Rule of Scary

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
A mouth inside a mouth looks pretty scary, but it'd actually be pretty inefficient for consuming prey, when you think about it.

"Yo, check it out! There's the right way, and there's the scary way. Now do you wanna make a scary movie or not?"
(Zoom with eerie music to the director Leo Gabriadze as he gets dumbfounded.)
"That's what I thought. Now get that logic outta my face!"

—YourMovieSucks (as the writer Nelson Greaves), Unfriended Review Part 2

Like the Rule of Cool and the Rule of Funny, the Rule of Scary says that if it's creepy enough, it doesn't matter how illogical it is. Why the maniac has a hockey mask, where he got it, and how it survived a shotgun blast to the face are irrelevant. All that matters is that it creeps you out.

Most effective formulas for scary:

If you cannot tell from the listings below, this is overwhelmingly a Film trope. Whether this is because producers don't care about silly things like logic, or they just don't have enough time to explain every little idiosyncrasy is a debate that will rage on for as long as the medium exists.

See also Hand Wave, Nightmare Fuel.

Compare Fridge Logic. Offscreen Teleportation is a Sub-Trope of this, as is Body Horror.

Contrast Narm, Nightmare Retardant, Rule of Cute.

Not to be confused with any rules used by Richard Scarry.

Examples of Rule of Scary include:

Anime and Manga

Film

  • Many of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were deliberately stylized to be more menacing. The velociraptors are a particularly evident example.
    • It doesn't stop there: why in blazes would a door lock ever be tied to an electrical grid in such a way that it cannot be manually operated? There's no sane reason for that whatsoever apart from this trope. It also explains why Tim and Lex keep a tight grasp on the Idiot Ball several times: if they didn't do incredibly stupid things, the dinosaurs wouldn't be able to menace them constantly and create tension.
  • Tales from the Crypt. This gets even worse in the 1972 movie, when the bad Twist Ending (probably forcibly added by a higher-up) of an otherwise excellent movie creates one of the largest Fridge Logic plot hole I've ever seen, how both a man who is supposed to "live forever" and a man stuck an an infinite dream sequence loop have died and been sent to Hell.
  • The xenomorph's life cycle from Alien is based on the way a spider wasp lays its eggs, but it hits some heavy fridge logic when you realize that facehuggers are laying eggs that couldn't have possibly been fertilized (expanded universe explanations notwithstanding). Best not to dwell on it; it's mainly just to freak the audience out.
    • Fridge Brilliance: The facehuggers don't lay eggs, they implant embryos. And they're aliens. Who says they can't reproduce asexually?
    • Fridge Horror: The xenomorph's have Lego Genetics, as exampled in Alien^3. Maybe the embryo's host also provides the fertilization?
  • A great many films that ape The Ring are like this - precisely why or how a ghost got into your video cassette/mobile phone/microwave oven, or why this should cause demented ghost like creatures to stalk you until you die is never explained and, when you think about it, is probably a pretty daft idea, but nevertheless, the films can still be exceedingly creepy.
    • "Anger at everyone within striking distance" is just an established feature of the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, owing to Values Dissonance.
      • To summarize, in Japan, ghosts are almost always malicious; the nice or at least not actively harmful ones are the exceptions, usually restricted to lighthearted works. It's a cultural thing.
      • Not quite. Traditionally the Japanese believe that air gets colder in autumn because dead relatives come to visit, and ghosts bring cold with them from the afterlife, but it's considered a good thing (the Japanese summer can be pure torture). But in Japan malign ghosts tend to be far more proactive than their Western counterparts,
    • The Japanese version does eventually explain how everything actually works, including the tape, but the actual explanation is actually strange enough to make it less scary in hindsight.
    • If you read the novel, it explains most of things scientifically. Made it more a science fiction than a ghost story though. In the novel, Sadako is not a ghost.
  • Why can't the blind crawlers smell the tasty humans hiding a foot away in The Descent? Because they're too busy being terrifying, that's why.
  • In the Feast films, we never find out exactly what the monsters are. All we know is, they like eating things and raping things.
  • Mrs. Bates's rocking chair shouldn't turn around like that, but isn't it damn creepy anyway?
  • Italian horror movies generally take this to higher levels than those made in other countries.
    • The films of Dario Argento (Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre and especially Phenomena), in particular, operate on a sort of bizarre dream logic. Things that make next to no sense are often seen to occur, but since the entire point of such events is to make the audience extremely nervous, the lapse in rationality is forgivable. (And it works—Argento has made some very creepy films.)
      • The best of the Italian horror film makers, including Lucio Fulci, the Bavas, and Michele Soavi, are very good at this. The lesser ones attempt this, and the results are usually still at least entertaining.
    • Hey, how about that film called The Anthropophagus Beast about a cannibal psychopath who rips open a pregnant woman's belly to eat its fetus and when he gets his own belly ripped open, he eats his own guts... The actor playing him got the nickname "the man who eats himself". And his stage name is George Eastman.
  • Soylent Green utterly obliterates the laws of Thermodynamics, but that doesn't stop it from being extremely disheartening.
    • This is also true of the "human battery" thing in The Matrix. Although it is a case of Executive Meddling; it was originally supposed to be human brains linking up to make a giant supercomputer.
      • Not that a supercomputer using human brains in a network makes a whole lot of sense either.
    • It would frak the laws of thermodynamics if Soylent Green was supposed to be a sustainable way to nourish the human population, but IIRC, the movie does not imply that it is sustainable.
    • Soylent Green was not the only thing they were eating. They had other food sources, they just weren't enough, so they added the only other available source on top of that (and it STILL wasn't enough).
  • Eraserhead is completely incomprehensible, like all True Art, and profoundly disturbing.
  • Any objections people had to the reinterpretation of Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins from a university professor to an asylum manager were forgotten the moment we saw his mask and his use of a chemical that can literally be called "Nightmare Fuel".
    • The very fact that The Joker has any capacity to do anything that he does, ever, breaks most common sense, but damn isn't he funny and scary for doing it. The song The Dark Knight Is Confused sums them up perfectly: The Joker's goons are schizos who are nevertheless dependable and self-sacrificing and for a guy who doesn't look like he had a plan, he musta organized these attacks on an evil day planner.
  • This trope is why Freddy wears a red and green Christmas sweater. Wes Craven had read that those colors together tend to mess with viewers' eyesight, and produce a generally unsettling result.
    • Also, Freddy's glove. It isn't nearly as efficient as an axe, a machete, or hell, a gun would be as a way to murder people. But it hits the middle ground between Rule of Cool and Rule of Scary quite nicely.
      • Freddy's glove was intended to be as much a torture device as a killing tool. In "Freddy's Dead" you can see a variety of gloves in his basement, including one with what look like rusty nails for knuckles and one with straight razors attached to the tips. Also, he specifically killed young children. What would terrify a child more than that? And since Freddy exists in nightmares, nothing he does has to be practical and can be as terrifying as possible. Freddy is basically Rule of Scary incarnate.
  • Technically, a faun really oughtn't to be made out of rotting wood, but Pan's Labyrinth was so disturbing that this can be forgiven. Also, the Pale Man walks really slowly and isn't all that dangerous. Still...
    • The Pale Man is justified in that it's supposed to have been a humongously fat creature that lost its main sustenance, and as a result withered to almost skeletal proportions. That sustenance? Human children.
  • The Night of the Hunter applies this to the villain's Offscreen Teleportation. Asks one character, "Don't he never sleep?"
  • Holstenwall looks very structurally unsound. Of course, there's a good reason for that.
  • Let's let Stomptokyo.com explain how this trope failed to cover the glaring improbabilities in the Bertha in The Attic-style plot of Bad Ronald, shall we?

