Creepy Red Herring

It's hardly surprising that detective stories and mystery fiction are popular with audiences. They're given a puzzle to solve, and if they are capable of doing so, it allows them to feel clever.

With any mystery, there has to be suspects, and usually various suspects with various potential motives. In many works, there will be an obviously sinister, creepy suspect who will make your skin crawl or shiver with how obviously creepy they are. Their features will hint at the sinister. Their personality will suggest something that is, at the very least, off, and possibly downright macabre.

They will then typically turn out to be completely innocent, and often harmless.

A form of Bait-and-Switch, though how obvious it's played will depend on whether the work is meant to be serious or satirical. In some works, it can serve as An Aesop about judging people for their appearance or personality quirks.

Also a sub-trope of Red Herring.

In serious works, it often overlaps with Never the Obvious Suspect, while in comedic works, it might be played with in that the creepy character is so blatantly a red herring that the audience never suspects them at all.

If the trope is played for drama and not comedy, the character is an effective Red Herring because of reliance on the audience believing that Beauty Equals Goodness and Loners Are Freaks. Contrast Sheep in Sheep's Clothing, which is about a Red Herring that is as nice as they appear. Compare Scary Minority Suspect. Also see Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold.

As this is a trope about Mystery Fiction, and thus clears out suspects, beware of unmarked spoilers!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigation: In a flashback episode that shows the first encounter between Sakurako and Shoutarou, the latter suspects the former, a reclusive young woman who collects and assembles the skeletons of dead animals, as being responsible for the disappearance of a senior citizen in the area. Of course, by this point, the audience know that Sakurako isn't a devious killer, but as it is Shoutarou's first meeting with her, he isn't aware of that, yet.
• Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun: During the Student Council Training Arc, Student Council President Ameri Azazel is attacked and her whole personality is changed from a tough on the outside but kind girl underneath, to a more docile and cute personality. This severely inhibits her ability to be Student Council President. Romiere Ronove is presented as the primary suspect in Ameri's change in personality as a means of weakening her so he could finally triumph over her. He is not it, and resents the claim. Such underhanded tactics are beneath him because they aren't flashy or attention grabbing. He is just trying to take advantage of her weaker personality. This misconception is helped by him trying to touch the more docile Ameri's hair without her consent and obvious discomfort. The true culprit is a background character who is seen in the crowds named Schnare. He is obsessed with Ameri and president of her fan club. His reason for doing this is to see other sides of Ameri to fill his ambition.

Fanfic

• In the Miraculous Ladybug fic Dangerous Games (NSFW), someone is obsessed with Marinette to the point of planting a bomb in her apartment. At first, Luka is suspected, and a search by Chat does find some rather creepy signs of obsession in his apartment. However, ultimately, it turns out for all of his creepiness, he had no intentions of harming Marinette; Nathanael was the one attempting Engineered Heroics.

Films — Live-Action

• Aliens: Not in a mystery sense, but Bishop's Robotic Reveal coupled with his flat delivery, and his fascination with the xenomorphs and their lifecycle are all supposed to make him seem eerie and remind viewers of Ash from the previous film. Of course, it turns out that Bishop is very much Three Laws-Compliant (even citing the First Law to Ripley early on) and not the source of danger from within the group.
• Doctor X has a whole cast full of them. In the film, police have become convinced that one of the doctors working at a certain medical academy is the "Moon Killer" who has been terrorizing New York for months. Naturally, every single one of the suspects has extremely strong Obviously Evil Mad Scientist energy, except for the academy's chief of staff, Dr. Xavier. Due to a combination of Never the Obvious Suspect and the movie's title, most viewers will assume that Dr. Xavier is the killer, but he's not: it was one of his weird colleagues after all, though one who had previously been written off as a suspect due to a Disability Alibi.
• Last Night in Soho: The Silver-Haired Gentleman has an unsettlingly familiar demeanor with Ellie and she soon suspects he is Jack, Sandie's abusive pimp, in the present day. These suspicions are proven incorrect after he is (possibly fatally) wounded in a car accident and the bartender vouches for him and confirms that he is a former police officer named Lindsey, who tried to help Sandie in the past.
• Mickey the gardener from The Screaming Skull. Creepy, weird, off-putting, prowls around the mansion grounds late at night, and has an alarming tendency to refer to his late, murdered employer Marion in the present tense. It ultimately doesn't work very well as a red herring because as creepy as Mickey is, the real murderer manages to act even more suspiciously to the audience, and Mickey's creepiness isn't menacing so much as it is pitiable.^note The director played Mickey, and may have tried too hard to make it seem like Mickey wouldn't hurt a fly.
• Urban Legend: In the first film, Wexler, the Sole Survivor of a previous massacre, and known to scare students with Urban legends, is a possible suspect. Being played by Robert Englund helps the creepiness factor. However, Wexler is effectively proven innocent by being murdered by the killer.
• Zodiac: At one point Robert Graysmith finds evidence linking the Zodiac Killer's handwriting to posters from a small movie theater, and thinks that the theater employee who wrote the posters may be the killer. He goes to visit the theater's owner at his house, hoping to get information on the employee, only for the owner to tell Graysmith that he himself did the posters, and invite Graysmith into his Creepy Basement to view his records. Graysmith is naturally creeped out by this and goes into the basement scared out of his mind, but nothing comes of this, he leaves the house in one piece, and the theater owner turns out not to be the killer.

