Eyeless Face

At least they don't have to worry about trips to the optometrist...

"They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be."

— G. K. Chesterton, Lepanto

Imagine you're drawing a face. You draw an oval, perhaps a jutting chin, some ruffled hair. Give them ears and a nose and a nice big smile. And then stop.

What does it look like? Well, not human, that's for sure. Without eyes (even just the sockets), our faces are unrecognizable and unreal. Without eyes, how can we see? More importantly, in many cultures (at any rate in Western culture) eye contact is a means to connect with others on an emotional level. It is said that eyes are Windows of the Soul, so intuitively it is impossible to connect with something or someone that has no eyes.

Creatures without eyes can be downright creepy, let's face it. Seeing a Faceless Eye chasing you is scary, sure, but seeing an eyeless face is usually more scary, since it looks so close to human but there's something not quite human about it. In addition, eyes are a massive weak point if you're looking to attack or injure something. When you're dealing with a hostile creature that lacks eyes, they don't have that weak point.

This is often a feature of the Sense-Impaired Monster, particularly when its missing sense is sight, and of the more extreme examples of Blind Bats.

Compare with Hidden Eyes, which is a temporary, metaphorical implementation of this. Contrast Extra Eyes, where the character in question has too many eyes. Related to The Blank. If something doesn't have eyes on their face, they may have them somewhere else. Not to be confused with Youngblood's disease. May be justified as a result of Eye Scream, or (in the case of creatures such as The Morlocks) if Bizarre Alien Senses are used in place of vision. Compare Ghostly Gape.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Pokémon: The Series: As in the games, the Pokémon Zubat has no eyes.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • The Mass Production EVAs from End of Evangelion. It isn't a human face though. Take a snake. Paint it white. Give it massive red lips, and a big block of square teeth. Now take its eyes away. And make it constantly smile, even when having its head blown off, back snapped, stabbed through the head.
  • In Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0, when Shinji gets the Internal Reveal of Rei's clone nature, the lights come on to reveal racks of Rei heads with empty eye sockets, spare parts for future clones. Then there's the giant decaying Rei head thing that Gendo is talking to.
• The Sailor Moon manga features a lot of moments where the characters (mostly villains) are drawn in with only eyelashes instead of the full eye. This looks quite creepy.
• Truth from Fullmetal Alchemist. He/she/it usually appears as The Blank. Sometimes we see a grin on Truth's face, but never any eyes.
• Digimon: This is a very common design element, especially in earlier Digimon. Most commonly, this takes the form of a Digimon possessing a metal plate bolted directly over its face, obscuring any eyes it might have.
  • This is particularly common for Insect Digimon, such as Kuwagamon, the first enemy in the first season, Snimon, the Kabuterimon line, Kunemon and Flymon. In the latter two cases, it's suggested that the lightning bolt-shaped marks on their faces might be their eyes.
  • Angemon and Angewomon resemble classical angels in most respects, except for the metallic helmets that firmly cover the upper halves of their heads and obscure everything above their noses.
  • From Digimon Frontier, Mercuremon's "face" is just a mirror with lips painted on it. No nose. No eyes. Just a mouth.
  • Whamon and the squidlike Gesomon also appear to lack visible eyes; Whamon shares an obscuring facial plate with other eyeless Digimon, while Gesomon just has a stretch of white, unbroken skin.
  • Gargoylemon is an interesting example — rather than having a solid plate, it instead has two interesting metal bands running across its face and over the areas where its eyes would theoretically be.
  • Digimon Ghost Game has two Monsters Of The Week that can inflict this on people. The first is Asuramon, who steals people's faces so he can experiance their emotions, leaving them with just their mouths, noses, and a mask. Removing the mask reveals feautreless skin where the eyes should be. Eyesmon also steals people's eyes, leaving blank skin behind until he replaces them with his own.
• Ghost Stories had the mirror spirits, who dragged people inside a mirror and took their forms. However they had no eyes, so they wore eyeglasses, that had their eyes on/inside the lenses, to disguise themselves.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica has one big, scary example in its resident Eldritch Abomination, Walpurgis◊nacht◊.
• Appears frequently on random people in No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!.
• The Faceless are a race of subservients with no eyes in Alice in the Country of Hearts.
• The short horror one shot Me wo Mite Hanase (Look Me in the Eyes When You Talk) is about man who's never been able to look other people in the eyes; this has caused him much trouble throughout his life. One night, he's beaten within an inch of his life after a group of thugs accuses him of looking at them the wrong way (which, of course, never happened). After he wakes up from his coma, he finds that nobody in the world has eyes, just eyebrows and smooth skin where the eyes should be. Unlike most examples, however, it appears that the people aren't really missing their eyes, it's just a result of the protagonist sustaining serious brain injury.
• One type of mushi in Mushishi lives as a parasite in a persons eyes and requires total darkness to grow. If not killed early with a combination of medicines and long exposure to bright light, it eventually consumes the eyes completely, leaving only two pitch black holes in the head.
• In Kill la Kill, Uzu Sanageyama has his eyes sealed off (in order to take advantage of Disability Superpower), the result being that there's a star-shaped scar where his eyes should be; there's not even any eyelids or eyebrows left! His face and sight go back to normal near the end of the series.
• My Hero Academia has All For One; everything above his upper lip, even his nose, is nothing but a mass of scar tissues. It's a result of a vicious battle between him and All Might in the past. He managed to give All Might a nasty stomach wound in return, though.

Art

• Some depictions of Cyclopes, such the painting Polyphemus◊, depict them this way, with the single eye being in the center of their forehead.

