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Nothing Is Scarier: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Being prepared for almost anything, he was not, by any means, prepared... for nothing."''|'''[[
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.
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** Ed Tom Bell investigating the hotel shoot out at the end with fear that Chigurgh could be in the room.
** Anton Chigurh, who we've already seen commit murder, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhXJcfczNIc chats with a storekeeper.]
* ''[[The Thing
** Done to a lesser extent in [[John Carpenter]]'s remake ''[[The Thing (
*** Though to be fair, that dog is doing an incredible performance.
* The scene in ''[[Mulholland Drive]]'' in which the two guys walk behind the diner.
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* ''[[Army of Darkness]]'', mostly a comedic masterpiece, has Ash being chased by...SOMETHING. We never see what it is, as we watch the chase from its perspective, and this monster is one of only a few things that seem to scare him after his experiences in the first two Evil Dead films.
* [[David Lynch]] movies in general. Especially ''[[Inland Empire]]'' which manages to be unsettling and frightening the whole way through with nothing nightmarish actually happening (well, until that one part....). Also if you look at ''[[Eraserhead]]'' from the right angle, minus the last half hour or so. True the baby is grotesque and monstrous but it never really DOES anything but still the movie manages to terrify its audience.
* ''[[Jaws (
** 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.
* Ridley Scott's ''[[Alien (
** 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.
*** Although the trailer DOES reveal the alien (the facehugger at least), it's just displayed in a torrent of images too fast for people to see it unless they're actually looking for it (freeze frame between 1:33 to 1:34). But the rest of the trailer is still scary as hell. And that's after already having seen the movie.
*** And it is very difficult to see a monster designed by [[
*** There is a cut of ''Alien'' where Tom Skeritt's character goes into the vents to hunt the alien... and that's it. He's never seen or heard from again.
*** Lambert's death in ''Alien'' is possibly the most horrific, since the audience doesn't ''see'' it at all - we only ''hear'' what Ripley hears over the intercom.
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*** Earlier than that, you KNOW there is going to be xenomorphs when the marines are walking into the hive, the only thing is how they'll meet... {{spoiler|wait, did the wall just move??}}
* By the same director, as a rare non-horror film example, the final confrontation between Deckard and Roy Batty in ''[[Blade Runner]],'' in the [[Hell Hotel|Bradbury Building]], also uses this trope intensely and brilliantly.
* [[Alfred Hitchcock]]'s movies revolve generally more around pure suspense than fear, but examples of this trope can still be found in ''[[Psycho]]'', ''[[North
** A great example is from ''[[Rear Window]]'': {{spoiler|Love interest Lisa has gone over to the murderer's apartment to collect a crucial piece of evidence while protagonist Jeff, who has broken his leg, can only watch with his camera's telephoto lens. He notices the murderer coming back down the hall; Lisa, obviously, does not, and cheerfully waves in the direction of the camera.}}
** ''[[Psycho]]'': {{spoiler|when Vera Crane sneaks into the Bates house, into Norman's room, sees the child's toys, sees a Beethoven record on the gramophone, then pulls out a book, opens it up, and looks quite unsettled. We don't see the contents; we can only imagine. (In Robert Bloch's original novel, it's a work of pornography.)}}
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* From [[The Other Wiki]]: on the filming of the early (nearly) silent horror movie ''[[wikipedia:Vampyr|Vampyr]]'' by Carl Dreyer, Dreyer reportedly told his cameraman, "Imagine we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered: everything in it has taken on another level; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed... This is the effect I want to get."
* In the American ''[[The Ring]]'' movie there's a scene where [[Naomi Watts]] is talking to someone on the phone as she pours herself a glass of water from a plastic pitcher. Subconsciously we recognize the pitcher from the opening sequence and become frightened even though nothing even remotely scary is happening to her... yet.
* While being mostly remembered for its [[Sequel Escalation|much gorier]] sequels and remakes, and despite its [[Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death|eye-catching title]], the original instalment of ''[[
** An extremely early teaser for the remake was nothing but a black screen and sound. The censors apparently didn't like due to how disturbing it was.
* ''[[REC]]'': the sequences during which we don't know {{spoiler|where the zombies are hiding}} are arguably scarier than the chase/fight sequences.
** The same can be said for the remake, ''Quarantine''.
** Also used to excellent effect when it is very dark in the movie. Especially in the last scene, where {{spoiler|the characters are in the attic with only the night vision on. You can't see what the creature is, or where it is.}}
* ''[[The Others (
* ''[[The Mist]]'' had the parts where people were fighting in the stores or arguing to go outside rather suspenseful.
* A common formula is to combine this trope with [[Quieter Than Silence]] and a bit of non-cynical [[Lampshade Hanging]] for [[It's Quiet... Too Quiet|it being quiet... too quiet]]. An example from [[Tim Burton]]'s ''[[Sleepy Hollow]]'':
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* The basement scene in [[David Fincher]]'s ''[[Zodiac]]''.