The thought that an orphaned lunatic might still lurk in the forgotten corners of a creaky old house is enough to make you start knocking surreptitiously on the walls of your own home, listening for hollow spots. However, this central conceit probably worked better as a novel than as a movie. On film, it becomes obvious that Ronald's subterfuge wouldn't last long once the other family moved in. Besides the fact that the lack of a shower in his room would probably mean that Ronald's body funk would knock passing planes out of the sky, Ronald couldn't possibly be quiet enough that everyone wouldn't figure out something was up. "It's just the house settling" only goes so far, especially when you consider that Ronald has a toilet in there. ("My house is haunted by a Phantom Flusher!") When Ronald carves all of his peepholes at eye level, the idea that he could go unnoticed in the house becomes downright ludicrous.

  • Failed example: the theatrical ending to the movie Joy Ride, as detailed under the entry for Shocking Swerve.
  • Event Horizon. The jokes about it being a prequel to Warhammer 40,000 are not helped by the fact that, for no apparent reason, the FTL drive and the room containing it look like a shrine to Chaos, complete with Spikes of Doom on everything.
  • Michael Myers is always right behind you. No matter how fast you run, no matter how slow he seems to be moving, he is right behind you.
    • Handwaved by the explanation that he's supposed to actually be evil and hate personified.
    • This troper and his friend reasoned it out as him having a between-scene-scooter. It made as much sense as anything else. When people aren't looking, he hops on his bike and races to get behind them.
  • Oddly enough, Godzilla could be said to fall under this trope. The original Godzilla from the 1954 movies was scary, and they made him scary again for the 1985 version that didn't do well in theatres. But objectively, he shouldn't be all that scary to an individual (to a city or country as such, yeah, but not to you as an individual). After all, he's gigantic and loud, you should be able to hear him coming, if you keep your head he ought to only be a threat to you by sheer luck (you happen to be right where he first shows up or something, or you get trapped and can't avoid him). If he's close by, just freeze and odds are he'll never see you, unless he just happens to step on you he'll probably pass right on by leaving you unhurt. If you're in the same city as him, for some reason, just make sure you skedaddle when you hear his roar start getting closer, or feel the vibrations of his footsteps, and you'll be fine. You probably have more to fear from the military anti-looter patrols than the monster, if you keep your head. And yet...Godzilla is scary. He is.
    • Probably also helps that he has THERMONUCLEAR BREATH! That'd get me running.
    • Think about how big he is... he has to be walking at like 35 KPH or more. Sure, it's not jet-fighter fast, but you try to evacuate an urban area when he rises up from the water 2 KM away.
    • It also doesn't help that he wants to destroy all of humanity. That's right, Godzilla's not just some confused oversized animal in the wrong place at the wrong time. He knows where he is and he wants nothing more than to kill all of humanity.
    • The GMK Godzilla in particular may be the most horrifyingly evil incarnation of the monster. Godzilla is bad. A zombie Godzilla resurrected by the souls of those who died and were forgotten in WWII in order to get revenge on Japan by wiping out its entire population and can even survive being reduced to a disembodied heart? Oh Crap...
    • Destoroyah is far worse. Its juvenile forms look like a cross between a scorpion and a Xenomorph, its main attack is to literally kill its enemies via asphyxiation, oh, and, unlike Godzilla, it doesn't kill for vengence. No, it kills for no other reason than for its own sadistic amusement.
      • To give an idea on how terrifyingly evil Destoroyah is, after he kills Junior his reaction is to start laughing while dragging the mourning Godzilla around by the throat with its tail.
  • Phantasm. None of it makes much sense: something about a conspiracy to steal our dead so as to revive them as slaves on another planet. But then there's the Tall Man, those Jawa-like slaves, and that flying ball...there's something surreal about the whole thing, and it just somehow works.
  • The ghost/demon from Paranormal Activity. It causes a lot of jump scares by stomping around, dropping pans and slamming doors, but why? None of that helps its objective of kidnapping children. Maybe it just likes to play pranks?
    • The parapsychologist/exorcist guy from the first film explains that demons feed on fear and that interacting with it only makes it stronger. By freaking everyone out and provoking them, it's making itself stronger.
  • Watching Tetsuo: The Iron Man can bring up many questions, such as "How is the protagonist able to live with all that metal growing out of his body?" or "How are the rocket jets in his ankles fueled?" or even "How is this even possible?" The answer to all these is Because Shinya Tsukamoto hates you and does not believe in this peculiar idea you call 'sleep'."