Comic Books

• The Sandman (1989):
  • The Corinthian. Not quite, though — once he whips off the shades, his eye sockets are twin tiny mouths, with teeth. Ow. For his victims, though — he can see just fine...
  • Likewise, in the few pictures of Destiny where the top half of his face isn't in total shadow, he doesn't appear to have eyes, though it's difficult to say for sure.
  • Hell, even Dream is sort of an example of this. He has stars for pupils in pitch-black eye sockets, but they are not legit eyes.
• In Supergirl story Bizarrogirl, the Godship's spawn are giant, bug-like critters with no eyes.
• X-Men villainess Destiny was a Blind Seer who wore an eyeless mask, which Spiral used for terrifying purposes when she literally nailed the mask onto X-Man Dazzler's face during the Fall of the Mutants X-Over in order to keep Dazzler from using her eyebeam laser attack.
  • Years later, another blind precog (Blindfold) came along and joined the X-Men's junior team. More true to the trope, she doesn't even have sockets for eyes. She wears a strip of cloth across her face at eye level (a 'blindfold' as it were) to hide the fact.
• Marvel's Batman-Expy the Shroud had his eyes burnt off by means of steaming hot iron being pressed in his face. To prevent the readers from spazzing out by seeing burnt eyes and molten flesh it's toned down to just scarred flesh. He's a Daredevil-esque hero, with supersenses and a Disability Superpower.
• Probe from the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle has psychic powers and no eyes, which she disguises with sunglasses. She mentions that she hasn't had any easy time growing up without eyes.
• Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The Legislators (enforcers of Chief Justice Tyrest) all have faces lacking eyes and the author (Roberts) confirmed this was to say "Justice is Blind." Kaon has large cavernous black eyes that caused many fans to speculate he was missing them. This was a design choice by the artist (Milne) and Roberts wasn't aware of it at the time. Roberts would later say that he likes the idea of Kaon being eyeless.

Fan Fiction

• In the Gene Catlow fanfic The Basalt City Chronicles, a historic emperor was born without eyes; it's implied this was a deformity.
• Boldores And Boomsticks: Attention is called to how Nox the Zubat manages to be cute with only a mouth on his face.
• Any Kill Bill sequel fic in which Elle Driver appears, given what happened to her in the movie. See this fic on FanFiction.Net and these on Archive of Our Own, for example.

Films — Animated

• Blindscape is about a blind man lost in the woods, the surroundings left blank until he hears or touches them to symbolize how he experiences the world around him. To convey his blindness, the protagonist is drawn with no eyes.
• The demonic Pink Elephants in Dumbo's (in)famous Disney Acid Sequence are bright shapes with empty black voids where their eyes should be.
• The Fates in Hercules have to share one eye and usually fight over who uses it. They even drop it once.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas plays with this in an odd manner. Being a living skeleton, Jack Skellington has empty sockets in his skull — but being animated, those sockets move in a wide range of expressions comparable to a living person's eyes.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien: The xenomorphs have no visible eyes — their skulls are completely smooth and dome-like, with no indication of how they see.
• Attack the Block: The aliens have no eyes and track their prey by smell. In fact, they have no discernible features at all, aside from their multiple rows of luminescent turquoise fangs, because their fur is so dark they look like living shadows (the smaller female is light-coloured, but still has no eyes).
• Tremors features the Graboids, although the lack of eyes doesn't bother them because they rely on sound. Its late metamorphosis stages, the Shriekers and Assblasters, also have no eyes, but they do have heat-sensing organs on their heads to find warm-blooded prey. The lack of eyes does mean the monsters can mistakenly attack things that make sound or generate heat, but aren't edible.
• Doug Jones has played two such beings in the films of Guillermo del Toro.
  • Pan's Labyrinth: The Pale Man actually has eyes. Just not in his face.
  • Hellboy II: The Golden Army: The Angel of Death has eyes all over its wings, but none on its face.
• Star Wars: The Miraluka are a species of gifted Force users that look like humans without any eyes and are usually light siders...
  • ...with the exception of Jerec from Jedi Knight, a powerful and truly evil Dark Jedi.
  • ...and Visas Marr from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, who starts out as evil but can become a Light Sider or stay Dark Side depending on the actions of the player.
  • The tie-in comic story "Unseen, Unheard" shows Visas Marr without the veil that she never takes off in the game. She has no eyes, just skin over the sockets. When she was captured by the Sith, they must have found it creepy as well. She woke up to find her new master had carved out large pockets of flesh to imitate eye sockets. The scars apparently never faded. This is why she never takes off her hood.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic states that aside from tradition, the other reason the Miraluka wear hoods, blindfolds, and visors is out of consideration for other species, who get unnerved by this biological quirk of theirs.
• Jacob's Ladder: The main character is haunted by the supremely disturbing figures with no eyes, though you eventually learn that they're actually Angels helping him leave his past behind and enter heaven.
• Clash of the Titans (1981): The grim oracles have no eyes, but trade a single crystal between them to see. This is based on the mythical Graeae, or "Grey Ones" — three women who were born old, with one eye and one tooth among them.
• Event Horizon's Dr. Weir pulls this off around the time he goes Axe-Crazy, gouges out his eyes and starts blowing up stuff and gutting fellow team members apart. He gets his eyes back though in time to beat the snot out of Laurence Fishburne. There's also the vision Weir has of his dead wife.
• In the J-Horror movie Apartment 1303, Mariko is telling a ghost story to her friends. This story features the ghost of a woman in a kimono, who stands by the elevator doors on the 13th floor. Her face is concealed, as she hangs her head and faces away. Whenever someone goes to use the elevator, the ghost first asks them if they are currently on the 13th floor. When they respond "yes", and start to move towards the elevator, the ghostly woman grabs their arm and reveals her face - pale, sickly, and with the eyes covered in bloody bandages. She then demands for the person to "Give me back my eyes", before the bandages suddenly fall away - to reveal an eyeless face.
• V for Vendetta: In the film, during the Dr. Delia Surridge's diary segment, V has no eyes.
• Hellraiser:
  • In Hellraiser: Inferno, the Engineer killer has only a mouth and nose — his face is blank where eyes should be. It's actually a mask used by Joseph's evil side. The Wire Twins Cenobites also seem to be lacking eyes.
  • The Chatterer from the first two films somehow manages to combine Eyes Always Shut and this trope.
• Minority Report. The dealer whom John Anderton buys drugs from has no eyes. According to him, his father used to say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
  • This incidentally is because in this world everybody is constantly traced by long distance retina scanners that are used in everything from paying train fare to bombing people with personalized advertisements. Not having eyes is the best way to hide, especially when it's always possible to buy a new set from the black market if you need them.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: In the extended edition, the Mouth of Sauron wears a rather painful-looking helmet that covers most of his face except his mouth, which is also digitally enlarged to make it extra unsettling..
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005): Humma Kavula, the closest thing the movie has to a villain, has what appear to be perfectly normal eyes behind goggle-like glasses... until he takes them off and wipes them on his sleeve...
• After Earth: The Ursa, a predatory alien. Because it cannot see, it hunts by sensing fear from its prey.
• Annihilation (2018): Dr. Ventress displays this trait as a side effect of the Shimmer's mutations in the climax.
• Escape From The Valley Of The Tapes is an Australian documentary film about a cult video store suffering financial difficulties, with flashback scenes in the style of a sci-fi B-Movie. A businessman (shown as a sinister figure wearing Sunglasses at Night) is willing to finance the store, until his Evil Plan is revealed — he wants them to sell Hollywood blockbusters! At this point, the owner of the cult video store tears off the man's sunglasses to reveal an eyeless horror and flees in terror.
• The Haunted Palace: A teenage girl with unbroken skin in place of eyes appears in the movie.
• Pitch Black: The bioraptors don't possess any eyes, since they're nocturnal creatures that hunt by echolocation.
• Similarly, the creatures that have infested the world in A Quiet Place never evolved eyes, according to Word of God.
• Captive State: The Legislators have these under their environment suits. Except for their round, jawless mouths, their faces are mottled, white flesh.
• The Silence (2019): The vesps — blind, catlike monsters that hunt by sound — have no eyes whatsoever; their heads rise into a smooth, unbroken bony slope above their nostrils.
• The Woman: Near the end, it is revealed the Cleek family had a daughter who was born without eyes. Disgusted, the father kept her locked up in the barn and treated her like a dog.
• One of the symptoms of the Demonic Possession in Dead Birds.
• In Mad Max: Fury Road, the Doof Warrior wears a mask for the majority of the movie, until it's finally removed and revealed that the guitar playing mutant has no eyes.
• Thirst (2015): The alien doesn't have any visible eyes on its face.
• In Doctor Sleep, in a rare heroic example, Abra manifests with just blurry skin in place of eyes when she confronts Rose inside her head, for intimidating effect and/or to prevent Rose from knowing her real face.

