Scooby-Doo Hoax: Difference between revisions

In the old days, this apparently really worked. Smugglers could scare away intruders by dressing as ghosts. Nowadays, however, this would be a really stupid ploy, as many alleged real life haunted houses and areas of "paranormal activity" are tourist attractions. The criminals wouldn't be able to move for New Agers, UFOlogists, people from shows like ''[[Myth Busters]]'', James Randi fans, and other rubberneckers. (Not to mention [[You Meddling Kids|meddling kids]].)

 

 

This can be a real source of frustration to fans of [[Speculative Fiction]], who tend to be drawn to certain works specifically ''because'' of the paranormal elements.

 

One of the major exceptions to [[Skepticism Failure]]. See also [[Monster Protection Racket]], where the monsters are real but they're being set up. The Inversion of a [[Scooby Doo Hoax]] is [[Mistaken for An Imposter]]. For the good counterpart, see [[Scarecrow Solution]].

 

== Because the existence of a [[Scooby Doo Hoax]] tends to remain secret from the audience until the ending and belie earlier assumptions, mere presence on this list can be considered a spoiler. ==

** Another episode features a different variation. An irreverent chef comes to judge Chef Kawasaki's cooking skills, but it turns out he was in a costume and working for N.M.E. What's under the costume was worse.

* ''[[Mazinger Z (Anime)|Mazinger Z]]'': In one anime episode, the heroes got reports of a huge, aquatic monster living on a chain of lakes near from Mount Fuji. When Kouji went to investigate to the site, a witch appeared all of sudden and warned him the lake monster would curse him if he did not leave. That woman had been scaring away whoever came to investigate the monster sightings. It did not take long for Kouji to discover that witch was Baron Ashura -[[Big Bad]] [[The Dragon]]- in disguise and the monster was a Mechanical Beast. Baron Ashura was using the curse hoax to hide their activities (mining the lakebed for uranium to fabricate nuclear bombs).

* At least one episode of ''[[Detective Conan]]'' / ''[[Case Closed]]'' did this. The protagonists receive a letter from a dead man and investigate a series of murders framed on his ghost. In the end, it turned out to be his son who was supposedly killed along with him, posing as a woman, seeking revenge for the death of his father.

* Taken in a more dark direction in ''[[The Kindaichi Case Files]]''. Most of Kindachi's cases involve murderers who disguise themselves as a feared monster from local folklore, and kill their victims in ways relating to the legends surrounding that figure (eg, a killer disguised as a legendary headless samurai ghost decapitates all his victims.) Kindaichi gathers clues leading up to a dramatic unmasking of the "monster" at the end of the story. Different from your standard Scooby hoax in that most characters understand from the get-go that this isn't a real monster, just a psycho in a disguise. Inverted in that this arguably makes it ''more'' scary...

** There's always one character who really believes that the killer is actually the legendary monster in question. That person almost always ends up dead, and his/her death leaves everyone else with eerie, lingering doubts about the killer's humanity.

** In ''[[Live and Let Die (Film)|Live and Let Die]]'', as in the novel, the villain uses Voodoo, as his mistress / servant Solitaire, who has "the power of the Obeah" which supposedly lets her see the future), to maintain an iron grip over his island nation and drug empire. He even has someone pretending to be Baron Samedi on his side, plus a host of traps and tricks. Subverted in that Solitaire seems like she really ''does'' have the power to see the future, and the ending has Samedi riding the front of a train, laughing, implying he was [[Real After All]]. Most of the other stuff really is just an elaborate hoax, like scarecrows promising death to anyone who trespasses on the poppy fields (and hidden cameras and guns in case you don't take the hint).

* The movie ''[[Volver]]'': The whole population of a superstitious village is convinced that the spirit of a woman who died in a fire has come back to take care of her sister in her old age. When the sister dies, the ghost moves in with her daughter. It turns out that she never died in the first place; she burned the house where her husband and his lover were sleeping to the ground, and the lover's charred body was thought to be hers. She pretended to be a ghost to escape a murder investigation.

* Parodied in [[Multiple Endings|one of the endings]] of ''[[Waynes World]]''

* ''[[Captain Clegg]]'' is about a circle of rumrunners, led by [[Peter Cushing]], who use this to try to scare away or distract the law.

[[Category:Plots]]

[[Category:Scooby Doo Hoax]]