* Generally considered a failure, ''[[The Happening]]'' still features one sequence (when Elliot wakes up in the isolated country-house) that was extremely unsettling, solely because of the way it is filmed (it may be an ordinary old country-house, but at that very moment it seems very, very creepy).
** ''[[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.)
** Shyamalan has a knack for bordering [[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane]] with [[Nothing Is Scarier]] to leave the audience guessing if [[The Sixth Sense|the kid really can see ghosts]] or [[Unbreakable|the guy really is superhuman]] long before the supernatural aspects are ever revealed, in a way that's generally suspenseful and leaving us, in the event that the occurances are supernatural, expecting the worst.
* ''[[Identity]]'' uses this quite a it as well, being a whodunnit slasher. One notable scene is when a couple are arguing and the wife locks herself in the bathroom. The husband starts banging really frantically on the door. It becomes unnerving when he stops.
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* Pick about any moment after the first twenty minutes of the [[Stanley Kubrick]] film ''[[The Shining]]''. Or even a fair few in the TV movie with Steven Weber. Or the original novel. People wandering around an old hotel with things maybe-kinda-did-that-just-really happening never was so unnerving.
** The famous [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6qDqdYY6-Y "Elevator of Blood"] scene in the trailer. It's not particularly graphic, but the message sends home immediately.
* ''[[Alone in
* The sequence in ''[[
** 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.
* ''[[The Descent (Film)|The Descent]]''. Watching it, and knowing something really bad is going to come out of the darkness at any second... The experience is perhaps best described as "Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit OH SHIT!"
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* The most terrifying scene in ''[[The Silence of the Lambs]]'' comes, not when a young woman is kidnapped and held in a subterranean well or when Hannibal Lecter escapes from his prison in a veritable spray of blood, but when Clarice Starling stumbles through absolutely silent, pitch-black darkness, knowing the insane [[Serial Killer]] (who can conveniently see her just fine<ref> via night-vision goggles, which he normally used raising and caring for moths</ref>) is in the room with her, and fully expecting to be shot dead at any second.
** 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 ''[[
* [[Leave the Camera Running|Attempted]] in ''[[Manos:
* The trailer for ''[[Buried]]'' is a solid minute of nothing but a black screen with a voiceover of a man panting and calling 911, not knowing where he is or what happened to him, until the very end where the flame of a lighter reveals that {{spoiler|he's six feet under and very much alive.}}
* ''[[Suspiria]]'' is made of this trope. It uses discordant and menacing music, a world intentionally designed to be slightly off, and constant buildup and anticipation to make truly frightening moments where absolutely nothing is happening... Yet. Unfortunately, as befits this trope, the tagline "The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92" is woefully inaccurate.
* 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]].
* In [[
** 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 ''[[
* Robert Wise's ''[[The Haunting]]'' (the original black-and-white film, ''not'' the remake) is a near-perfect (in every sense) example of this trope. We hear rhythmic thumping and pounding several times in the film, and one character realizes that ''something'' was holding her hand a moment ago, and there is a creepy moment where a door softens and bulges as something on the other side tries to get in. But it is never revealed who or what is stalking the characters. The film is a guaranteed way to give yourself nightmares. (The book that serves as inspiration, Shirley Jackson's ''[[The Haunting of Hill House]]'', does the exact same thing.)
* In ''[[Dark City]]'', arguably the most nerve-wracking bit of the movie is when John wakes up in the eerie hotel bathroom. Hell, the city's unreal, dark, gloomy atmosphere never gives anyone a moment of respite.
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* This trope is what made ''[[The Exorcist III]]'' so damn scary. The hallway scene is simply a nurse doing her rounds for the night {{spoiler|including a nice fake-out before she's almost done, and is beheaded by a fast-moving cloaked figure with amputation shears, which we don't even see used since the scene is quickly cut away.}}
* ''[[Tremors]]'' did this very effectively during the first part of the film. All we saw of the Graboids (if we were shown anything) were surface undulations as they moved. Most of the time there was little hint at lurking danger, and the attack scenes were viscerally frightening because ''we couldn't see the subterranean monsters that were attacking''. When the Graboids eventually revealed themselves, though, it made them only a little less scary.
* The first ''[[Resident Evil (
* ''[[Dead Silence]]'' relied quite a bit on the [[Quieter Than Silence]] version of this, as the title would indicate.
* Ti West's ''[[
* Henri-Georges Clouzot's ''[[Les Diaboliques]]'' employs this ''extremely'' effectively during its climax.
* 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.
** Oddly, the remake/reimagining of ''[[
** The original ''[[Dawn of the Dead (
* 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 ''[[
* 1980's ''[[The Changeling (
* AJ Annila's [[Surreal Horror]] film ''[[Sauna]]''. Sure, there's a [[Stringy Haired Ghost Girl]] and a victim of [[The Corruption]], but both are just remants with the encounter with ''something'' in the dark of the cellar, the shed, and ofcourse the sauna. You are in the dark. You are not alone. You hope that the ''other'' doesn't turn its gaze on you. And then there's the burning question: is the person who walks out of the sauna the same person who walked in?