Literature

• City of No End has the Wellmen, a Human Subspecies that has evolved for the darkness of the Depths. Their other senses are superior, and can track blood like a hound.
• In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Bon-Bon" (1835), about a Frenchman having a philosophical conversation with the Devil, the Devil initially wears a pair of green sunglasses that completely hide his eyes. Eventually he removes the glasses and thereby reveals that he has neither eyes nor eyesockets. He helpfully explains that he has a different kind of vision that not only allows him to perceive his physical surroundings like any human, but also to "see" the thoughts and minds of living beings. Moreover, in the Devil's workplace physical eyes would only be an "incumbrance, liable at any time to be put out by a roasting-iron or a pitchfork."
• In Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face is a maybe example—he always hides his face under a hood, but considering his name, maybe that's a good thing.
• The inhabitants of Ixchel in A Wrinkle in Time. They turn out to be very nice people. Apparently, vision is an alien concept for the entire planet, because even the plants are gray.
• The McDonald's employee in the created universe in Animorphs. He was created from the memory of a character who never noticed anything about his "real" incarnation but his acne. Therefore, his face is a solid mass of oozing pimples. The Andalites themselves are kind of an inversion: two eyes on the face, another two above the face, but no mouth.
• The Myrddaal from The Wheel of Time have perfectly smooth skin where their eyes should be (and that, like the rest of their body, is pale as if a week dead). Despite this, they can see better than any creature that does possess eyes, especially in the dark.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series novel Planet of Judgment, a security guard named Bill Hixon is taken by a group of aliens and physically altered: one of the changes is that his eyes are removed and covered over with flesh.
• The Harrowing in Nightside.
• Moonbeasts from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath have no eyes. Or even a face—just a tangle of writhing slimy tentacles where it should be. The god Nyarlatothep is also occasionally described as having an eyeless face (or a mask that covers his eyes)... when he doesn't have one huge tentacle instead of a face.
• The Miraluka in the Star Wars Expanded Universe have eye sockets filled with flesh. They see through the Force.
• The character Victor Farkas (he's on the cover of one edition) in Robert Silverberg's novel Hot Sky at Midnight.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has three examples. Ur-viles the stock monster in The Land, have eyeless faces. However, the hero Hile Troy also has an eyeless face, having been born disfigured in the "real world". When he comes to The Land, he gains sight despite having no eyes. The Waynhim, the non-chaotic-evil version of the Ur-viles, are also eyeless.
• In the text version of ElfQuest, Leetah's offer to mend One-Eye's lost eye is declined, as a Wolfrider healer, less skilled than her, had treated his injury long ago by sealing the socket completely.
• The inhabitants of H. G. Wells' The Country of the Blind are born like this due to a congenital illness. Not only do they consider their condition normal, but upon feeling the face of a sighted man, they conclude that the pair of soft masses above his cheeks are tumors that should be removed surgically.
• Skulduggery Pleasant:
  • The Faceless Ones turn out to be so named because humans they possess have all of their facial features melt away.
  • To a less creepy extent, we have Billy-Ray Sanguine, who would, in different circumstances, be described as handsome...except for the two empty sockets where his eyes should be.
• Lights Out from the hard-hitting novel Angel Blood was born like this. She, as well as three other severely deformed or disabled children, is living in a hospital, where she is frequently mistreated and tranquilized. During the course of the book, she never verbally communicates, yet shows a sweet and innocent nature.
• The Dementors in Harry Potter normally have their faces hidden by hoods, but are described as having faces with no eyes (only skin over where the eye sockets should be) and giant round sucking mouths.
• Discworld:
  • The aptly named Blind Io, who is arguably the chief god of the Discworld (or once was, real estate in Dunmanifestin moves around fairly quickly). He has eyes, but they don't spend any time in his head.
  • The Cunning Man from I Shall Wear Midnight is a curious variant of this. Instead of empty sockets or smooth skin where his eyes should be, he has holes straight through his head, through which can be seen whatever is behind him. As, on the Discworld, the eyes are literally windows to the soul, this is a very bad thing indeed.
• After Man: A Zoology of the Future: Most bats have completely lost their eyes, making room on their faces for additional echolocation-enhancing folds and depressions.
• There's a New Series Adventures novel titled The Eyeless, although that is not the creepiest thing about the Hive Mind aliens who harvest "trophies" and absorb them into their transparent bodies. In fact, the creepiest one does have eyes.
• In Perdido Street Station, the slake-moths have antennae positioned where a normal creature's eyes would be.
• Every creature in Expedition is eyeless, save for one creature that sports what might be a single (retractable!) eye. Semi-subverted in the case of those species whose nostrils or breathing-spiracles are positioned so they resemble eyes.
• Lissener, the Blind Seer in Riddley Walker.
• In The Folk Keeper, Old Francis says of the beings beneath Marblehaugh Park, "the Folk are mostly mouth". Corinna later encounters one and sees that its face is indeed mostly taken up by a large mouth, with no eyes.
• In Coraline, the first major red flag about the Other World is that everyone has black buttons where their eyes should be. Even creepier, to permanently join their world, you have to let them sew those buttons over your eyes too.
• The Toothguard in Tailchaser's Song are hairless cats with folds of skin where their eyes should be. Pouncequick compares them to large, deformed newborns.
• Lilith's Brood: The Cthulhumanoid Oankali have no eyes, ears, or noses; instead, patches of short tentacles on their scalps, foreheads, throats, and bodies provide equivalent senses. They have to learn to face humans when speaking with them, since their species' equivalent is just to point some tentacles in their conversation partner's direction.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Happened to Gordon after he was exposed to Terrigen Mist, which activated his teleportation power but removed his eyes and rendered him blind. He's pretty well-adjusted in the present, though flashbacks show the transformation was very traumatic for him, and he still seems to hold some resentment towards Inhumans like Lincoln who made the change without any physical deformities at all. Despite being blind the first time around, the most unusual fact however, is that he gained a new vision overtime which allows him to perceive things that others couldn't.
• Beyond: The beings in the Realm.
• The Harbingers or Bringers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer have scarred flesh instead of eyes. "Crazy alphabet eyes".
• Doctor Who:
  • Davros has rotting scar tissue where his eyes should be, but a blue light on his forehead. Not that that's better, but...
  • The Silence have eyes, but those eyes happen to be so deep into the sockets that you can't see them.
  • In "The Girl Who Waited", the Handbots' faces are completely blank. They see through sensors in their organic hands. The Doctor comments on this, wondering why the builders didn't just include eyes. It's because the robots keep their syringe guns behind their faces.
  • The Whispermen in "The Name of the Doctor" have eyeless faces, except when their master, the Great Intelligence, possesses one of them to manifest corporeally.
• The Demon Mephistopheles ends up like this in HEX after defying his masters. They put him on "a permanent loop through the nine circles of Hell", and one of his punishments is having his eyes sewn shut.
• A consequence of the horrific Helvetica Scenario in the first series of Look Around You. In the second series of Look Around You, Prince Charles falls into this category.
• Several The Muppets don't have actual eyes, though all of them have some sort of "indicator" of eyes:
  • Professor Bunsen Honeydew has no eyes, just glasses. It's hilarious when he raises his glasses in order to check his work.
  • The Swedish Chef just has bushy eyebrows.
  • Janice has eyelashes but no real eyes.
  • Scooter's eyes and glasses are one piece, and a few times he's taken them both off at once.
  • One sketch involving a face-lift machine had Muppets with their facial features temporarily removed, resulting in nothing but a mouth.
• Tom Servo is the only robot in Mystery Science Theater 3000 without eye parts. And if you're now asking "Then how does he watch the movies?", well...
• The Trickster in The Sarah Jane Adventures.
• One Ultraman story has a race of eyeless subterranean humanoids kidnapping Hayata (Ultraman's human form) as part of an attempt to take over the surface world.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): The Myrdraal lack eyes, and it's part of their creepiness.
• The alien rebels from The X-Files have their eyes, ears and mouth sealed up so they can't be infested with the 'black oil'.

Music

• The drummer for Australian band Rudely Interrupted was born without eyes.
• Daniel Amos are pictured on the cover of their album ¡Alarma! with their eyes airbrushed away. This gets a Call-Back on the followup album, Doppelgänger, where the first track has the lyrics:
  Where have the eyes gone? One finds no eyes here.
• PVRIS' music video for "What's Wrong" features a dinner scene where the guests are all blindfolded, and when the blindfolds are taken off, they're revealed to have eyeless faces. By the end of the video, even Lynn has a face like this.
• Inverted in the 1980s Billy Idol hit "Eyes Without A Face".
• Lemon Demon has "No Eyed Girl", a love song to a Humanoid Abomination from a reality of blinding light.

Mythology

• The three Graiae (Gray Sisters) from Classical Mythology have only one eye and one tooth, which they take turns using. When one of them is using the eye, the others are eyeless.
• The Ohaguro-bettari Yōkai from Japan look like pretty women from behind or from the side, but when they turn around all they have is a huge mouth with black teeth. They enjoy scaring the shit out of young and married men for laughs.

Pinball

• Featured in both Pin*Bot and The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot, who have empty sockets where the eyes should be. Filling them with pinballs is a condition in both games.
• Batman (Data East) has a board with the Joker's face, but with sinkholes where the eyes (and mouth) would be. Shooting pinballs into the holes yields million-point bonuses.

