other Mother knocking on the table. She kept walking without looking.

** In another [[Terry Pratchett]] ''[[Discworld]]'' novel a witch visits her most terrible punishment on a man who broke into in her cottage. Nothing. After a couple of weeks waiting for her to do something in retaliation the man has a nervous breakdown and runs away.

** He's probably at his scariest when he tells you ''absolutely nothing'' about what's happening; see "[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Music_of_Erich_Zann The Music of Erich Zann]" for an example.

** At other times, on the other hand, he gives meticulous, almost clinically scientific descriptions of what the creatures are like. But in ''[[At the Mountains of Madness]]'' he combines the two ways of storytelling, and describes the creatures to the most minute detail when they are in hibernating state and assumed dead, but at no point does the narrator see them move or do anything - he only sees the results of the massacre that took place once they woke up on autopsy table.

* In ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'', the Baudelaire children experience this trope when {{spoiler|they are shoved down a dark, empty elevator shaft}}. The following two pages are filled entirely in black, after which the author writes that he couldn't write anything describing what their screaming sounded like.

* This is actually fairly common in Gothic Romanticism. Ann Radcliffe wrote what amounted to a treaty on horror writing. Essentially, "terror" is the feeling that precedes an event, while "horror" is the revulsion felt during/after said event. The former is, by far, more difficult to pull off. Scaring the audience without a visible threat is no small feat, but, as the other examples show, it tends to be much, much more effective.

** As the quintessential Gothic novel, Radcliffe's ''[[The Mysteries of Udolpho]]'' spends its time terrifying Emily, the main character. At one point she freezes because of some unseen thing lurking in the shadows, only to be relieved when it turns out to be a suitor . Radcliffe gets bonus points for including a bit of [[Fridge Horror]] when the reader realizes that this takes place in the character's room; the real "terror" isn't the possibility of something supernatural, but the possibility of {{spoiler|rape by her overly-aggressive suitor}} even if it doesn't come to that.

* A literal example, which crosses with [[The Nothing After Death]]: ''[[The Neverending Story (novel)|The Neverending Story]]'' (and [[The Neverending Story (film)|its movie adaptation]]) has an [[Eldritch Abomination]] called The Nothing, which is a sudden erasing of existing things. Only that. And it's disturbing!

* Mentioned fairly explicitly in the [[H. G. Wells]] story ''[[The Invisible Man (novel)|The Invisible Man]]'' when the invisible man finally reveals himself:

* In ''[[The Hobbit]]'' it's flat-out stated that the scariest thing Bilbo had to do in his whole adventure was walk down the lightless tunnel to Smaug's lair. Not the dragon himself, not the giant spiders from Mirkwood, not the Goblins, Trolls or Wolves from the Misty Mountains, just the tunnel and the crippling fear of not knowing what was at the end of it.

 

* In ''[[The Avengers (TV series)|The Avengers]]'', there was a fairly long sequence in the middle of the episode "Don't Look Behind You" with Cathy Gale walking around in a large, spooky house in the countryside. It seems at first like no one else is present in the house, but then things in rooms begin to get changed while she is out of the room. There is no [[BGM]] at all during this sequence, just the sound of Gale's footsteps.

** From "The Pandorica Opens": {{spoiler|never have the words "silence will fall" been more scary. ''Even the background music stops.''}} Earlier in the same episode, we suddenly hear {{spoiler|"silence will fall"}} spoken by a hideous, rasping voice out of goddamn nowhere, just before the TARDIS is hijacked. The source of the sound, and hence the source of the tampering, is ''never shown''.

** While the Silence in the series itself don't really count, series 6's advertisements talked a lot about them, and they've released a couple of few second long videos as an advertisement. These videos show... Well, absolutely nothing except for a couple of empty streets on cctv footage. People have been pausing and going through them frame by frame but still seeing nothing unusual, except for the occasional flickering of the screen. And they are ''scaring the pants off of everyone.'' See [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeRbYXrIGcs here]. In one of them, you can see one of the Silence. It isn't doing anything, just standing there in plain sight.

** There's a scene near the beginning of the "The Eleventh Hour" where Amy has the Doctor handcuffed and he lets slip where Prisoner Zero is hiding. She starts walking towards the door, and he's screaming at her not to open it, but she walks through anyway... the appearance of the {{spoiler|giant piranha-eel thing suspended from the ceiling directly behind Amy's head}} is actually a bit of a relief compared to the empty, dusty room that's always been in your house but you've never noticed it that the Doctor is yelling to ''get out of now''.

** The classic series has a few examples of this as well. In the first Doctor's encounter with the Daleks one of the companions, Ian, drinks from a river and the camera shows his face reacting in horror to something underwater. He has no idea what it was he saw and later on a secondary character in the same place is heard screaming in fear as he is dragged under the surface. What exactly it was is never revealed.

** It's more frightening after they resurrect Buffy in S6, however, as the way she acts makes one wonder if Joyce would have been fine in the end (that is to say, much different from her normal self).

** There's also the season four finale "Restless" in which Xander, Willow, Giles and Buffy are hunted in their dreams by a malevolent entity that is only ever seen as a shadowy shape or a blurred, fast-moving brown thing or a shimmering, indistinct object stalking back and forth in the heat-blasted distance...

** ''Cold Case'' is surprisingly good at this. Another "fine" example would be the rape/murder flashback in ''Death Sentence: Final Appeal''.

* ''[[Burn Notice]]'' makes good use of this in ''Shot in the Dark'' when Michael has to scare the Douchebag of the Week into leaving town.

* In the second season of ''[[Slings and Arrows]]'', the portrayal of Banquo's ghost [[Nighmare Retardant|suffers]] [[Narm|greatly]] from [[Special Effect Failure]] up until someone points out that the director arguing with an empty chair is the scariest thing happening in the theater.

 

* It is common now for albums to feature hidden "bonus tracks" after the last listed song with several minutes of silence in between. Some of these can start out [[Last-Note Nightmare|startling or even outright alarming]]. If you've been forewarned and have decided to leave the player on to see for yourself, well... the people who were surprised might have been better off.