* 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
* The horror film ''[[
== Literature ==
* The [[Stephen King]] short story ''The Reaper's Image'', one of his first published stories, focuses on something seemingly innocuous: a mirror with a black smudge that sometimes appears in the corner. The smudge doesn't appear for most people. But the few people who do see it, for some reason, become terrified and flee the room. Once they do -- and once they are out of sight of any other human being -- they are never seen again.
* The book version of ''[[The Princess Bride (
* ''The Red Room'' by [[
* ''The Curious Sofa'' by [[Edward Gorey]].
{{quote| ''As soon as everybody had crowded into the room, Sir Egbert fastened shut the door, and started up the machinery inside the sofa. When Alice saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably...''}}
** 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]]''.
* The famous short story "[[The
* In [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s poem "[[The Raven (
* In ''[[Coraline (
** 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 scene, the Other Mother disappears immediately after shaking hands with Coraline {{spoiler|to agree to the game.}} Coraline's creeped out by this-- she prefers the Other Mother to have a definitive location, because if she's nowhere, then she can be anywhere. And of course, it's always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
* [[Lampshaded]], of course, in ''[[Discworld
** Pratchett even coined [http://www.wordnik.com/words/p%27ch%27zarni%27chiwkov a name] for it.
** 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.
* This trope is the heart of [[William Gibson|William Gibson's]] short story "Hinterlands", which concerns an interdimensional "highway" and its effects on the astronauts who travel it. [[Primal Fear|The Fear]], as it's called in the story, visits those who even ''think'' too much about what's on the other side. {{spoiler|The astronauts who actually go there all come back insane or dead by their own hands.}}
* One of [[
** 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 ''[[
* 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 ''[[
* Seven words from ''[[Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark]]'': "Ellen...I am coming up the stairs..."
* A literal example, which crosses with [[The Nothing After Death]]: ''[[The Neverending Story (
* Mentioned fairly explicitly in the [[
{{quote| ''They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but'' nothing!}}
* 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.
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== Live Action TV ==
* 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.
* In ''[[Doctor Who/NS/Recap/S4 E10 Midnight|Midnight]]'', a [[Bottle Episode]] of ''[[Doctor Who]]'', there is... ''[[Eldritch Abomination|something]]''... that torments the Doctor and the people he's traveling with. {{spoiler|We ''never'' find out anything about it, other than that it [[Deconstruction|utterly deconstructs an ordinary Doctor Who episode]] and brings all of the Doctor's flaws to the forefront.}}
** 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''.
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** 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...
** Not to mention the Cheese Man...
* The ending of the ''[[
** ''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.
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== Video Games ==
* A previous interpretation of ''[[SCP Foundation
* ''[[Castlevania II:
* ''[[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...
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** One instance where its the music is when you come out in the courtyard of the other world school, you come out side, and the music that starts up practically screams "SOMETHINGS COMING!" while the area is totally dark, it turns out to be completely empty.
** In ''[[Silent Hill 2]]'' at one point you were forced to stick your arm into a hole in the wall of a decrepit room, and the whole atmosphere of the place makes you watch in real dread... until nothing happens. This reaching into darkness is repeated a few other times in the game, but seldom more effectively than here.
*** This changes in ''[[Silent Hill Homecoming]]'', where there are a couple instances where you stick your arm into a hole and some [[Gory Discretion Shot|unknown thing grabs hold of your arm]]. If you're not quick, you fall back with a [[An Arm and
*** Played for laughs in a different Silent Hill game, if prompted, you almost stick your arm into a toilet, which builds up the tension, then has the heroine stop and [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|reprimand you for making her attempt to stick her arm in a toilet]].
** There are also many strange rooms (such as the one with the butterflies) with nothing in them at all despite them appearing clearly distinct from others, where the soundtrack just repeats ominous clanks and gutteral buzzes that create far more unease than any of the monster-infested rooms.
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* This trope is one of the reasons why ''[[Thief]] 3's'' "Shalebridge Cradle" is one of the scariest video game levels of all time. The first part of the level has nothing in it whatsoever. It's just dark, and has freaky ambient noises. To get to the second half, you have to go down to the basement and and turn the generator on, which causes enough noise that you just KNOW will have alerted anything within a mile radius. It also turns most of the lights on, leaving little shadow to hide in.
** This is used twice in the same level. At some point in the first empty part of the Cradle you hear the sound of something beating on a door, trying to get out. The ONLY way to proceed further in the level is to walk up several flights of stairs all the way to a single solitary door leading into the attic. Right outside the door the beating sounds are loud and frantic. Once you muster the courage to open the door you find... {{spoiler|an empty room. For starters, at least.}}
* Some of the most chilling words ever to appear in any video game: "[[Zork
** Though the grue disguise in ''Zork: The Undiscovered Underground'', the Grue Repellent and Grue Convention of Zork III, and the Snavig spell (turns you into the target creature, i.e. "snavig grue") kind of ruin their scariness.
* The first level of ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R.]]'' has exactly zero enemies, just try not firing your weapon in it. There are also lots of dark, creepy hallways in the rest of the game that would make great ambush points for enemy soldiers and psychic little girls... and most of them are completely empty and no less terrifying for it.