Literature

• Dark Days Of Hamburger Halpin: The bus driver, nicknamed "Jimmy Porkrinds" by Will, talks to his fingers and deals drugs as a side-gig, but he had nothing to do with Chambers' murder.
• Early on in A Game of Thrones, Sandor Clegane is showcased as a sociopathic Jerkass who in most fantasy stories, would be expected to be a Knight of Cerebus, or even a Big Bad. This appears to be where his role in the story is headed, but his menacing appearance just distracts from the real villains in the game. The role he is foreshadowed to play is ultimately taken up by Joffrey and Gregor Clegane, and Sandor ends up becoming something of a Token Good Teammate on the Lannister side.
• The Goosebumps book Ghost Beach involves Harrison Sadler, a creepy old man who lives in a cave by the beach. The main characters and their new group of friends initially think he's the ghost haunting the beach. At the end of the story, the old man proves the children are the real ghosts and sacrificies himself to trap them within the cave.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Harry and his friends initially suspect the creepy, grouchy, openly-nasty Snape to be the one sabotaging Harry and seeking out the stone. At the end, they discover that the culprit was the unassuming Quirrell, who had Voldemort on the back of his head, as well as that Snape was actually protecting Harry throughout the book.
• The Hike (2023): Erik often behaves in an aggressive and off-putting manner, gives other people a wide berth and he was the last known person to have seen Karin before she disappeared; Karin's father publicly accuses Erik of killing Karin. Erik seems to be following the the protagonists along the Svelle Trail and acts in a very creepy and suspicious manner towards Maggie (who resembles his girlfriend) when he encounters her alone in the woods. It turns out that Erik had nothing to do with Karin's murder and knows nothing about the cocaine smuggling that led to her death.
• In the Lord Darcy story "A Case of Identity", Lord Seiger is a very disturbing man who works for the missing Marquis of Cherbourg and who creeps out the Marquis's wife. He is in fact a homicidal psychopath, but a geas has been placed on him by the Church to render him safe and keep him safe from others. He is incapable of using force on others unless instructed to by his superior, who is in this case the Marquis himself.