** ''[[My Chemical Romance|Well, they encourage your complete cooperation...]]'' (Bonus points because Way starts singing in a tinny music hall voice, to the accompaniment of nothing but piano, that sounds so different from earlier tracks that some people refused to believe it was the same singer.)

** Ladytron's ''Witching Hour'' ends with 10 minutes of silence, but no hidden track afterwards.

* Boris has a song called Absolutego which is a complete, droning, shrapnel heavy drone doom song that goes on for about 49 minutes. If the genre of drone metal wasn't creepy enough, during the final 16 minutes of this "song" (if you can even call it that), we get an ear piercing, headach inducing "riff" that sounds like a sawblade trying to cut up metal. But the scariest part about it is that it is just pure, absolute nothingness - it's just that one riff droning for endless minutes, no instruments to back it up, just...THAT. If Cthulhu sounds like anything, it sounds like this.

** [http://www.turnmeondeadman.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3=9 Turn me on dead man.]

* Alien Sex Fiend's "Black Rabbit" could be the theme song for the full version of this trope. This throwaway song was the last track on the band's first album, and remains one of the most unsettling pieces of music ever recorded, even by ASF's bizarre standards. It doesn't go anywhere in terms of music, but that's what makes it spooky.

* The Cure's "Subway Song" from their first album is an unsettling little number about a woman being followed home from work late at night. After about a minute and a half, the song starts to fade out. There's about a second of silence, followed by a startlingly LOUD reverb-drenched scream. It manages to have the same effect every time, even when you know it's coming.

 

* A previous interpretation of ''[[SCP Foundation|SCP-087]]'' was the prime example of this trope taken to the extreme. While not exactly a game, SC-087 serves as a "simulator" of sorts. This "simulator" involves the player simply {{spoiler|going down stairs in the dark with nothing but small light sources at each platform which leads to the next flight of stairs. The paranoia level is BEYOND eleven and the tension is so thick you can't even cut it with a chainsaw. The only thing that causes the tension? Nothing. The only thing that happens is you go down countless flights of stairs and occasionally see a shadow pass by you, which can be classified as a [[Cat Scare]], since it does nothing other than scare the living s**t out of you for a second followed by an awkward laugh or sigh of relief. The simulator only gets scarier from here, since you now hear the sounds of scary breathing echoing through the flights of stairs. The breathing gets louder and louder until you get to the last platform, where you are surprised by a strange figure while cardboard cut-out hands extend their reach towards your face before the simulator intentionally crashes. While the initial scare is expected, the hands reaching out towards your face can generate mild yelps from the easily terrified.}}

* ''[[Castlevania II: Simon's Quest]]'' attempts to envoke this, with Dracula's ruined castle and the preceeding bridge being devoid of enemies. YMMV as to whether or not it suceeded.

* ''[[Jurassic Park]]'' for the SNES. Not the whole game by any means, as most of it just involves walking around in a top-down view and blasting any dinosaur that gets in the way, but the indoor segments were a different story. Especially if you walked into one of those [[Darkness Equals Death|dark rooms without night vision equipped...]]

** Even further, there's a glitch in a specific room in one indoor area that allows you to walk through a wall and into a room where there is absolutely nothing to be seen. The walls, even the ones you should be able to see from that position, appear completely absent. There's only the floor and ceiling gradient on the screen beyond your goggles and weapon, and it's impossible to tell if you're coming or going, or if you're even moving at all. If you don't turn back immediately after entry, you could get lost forever... and you can still hear the dinosaurs...

* The whole ''[[Silent Hill]]'' series use this. All the time. Never before has radio static made your heart leap out of your mouth and go running for cover.

** Even better is the fact that the monsters are attracted to light and sound, so you can either check out what's going on and at least have an advance warning, or avoid bringing attention to yourself as much as possible and risk an ambush. The ''[[Doom]]'' games invoke a similar compromise.

*** Some of the scariest background music/noises are heard in [[Empty Room Psych|empty or dead-end rooms]]. The prison morgue has the most pants-shitting sounds in the game, including [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj94qGls1kA a high-pitched siren-type noise] when you jump down the hole, but nothing to hurt you. The dead end near where you find the Seductress tablet has an empty bloodstained cell with a creepy [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHbFEOVV6Xw clock-like ambient noise].

** Shattered Memories has absolutely no monsters outside the nightmare world (except for a random shadow figure which doesn't harm you and really doesn't interact with you that much), but you still feel like you could be attacked at any moment. Everything is creepy, even though it seemingly does nothing to try to be creepy.

*** In the same game, you enter the hospital basement, hear a creaking noise, and round a corner to find an overturned wheelchair with its wheel still spinning, and the walls bloodstained and riddled with bullet holes, but no signs of life.

** Approaching the apartments' third floor door in ''SH2'', you hear a [[Sinister Scraping Sound]] that happens to be the same sound as Pyramid Head dragging his knife, although this is well before he is introduced.

* ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'' is organized in chapters, during each of which the player controls a different character. Most of the characters go mad or die horribly at the end of their chapter. The story is tied together by the main character, who is reading their stories. Between each chapter she wanders around the [[Lovecraft Country]] house looking for the pages of the next chapter. ''Nothing'' happens to her until after the much later chapters, even after [[Suspicious Videogame Generosity|finding a weapon right at the beginning of the game, as well as several better weapons]], and even playing a level in the same house she's wandering around. It doesn't help that there's a good chance that her [[Sanity Meter]] might be low just from reading a chapter, leading to [[Through the Eyes of Madness|Sanity Effects]]. It's almost a relief when she starts meeting things that can actually be killed...

* ''[[No One Lives Forever]]: A Spy in Harm's Way'' contains a brilliant example in a level set in at an Antarctic base. The protagonist infiltrates a secret base with the sole occupant being one scientist in the beginning that promptly dies. The rest of the level has the player explore the base without running into anyone, gathering loose pieces of information and finding ways to advance, all the time while the game's signature swinging 60s is absent and the only background sound in the wind blowing outside. It all comes to an end when the player finds schematics to a new super-soldier, and just then, the silence is interrupted by the blood curdling, anguished screams of one prototype super-soldier, who promptly goes on to obliterate everything in its path trying to get to you.