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** The worst scares you can get in Left 4 Dead 2 is in the mutation The Last Man On Earth, where it's single-player with no bots, and no common infected. It can get very eerie walking through the level alone while hearing the growls of special infected sneaking up on you, and since you're alone they are far deadlier.
*** What's even worse than that is the fact that the single character's vocal script is unchanged, meaning that they talk to thin air - even taking to specific survivors 'who aren't there anymore'.
* In the ''[[
** Similarly the whole series of ''[[They Hunger]]'' mods for ''[[Half Life]]'' used this well, along with every zombie trope in the Wiki.
* ''[[Siren]]'' is pretty bad for this. Often you'll be walking in a nearly pitch black house, village, whatever with no weapon and sight jack. You'll be able to see through the Shibito's eyes but you won't actually KNOW where they are visually until you hear them. This is bad because generally you're too afraid to go forward even though the Shibito are dumb as a pile of hammers and aren't likely to do much.
** Also, there'll be no music or any indication anything's wrong when suddenly the screen will flash red and you'll hear a Shibito yell from near you providing a wonderful "omg wtf what that?!?!?!" moment complete with running in random directions and possibly pissing yourself.
* In ''[[Diablo]]'', the dungeon levels are large and there can be quite a distance between the monsters, which only adds to the suspense and scariness of the game. Even more so because there are monsters that can turn invisible and sneak up on you, and others that charge you from far off-screen with a blood-curdling roar.
* ''[[Portal (
** Not to mention the effect of this level on players who rely heavily on hearing as a habit. In the final level, much like the rest of the game, there is total silence, punctuated very occasional by mechanical creaks and thumps. When you're going through the level searching for ANY sign of life, alive or otherwise, and you expect every door to try to kill you anyway, these little sounds can be terrifying.
*** 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?
** Really, the whole game is this. From the beginning, [[G La DOS]]'s vaguely sinister remarks, the occasional death-trap, and the fact that nothing has happened yet lead the player to think that surely something will in the next chamber... or the next... or the next...
* ''[[Dead Space (
** 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.
*** And of course, if you think that's bad, try turning off the music and wandering the Ishimura in silence. No stings, no problem, right? ''Wrong''. Without the stings to warn you when something is ''just'' out of view, you get real paranoid real quick.
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** Done to great effect in Chapter 10 of the sequel, upon {{spoiler|Isaac's return to the Ishimura}}. After slaughtering your way through nine chapters of Necromorph-stuffed corridors and hallways, you've started to get used to encountering them everywhere you go. So you would ''think'' that dozens of empty rooms and walkways would be a welcome change of pace, but if anything the quiet, empty corridors and constant expectation of attack that never come makes it one of the scariest portions of an already terrifying game
*** When you acess the shops, music stops playing. But some disturbing whispering can be heard if the volume is loud enough.
* ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'' features a showdown in Killer Croc's lair; an abandoned sewer beneath Arkham. Croc's just [[Dumb Muscle|a stupid brute]], right? You'll just have to trick him into running headlong into something or exploit his weak point, right? {{spoiler|Nope, he spends most of the sequence underwater, listening for you. If you move too fast, he'll figure out where you are and drag you down to your doom. So you have to move through the level gathering [[Plot Coupon|plot coupons]] at a glacial pace, with only the sound of Croc's breathing keeping you company. Unless he decides to come up and attack (and if he catches you, you're not getting away), which gets nerve wracking, really quick.}}
** {{spoiler|Unfortunately, you can destroy that by just crouch-walking, which is fairly quick, and using a quick batarang throw to knock him back into the water.}}
** There's also an area that is used to house the criminally insane in group cells. If you're unfortunate enough to be using Detective Vision (which you will use all the damn time), all you see are hordes of red skeleton enemies before you even go through the door to the room. Then the door opens and reveals all the enemies are still securely locked up, and they are never freed the entire time you walk through the room. {{spoiler|that happens later}}
** During the first Scarecrow nightmare, you end up entering a morgue that has nothing dangerous at all in it except for some body freezer doors opening and closing on their own and some creepy whispering. Then you turn to leave through the same door and {{spoiler|end up going into another room of the morgue, where you find three body bags containing Thomas Wayne, Martha Wayne, and Scarecrow respectively}}.
* In ''[[
** ''[[
*** There's no background music, but there is an unusally high-fidelity recording of children laughing in the distance. It's not quite silent, but definitely makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
* ''[[Ace Combat]]'' does this at least twice. In ''04'', the briefing for the final mission, "Megalith" - it does admittedly make the mission's [[Ominous Latin Chanting]] that bit more startling, though. In ''Zero'''s Mission 12, after accomplishing the first objective, [[Deus Ex Nukina|the screen flashes completely white, your HUD shows a missile warning for a few seconds]], your wingman starts shooting at you, and the background music suddenly stops.