Live-Action TV

• Bones: One episode sees Bones go back to her old high school, and wind up trying to solve a murder. The school janitor, who is decidedly fond of Temperance, is an eerie, creepy old man (played for all he's worth by none other than Robert Englund). The killer turns out to be one of Bones' old classmates, and the janitor is innocent, albeit deliciously creepy.
• Castle:
  • "Vampire Weekend" gives us a character who goes by "Morlock", a self-professed vampire whose fingerprints were found on the stake in the victim's heart. He suffers from porphyria and is only semi-lucid. He is innocent and witnessed the murder. His fingerprints were on the stake because he was trying to remove it.
  • "A Deadly Game". Beckett and Castle arrest a man in connection with a murder. He manages to creep them out, telling them that in a short while they will receive a phone call from someone far above them, telling them to release him, which they will then do contritely. His stone-cold demeanor manages to send chills down the spines of a seasoned homicide detective and a mystery writer who is no stranger to death and murder. It later turns out that not only is he not the killer, he is a regular joe who is taking part in a "spycation" LARPing game, and doesn't realize that he's in a real jail being investigated for a real murder. The fact that he swaps from hard-nosed badass (he's played by Mitch Pileggi, who has a knack for such roles) into a nervous wreck as soon as he's informed of the gravity of his real situation is both hilarious and a testimony to the actor's talents.
  • "Scared To Death": After witnesses who testified against the now-deceased serial killer Nigel Malloy start turning up dead, Castle and Beckett interview Nigel's brother, Leopold. Leopold helped concealed his brother's crimes under the influence of his brother, but never killed anyone, and so is in a mental institution. He greets Castle and Beckett with an eerily calm manner. Not only is Leopold innocent, he actually asked the doctor who was treating him to help keep the surviving witness alive, fearing the new murders will hurt his efforts to be released from custody.
• Criminal Minds: The BAU is called in to help with the investigation of a missing teen girl. The townsfolk suggest the involvement of a Satanic Cult, and the head of the group is brought in for questioning. He quickly points out the flagrant hypocrisy of the town and is eventually proved to be innocent. In fact, the killer is the clean-cut teen son of the police chief, who killed the girl for rebuffing him, and the BAU suspected him immediately because of how he tried to inject himself into the investigation.
• CSI: NY: A Neo-Nazi suspect named Michael Elgers appears and has motive in not one but two, non-sequential, episodes of season 5. He's an openly racist skinhead with tattoos including "White Power" across the front of his neck and a swastika on the back of his head, but he is not the killer in either episode. He gets framed in "Green Piece" where a car bomb goes off down the street from a Jewish temple, while in "Yahrzeit", his alibi for the murder of a fellow Neo-Nazi is confirmed.
• Doctor Who: Invoked by Lady Cassandra O'Brien in "The End Of The World". The Adherents of the Repeated Meme were supposed to be the sinister and obvious suspects to take the fall, should Cassandra's plan fail. They were, however, mere robot dummies, merely obeying a set of prearranged commands, and The Doctor saw through it immediately.
• One episode of Law & Order: SVU opens with a woman waiting for an elevator in her apartment building. As she does, the camera cuts to a young man in a hoodie watching her from the shadows and breathing heavily. The music swells dramatically as he emerges and slowly approaches her...and then taps her on the shoulder to say "Hi." It turns out they're neighbors, and they share a laugh about how he surprised her—and then the elevator doors open and a corpse tumbles out, to both of their horror.
• The Mentalist: In one episode, Patrick Jane and the CBI are investigating a Scientology Expy after a member was murdered. The group is led by a man who appears to be more than a little sinister (played by Malcolm McDowell). When Jane is setting up a trap for the killer, he asks the group's leader for his cooperation to reveal the killer. He counters by asking Jane, "What if I'm the killer?" Jane just smiles and says, "You? You wouldn't hurt a fly." McDowell's character is not the killer. (He's not even Red John, though he is also on that suspect list for a time).
• Night Heat has a group of parents corner a creepy fellow at the edge of a playground. While the creep denies harmful intent, someone discovers a child's body behind some bushes. The parents are poised to massacre the creep until the police arrive and arrest him. The suspect vows he had nothing to do with the victim, and forensic evidence confirms that. In fact, the evidence points to someone in the victim's immediate family.
• Rizzoli & Isles:
  • In the Season 1 episode, "I Kissed A Girl", the police are investigating the murder of a woman who was leaving a lesbian bar. When DNA evidence reveals her killer was another woman, Jane goes undercover as a lesbian, trying to get DNA samples from suspects who both frequented the bar and used the same dating site the victim had. One woman, in the end, strikes Jane as creepy when she suggests that the victim might not have been killed if she hadn't been cheating on her wife. She's not the killer, but she is right about the motive, as the jealous spouse paid the bartender to commit the murder.
  • The season 2 episode "Bloodlines" has Jane investigating a modern witch burning. One member of the coven is Sabrina Scott, daughter of Reverend Scott. The Reverend denies having killed anyone, but he strikes Jane as being a Sinister Minister by his eerie demeanor. She has him watched. But the Reverend is innocent, and his demeanor was likely based on the fact that the witchcraft issue touched on some private family history (they're descended from Sarah Goode, one of the original "witches" persecuted at Salem). The killer is actually Sabrina, suffering a mental break and self-persecution.
• The The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" is a variant on the Locked Room Mystery: a pair of cops discovers evidence of a UFO in a lake and a set of footprints leading to a nearby diner, where a small group of people traveling by bus are holed up because of a warning about a washed-out bridge on the road ahead. They realize that someone in the room is an alien in human guise, and try to Spot the Imposter. One passenger is a strange, wild-eyed old man who speaks in an exaggerated voice, throws suspicion on the others, and deliberately lampshades all of the cops' interrogation techniques. Despite his wild demeanor, though he's not the alien—just a troll.
• The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Parodied.
  • Buell is a handyman who permanently stands outside Anna's house fixing her mailbox, is also a "cured" psychiatric patient who murdered his entire family with a claw hammer, and a Secret Squatter in Anna's house. All of this is handwaved with the discovery that Buell has been living in Anna's house to watch over her following Elizabeth's death and that he genuinely was cured. Anna even lets him move into her attic permanently.
  • Anna herself is an alcoholic who spends all day spying on her neighbors, is the only witness to Charity's murder, and even has a violent hallucination where she attacks Charity the night of her murder. The show reveals that Anna only stabbed the painting she made of Charity, not Charity herself.