* Ravenholm in ''[[Half Life]] 2'' is like this at times. Made especially scary by the fact that fast zombies may not attack for several minutes after they scream...

** And ''will be''. You can clear out an area and make it safe to inhabit, but only for a while; the game is diabolically clever in this regard, and will spawn new enemies far away from your current location ''just so you get to hear them hunting you down''. There's times in that game where it's awfully damn hard not to just cower in a dark corner and wait to be slaughtered.

** The original has its moments too. Players who ''think'' they'd cleared out the maintenance level of Citadel Station are completely surprised when one of those invisible blobs wandered up and smack them. A full clip of ammo was spent on it, just to make sure.

** In the sequel, there's a stretch of hallway just before your chosen character tackles the final boss. There's no music or hostile enemies, only the sound of machinery humming and your character's footsteps. You can shoot the test tubes full of those little {{spoiler|seed parasite}} creatures to build up your Beat Meter/Demolition Gauge, which results in them letting out an [[Hell Is That Noise|ear-raping]] shriek.

* In ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'', hearing a sobbing Witch and knowing she's close and you have to be careful or you'll startle her and she'll screech and try to rip you apart - and sometimes you just don't find her...

*** And after walking along for ages you get to a place where {{spoiler|you walk down a short hallway that is immediately, and silently, blocked off by some sort of pillar.}} You step into the next room {{spoiler|and the floor slides out from under you, dropping you into a room full of turrets.}} It's scarier after the long silences.

** From the very start of the game, the windows to the offices above you give you the eerie sensation that [[Big Brother Is Watching|you are being watched]]. But when you see these windows from the other side, you realize there was no-one watching you, which in turn, raises a question: where is everybody?

* ''[[Dead Space (series)|Dead Space]]'' is a fan of this, especially in the space walk segments, where you [[Averted Trope|can't]] [[Space Is Noisy|hear any noises]] except sounds from inside your suit and coming up from the ship, meaning you'll never know the necromorph is right behind you until you see him slashing you across the back.

** Unfortunately, when inside the ship, unless you are in an area with lots of large machinery running, the Necromorphs often loudly announce their presence, which kinda kills the tension.

* ''[[Mother 3]]'': Inside the mailbox was absolutely nothing.

** Nothing after nothing came bursting out.

** Actually, for some, just the drastic change of the lights in Poniko's room turning on and off, ''without'' Uboa, is horror.

* Of all places, it appears that ''[[Super Paper Mario]]'' invokes this trope. {{spoiler|After Sammer's Kingdom gets destroyed by the Chaos Heart, Mario and friends return there to search for the Pure Heart. The previously colorful, vibrant kingdom of samurai has been replaced with... a gigantic white emptiness that you have to walk through for quite some time. It can be rather foreboding, especially with the music....}}

** This was made specially for everyone who played the original. The dogs jumping through the windows scared most of us. Then we all played the remake, and were expecting the dogs again, but nothing happened.

** The basement, particularly the filthy, dimly lit kitchen, has the same effect, aided by [[Hell Is That Noise|some really unnerving background music]].

** Aside from the sewers, there's only one really scary place in 4, the operation room. You see the blue guy. You know he's going to attack you. And then he doesn't. And he keeps not doing it. He's just sitting there. Then, when you finally defrost the room, the door gets locked. But it doesn't end there. You escape him, and then get out into the hallway. Basically, your next experience should be "whew I escaped let's keep goiHOLYSHITANOTHERONE."

** The first encounter with a Licker in RE 2. You enter a room where there's no music playing, then you see something run across the window. Enter the next hallway, still no music, then the Licker drops down from the ceiling.

** After leading you to believe that this trope will be played straight, the Amnesia Custom Story "The Dark Room" manages to avert this trope completely. After spending the first minute or so looking around for keys to unlock different doors, you have to go through a corridor which is completely pitch black. Once you go in the corridor, you hear an earth-shattering roar and a monster appears...{{spoiler|but it's only when you see it that you find that they've stuck a troll-face on it, and the troll's "theme music" comes on when you're standing next to it.}} The revelation that EVERY enemy {{spoiler|has something to do with an internet meme}}, despite their attempts to try and build tension, just makes it even funnier when the monsters show up.

* [[Chzo Mythos|7 Days a Skeptic]]. At the end of the game, you are {{spoiler|1=chased by John DeFoe. Sort of. In the ''original'' game, there was no way of telling when DeFoe would enter a room, or from where, which meant that in some cases, you could enter a room, wait a moment to regroup, ''and be instantly gored to death when DeFoe '''appears inside of you'''''.}}

** Harbor missions at night in '''Terror From The Deep'', as well as alien base assaults when Tentaculats are involved. Dark spaces, never knowing where the aliens might hide, outmatches troops is one half, the music does the rest.

* The ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]] DLC Dead Money'' evokes this. When you're getting swarmed by Ghosts, it's scary. When you've killed them all, the Villa gets really unnerving, really quickly. The dim lighting and constant haze limiting visibility doesn't help.

* ''[[Metroid Fusion]]'' has your first visit to Sector 6 (NOC). You're told ahead of time that there are Blue X in the sector, which are sub-zero cold and will do heavy damage if they touch you. There's no enemies except the blue X and very dark backgrounds and scenery, as well as blue X hiding in the various bits of destructible scenery. Couple the fear of the blue X with the sector's eerie music, and you'll soon be jumping out of your skin every time you enter a new room.

 

* In ''[[Girl Genius]]'', Volume Five, two men from the troupe scout ahead, and return riding as fast as they can, and there's no pursuit. Then the monsters come...