Radio

• In the Alien Worlds episode "Night Riders of Kalimar", it is mentioned that the titular Night Riders lack eyes.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • The Mujina have little in the way of facial features at all.
  • The Grimlocks are another eyeless D&D race.
  • Doppelgangers are an inversion, they have eyes but no other facial features in their natural form.
  • The Grims from the Epic Level Handbook also count - they have a Slasher Smile as their only facial feature. They can see just fine, though.
  • The Keepers, human-like creatures clad in dark coats and goggles. The goggles hide their lack of eyes, and there's not even indentations for eye sockets.
• Pathfinder contains stats for the Graeae from Greek Mythology, as well as the Youkai known as the Tenome, aka the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth.
• The Scarred Lands — After the gods won the war against their parent Titans, they sealed them since they could never be killed. One of the Titans, Kadum the Mountain Shaker, was chained and flung into the deepest oceans, where the sea now runs red from his constantly bleeding wound where his heart was cut out. As a result of the exposure, all nearby sea life became tainted by the Titan's blood. One of these beings were the Blood Maidens, who look like beautiful women with long black hair and pale skin. When seeing their faces, the creature's monstrous nature becomes clear. Instead of a normal face, the blood maiden has only a giant circular, eyeless maw, like a lamprey.
• Every native species on the planet of Skyrealms of Jorune, good or bad, is like this, because they navigate by sensing life energy instead of light.
• Games Workshop games:
  • Warhammer 40,000 examples:
  • The Ur-Ghuls from the Dark Eldar army are eyeless, but they can sniff out their prey.
  • Some Tyranids have no eyes, especially in older editions. Currently the only 'Nids that retain this feature are the Hive Guard, and they still fight and even shoot reasonably well. This is justified by Hive Guards being mindless bodyguard creatures that are remote-controlled by the synapse creature they're protecting, so all sensory input is relayed to them directly from their boss.
  • In Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, a Curseling’s parasitic Tretchlet homunculus lacks eyes, having nothing but flat skin stretching from their noses to the top of their heads. Instead of sight the Tertchlets use their arcane sense of smell to perceive the world.
• Iron Kingdoms' Everblight have eyeless warbeasts. In fact, it often appears as if those beasts only have mouths on their heads.

