Nothing Is Scarier: Difference between revisions

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** Allegedly, Hitchcock observed that the scariest thing one could put on the silver screen was a closed door.

*** [[Roger Corman]] has asserted that one of the creepiest effects in a movie is a handheld camera slowly approaching a closed door; one of his "alumni", director Jonathan Demme, uses this to good effect in ''[[Silence of the Lambs]]''.

* 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 ''[[The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Film)|The Texas Chainsaw Massacre]]'' makes very good use of this trope, particularly in the scene immediately before the first murder.

== Live Action TV ==

* In ''[[The Avengers (TV)|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.

* ''[[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.

** And how about your wingman yelling "The {{spoiler|8492nd squadron}} does not exist!" then the music stops and tons of enemies appears from nowhere.

** There's also the one Marine who evidently saw {{spoiler|the Flood}}, and was driven insane by it. When you find him, he starts screaming [[Through the Eyes of Madness|"The monsters are everywhere!"]], which only serves to ramp up the [[Paranoia Fuel]] [[Up to Eleven]].

** 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.''

* The level ''Second Sun'' in ''[[Call of Duty]] [[Modern Warfare]] 2'' is like this. One minute, {{spoiler|you and your squad are making a heroic last stand in and around a downed helicopter}}. The next, {{spoiler|a nuke goes off over DC, and everything electronic shorts out. It's one minute of madness as planes and helicopters ''fall from the sky'' and come crashing down all around you, and the squad is running for cover in panic.}} And then, just silence. Then it starts to rain heavily as the last light of the day fades. Suddenly, in a flash of lighting, three enemies are spotted in front of you.

** And then there's another encounter later in the level when the squad is sneaking through the ruins and the lighting reveals another squad crossing the street 20m ahead of you, completely oblivious to your team. Unsure of whether they're friend or foe, Sergeant Foley shouts the challenge "Star". They don't respond.

* In ''[[The Suffering]]'', much of the navigational and informal help can be seen through watching the prison surveillance cameras. You click on the control panel to watch them, and the window then takes up the entire screen, they are also in real-time, so you'll be watching a security guard being torn to bits by shank-monsters while it happens. You can also gather that there's going to be monsters in that room when you come to it. This is more of a "warning" than it is a shock strategy. That is, until you watch a surveillance camera showing {{spoiler|a guy watching a surveillance camera, and see a creature slowly walking towards him. You try and exit the screen as soon as possible, then turn around to see nothing at all.:}}

* ''[[Irisu Syndrome]]'''s game folder, as you play the game, gets populated with text files containing character profiles. Irisu's profile, conspicuously, is just [[Visible Silence]]. {{spoiler|There is a very good reason for this.}}

* The ''[[Descent]]'' series likes to play with this trope, all three variants of it. All three games have at least one melee bot that make little to no noise and prefers to hide in dark areas. There are several levels in each game where these robots are a common enemy. Those levels are usually very dark, and will often have areas where there is no noise whatsoever. Using the headlight may not be an option; it runs on energy, and a lot of dark levels have a rather precious supply. Sometimes said enemies are [[Invisible Monsters|stealth-camouflaged]], others [[Roaming Enemy|randomly stalk]] you. The soundtrack is also sprinkled with sections where the music drops to near silence without warning. That's if you have the music turned on at all...

* ''[[Baten Kaitos]] Origins'' has the dungeon inside Seginus, an ancient magical puppet. The creepy music and surroundings only serve to remind you that you're walking ''inside its mind''. At the end of the dungeon, when Seginus starts talking, there's a very good chance you'll jump out of your seat, just because it's such a nervewracking dungeon.

* ''[[Scratches]]'' has nothing but the titular scratching noises, a flash of movement from a hidden room, and that creepy tribal mask. When the game cuts to a {{spoiler|CGI cutscene of the actual creature plodding toward you}}, it just comes off as [[Special Effect Failure|silly]].

* ''[[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.

* ''[[Julias Eyes (Film)|Julias Eyes]]''. The movie is this trope, the fear of that which you cannot see. It's played particularly well [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK7NY4h4zyc In this trailer (It's in Spanish)]

* In ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey (Film)|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.

** 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.

 

== Live Action TV ==

** 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 ''[[Torchwood (TV)|Torchwood]]'' episode "Countrycide" where it seems as if aliens are kidnapping and skinning people. Made even ''more'' creeper when we learn the danger is {{spoiler|the local villagers, who kidnap strangers in order to eat them. Just because it "makes them happy." It's the ''only'' episode in the entire Whoniverse that doesn't feature anything supernatural, which is completely [[Played for Drama]]. Gwen suffers a full-on breakdown from the realization that humans can be worse than any alien threat she'll ever face.}}

* The [http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=870 cover art] for [[Orbital (Music)|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.

 

 

== Paintings ==

* [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.

== Real Life ==

* 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.

** 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...]]

* The [http://www.hopetunnel.org/subway/nyct/s4/index.html never-built South 4th Street station] in the [[New York Subway|New York City Subway]]. The station is immense (It has 6 trackways and 4 platforms) and ''pitch dark''.

* [http://www.google.ca/images?q=Paris+Catacombs&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&sa=X&ei=01iZTeP2JoOztwex6J37Cw&ved=0CDYQsAQ&biw=1440&bih=679 The Paris Catacombs] is this trope: The Official Place.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

** 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 (TV)|Torchwood]]''.

** 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.}}

[[Category:Self Demonstrating Article]]

[[Category:Horror Tropes]]