** Worse, when Lars and Augie tell the story, this is when they note that something is ''very'' '''very''' wrong.

* Discussed and parodied in ''[[Skin Horse]]'' after Tip becomes a werewolf. Unity references ''[[Jaws (film)|Jaws]]'' and ''[[Alien (franchise)|Alien]]'', both classic movies that took a very long time to show monsters that ultimately turned out to be disappointing. "The monster's always a letdown because it's not as scary as the idea of the monster! Y'know what you are? [http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/skinhorse/series.php?view=archive&chapter=39951 You're a plywood shark]!"

 

* Some might say that the online point-and-click game ''[[Daymare Town]]'' is this. The lack of audio and stationary, colorless, environment.

** Lampshaded when you're forced to go into the pitch black cellar of the lowest floor of the library to obtain an item; the game refers to the cellar as "scary," and labels the exit as "get out!"

** Really, this is very common with most of the games made by Mateusz Skutnik. ''[[Sub Machine]]'' features very creepy sound effects and soundtracks, with only vague hints about where you are and what has happened. ''[[Covert Front]]'' features dark stone areas that look like agents from the [[Imperial Germany|Empire]] could pop out of at any second. And in ''[[The Fog Fall]]'', the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust is made deathly apparent by the lack of people and stark environments.

* [[The Slender Man Mythos]], wherein we only see traces of the Slender Man. What exactly he does to his victims and how is completely up to the imagination.

** And of course [http://www.youtube.com/user/marblehornets?blend=1&ob=4 the series based around Slendy], ''[[Marble Hornets]]''. Think ''[[The Blair Witch Project|Blair Witch Project]]'' to the 10th power.

** ''[[Everyman HYBRID]]'', in ''I'm Okay''. It starts out rather quiet, before suddenly springing incredibly loud distortion on you. Expect to have full britches afterwards.

* [[SCP Foundation]]. Most of the time they describe the stuff that's happening in bureaucratic language to make it even creepier, but when things get really scary, like [REDACTED] incident with SCP-███, they just [DATA EXPUNGED].

** SCP-231. You never know what they're actually doing to the pregnant <s>woman</s> girl, though it's kinda obvious with how any Class-D personnel conducting Procedure 110-Montauk will be terminated if they even try to prolong it. (The author has claimed it's actually not the obvious answer, but refuses to elaborate on what it actually is, beyond "worse".)

* [[Ben Drowned|The Haunted Majoras Mask]] [[Alternate Reality Game|ARG]] actually has type 3 several times, especially in the first arc. The [[Paranoia Fuel|most unnerving]], though, is in the first video of the Ryukaki arc, Sounds.wmv, where Kayd is going through his house while weird things are happening, happens to turn right, and [[Oh Crap|OH SHIT]] OH SHIT [[Rule of Three|OH SHIT]] {{spoiler|the Elegy statue [[Most Dangerous Video Game|from MM]]'s EYES are staring back at you!}}

* The first minute and a half of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-SamlxVgnc this] video is conventional, if effective, horror. The rest of it is equally terrifying to watch, running purely on this trope, even though ''nothing happens''.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBHkW0aKHRc The Wyoming Incident], a simulation of a TV broadcast hijacking courtesy of [[Something Awful]], uses this trope very well. The entire sequence is made up of only black and white, and in a low resolution. The [[Hell Is That Noise|ominous noises]], unsettling font, and abstract messages<ref>"WHAT HIDES IN YOUR MIND?"/"WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN IT"; "WE STAND AT THE DOOR"; "YOU ARE ILL"/"WE JUST WANT TO FIX YOU"</ref> magnify the apprehension of the viewer, building up to the [[Surreal Horror|surreal and VERY creepy]] use of [[Uncanny Valley|3D model]] [[Nightmare Face|faces]], in between a pattern of long pauses and sudden transitions. And the little static hisses on the soundtrack during those pauses ramps up the tension even further if you can use them to mark time before the faces and music kick in.

 

* ''[[Serial Experiments Lain]]'' is also fond of this, the whole show sweats with creepiness even in the most casual scenes.

** Less systematic, but still present to some extent in its spiritual successor ''[[Ghost Hound]].''

* ''[[Boogiepop Phantom]]'': the [[Deliberately Monochrome]] and [[False Camera Effects]] make the entire show look like some insane nightmare.

* Possibly unintentional, but there is a certain uncanniness to ''[[Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou]]'''s harmonious, post-apocalyptic setting. It is caused by a combination of the unexplained mysteries regarding the androids, humanoid fungi and feral beings that populate the world, and the apparent lack of purpose they seem to have (despite presumably them originally having one). The suspense comes just from the endless waiting for them to reveal why they are here.

* [[Yu-Gi-Oh!]] does this with the monsters 'The Thing in the Crater', where all we see is a deep crater filled with lava, and 'Dweller in the Depths', where all we see is a dark cave with stalagmites and stalactites everywhere.

 

* The [[Big Finish Doctor Who]] audio drama ''Dead Air'' plays with this trope. The recording opens with a cheerful woman telling you that you're about to listen to a piece of history, the very last recording of a Pirate Radio station from the 60s. What follows is the Doctor telling you "If you can hear this, then one of us is going to die." The doctor then goes on to narrate a story (switching, a bit oddly, between first person and third person point-of-view) which is pretty standard Doctor Who fare. A nasty alien entity which is composed entirely of sound has taken over the pirate radio ship and is killing everyone aboard before going on to conquer all of Earth. Throughout the recording there are instances of static bursts, occasional distortion in sound, jumps in the recording that give you snippets of odd music that was on the tape until the Doctor recorded over it, and at one point a tinny voice overlapping the recording begging for help. In the final confrontation between the Doctor and the big bad, {{spoiler|the Doctor traps the monster in a recording, the very one the audience is listening to. The monster taunts that as soon as anyone listens to the recording the monster will be free, and the Doctor announces that no one will ever listen to the recording, because he’s put a warning on the tape to not listen to it. And that, which such a warning in place, who could possibly be stupid enough to listen all the way to the end of the recording? }} The Doctor then says a cheerful “Goodbye!” and the tape immediately cuts to a distorted portion of blaring music which clicks into static...