Literature

  • H. P. Lovecraft's monstrosities are designed by rule of horror.
    • Specifically Lovecraft's idea of horror, which means that anything alien (read: foreigners) and fish are terrifying. This adds its own veneer of creepy to modern readers.
  • Anything by Clive Barker. Ever.
  • Similarly, anything by Bentley Little. Somewhere between the cult of women who have sex with a tire iron and the humanoid figures in trenchcoats who are faceless except for their huge disembodied grins, you'll realize that absolutely none of the horrifying, insane things that happen in his novels make the least bit of sense; your best bet is to simply assume that the evil...whatever...that's causing it is powerful enough to warp reality and do whatever the hell it wants. Even making that assumption, most of it still comes across as lunacy. Extremely creepy lunacy.
  • Stephen King loves this trope- why the hell is a dog/clown/car/laundry press/platoon of green army men toys/pair of chattering teeth trying to kill people? Why is that kid's dad turning into a giant germ from drinking expired beer? Where did that man-eating oil slick come from? The answer: Who cares? It just happened, and it's scary.
    • And explaining where some of these horrors came from would probably have made them less frightening.
    • One of the themes of From a Buick 8" actually is that some things will never be understood.
    • In discussing his early novel Firestarter, Stephen King once wrote that he was unhappy with his clumsy attempts to explain where the antagonist's pyrokinetic powers came from, and ultimately decided that the 'how and why' of his scary ideas didn't interest him as much as the scary ideas themselves.
    • Most monsters from Stephen King books can just be Handwaved as having come from a different dimension. This is usually the most in-depth explanation they ever get anyway.
  • House of Leaves. Why does any of it happen?
    • Does any of it happen?
  • Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. How does a giant snake living underneath a castle stay alive for over 1000 years without eating any of the students? Doesn't matter, it's still terrifying.

Live-Action TV

  • This is second only to Rule of Cool in Doctor Who.
    • Many aspects and subplots of the Seventh Doctor episode "Ghost Light" are never fully explained, but the effect is so creepy you don't care... all you actually want is a sofa to hide behind.
    • Weeping Angels are built entirely on this trope. They're statues. What's the scariest thing a statue can do? Move when you're not looking. They make people disappear instead of leaving bodies. You have to keep looking at them; you can't just film them because then the film will become an angel. But look at them in the eye and one will start growing in your brain. Are they scientifically plausible in any way? No! Are they terrifying? OH YES!
    • Why do the dolls in Night People turn people into dolls when they grab them? Because it's creepy as hell, that's why.
  • Sylar, early on, literally has no definition other than this rule, though this becomes less and less true as the series went on before vanishing, never to return, by season 2. Why does he need to remove the brain? How did he just appear right behind you? How'd he survive/come back to life? What, exactly, are his powers?
    • Well, by the time season four rolls around, now we know.
  • Supernatural is this trope.
  • The Borg throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation were originally made to be pale/albino guys wearing piecemeal armored suits, cybernetic implants and helmets. In Star Trek: First Contact they were retooled to fit a modified premise that the Borg assimilate people along with technology, so that their growing Borg drones had the appearance of decayed corpses along with spider-veins. No explanation was given for the change, it just looked much better in a movie format. Looking on the earlier episodes they don't have quite the same sense of dread.
    • It gets worse with the change of the Klingon Race between The Original Series and The Next Generation (or even the movies). Originally? Actors in costumes. Now? Full facial makeup required and much stronger. Handwaved in Deep Space Nine because Worf "is forbidden to discuss it"
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In "Hush" nobody really cares that The Gentleman look like gray glittered morticians who can float above the ground and are only single episode villains. The viewers are too focused on their unsettling smiles. It's telling enough that creator Joss Whedon said he was basically creating creatures that kids would have nightmares over.