Video Games

• Bound by Blades: Mittux is a monster consisting of a gigantic mouth with leathery, bat-like wings, without any eyes. Turns out it's sole eye is located on its tongue.
• Buckshot Roulette: The dealer seems to have no eyes in its sockets, adding to its intimidating appearence.
• EverQuest: Cazic-Thule the Faceless is a malevolent four-armed god whose worship is dominated by fear. His spiny head lacks any eyes (or nose, or teeth, or eyes for that matter). The angry god also has his Avatars of Fear, who bear his likeness.
• Kâbus 22: The Maduns only have a mouth full of sharp teeth on the front of their heads.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The dragon Argorok's helmet lacks eye slits, and once broken off reveals only flat scales where its eyes would be.
• Mica: Apoptosis: The Things look like humans with drilled holes for eyes. It's extremely disturbing.
• Undying: All of the characters in the game, human and zombie, have no eyes. In fact, the only times they even have mouths is during text speeches.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • As they've undergone Art Evolution through the course of the series, this has become a trait of the Atronachs. Atronachs are a type of unaligned lesser Daedra which are essentially the Elemental Embodiments of the elements they represent. The most common are the Flame (also known as "Fire"), Frost, and Storm varieties. As they've become less humanoid as the series has gone on, Frost and Storm Atronachs no longer have eyes (or really any facial features). Flame Atronachs, though they've otherwise become more humanoid (and feminine), still have eye-slits or holes in their "masks", but just fire behind them, no actual eyes.
  • Vermai are a blind and aggressive form of lesser Daedra with minimal intelligence, commonly found in the service of Mehrunes Dagon. While otherwise mostly humanoid in appearance, Vermai lack eyes.
  • Morrowind has Ash Zombies and Ash Ghouls, two types of minions to Dagoth Ur who have been twisted by his Eldritch magics. Ash Zombies have the entire upper part of their face gouged out from nose to eyebrows. Ash Ghouls take it down the Body Horror route, with the front of their face replaced by a proboscis.
  • Skyrim has the Falmer, formerly the Altmer-like Snow Elves who were nearly driven to extinction in the series' backstory. They were taken in by the Dwemer, who enslaved the Falmer and forced them to blind themselves. The Dwemer would further twist and mutate the Falmer until they became the debased goblin-like creatures encountered in the game. While they still technically have eyes, the eyes are covered by a layer of skin. This has gameplay connotations as well: They are completely incapable of light-based detection against sneakers, but have keen sound-based detection. You could walk right in front of them without them detecting you if silent enough, but make even the slightest of noise and they'll detect you in no time at all.
• Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation, due to technical limitations.
• Nobody Saves the World: No matter your Form, Nobody has pitch-black empty sockets instead of regular eyes like the NPCs. The only others to share this are victims of the Calamity's Mystical Plague, indicating that it had something to do with Nobody's current state.
• NPCs in Suikoden Tactics who aren't important to the plot have eyeless character portraits.
• Many creatures in the Silent Hill series, if they have a face at all. Outside of pre-rendered CGI, all the characters in the original game as well.
• All the monsters from Specimen Zero have no eyes, relying on their sense of hearing to hunt you down instead. And it doesn't make them any less horrifying when they chomp you to bits.
• Pokémon
  • Zubat have no eyes, "seeing" entirely via echolocation. Their evolved forms, however, develop eyes. Its counterpart in the fifth generation games, Swoobat, may or may not have eyes, but if so these are entirely covered by fur that only leaves its nose and mouth visible.
  • The "eyes" of Roggenrola and Boldore are actually their ears.
• Skullgirls: Peacock can classify as an eyeless face. What look like her eyes technically are fake and don't work at all, as her real eyes were gored out. The eyes on her arms are the only way she can see now that she's a cyborg. We also see how she lost her eyes. From her first person view.
• Propogation: Some zombies have mutated to the point where their eyelids are fused shut. It's most evident when they lunge towards you for a bite and you get a lovely, close-up glimpse of their faces.
• Spore: A creature's eyes can be removed entirely in the creature editor. Making your creatures this way causes the screen to be dark while playing, until the Civilization phase.
• World of Warcraft: In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack, there is an old Titan base called Ulduar, which has been corrupted by the villainous old god Yogg-Saron. The beast in question is known as the "Beast With a Thousand Maws" because, in addition to its main mouth, it has several other mouths all over its body, including where its eyes would normally be.
• The Licker monsters from the Resident Evil series.
• The Puppets from Thief: Deadly Shadows. Of course, they're mostly lacking faces entirely, showingly merely the vague shape of a face beneath the cloth wrapped around their faces. But the effect is the same.
• Enjoy playing Runes of Magic? Does your computer barely meet the minimum requirements? If so, you'll probably have to play with the lowest display settings, with the side effect that NOBODY has eyes. Not you, not any other player avatars, not NPCs, and not monsters. Have you SEEN an eyeless wolf?!
• The Final Fantasy IX version of Bahamut seems to lack eyes for some reason.
• All of the Asura demon forms in the Digital Devil Saga series are notable for having no visible eyes.
• The Wannamingo in Fallout 2 were modeled similar to the Alien xenomorphs.
• Half-Life's Xenian organisms pretty much either have too many eyes, or none at all. Examples include Antlions, and Headcrabs.