** Used to great effect in ''Scherzo'', where the Eighth Doctor and Charley are trapped in a [[White Void Room]] and slowly lose all of their senses except hearing, ''including their sense of time''. That the listener already only perceives the story through hearing punches it up to almost unbearably tense.

* ''[[Quiet Please]]'' uses this in the very first episode, entitled, fittingly enough, ''Nothing Behind The Door''. The protagonist and his friends try to rob a small house on a mountainside, only to find that {{spoiler|anything that passes through the door simply ceases to exist}}.

 

* DC had a horror anthology title in the 80s called ''Wasteland.'' Due to one error or another, issue #5 was published with issue #6's cover. When [http://www.comicvine.com/wasteland-method-actor-paper-hero-on-the-road-part-1/37-47657/ the real #6] came out, it was numbered "the real number six", and the cover, apart from framing elements, was pure white. For a horror comic, it worked quite well.

 

* ''[[Picnic at Hanging Rock]]'' exemplifies this trope. The mystery at the crux of the film is never explained.

** The book did explain it - eventually.

** Just to show how well they use this trope - there are still LOTS of people who are convinced that you actually see {{spoiler|Mr. Blonde cutting off the cop's ear}}. Despite there not being the actual gore on screen, there are still people who insist that it happened plain as day.

* ''[[The Orphanage]]'' lives and breathes this trope. Shall we cite the main character playing a game with ghost children? Or how about little [[Creepy Child|Tomas?]]

* In ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]'', the approach to [[The Monolith]] is fearsome simply because we do not know what will happen when the people touch the Monolith.

* ''[[Who Framed Roger Rabbit?]]'' has this with {{spoiler|[[Big Bad|Judge Doom's]] true form. We see a glimpse of it with his [[Red Eyes, Take Warning|glowing red eyes]] that are occasionally ''literal daggers'' and the shapeshifting weapons he uses, but the fact he remains hidden completely by his latex suit except for that enters this trope. Since the dip melted him while was still in the suit, we don't know what his true form is, if he even has one, and that just makes a villain who was already pure horrifying ''even more terrifiying!''}}

** What really deepens the horror is that {{spoiler|Judge Doom had been a [[Devil in Plain Sight]] for years. Nobody ever suspected he was not human, and in fact ''the Toons themselves'' had voted him into the position after he bribed them. Up until the climax he was always more forbidding than truly scary, a [[Knight Templar]] with [[Smug Snake]] undertones who was hated as well as feared. Eddie Valiant even calls him a "gargoyle" while he's in the same room, hushing his voice more out of feigned politeness than out of fear of retribution. It's actually a bit of relief when he's revealed to be a Toon himself, since now Eddie [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?|can destroy that murdering bastard without any qualms]].}}

* The short film "The Confession" by Tanel Toom uses the "disturbing lack of noise" part of this trope very well. There are numerous scenes in the films, such as {{spoiler|right after the first car crash}} and {{spoiler|after little Jacob's fall}}, when there is nothing but heavy, empty, silence, allowing the horror to REALLY sink in.

 

* In "The White People" by [[Arthur Machen]], {{spoiler|we never do find out what the horrible eponymous beings ''are''.}}

* In ''[[Percy Jackson and The Olympians]]'', the heroes are traveling through the Labyrinth when they hear breathing and footsteps. They escape from the maze and seal the door before they find out what the creature is.

** We're talking about a man here who managed to make a description of an ordinary rental apartment in the middle of a hot summer day, with the narrator in the company of the landlady and two burly mechanics suspenseful and creepy.

* ''[[House of Leaves]]'' was built on this. The {{color|blue|house}} <s>({{color|red|and the Minotaur}})</s> are terrifying because you can't possibly know when they'll strike. Tom nearly goes insane from this, which gets all better when he smokes a few joints. But the same sensation {{spoiler|drives Halloway to suicide}} and traumatizes ''everyone'' who was in the {{color|blue|house}}, including Karen who never actually ''went'' into the mysterious parts of the {{color|blue|house}} and Johnny, who didn't even know whether it ''existed''.

* ''The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock upon the door.''

** This is known as the shortest horror story ever. However, another author was able to modify this story to make it even shorter and scarier:

* Of all the places for this trope to [[Trope Maker|originate,]] it may have come from ''[[A Christmas Carol]]''. After the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present give Scrooge [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|long conversations about what's wrong with him,]] the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come never says ''a thing''. Adaptations with a narrator tend to emphasize this by removing or reducing the narrator's part for the length of time that the third spirit is on.

* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'': when Daenerys visits the [[Mind Screw|House of the Undying]], she is told to take the first door on the right in each room to navigate the house. At some point she comes across a long corridor with only doors to the left. Then the lights begin to go out and she hears ''something'' approach... {{spoiler|At which point she figures out that the last door to the left is the first door to the right, escaping whatever that was.}}

* This ironic and somewhat disturbing poem by Archibald MacLeish (see also [[The End of the World as We Know It]] trope):

 

 

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off: }}

 

Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all. }}

 

* While mostly played for the Classic example, the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "Midnight" also plays the full version too. {{spoiler|We're built up to believe something terrifying has happened to a woman's face, but when she finally turns around, it's completely normal, and on some level this is worse}}.

** Played with more famously in "Blink", when every time you see the Weeping Angels, people are safe. It's between these moments that they're lethal, but the audience is most frightened when everything is, for the moment, clearly fine by the story's rules.

* In the ''[[Firefly]]'' episode "Bushwacked," the entire derelict ship is one long example of this: nothing but empty corridors, signs of habitation, and a crewman's log that interrupts right in the middle. But you know something's wrong, because [[The Empath|River]] is acting very odd. This is also one of those cases where the crew discovering what caused the disaster is in fact as scary as the nothing preceding it.

 

* The [http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=870 cover art] for [[Orbital]]'s 1996 single 'The Box' is weirdly unsettling, despite the fact that it just shows a house with, well, nothing going on. The tracks on the single (especially track 2) just add to the fear factor of the house...