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** Worse is the ''implications'' of things happening everywhere. You find barricades, shattered glass, bullet casings, hallways and floors absolutely covered in various kinds of alien blood. Sometimes you even find piles of corpses behind locked doors. ''And there is absolutely no evidence of what the hell caused all of this.''
** Especially when you realize that all the barricades and defenses that have been set up and positioned in such a way as to counter something trying to get out of the facility, rather than something trying to force its way in. And you are headed into the direction those defenses are set to defend from...
** Ditto for the first few minutes of ''[[Halo: Reach]]''.
* ''[[
* In ''[[Sly Cooper]] and the Thevius Racoonus'' there is an area with a massive gate outside it, allegedly to keep some horrible monster inside. The player wanders through the quiet, empty level for several minutes, constantly expecting the monster to appear and being severely creeped out when the reeds in the water beneath them move as if an animal is swimming right past you. After all of this excellently terrifying nothingness, the monster turns out to be a flamboyently-colored and cartoonish cobra thingy that moved so slowly you'd have to ''try'' to get caught by it.
* In ''[[Operation Flashpoint]]'', you might be on patrol in a forest for ten minutes, encountering no enemies whatsoever and hearing nothing but the birds singing, when you walk right into an ambush and the scene explodes into a loud firefight. This being in stark contrast to a game like ''[[Call of Duty]]'', where you're rarely ''not'' being shot at, the sudden transition is quite harrowing.
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** Don't wander the Zone at night with just your head lamp. Just don't. See main entry for details.
** In general, the Zone is mostly empty. ''Mostly''. You can wander all the way from Agroprom to Dark Valley, seeing nor other stalkers, nor any monsters. Try to relax, though, ang get torn to shreds by pseudodogs or a rifle round through the head from a bandit looking for some loot.
* ''[[
** Nothing after nothing came bursting out.
* ''[[Yume Nikki]]'' is very good at this, but oddly enough, the best example wouldn't even ''be'' an example were it not for the fact that one of the game's secrets got out. [[media:Achievement_Unlocked_-_0G_-_UboAAAAAAAAAAAAA_6626.png|See this]]? A little creepy, but not worth being the picture for the game's Nightmare Fuel page when there's entire worlds full of severed body parts, right? Thing is, if you want to see Uboa ([[Watch It for
** And on a broader scale, the dream worlds are so big and have so much empty space that you never know when you're going to stumble onto something, and after you've found a few of the... ''[[Nightmare Dreams|weirder]]'' parts of Madotsuki's dreams, you realize that whatever it is, it's going to be deeply disturbing. But then, this ''is'' basically ''[[Earthbound]]'' [[X Meets Y|meets]] ''[[Silent Hill]]''...
** 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 ''[[
* ''[[Myst]]''? Where could nothingness ever be scary in ''that'' series? Try in ''Myst III: Exile'', after you've seen the evidence of Saavedro's insanity [[Fridge Logic|and realize]] that you yourself are essentially trapped on those same worlds, with no humans and very little life save plants and a few animals, retracing Saavedro's footsteps as he desperately tried to find a way back home... {{spoiler|And once you get to Narayan and meet Saavedro face to face and he locks himself in the bunker, [[Fridge Horror|you realize that he can get out to attack you at any time if he so feels like it]], even though you can't get in.}} Saavedro never {{spoiler|actually leaves the bunker until you solve a certain puzzle}}, and you're never actually in any danger {{spoiler|(unless you don't solve the final puzzle correctly)}}, but the loneliness of the ages and the sheer effect of nothing really going wrong up to that point is ''really'' creepy. Actually, the Myst series likes to use this trope quite a lot, come to think of it...
** ''Riven'' also uses this very effectively by leaving little hints around the game that Gehn is moving around the islands and aware of your presence. Knowing that he never catches you until fixed points in the game doesn't help much. Similarly, in the original ''Myst'', three of the four ages you visit were once inhabited, but are now empty, implying that the people who lived there have all been murdered; but somehow this doesn't match up to the creepiness of the fourth age, which has ''always'' been empty.
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** Lampshaded and subverted in ''Resident Evil Code Veronica Flash Edition'' by Legendaryfrog based on the part where Claire walks down the area where dogs are hiding but let her past the first time and 3/4ths of the way back. "Somethings going to jump out at me somethings going to jump out at me somethings goiNG TO JUMP OUT AT ME!!! ... pheww" then when shes gone the zombies jump out and complain about being late because of decomposing bladder issues.
* ''[[Alan Wake]]'' gets scary as hell thanks to this. It doesn't take much playtime for you to start whirling around at every little noise, and scanning around yourself constantly with the flashlight. You'll be sprinting for the Safe Havens in no time.
* In the final stage of ''[[
* In ''[[
* Any time in the ''[[Metroid Prime]]'' series where you're going through either a large empty area, or a hallway surrounded by things that look like they ought to be gargantuan enemies (or Metroids) ready to come out and decimate you, only for absolutely nothing to happen. {{spoiler|Yet.}}
** ''[[Metroid]] II: Return of Samus'' was, by far, the king of this trope for the series, especially considering how many of the Metroid attacks would come out of freaking ''nowhere,'' and just about everything else was 99% ''empty.''