• The True Final Boss of Shadow the Hedgehog shares one eye between two heads, and the eye has to constantly switch between the two heads. Which means that one of the two heads just has an empty eye socket where its eye should be.
• Theresia: Dear Emile does everything it can to avoid showing people's eyes in cutscenes, but whenever we get a glimpse they're shown as having small inward curves with no actual eyes in them. This is probably stylistic rather than literal.
• The first boss of Perish, Karathao is a horned Big Red Devil without eyes.
• Many of the Eldritch Abomination monsters in Quake.
• The Imps in Rule of Rose just have a pair of asymmetrical, black eye sockets on their face.
• The Aqua Demon monsters in the Disgaea series lack any visible eyes, and instead use the horns on their heads to sense things in their environment. A bunch of them had Blank White Eyes on one instance, though it was presumably just to emphasize how badly they had gotten beaten up.
• Piranha Plants in Super Mario Bros., seeing as they're based off of Venus flytraps, which consist of nothing but a "mouth" and a stalk.
• Crazy 8's driver No Face from Twisted Metal. He is still able to drive, because he can somehow sense what's around him.
• Dota 2 has two examples: Faceless Void◊ and Bane◊.
• The redesigned versions of Lurkers and Nosalises in Metro: Last Light have no visible eyes— just big mouths full of teeth. Since they dwell in dark, subterranean tunnels, they may navigate by smell instead (especially the nosalises, who have quite large and prominent nostrils).
• The Cultists of the Eternal End in Endless Legend are a race of malfunctioning Endless robots, which have human-like ceramic faces with no eyes. Their marionette-like motion and odd anatomy - too many heads in weird places, generally - makes them unnerving to watch.
  • From the same game, the aptly-named Eyeless Ones minor faction are a race that essentially look like less spiky xenomorphs. They are also one of the most benevolent races in the game; their unique unit is a healer, and their faction trait improves happiness with each of their settlements you add to your empire.
• The second boss in Mind Your Manors is an odd variation; the boss has no face at all. However, she consists of heavily applied makeup floating in midair, creating a similar effect.
• Warframe: The warframes themselves almost never have eyes, or at least the correct number or placement of them. Technically their "faces" are helmets, but they're designed never to come off. Underneath their masks they still have eyes, twisted by the Infestation that makes them so powerful. Parodied by Alad V if players chose to back him during the Gradivus Dilemma event.
  Alad V: Tenno, you know, we may not always see eye to eye... well, you don't have eyes, but I'm pleased to see we've found common ground in our fight with these Grineer dogs.
• Yo-kai Watch has Chatalie and Nagitha. Chatalie, based on the Kuchisake-onna, is a yokai with a fat head and even fatter mouth, forcing those she inspirits to make big claims they cant/won't follow up on. Nagitha, based on the Ohaguro-bettari, nags and complains constantly and so does anyone she inspirits. Both of them look like small imps with huge mouths, large heads with bangs, and small bodies.
• Much of the fauna in the Oddworld series have heads but lack eyes. Background materials explain that they perceive their environment through other means, usually scent or echolocation.
• A surprisingly large percentage of Hell's demon roster in Doom (2016) lack obvious eyes, including but not limited to all five subspecies of Possessed, Hell Razers, Hell Knights and Summoners. Neither has any trouble hunting you down regardless, not even the Razers, which are basically demonic snipers.
• White Noise Online: The supernatural creature (named Subject 23 in the sequel) stalking the investigators doesn't have any eyes.
• All the characters that become ghosts in Eternal Darkness have empty eye sockets.
• Clea (2019): The chaos spiders have no eyes.
• Several of the monsters in Monster Hunter do not have eyes, or at least not any functional ones. Among these are the juvenile Elder Dragon Gore Magala, whose eyes haven't yet develop and which uses sensory scales shed from its wings to sense its environments, inadvertantly spreading the Frenzy virus in the process. The cave-dwelling Khezu, on the other hand, is completely blind, and this is reflected in the fact that is has no combat music - a monster's combat music only starts playing when that monster sees you, after all.
• If you're playing as the Byzantine Empire in Crusader Kings II, this is how defeated enemies appear◊ if you choose to blind them. This is in keeping with an actual practice in Byzantine politics—with the purpose often being to nullify rival claims to the throne, as The Emperor was considered God's earthly representative and thus had to be physically perfect. (Blinding also made it harder for rivals to lead troops into battle. On the other hand, castration—another common form of mutilation in the Byzantine Empire, and their alternate option for neutralizing foes in CKII—had the added benefit of preventing opponents from siring heirs.)
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • With all the Body Horror in the game, it's no wonder there's plenty of enemies who are lacking eyes, but it's also the case with one character: Lilith. Unlike most characters, she can't use her tears to fight, since she's wearing a bloodied blindfold, depending on her companion Incubus to do the shooting. Come Repentance, we get Tainted Lilith, who has no blindflold, leaving her empty, bloody sockets in sight.
  • Some of the items you find cause your character to lose their eyes, for example: Sulphuric Acid apparently dissolved your eyes and now your tears have a chance to be made of acid, which are not only stronger, but can destroy obstacles. The 8-Inch nails cause your eyes to be completely gone thanks to having nails driven on them (instead of tears, now you cry nails), Mucormycosis does the same, but with a fungal infection and The Intruder has a spider taking over Isaac's head, with some of its legs poking out of his now empty eye sockets.
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: An Aneru's face consists of a wide mouth and nothing else.