* Similarly, the [http://petermenz.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/david_byrne_and_brian_eno_-_everything_that_happens_will_happen_today_album_cover.jpg cover art] for [[Brian Eno]]'s and [[David Byrne]]'s album ''Everything that Happens Will Happen Today''. In this case, the artist deliberately added some unsettling details to the pictures inside the liner notes: for example, there's a discarded condom wrapper in the roof gutter, and one of the interior rooms has a large, sealed, metal door. The deluxe edition of the album takes this several few steps further by adding a sound chip to the packaging, so that it plays the sound of a door creaking open and footsteps when you open the tin.

* Oddly, yet another example involving an album cover depicting nothing but a nondescript house - Silversun Pickups' ''[[wikipedia:File:Silversun Pickups neckofthewoods.jpg|Neck Of The Woods]]''.

 

* [http://www.abcgallery.com/C/chirico/chirico9a.JPG Surrealism in general.]

* A lot of Edward Hopper's paintings fall into this category, but in all cases overlap with [[Fridge Horror]], so you don't quite notice it until you think hard about it.

 

* Punchdrunk Theater Company's [[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot|Hitchcock inspired, haunted-house-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-1940's Noir ballet of Macbeth.]] 'Sleep No More'. The audience is given a [[The Blank|creepy mask]] told not to talk and set loose in the 100 room, five floor, Mckittrick Hotel to find their own way through a series of beautiful, unsettling rooms. You're allowed to touch/eat/read/open anything you find and follow the performers at will. And it's instantly terrifying. *Nothing* will ever jump out at you or even attempt to scare you and there's no conventional Haunted House elements, besides the atmosphere of dread and general creepiness of the design. After a while you get into the swing of things, the place becomes familiar and you can start to really enjoy exploring or following the story- but the first twenty minutes after getting off the elevator, faced with room after creepy room, with no direction and separated from your friends, is pants-wettingly, paralyzingly scary.

 

* The level from ''[[Tomb Raider]] Legend'' which has Lara exploring King Arthur's tomb features a section where Lara must swim across a vast body of water. As she swims, the camera pulls out showing just how vast the water is and how little Lara is...and you wonder if something is going to come up from underneath...

** Another particular example is in Temple of Xian in ''Tomb Raider 2'' {{spoiler|when you enter a cave full of small and [[Giant Spiders]] you find a massive chamber with a huge egg cocoon; the level design makes you platform almost right next to it, but it never opens...}}

* The first level of the original ''[[Alien]]'' TC for ''[[Doom]]''. No enemies. None. Just fifteen minutes of slowly freaking out, searching every corner twice, thrice, four times, because for god's sakes, this is ''Doom!'' '''''Where are they?'''''

* Same thing in the Marine's first level of ''[[Alien vs. Predator|AvP]]''. The first time your motion sensor goes ''beep'' it's just an automatic elevator activating, but after several long minutes of increasing tension in deserted corridors, dark corners, hissing steam vents, and flickering lights you ''will'' empty the magazine in its general direction. The game's designers know full well that the motion sensor is more effective as a tension builder than a tracking device.

* In either version of ''[[Dead Rising]]'' after special forces have apparently taken out the zombies, those zombies all just lie on the ground. It is quite disturbing in the first play through.

* ''[[Rayman]] 2/Revolution/DS'' has the Cave of Bad Dreams, which is [[Nightmare Retardant|too over-the-top to scare anyone]]... except for the threat of a cyclopean demon attacking you if you take too long to complete the level.

* An after-case, if possible: if you arrive at the Romani Ranch on the third day in ''[[The Legend of Zelda|Majora's Mask]]'', you'll notice that the entire field, inhabitants included, are severely quiet. Not that [[Thriving Ghost Town|there's that many people living on the ranch, mind you]], but the effects are still felt. The problem is that {{spoiler|alien-ghost creatures invaded the ranch just last night, and abducted the livestock and the owner's little sister}}. And when you talk to the younger girl on the farm, you'll notice what looks suspiciously like a {{spoiler|lobotomy}}. For experienced players who knew about this, it's just a tiny bit creepy. But for those new to the area/game, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O7efpJMPhQ it's very, ''very'' unsettling].

** And ''Invisible War'' does this with the abandoned Antarctic base. Parts of the level have only a few guards and penguins, the music is just this ambient wind, and inside is dead silent. Scattered throughout the level are datapads that serve as [[Apocalyptic Log|the diary of a researcher long dead]], adding to the creepiness. Lastly you have to fight mutagenic creatures that have escaped into the base, and it is nearly a relief towards the end when you finally run into a few humans.

** ''[[Deus Ex: Human Revolution|Human Revolution]]'' uses this trope on three occasions:

* ''[[Resident Evil]] 2'', safe rooms. Keep in mind that these are places ''explicitly named'' such that nothing will jump out at you, so you can save your game and stuff. Then the rooms themselves are creepy as hell and they play [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5SdZJ6LfQk this]. * shudder*

** Then, in the [[Two Lines, No Waiting|A side story]], there's a door in one of these safe rooms. Normal enough, and maybe something interesting behind it. But then there are ''zombies in the loading screen.'' Suddenly the safe room is not so safe anymore. And it leaves the creeping worry... will it happen again?

* Fujiwara no Mokou from ''[[Touhou]]'' mentions this after the heroines note a distinct lack of opponents at the end of the extra stage. Very much subverted, in that while it is almost outright mentioned in one stage, that happens to be the one in which you play the ghosts.

** Mentioned again in ''Undefined Fantastic Object'' in one of Reimu's routes right before the final boss (although said final boss turns out to be [[Anti-Villain|not very horrifying at all]]).

