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Defanged Horrors: Difference between revisions
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== Literature ==
* ''[[Coraline (novel)|Coraline]]'', by [[Neil Gaiman]], and the film adaptation also by Henry Selick.
** [[Word of God|According to Gaiman]], at least, adults find it much scarier than children do, because children tend not to pick up on the implied [[Adult Fear|Adult Fears]].
* ''[[Goosebumps]]''.
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** The slow despair of [[Crapsack World|living under a tyrant for seventeen years with no hope of salvation whatsoever]], and the bitterness that comes with it.
*** The very real danger of choosing a side in a war of tyrant vs. [[La Résistance]].
** [[Body Horror]] galore - the Shadowland prisoners, Fardeep and his "pets", multiple counts of dismemberment at the hands of the Granuous, public branding and execution, not to mention the [[Voluntary Shapeshifting|Ols']] true form...
** And, of course, the many psychological horrors - Discovering that everything you've ever been told about your world and your life has been a lie to keep you complacent. [[And I Must Scream|Being paralyzed and forced to wait for a horrific monster to eat you]]. Knowing your loved ones are being tortured for information on your whereabouts and being unable to help them, hiding enemy spies that [[Properly Paranoid|could literally be anything from your best friend, to the squirrel that just ran past, to the chair you're sitting on]]. Living every waking moment in fear that someone else is going to die. Honestly, as the series goes on, it's difficult to remember that it was written for kids... particularly if you have a vivid imagination.
* The "De Griezelbus" series by the Dutch author Paul van loon are a perfect example of this. Almost every installment deals with a group of kids whom are forced to listen to the stories of the {{spoiler|werewolf, and later vampire/undead}} writer P. Onnoval, with a climax at the end of each book. The stories are a combination of horror clichés like vampires, werewolves, etc. and a great deal of suspense, and most stories leave the end open, leaving you to wonder what happened.
== Live Action TV ==
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* Another literal example, but also a parody: the ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' episode "You're No Fun Anymore" features various uses of the title phrase. One of these is a parody of [[Hammer Horror]] films, with Count Dracula (played by Graham Chapman) looming menacingly over a sleeping woman. He goes in for a bite...and his fangs fall out. The woman wakes up, looks at him, and says, "You're no fun anymore."
* Space (the Canadian equivalent of the Sci-fi channel) used to have short segments they'd play between shows to fill up their Canadian content requirements. One of the segments was a ''Blair Witch'' style 'recovered footage' short story, where we'd watch regular home movies that invariably took a turn for the strange. These where all done without explicitly showing anything evil, for instance the family who are driving along only to be knocked out and awaken in a vast, empty, rock-strewn wasteland. The second was far more scary, and was the tale of a crypt in the middle of a lost-graveyard containing something. We aren't shown what it is, as our camera man refuses to go down. But needless to say, whatever it is, it starts haunting him, and that book of Eldritch lore his friend recovered before 'disappearing' isn't helping matters.
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'' manages to put even adults under the bed shivering, often without a single drop of blood ever seen, and sometimes with a body count of zero.
** ''The Empty Child'' and ''The Doctor Dances'' two-parter takes a fairly traditional zombie movie plot and alters it so there's no blood and no deaths. And it's possibly the creepiest bit of programming ever to be aired on television.
** ''Blink'' gives it a run for the money; it's ''terrifying'', considering there are almost no special effects and only two character deaths, both of which are peaceful, non-violent, and off-screen.
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* [[Snowboard Kids|Snowboard Kids 2]] features a course called [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Haunted House]].
* ''[[Super Mario]]'': The entire series has places with ghosts (especially spherical ones called Boos). Most of these are in haunted houses, but there are also places such as [[Paper Mario (franchise)|a haunted forest]], [[Super Mario RPG|a sewer system]], and at least two [[Super Mario RPG|sunken]] [[Super Mario World (video game)|ships]]. Bowser is also known to reside in a gothic castle at the end of most games. [[Luigi's Mansion]] revolves around this trope from beginning to end.
** According to [[Chuggaaconroy]], this is the reason a hunter ghost was cut from [[Luigi's Mansion]]; he would have been the only {explicitly} homicidal ghost and was deemed too scary.
* In ''[[Earthbound]]'', [[Final Boss|Giygas]] was nothing short of terrifying, and for [[Eldritch Abomination|good]] [[You Cannot Grasp the True Form|reason]].
* ''[[Pokémon]]'': Certain Pokedex entries in the series (especially about Ghost Pokemon) are this trope. For example, Gengar likes to imitate people's shadows under a full moon, and then laugh at their fright, Shuppet was a doll who seeks revenge on the child who disowned it, Dusclops traps anyone who looks into its eye into a void, and so on. Of course, none of this actually happens in-game.
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* ''[[Courage the Cowardly Dog]]'', which often turned the [[Surreal Horror]] up a bit too much, and we all learned the hard way that you can't unsee this stuff...
* ''[[Wallace and Gromit]]: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.''
* Some episodes of ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' including ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Recap/S1
== Real Life ==
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