Visual Novels

• A technique used frequently in Visual Novels, especially H-Games. The main protagonist will usually not have an actual visual design in order to make it easier for the player to imagine themselves as that role. If the protagonist absolutely needs to be depicted in a scene, they'll be drawn without eyes so that their face appears featureless. It often just ends up creepy. Some games use Hidden Eyes instead - for example, Ibuki from Let's Meow Meow, whose hair hangs over his eyes.
• None of the characters in MetaWare High School (Demo) have eyes. As it turns out, they don't even know what eyes are.

Webcomics

• Silent Hill: Promise: The first monster to appear only has indentations where its eyes should be.
• Homestuck:
  • All of the adult characters are drawn with eyeless faces. Some — Jade's Grandpa, John's Nanna, and Dave's Bro — wear glasses, but the eyes still can't be seen through them. This has been confirmed to be only stylistic: they do actually have eyes.
  • On a more literal level, Doc Scratch has no eyes at all, since his head is a blank cueball; his fellow Physical God Becquerel doesn't either, which is the only difference between him and Halley is the eyes. In the post-Scratch timeline, GCat is likewise eyeless. Combined with how Jadesprite complains of the Green Sun's light always being in her eyes when she's fused with Bec, it's entirely possible that all First Guardians are deliberately engineered without eyes.
  • Dead characters have blank, white eyes without pupils, but can still see. Sollux had his eyes burned out, leaving him with only empty sockets, after losing a duel against Eridan.
  • Horsearoni, a horselike monsters hatched by Tavros during a game of Fiduspawn, lacks eyes of any sort.
  • There are a couple of Stylistic Self Parodies that depict John and Jake having no eyes when they get their glasses knocked off.
• Carpe Chaos: The Turikasuul alien race.
• Wurr: Iralbe the hellhound. It's surprisingly expressive.
• L's Empire: Palmaster has a mutation that makes it where he doesn't have eyes. Since eyes are the only thing male Kayoss have on their faces in the first place, this also makes him The Blank.
• Played for Laughs in one Rosebuds strip. Rosa does have eyes, but in the one panel where she's not wearing her glasses, she's drawn without eyes, to illustrate how she's Blind Without 'Em.
• Drowtales: The Xuile'solen are a subspecies of drow who have no eyes in later generations as a result of living in the pure darkness and not needing them. They more than make up for it with their other senses to the point that the Sarghress hired some to teach the Fallen Legion their tricks. Most of the ones living outside the drow cities are living terrors that are essentially feral animals.
• Nebula: Comets are pretty much dogs made of rock without eyes. Still surprisingly cute, though.
• Runewriters: Jonan has done this to people as a punishment for trespassing on his lands. He does this by "healing" their eyelids shut.
• The Shadows Over Innsmouth: Jaunt is a Dimensional Shambler, a creature native to an alien dimension, and so he lacks eyes. There are simple bony plates beneath his brow-ridges. While on Earth he uses an enchanted High-Class Glass to allow him to see wavelengths of visible light.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: The goblin race has four or more extensive, slitted nostrils in place of eyes, which gives them a sense of smell that's acute to the point of Supernatural Sensitivity. It also gives them a rather unique style of pipe-smoking.
• Objectified: Infected objects tend to have gaping, eyeless sockets after they transform.

Web Animation

• Steve the Pirhana Plant from Bowser's Kingdom, in accordance to all Piranha Plants.
• Tom from Eddsworld has two large holes where his eyes should be. Somehow he can still see. His mother was a bowling ball and his father was a pineapple, justifying his lack of eyes.
• Nuzzner Fubs from The Pink City, whose face consists solely of a massive set of Scary Teeth.

Web Originals

• Bosun's Journal: The sentinels of the Ezarian abyss are a posthuman species adapted for life within the Nebukadnezar's immense water holding tanks. Since these areas are entirely lightless, the sentinels have long lost their eyes; their elongated faces are instead dominated by nasal slits.
• Marble Hornets: The Operator seems to lack eyes... and a face.
• The 99 Rooms: When you open the eyelids of the man in Room 16, he has only empty sockets.
• Tails of the Space Gladiators has Ralousha Gorgonozz. Ralousha is a klakroshan, a reptilian alien race that has long snouts but no eyes on their faces.
• In the Star Trek-based Play-By-Email game Shadow Operations, Admiral Clancy recounts an incident in which Star Fleet got a hold of telepathy-based technology made by an alien race known as the Carnora. After a disastrous test in which the test subject was compelled to destroy the device, the Carnora sent an agent to explain to her that they'd caught Star Fleet red-handed and were displeased. The agent was a small creature that could levitate and suffered a genetic disorder that caused him to be born eyeless. Admiral Clancy thinks the Carnora were intent on creeping her out. She's absolutely correct.