Urban Legends

• There is a popular urban legend, with a few variations^note said variations often involve a Scary Black Man, but the most common variation is that a gas station attendant who appears eerie or sinister keeps trying to get a young woman to come into the gas station with him, and she is so put off by his demeanor and/or appearance that she flees the scene in her vehicle...only to realize a moment too late that he was trying to warn her about the dangerous individual, usually an escaped killer, hiding in her back seat.
  • A variant of this legend (which shows up in the first book of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) has a young woman being pursued by a burly, wild-haired man in an enormous truck as she drives down an empty road. She tries to lose him, but he keeps up and strangely keeps flashing his high-beam headlights. When the woman finally gets home and calls the police, the man gets out of his truck holding a gun and refuses to move; the cops arrive to arrest him, and he tells them to check the back seat instead. Sure enough, there's a man there armed with a rope and a knife, and the trucker was protecting the woman by following her—he turned on his high beams whenever the killer rose to attack, knowing that the guy would hide himself if he knew someone was watching.

Video Games

• In Bloodborne, the player has the choice to either send any surviving civilians they find to either the Old Oedon Chapel or Iosefka's Clinic for asylum. Whereas Iosefka is a beautiful, young doctor trying to treat the victims of the scourge, the Chapel is cared for by a blind, decrepit old man with unnervingly long limbs and fingers who is dressed in nothing but a tattered, blood-red shawl. As such, players would logically be inclined to take them to Iosefka. For those hoping to save as many people as they can, this is a mistake. The Chapel Samaritan is truly a sweet, terribly lonely man whereas Iosefka has been replaced by an impostor who will experiment on and horribly mutate anyone you send to her clinic.
• Played for laughs in Granblue Fantasy when Lich is introduced as a playable character. The crew is investigating the appearances of the primal beast Lich, who has been reported killed on many occasions throughout the years. A creepy young woman with unusually pale skin and sharp teeth asks to join them in their search, and the whole thing is played out as though she's luring them into a trap on Lich's behalf. When they confront Lich, the young woman reveals she is Lich, and the primal beast they're hunting is actually an aspect of her power that separated from her (nicknamed Boneby) and she's been hunting it ever since. Once she joins the crew, it's clear that she was deliberately acting suspicious because it amused her. Her old friend Rosetta (aka the primal beast Rose Queen) mentions that playing up her creepy factor has always been a bad habit of hers.
• Detective Pikachu: Chapter 3 has Wallace Carroll, the creepy PCL scientist who spends all his time in a dark lab only accompanied by some Solosis and Duosion, distancing himself from the others. The first time you hear about him, it's when you learn he's locked his fellow researchers out of the courtyard, and when you actually meet him, he's almost immediately interested in experimenting on Pikachu, all of which makes him an immediate suspect for the person behind the usage of the chemical R. He's not.
• Zig-zagged in Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan. You're sent to stop the theft of a program on a luxury cruise, and you're instantly met with a guy who speaks in Sssssnake Talk. He's not the boss fight of the scenario... but he actually was the Nebula agent trying to steal the program. It just happens that a Hero Antagonist got to it first.
• Downplayed with Mitsuo Kubo in Persona 4. He has a creepy appearance, is an Abhorrent Admirer to Yukiko and spends much of the game speaking ill of the cases' victims. When he becomes a suspect, the party is quick to blame him for all the serial murders. It turns out that he did kill someone, but it was a copycat murder committed for attention.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • "Director" Hotti, a creepy Dirty Old Man who poses as a doctor, appears in a few cases in the series and isn't guilty of anything in any of them.
  • The Great Ace Attorney has Esmeralda Tusspells, the owner of a wax museum and an implied Nightmare Fetishist who frequently describes dead bodies in morbid detail, and has an ominous Leitmotif. While one of her wax figures was involved in Case 3's crime, she wasn't a willing accomplice.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: Case 3 features Iruka, a member of La Résistance. Unlike her pacifistic boss Shachi, she's an openly sadistic Gun Nut who makes her preference for violent methods vocally clear. Then Shachi turns up dead from a bullet to the head, fired from the custom gun she built him. All of these traits are vital... to clearing her for the murder: the killer placed the gun in Shachi's right hand to make it look like a suicide, but the revolver Iruka built for him was a left-handed model, so she obviously knew his dominant hand and wouldn't have made that mistake.