* This is [[So Okay It's Average|probably the only "good" part]] of ''[[The Crystal Key]]'', although it only kicks in during the second half of the game. In the beginning, you're in a [[Beautiful Void]], and while the lighting and music are pretty dang creepy, it's not so bad because you have no reason to believe there's anything out to get you. When a soldier appears out of nowhere, shoots you, and dumps you in a prison cell, it's a bit jarring, but still not that bad. When you [[The Guards Must Be Crazy|break out]], however, you get to watch a [[Expy|Darth Vader ripoff]] force-choking a guard. And then he rushes out of the room and heads straight your way, and you have only a few seconds to get into a side corridor. After ''that'', even the rest of the [[Beautiful Void]] segments become horror as you wait to see what will come for you next.

** In another optional mission, you're on a crashed ship hanging off of a cliff. There are no enemies and you can't bring any party members. There's also no music and the only sounds you'll hear are the creaking of the ship as it starts to slip off the edge (Which gets worse the farther you get into it) and the occasional crash of a piece of metal falling.

*** It becomes less scary once you've played it a few times and realized that all the creaking, crashing, and falling objects are scripted and no matter how fast you move the ship will never fall over the cliff until you reach the end.

* "[[Dark Fall: The Journal]]" uses this method of horror almost exclusively. It's not possible to actually die at any point in those games, but they do their damnedest to help you forget that.

** ''Dark Fall: Lost Souls'' makes similar use of this trope, although it has a ''lot'' more in-your-face horror than the original too.

** Example: {{spoiler|The seemingly utopian town of Roppongi. Everyone seems to be at peace, and there are no demons around. Then you find out they're all zombies, reanimated by Belial and Nebiros in order to keep [[Creepy Child|Alice]] company. Then there's the dungeon you navigate to get to the three of them--no encounters again, but instead, poison floors and exploding chests ''everywhere.''}}

* ''[[Shivers]]'' has you walking around a haunted museum of weirdness. Alone. With evil spirits hiding in inconspicuous objects, just waiting to suck out your soul.

* ''[[Sub Machine]]'' is made of this and [[Ontological Mystery]], especially the later games.

* The Hellion-based instances in ''[[City of Heroes]]'' are creepiest when the map is largely cleared, and all you can hear are the eerie sound and music effects around the glowing mystic artifacts, bloody symbols, and candlelight. For those that are brand new to the game and unaware which game objects react to you and which don't, it's especially bad, as you keep expecting the symbols to do ''something.''

* ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'' uses this well after you left some areas. The Medical Facility and The Visitors Center are good (and terrifying) examples of this. The former, after you defeat Bane, you can enter and explore it on full... except that it has no enemies, and everything its just empty, except for a few doctors, that are of course just waiting for everything to chill out, and you can still go further and further on the medical levels, down and down below the elevator, and explore the chilling interiors of the facility. If it builts a lot of agoraphobia inside you, congratulations, it's working. For the Visitors Center... it's even worse, as its the only building that forces you into a first person view, and it's just a corridor with a lot of windows and chairs, and the only thing beside you in the building its a mannequin of The Joker, with a tv set on his head, that talks to you like a doctor to a patient, and nothing else.

* While ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'' is better known for the classic example above, there is one Sanity effect that deserves mention here: Sometimes, when you enter a small room with no other exit than the door you came in through, you might go back through the door only to find that it is locked. Usually this happens when something really weird is about to happen, like your character sinking into the floor... but sometimes ''nothing happens,'' not even a flash of light or a cry of "This isn't really happening!"

* An interesting example in ''[[World of Warcraft]]''. In the Southern Barrens, a dwarf tells Alliance players that they [[Dug Too Deep]] and found... something. She doesn't say what they found, but they found ''something''. She then mentions that the Cataclysm caused the cave where whatever it was is to cave in and tells you to pray that it was enough to keep it down.

* Whereas the [[Dream Land]] of ''[[Yume Nikki]]'' falls under the Classic Variation (as noted above), the door in Madotsuki's (normal) room qualifies as this. Every time the player tries to enter the door, Madotsuki would nod her head and refuse to leave her room. What could be on the other side of the door that has her too afraid to leave, especially since she enters the door to her [[Nightmare Sequence|nightmarish]] [[Dream Land]] throughout the game? {{spoiler|Whatever it is, she would literally rather die than confront it.}}

 

* Technically speaking, very little happens in ''[[Marble Hornets]]''. "Nothing happening" will keep you awake for weeks.

** Case in point: Entry 21. Daylight. No [[Hell Is That Noise|audio or video distortion]] whatsoever except around a small burrow of sorts. Yet when Jay climbs up the tower, you feel like you're gonna die!

** The entirety of Entry 17 is Type 3. It's just a clip of Tim sitting around, running through some lines with J and Alex. It might take some time to notice [[media:SMInBackground.jpg|our friend in the back]].

* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', we have D{{color|white|o}}c Scratch's warning to Karkat:

** When he turns around, {{spoiler|none of the bodies have moved.}}

* In the game [http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/572817 The Outsider], it's extremely silent and dark throughout the entire game. In several rooms, it's so dark that you expect something to jump out at you. {{spoiler|It never happens.}}

 

* ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'': "SB-129":

* There's a ''very'' creepy episode of ''[[Samurai Jack]]'', called "Jack And The Zombies". No prizes for guessing his opponents in this one. However, it begins with him walking into a graveyard, and it is [[Incredibly Lame Pun|dead silent]]. Except for children's laughter. And a man's evil cackling. And scraping, rattling noises. It is very, very effective.

* Parodied in ''[[The Simpsons]]'' Treehouse of Horror. Lisa reads Poe's "The Raven", causing Bart to comment "You know what would be scarier than nothing? ANYTHING!"

* In an episode of the new ''[[George of the Jungle]]'' cartoon, Ursula is telling a scary story to the gang while they're all around the campfire. Ape persuades her to change the ending to something not very scary so that he won't have to deal with George having nightmares. She complies, and when the man in the story opens the door, there is nothing on the other side. George then spends most of the episode ''literally'' afraid of nothing.

*Ape slams the closet door in the monster's face and heads to bed.* }}

* In [[The Magic Roundabout|Dougal and the Blue Cat]], as Dougal tells Zebedee about the events of the night before, we are treated to a flashback in which Dougal wakes up and wanders around in the middle of the night and we hear the piercing sound of a cat shrieking, then we hear a sinister female voice singing "Blue is beautiful, blue is best." Nothing happens to Dougal and for now we don't see the source of either of them, but the atmosphere is chilling.