Western Animation

• Rectangular Businessman of 12 oz. Mouse wears a pair of glasses that hide the fact that he has no eyes. He casually reveals to the other characters a couple of times over the course of the series.
• Aaahh!!! Real Monsters has Krumm, a monster with no eyes on his face, who has separate eyeballs which he carries around in his hands or mouth.
• In Adventure Time, Jake's daughter Jake Jr. lacks eyes even though the rest of Jake's children have them.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The Shirshu is a cross between a giant anteater, a German Shepherd, and a star-nosed mole. While even the blind Badgermoles have eyes, albeit blank, glazed over ones, this beast doesn't have any at all, instead navigating by means of its acute sense of smell.
  • During the Nightmare Sequence in "Nightmares and Daydreams", Aang sees Toph gazing soullessly at him with eyes entirely filled in the same color as her skin before she's dragged into the ground.
• Ben 10:
  • Eye Guy has eyes everywhere on his body except his face. Either because of this, or at least Ben not being used to it, Ben is very prone to being taken by surprise despite being able to see in every direction.
  • Wildmutt doesn't have eyes at all. He "sees" using gill-shaped nostrils on either side of his head.
• Centaurworld: The moletaurs have no eyes. Some close up shots show with shallow indentations where eyes would normally be.
• Both of Everett Peck's cartoon series Duckman and Squirrel Boy lampshade the Eye Glasses trope by having Duckman and Andy remove their glasses, revealing no eyes at all, while the eyes are still in the lenses.
• Futurama: "The Farnsworth Parabox" features numerous alternate universes, among which is one where nobody had any eyes.
  [The eyeless Fry, Leela, and Hermes are facing away]
  Alternate Amy: Hello? Did you see two smelly lobsters?
  Eyeless Hermes: We didn't see anyt'ing... [they turn around] ...ever.
• The Owl House: Braxas, the demon child in the baby class, has a massive mouth with sharp teeth that takes up the entirety of his face. Interestingly enough his father (revealed to be Warden Wrath) presumably a more mature version of his demonic species, actually has eyes that are normally hidden by his hood.
• The victims of Ahuizotl in The Secret Saturdays episode "The Thousand Eyes of Ahuizotl".
• At the end of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Teacher's Pests", SpongeBob, Mr. Krabs, and Plankton are sewn together after surviving an explosion. Out of all of them, SpongeBob is the most intact... other than him missing the top of his head where his eyes once were.
• Many characters from VeggieTales don't have eyes. It's more silly than creepy. Most cover them with hats, Pa Grape switches between glasses and hats. Notably, Mr. Lunt has been seen without either glasses or a hat. His eye-indicators are two locks of his hair that fell down on his brow. That brow crinkling with passionate song is creepy, though. Later averted for Pa Grape in his new design, as he gains Black Bead Eyes.

Real Life

• Several◊ cave◊ animals◊ lack eyes, since they'd be useless in a pitch black environment and would therefore only serve as a waste of resources and vulnerable entry point for parasites and pathogens. Some are also socketless.
  • Parasites themselves, if their free-living ancestors had eyes, tend to lose them. Creatures such as fish-parasitic copepods have no use for such organs, and eliminating them removes a potential target for a host fish's immune system to attack.
• And of course, many worms are like this, most notably earthworms. Again, because such a thing would be impractical to their living conditions.
• Moles, mole-rats, and similar burrowing creatures often feature eyes reduced to such an extent that they are overgrown by a layer of skin and fur. Marsupial moles and Golden moles take this to an extreme, having just vestigial remnants of retinas where eyes would have once been. This, however, doesn't make them scary, instead it makes them balls of fur with legs, and therefore extremely huggable.
• Bilateral anophthalmia is an extremely rare medical condition where children are born without eyes.
  • A similar symptom is when a child is born with their skin covering over their eyes. This can be a result of radiation in the environment. This looks actually freakier than bilateral anophthalmia (who look like their lids are permanently closed), since the children born with this condition appear to have nothing but smooth skin where their eyes should be.
  • A (not necessarily easy to believe) story featured in a very old issue of the Mexican magazine "Casos de lo Insólito" was about a boy named Ivan, who lived in the post-World War I Eastern Europe and suffered of this condition. The illustrations showed him as a normal kid... but with empty eye sockets.
• Laura Bridgman was one of the first deaf-blind Americans to be educated, 50 years before Helen Keller. Usually she wore a silk band around her eyes, or dark glasses, but there is one picture taken for medical reasons that shows her without them. It takes people a minute to realize they're looking into nearly empty sockets. She actually did have eyes, but the rest of the story is moderate Eye Scream.
• Rarely a cat will be born with one eye not properly developed. For example, this kitten. Even rarer still when a cat is born with no eyes at all.
  • There's also the story of Homer, a cat who lost both his eyes to an infection as a kitten, but went on to live a long and happy life. (Info and picture here.)
  • Similar birth defects occur among many domesticated animals. In commercial livestock it's usually grounds for euthanasia, but pets born without eyes can often find loving homes with caregivers who don't mind a "special needs" animal. If the pet is of a species that doesn't much depend on eyesight, such as a rat or mouse, it may not even require accommodations for its blindness.
• The late Raymond Robinson, aka the Green Man aka Charlie No-Face.
• A mature flounder embodies both this trope and Extra Eyes, as one of its eyes shifts to the other side of its body as it grows up.
• Dallas Wiens was the first American to receive a full face transplant. He lost his eyes (and most of his face, for that matter) in a horrific accident.
• Many newborn mammals, such as rodents, marsupials, hedgehogs and bears, have their eyes sealed at birth. This makes their eyeballs either invisible or distinguishable only as darker spots beneath the skin.
• Persistent hyperplasia of the primary vitreous is a condition where human eyes stop developing in the womb. It's very common for the eye this happens to be removed. Most people who have the condition have a perfectly fine other eye, but in rare cases that eye can have problems too.
• Although not a straight example, adult emperor◊ and king penguins◊ certainly look like they have a case of this, especially when viewed from afar, with seemingly featureless, pitch black heads complemented only by reddish beaks and either white (emperor) or yellow (king) cheek patches. This is because of a combination of two factors: the way their countershading works, which colors their head feathers completely black (most other penguins have the feather area around their eyes highlighted with a lighter color), and their black eyes (the crested penguins also have completely black head feathers, but their eyes are red). Of course, when you look at them closer, you'll see that they do have eyes, and this doesn't apply to their chicks, whose head feathers are a different color.

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