Western Animation

• Lampshaded in the 1952 Daffy Duck short “The Super Snooper”. When Daffy’s detective character Duck Drake arrives at the scene of the crime, he’s greeted by a creepy butler, whom he immediately dismissed as a suspect because “the suspicious-acting butler is never guilty in these whodunnits.”
• Scooby-Doo: This shows up in the various series:
  • Scooby-Doo Where Are You episode "Don't Fool with a Phantom" has an Exploited example where even the Red Herring himself believes himself guilty. When the mysterious Wax Phantom begins haunting the local TV station, suspicion naturally falls on disgruntled former employee Mr. Grisby. Grisby gleefully takes credit for the Phantom's existence, claiming that his Black Magic Curse has come to fruition. Naturally, it's completely different man in a mask who intended for Grisby to take the fall.
  • The Scooby-Doo Dynomutt Hour has Tarlof, the butler, in "The Headless Horseman of Halloween", who looks like he was modeled off of Lurch, and who shows up after nearly every Headless Horseman sighting. He is, of course, innocent.
  • The New Scooby-Doo Movies has Creech, another butler, in "The Haunted Horseman of Hagglethorn Hall". He is has a sinister appearance and a creepy voice and is considered a suspect until he saves the gang from the titular Horseman, at which point Fred makes a point to apologize to Creech for suspecting him. Creech accepts the apology graciously.
  • Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: Inverted. Velma points out in "The Gathering Gloom" the utter creepiness of one suspect, the gravedigger, who is actively glaring at her menacingly. Fred says that it's "villain profiling", and Mystery Inc. just doesn't do that. Naturally, in this instance, the guy turns out to be the culprit.
  • What's New, Scooby-Doo?: In "It's All Greek to Scooby", one man was suspected of being the fake centaur because he had a loud voice and a very intimidating-looking face and was chasing the gang. As it turns out though, he just happened to look and sound that way and was chasing them to return Daphne's purse. The gang couldn't know he was intending to do that because he only spoke Greek.
• In an episode of Adventure Time where people are apparently being murdered on a train, Finn lampshades this trope as why he ruled out the conductor as a suspect right away: he's super creepy and obviously suspicious so he must be a red herring. Jake disagrees, arguing that he's not creepy. This turns out to be a subversion—the killer is the conductor, who is actually Jake in disguise, but no one is actually dead: Jake set the whole thing up as a mystery-puzzle for Finn to solve as a birthday present. Jake also knew that Finn would deliberately use tropes as "evidence" and so invoked the "creepy suspect" rule to deliberately throw him off.

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