* [[Silent Antagonist|Soundwave]] from ''[[Transformers Prime]]'' makes heavy use of this trope. Even in situations where you think he'll do something, he's usually content to just stand there and ''stare'' directly at the object of his ire (or [[The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You|the camera]]), boring into their sparks with his blank void of a faceplate, punctuating it with an occasional menacing gesture or two. Otherwise, he mostly just lurks in the background, ever watching, ever waiting...

 

* Since a [[Cessation of Existence]] is difficult to comprehend, often times that fear is more in line with characteristics of [[The Nothing After Death]]. This fear can often pop up in places of darkness and/or silence.

* [[wikipedia:Sensory deprivation|Extended or forced sensory deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression and death...]]

** Scientific experiements using [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2124581/The-worlds-quietest-place-chamber-Orfield-Laboratories.html the world's quietest room] has indeed shown that an utter lack of stimuli (in this case, sound) can cause people to start hearing things they normally don't hear, such as their own heartbeat. In addition, the lack of sound also makes it harder for the body to maintain its orientation, especially of the light are off.

* [[Go Mad From the Isolation|Spend too much time alone, and you go insane...]]

* In Mexico we have ''"los Túneles de Guanajuato"'', mining tunnels that cross the whole city from below, most of them are well-lighted and used as a fastway through the city... most of them.

** Bonus points: this is the same city that gaves us ''las momias de Guanajuato''. Guess where the mummies were found.

** Scientists have discovered a giant void in space. There is nothing there. When we say "nothing", we mean NOTHING. Not even a ''hydrogen atom''. It is ''one billion lightyears across''. To compare, that's ten thousand times wider than the Milky Way galaxy.

* Part of the reason Graveyard shifts (or just late/closing shifts in ''general'') are often portrayed as scary in fiction is because of this trope. Enter a place like a big retail store or a mall late at night, ''really'' early-morning, or when it's just near closing. We've trained ourselves to basically accept common background noises that when we enter crowded areas and it feels unsettling when it's not there. This has been known to drive people away from late shifts because they're so used to hearing common background noise that it's unsettling.

* Aokigahara, the forest at the foot of Mount Fuji, is well known for being dead quiet due to its general lack of wildlife and the wind being blocked by the densely-packed trees. That may not sound too bad on its own, but the place is also known for being a favorite place for suicides (second in the world after the Golden Gate Bridge, in fact) and it is rumored that ''ubasute'' (where people would leave sick or elderly relatives in the forest to die, usually during a famine when extra mouths were hard to feed) was commonly practiced there as late as the 19th century. The eerie silence coupled with such a strong association with death can be extraordinarily unnerving.

 

* In [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNSgmm9FX2s this video], if you follow the instructions of the video, {{spoiler|you don't notice the moonwalking bear}}

 

* In ''[[Party of None]]'', an insane Pinkie Pie lets it slip that she's been spying on Rainbow Dash months prior to imprisoning her. From Dash's perspective, every single time, there was nothing there when she went to check.

 

* ''[[Lake Mungo]]'': While you see images of a ghost in photos and videos throughout the movie, most of these are {{spoiler|later revealed to be fake. But during the credits, you see the ghost is actually in some of the fake photos, just very well hidden.}}

* In ''[[Signs]]'', Mel Gibson's character is in his corn field at night. He hears a noise behind him and whirls around, shining his light between some rows to reveal... nothing. {{spoiler|Then the alien moves.}}

 

* ''[[Doctor Who]]''

** The first and third series had this in a unique form. {{spoiler|Bad Wolf}} is strewn heavily throughout the season, but you don't even notice until they point it out. You think to yourself, "That won't catch me off guard again" until you realise that "Mr Saxon" and "Vote Saxon" thread of series 3 connect to a newspaper article in "Love & Monsters" and ''the order to shoot the [[Monster of the Week]]'' in "The Runaway Bride". The first appearance of the "Vote Saxon" posters actually appears in series 1 of ''[[Torchwood]]''.

** The Silence of series 6 are an excellent example of this. They're almost an opposite of the Angels in that they only seem to exist when you are looking at them. As soon as you look away, you forget they were even there. This can get really creepy when the viewer knows where they are and what they are doing but the characters act like everything is normal. It is especially creepy when the scene is progressing as normal and all of a sudden a character turns around and tally marks all over their arms (each tally mark means they have seen a monster) or have their palm glow red (the Doctor put a device in their palms which lets them record messages. It then glows red until the message is played back).

*** Case in point: Amy and Canton Delaware visit a creepy orphanage. At night. During a thunderstorm. They split up so Amy can explore on her own. She enters a room, doesn't see anything (and neither do we). She walks over to a window, looks out, and sees her reflection in the window {{spoiler|revealing that she's seen dozens of Silence in the room that we haven't}}.

* In one episode of [[Psych]], a killer is stalking a woman in a cabin, and at one point, she is talking on the phone, and you don't notice the killer is standing behind her until he moves out of frame.

 

* ''[[Blindsight]]'': After frantically fumbling around while weird things happen all around them, the protagonist finally realizes that alien...things have been on their ship for quite some time, concealing themselves ''in plain sight'' by using a loophole in human visual processing. It's actually pretty ninja.

 

 

* Most photos from [[The Slender Man Mythos]]. You'll see, say, a creepy, [[Ominous Fog|foggy]] [[Don't Go in The Woods|forest]]. You'll stare at it for a while, trying to see what all the "OH SHIT" comments are about. Then you'll notice that that one tree off to the side and way in the back {{spoiler|''[[Humanoid Abomination|isn't a tree]]''}}.

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{{reflist}}

[[Category:This Index Happened Offscreen]]

[[Category:Fear Tropes]]

[[Category:This Index Does Not Exist]]

[[Category:Silence Tropes]]

[[Category:Horror Tropes]]