** Several times in Corruption, you walk through various {{spoiler|Metroid research facilities}}. Everything's okay, though you keep expecting something to come out and attack you. Those who are [[Genre Savvy]] enough, though, will know what you'll have to eventually do...
* In the SNES version of ''[[Prince of Persia]]'''s Level 19, there are no enemies or traps until the [[Boss Rush]] at the end.
* ''[[Amnesia:
** Let's not forget that Daniel forgot everything ''on purpose,'' leaving you, present-time-Daniel, in the dark. In his letter to himself, past-Daniel says that he can't tell you ''why'' he chose to forget. This leaves the player wondering what the hell is so wrong with this place that the main character would ''willingly'' forget everything.
** 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.
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* ''[[X-COM (Video Game)|X-COM]]'': Do you know what is worse than detecting a snakeman battleship loaded with the goddamned [[Demonic Spider|Chryssalid]] going [[Oh Crap|straight toward your weaker base]]? Not detecting anything. [[Paranoia Fuel|You know they are there somewhere. You know it. But what are they up to?]] What is worse than seeing a Chryssalid rushing right toward your soldiers? Not seeing any ennemies on a snakeman terror mission/alien base mission/Ufo ground assault mission/Ufo Crash recovery mission. [[It's Quiet... Too Quiet|They are already preparing an ambush]].
** 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.
* The Dunwitch building in ''[[Fallout]] 3''... Where do I begin? The Ghouls patter of footsteps and shrieking in the dark is bad enough, then there's the audio logs of an unfortunate wanderer who was unlucky enough to be entrapped there. But possibly the most unsettling part are the hints of the supernatural. Most of the game is an outlandish but clearly defined sci fi universe where even the most nightmarish enemies have some explanation. The Ghostly whispering, slamming doors and mysterious flashback however all leave the player in a constant state of terror that some sort of demon, ghost or vampire will lunge at them from the shadows at any moment.
* Lampshaded in the ''[[Dragon Age]]'' expansion ''Awakening'', where one of your resident snarker companions comments on a particularly long and ominous hallway (leading to a major boss battle): "Ooh, the suspense is killing me!"
** In the basic game, there's much darkness and horror, but only two scary segments: [[Town
** There is also the Orphanage in the Elven Alienage in Denerim. There's a lot of blood on the floor, and a whole bunch of demons. Creepy enough, but not enough to get on this trope. But the creepiest part is the fact that {{spoiler|[[Fridge Horror|you never meet who summoned the demons, and you have no idea why they were summoned.]] There literally is no cause for the slaughter, as far as you know. And you don't even know what happened to the person. They could still be out there...}}
* When exploring Tartarus in ''[[Persona 3]]'' every so often you will enter a floor where there are no enemies at all. Fuuka(Or Mitsuru, most likely Fuuka though) will comment that "something doesn't feel right". She's right, because this is one of the special floors of the game, the "Reaper Floor", where one of the Secret Bosses of the game (Aptly named "The Reaper") spawns after a fixed ''2 minutes'', must we remind you that these floors tend to be ''excruciatingly'' long and be [[Suspicious Videogame Generosity|filled with items]]? And that, unless you're max level or is using the cheap Satan & Lucifer trick, he's most likely going to ''slaughter'' you? And the fact the there is a ''chain rustling sound in the background that only gets louder the closer he is''? And that your analyzer (Be it Mitsuru or Fuuka) ''tells'' you that he's spawned, but in a very indirect manner? (Saying something along the lines of "I've got a bad feeling...")
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== Webcomics ==
* Parodied in ''[[
* In ''[[
** Worse, when Lars and Augie tell the story, this is when they note that something is ''very'' '''very''' wrong.
{{quote| '''Augie:''' Took us a while to figure out ''why.'' No animals. No birds. We left the road to look around. There were no signs of life. No active burrows, no fresh nests. No fresh tracks. No droppings. No bodies. No bones. '''Nothing.'''}}
* Discussed and parodied in ''[[Skin Horse]]'' after Tip becomes a werewolf. Unity references ''[[Jaws (
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** ''[[Tribe Twelve]]'', starting with [[It Gets Better|Night Recording]].
** ''[[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.
* [[
** This gets even worse when you see SCP-835's incredibly [[Squick|squicky]] uncensored articles and realize that ''there is a very good reason for that''.
** 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
** It's even worse if you read the video's description where Ryukaki says that {{spoiler|he didn't see them until he actually watched the video}}
* ''Encyclopedia Dramatica'' features an article "Offended", a [[Shock Site]] unto its own (once you start scrolling down past the pictures of cute animals). Visit {{spoiler|the [http://whatport80.com/Offended same article on its SFW counterpart]}}, and you'll find {{spoiler|nothing but pictures of cute animals. What, you expected those nasty, nasty things on an explicitly SFW site?}}.
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* The Horror Manga series ''[[Fuan no Tane]]'' very rarely has anything that is overtly threatening anyone, but is nonetheless incredibly eerie. A prime example is in the 5 page segment starting [http://www.mangafox.com/manga/fuan_no_tane/v03/c000/109.html here].