Tabletop Games

  • Don't Rest Your Head runs off this like crazy. The Mad City doesn't operate on normal logic, but instead functions as a surreal and bizarre world that will warp and twist things for the sake of horror. It uses all three methods: mixing the weirdness of the Mad City with almost normal inhabitants, and the perfectly mundane City Slumbering; lots of fairly amusing ideas for Nightmares that are cranked up to their terrifying potential, and stories that tend to end with the most terrible outcomes possible; topped off with lots of violence, truly bizarre and creepy entities with warped bodies, and many a hero slowly turning monsters themselves.
    • The one supplement, Don't Lose Your Mind, cranks this up even further by having a list of 26 new Madness Talents (one for each letter of the alphabet) that have built in methods of turning those that have them into Nightmares, each Nightmare being based off of a pun that somehow, despite the humor, ends up being horrifically creepy.
  • The game designers responsible for the Ravenloft D&D setting knew this trope as "The Bill Rule", naming it for design-team member William W. Connors. He summed up the concept by suggesting that Ravenloft DMs should, when faced with an in-game choice between options, always ask themselves: "Which would be scarier?"
  • Playing a mortal in New World of Darkness (as distinct from an actual hunter) will typically mean that encounters with the supernatural will be left unexplained and seemingly non-sensical. Supernatural characters generally have a better chance of figuring out what's going on (although there's always an exception...).
  • Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) has a strange mixed relationship with this. On the one hand, most of the monsters defy physics and evolution entirely, and are often made far more frightening for it. On the other hand, this makes sense because many of the monsters are aliens, and often extradimensional beings that don't follow normal laws of physics.
    • Also weird with actual adventures, as they're typically set up as mysteries that do have actual explanations that persistent players can find, but player characters are so fragile and limited they're likely to die, or retreat, before uncovering much of the mystery. Most questions will remain unanswered, making it at least appear to be Rule of Scary at work.