* 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.
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== Film ==
* ''[[Picnic
** The book did explain it - eventually.
* [[Andrei Tarkovsky]] uses this a lot, particularly in ''[[STALKER]]'', ''particularly'' in the insanely creepy "meat grinder" sequence.
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** 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 ''[[
* ''[[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.
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== Literature ==
* In "The White People" by [[
* 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.
* [[H.P. Lovecraft
** 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''.
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* ''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:
{{quote| ''The last man on Earth sat in a room. [[Zombie Apocalypse|There]] [[Alien Invasion|was a]] ''[[Sealed Room in
* In [[Patricia
* 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.}}
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* "The Nothing Equation" by Tom Godwin (better known for his [[Cold Equation|other short story with "Equation" in the title]]) is about a man who's sent out to an observation bubble in space, far away from any space station or planet. The people who've manned the bubble previously have all gone insane and/or committed suicide, afraid of what's outside the bubble. The protagonist, however, is quite certain that there's nothing out there. {{spoiler|He's right, there's nothing. A ''whole lot'' of nothing.}}
* Most of the vignettes in the "Notebook of the Night" section of [[Thomas Ligotti]]'s story collection ''Noctuary'' are of this nature, with special mention to be paid to "One May Be Dreaming".
* The vug under the rug from [[Dr. Seuss|Dr Seuss']] ''[[
* This ironic and somewhat disturbing poem by Archibald MacLeish (see also [[The End of the World
{{quote| THE END OF THE WORLD}}
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* 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.
* Used very effectively in the ''[[
* Parodied in an episode of ''[[The Weird Al Show]]'' that aired shortly after ''[[The Blair Witch Project]]'' became a hit. Al announced that they would show a clip of the upcoming ''Blair Witch 2'' (years before the film was actually made), which will be "the first film done entirely with the lens cap on." Cut to a solid black screen and a woman's voice screaming, "oh no, it's coming, it's so big and ''so horrible!'' AAAAAH!" Cut back to Al, who says "now isn't it scarier when they leave it to your imagination?"
* The red bag in ''[[Ideal]]'', which apparently contains something terrifying enough to reduce [[Ax Crazy]] gangsters to tears. What is actually in it is never revealed.
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* In an episode of ''[[Bones]]'', the characters are investigating the dead body found in the middle of nowhere by a UFO hunter. The episode is known for several creepy moments, unusual for the crime drama. However, the scariest moment happens at the end, after the murder is solved. Booth and Brennan are in a field, lying on a car hood, stargazing and talking about the possibility of alien life. Suddenly, all sounds stop, even the crickets and the wind don't make a sound. Both characters are suddenly very uncomfortable. End of the episode.
** Made worse by the fact that right after this happens, Booth asks, "Did you hear that?" the viewers NEVER FIND OUT WHAT THEY HEARD.
* Parodied in the ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]'' presentation of ''[[Manos:
* The original series of ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' had an episode called "Cry of Silence" that was intended to work off this trope. Unfortunately, the first half of the episode involves possessed killer ''tumbleweeds'', and a later scene features possessed [[Frogs and Toads]]; both of these tend to invoke giggles rather than shudders.
* An episode of ''[[Millennium (TV series)|Millennium]]'' has this occur. The group is aware of a serial killer whose motive is proving nobody is safe, and part of his MO is casing out "high security" suburban homes during their open house showings. They know him well enough to set up a sting for him on the "right" night, and they've got a strong suspect and a picture, just no proof prior to the sting. When the sting goes off, however, nothing happens... {{spoiler|until they realize they're in a suburban housing tract, and every house for blocks around them has the exact design plan as the one they assumed he was in. This being the "right" night, he's somewhere in one of these identical houses, killing again, and they won't find him until he's done. They get to spend the rest of the night dwelling on that as a family dies.}}
* ''[[Twin Peaks]]'', already a somewhat creepy and unsettling series, also had a vibe throughout it that there was something beyond the town, just watching. Many viewers think that it was a [[Wendigo]], never seen but felt.
* 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.
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== Music ==
* The [http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=870 cover art] for [[
* 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]]''.
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* ''[[The Path]]'' has no enemies, no jump scares, nothing. It's just you, walking ''almost'' alone in the forest, listening to the calming songs and sounds of the forest, and yet you feel worked up, knowing that, since the game is a remake of the story of Little Red, there is a wolf out there, watching you...
* There is a good reason why someone put ''[[Myst|Riven]]'' (and the first ''[[Myst]]'' for that matter) in the [[Video Games/Nightmare Fuel|Nightmare Fuel Page]].
* The ''[[Penumbra (
* Speaking of Frictional Games, their latest offering, ''[[Amnesia:
** One of the key elements of keeping the monsters enduringly frightening throughout the game is that you ''can't even look at them'' without taking a severe hit to your [[Sanity Meter]]. If you do attempt to just look square-on at them there's an [[Interface Screw]] that blurs your vision: you ''never'' really get a good look at them unless you go on a panic-induced suicide spree, never mind that their models on their own are grotesque enough. The most one can catch safely during gameplay is perhaps their toes.
* ''[[
** 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
###Near the end of the FEMA camp, you have to go through one otherwise empty warehouse room with shelves stocked with hundreds of huge boxes. After a couple seconds you recognize them as something you first saw earlier in the level: each and every one is the compact form of '''a car-sized killer robot that can be activated at any time''', and the emptiness continuing for the next couple rooms highlights how completely screwed you'd be if they were.
###During your initial wanderings through {{spoiler|the Picus building}} it starts out completely empty, with little to no background music, but on it's very clear ''something'' bad has happened by all the locked fire-escapes and signs of a hasty evacuation. You'll be overjoyed when the bad guys come out of the woodwork - at least then you'll have something to ''hit''.
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*** They were most likely fired by the owner due to the Prince's influence. Living in a building with overly curious [[Creepy Janitor]] is actually not very Masquerade-conscious.
* ''[[Scratches]]'' also relies heavily on this for 90% of the game, noteworthy examples are the effect the first time you enter the [[Creepy Basement|basement]] of the mansion, the music makes you thing something is gonna jump at you from the shadows at any moment, also {{spoiler|near the end, when you finish crafting the sacred totem and you are on your way to confront the cursed mask, creepy laughs and whispers haunt you all the time on your way to it.}}
* ''[[
* ''[[Clock Tower (
* At one point in the first ''[[Umineko no Naku Koro
* Similarly, in the first arc of ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro
* ''[[Metro 2033]]''. Iradiated areas when your mask is running low. The deep breathing, and just nothing else.
** One of the creepiest levels is ''Ghosts''. There is not a single enemy.
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*** Unfortunately, the third game reneged on this.
* Used occasionally in ''[[Dragon Age]]''. During the Dalish Elf origin, a companion notes that there are no sounds of wildlife, no wind in the trees... And of course, there's what happens if you decide to abandon Redcliffe to its fate and come back later...
* "[[Dark Fall:
** ''Dark Fall: Lost Souls'' makes similar use of this trope, although it has a ''lot'' more in-your-face horror than the original too.
* ''[[Shin Megami Tensei I]]'' has [[Random Encounters]] ''everywhere''. In every town, every building-- even [[Nintendo Hard|places where it's decidedly unfair]], like right outside shops and places to heal. When there ''aren't'', you know there's something deeply wrong.
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* In ''[[STALKER]]'', there's the Wild Territory, a location usually bustling with mutants, anomalies and NPCs. Then there's a house which contains a stash that is completely empty, except for a few bushes which add to the "there's gotta be ''something'' hiding here"-feeling.
* An unexpected (and possibly unintended) example shows up in ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]''. There's an apartment across the street from one of your safehouses with an openable door. Usually building with a door you can push open serve some purpose or another (be it part of a mission, the location of a collectible item, or even the site of an [[Easter Egg]]), this place serves no purpose. Even weirder, every other apartment building in the game contains people hanging around the halls. This one is completely empty. It's pretty creepy, to say the least.
* The endless staircase prior to the final level of ''[[
* ''[[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.
* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots]],'' Snake and Otacon return to a now deserted Shadow Moses Island. Despite knowing that all the soldiers are gone, and that nothing lurks around the corner, you still feel a sense of discomfort as you traverse the empty halls. This is especially prominent during the flashback at slaughter hallway, where you hear the agonizing screams of soldiers being sliced apart. There's no one there, and the screams eventually fade away, but you're left with a lingering feeling of unease.
* 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.
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** 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.}}
* In [[
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[
{{quote| '''''ALONE'''''}}
* 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.
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*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.
* The ''[[
* [[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...
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== [[Fan Fiction]] ==
* [[
* In ''[[
== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[
* 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.}}
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[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 ''[[
** As well as the Weeping Angels in "The Time of Angels". The first half of the episode is spent hunting a lone survivor using its own very effective (but involuntary) disguise of turning itself into a stone statue when looked at into something even more effective, by hiding amongst a mausoleum of stone statues of an extinct two-headed species. The characters venture deep into the mausoleum in search of it, until that thing that was bothering them comes into focus-- {{spoiler|the stone statues only have ''one'' head.}}
** 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).
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* In ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'', the implication at the end that {{spoiler|[[Big Bad|the Joker]]}} was [[Hidden in Plain Sight|with you all the time in front of you]], when you visited {{spoiler|the Visitor Center}}. It gets worse when you realise that the mannequin is posed differently everytime you go into that room, and that {{spoiler|after you "speak" with the Joker & walk a certain distance away before quickly turning around, the damn thing's posed differently}}.
** Also, although you were attacked several times earlier in the game by {{spoiler|Scarecrow}}, if you find his secret lair, it is almost completely covered in pictures of you. Since they're polaroids, and due to the nature of {{spoiler|Scarecrow}}'s attacks, it's safe to assume that he has been stalking you since you arrived at the Asylum, and probably followed you around every other time you went there. *Brr...*
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