Video Games

  • Silent Hill. Specific examples include the mannequin in Silent Hill 3 that screams and has its head break off, complete with blood, when you happen to be looking the other way? No real reason for it, but it's creepy.
    • Stanley Coleman. Finding his little notes for Heather is completely optional, and has no real impact on the plot, except to provide serious Paranoia Fuel.
    • In the otherworld of Silent Hill 3, especially in the hospital and church levels. Why are the walls bleeding!? There is none, except to freak you out. Also some Rule of Symbolism.
  • Half of the non-zombie creatures in Resident Evil. Giant zombie spiders are creepy, even though you might wonder why a tarantula would grow several hundred times its body mass, but not other zombies.
    • Oddly enough, it seems that only mammals can become zombified; the T-virus seems to just make insects, reptiles, and plants get bigger and more aggressive. Birds seem to just become more aggressive without becoming larger or putrefied.
    • For that matter, the motives behind the actions of the Umbrella Corporation hardly ever make sense. It's as if their strategic planning sessions consist of people saying "Hey, I wonder what would happen if we injected zombie juice into one of these!" Then again, this is a company where getting into the mens' room requires fetching the four parts to a family crest on the door, each of which is heavily guarded and hidden at a different corner of the map.
    • The pre-rendered backgrounds only allowed for fixed camera movement in the older games for the Playstation (and this was the case for many other PS 1 games at the time). Many argue that this techinical limitation actually added to the scary atmosphere compared to the later games, as the player usually cannot see what is attacking them from certain areas. This applies similarly to the Dino Crisis games.
  • Also, ReDead from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Why these dried-up zombies wanted to rape your face was never explained.
    • Beneath the Well, and the Shadow Temple in Ocarina of Time. Spontaneously sinking ghost ships, fake walls, floors, and platforms, autonomous giant guillotines, an invisible boss that fights by beating on a giant bongo... need I go on?
  • Eternal Darkness has a statue that turns its head to look at you, even when your sanity is at its highest. It serves no purpose, other than to creep you out.
  • By and large, BioShock (series) is not a horror game. It's a narrative-driven game with fairly standard baddies, albeit much more thought-provoking than most. That did not stop the developers from randomly throwing in scripted events where enemies suddenly appear right behind you or things that shouldn't be alive suddenly become so. The general lack of this elsewhere in the game and total subversion of logic is exactly what makes it so effective.
  • F.E.A.R.. How is Alma able to rape the player character and become pregnant when she's an undead psychic ghost? Who cares, because it's absolutely terrifying.
  • The Suffering. Why are those malefactors suddenly appearing and murdering everyone on the island and in the city?
    • One theory in-game is that when too many atrocities are committed in one place, the monsters come. Thus, the possibillity the events of the game could happen anywhere. It's a small world after all...
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon 2. How did those floating rocks in the future got up there in the first place?
  • Castlevania has been going on this for a while. Why does Dracula have a giant rotting corpse hanging on hooks that's full of maggots or a laser shooting tentacle monster covered in naked corpses in his castle? Because it's disturbing, that's why.
  • Fatal Frame has quite a bit of this. Why do ghosts have to get close if you want to inflict maximum damage? Because it's scary.
  • While most, if not all, of the necromorphs in Dead Space are pure Artistic License: Biology, special mention has to go to the Hunter; that tenacious horror that stalks Isaac throughout certain portions of the game and is nigh unkillable due to its ability to grow back its limbs when they get chopped off. Where does it get the extra mass to grow those limbs back? No one cares because it's terrifying.
  • Or in Condemned 2: Bloodshot. Why did those mannequins move to block the door behind you? Almost everything else in the game had some form of explanation, except that bit! Sanity Slippage machines that are literally everywhere. It's just a hallucination. Now, why are Sanity Slippage machines literally everywhere? Ancient Conspiracy. Why would an Ancient Conspiracy want Sanity Slippage machines literally everywhere? This trope. That's why.
  • Similar to the Condemned example above, what is up with the mannequins in Nightmare House? Or the shadows in the hallway? Are the zombies even real in the first place?. Doesn't matter, it's still damn scary.

Web Comics

  • Annyseed Why does Count Tarrorviene have red scabby rings around his eyes? And how come Uncle Tarkwin doesn't have them, yet is the same age and species as Tarrorviene? Also, just how did they get that conveniently designed blood machine into that castle keep, and manage to plug it into his shoulder blades whist he (most likely) fought for his very existence? It doesn't matter, it's creepy, so let it be.

Web Original

  • About the only consistent detail regarding the Slender Man is that he is freakishly tall, impossibly skinny, faceless, and has arms that are in some way related to tree branches and/or tentacles. Oh, and he's scary. Aside from that, nobody has quite the same interpretation of him, which just adds to his Eldritch Abomination mystique.
  • The SCP Foundation basically defines this trope, often describing the effects of its various horrors in emotionless clinical detail, and just when you think it can't get any worse they [DATA EXPUNGED], forcing your mind to follow the list of [REDACTED] to the logical conclusion that █████████.
  • In the Nostalgia Critic's review of The Shining Miniseries, Critic is satirizing the Stanley Kubrick version by showing up in a black and white picture and invokes this trope:

Nostalgia Critic: I don't care if it doesn't make any sense, at least it's scary.

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