Faceless Eye

I am the eye in the sky, looking at you...

"Got no human grace, your eyes without a face."

— Billy Idol, "Eyes Without a Face"

As other tropes indicate, eyes are very, very meaningful. It's a cliché to call them windows to the soul. This trope reminds us that alone, eyeballs are fragile spheres of gel only vaguely reminiscent of their usual purpose of subtle social cues. So a single eye completely outside the context of a face is just creepy. Bad guys often favor a singular, unblinking, Faceless Eye as an insignia— bonus points if said villain is The Omniscient Council of Vagueness that runs a dystopian society of unending surveillance ala The Illuminati. Even without an ominous Big Bad attached, the prospect of a thousand eyeballs shooting you to death with Eye Beams is fundamentally more unsettling than a thousand Mooks with Energy Weapons. Fighting them usually leads to "Go for the Eye". A Cosmic Horror Story can involve a vague entity such as an Eldritch Abomination whose eyes are one of the few things to be recognized with the remainder of its body being too horrid to describe and its actions being too alien to understand.

A cyclops character is more relatable than this kind of being, since cyclopes have a recognizable facial structure, with at least a mouth. These examples are far beyond the edges of the Uncanny Continent. It is also interesting to note that the representations of many insane AIs use this trope — most likely to underscore their creepiness.

Of course, being long past the Uncanny Valley already, these examples often also involve Technicolor Eyes, Hellish Pupils, and Red Eyes, Take Warning. Contrast The Blank and Eyeless Face. If an eye is on a part of the body other than the face, it's Eyes Do Not Belong There. See also Oculothorax for monsters whose body is primarily an eyeball.

Not to be confused with Eyes Without a Face.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Vision Express, a chain of opticians in the UK, started an advertising campaign in 2009 using pairs of identically-dressed people with giant eyeballs for heads. It is probably meant to be goofy rather than creepy.
• Eylea, a medicine for treating certain eye-based diseases, has an advertising campaign involving an animated man and woman who have only a single eye on their faces, meant to represent the human eyes.

Anime & Manga

• Angel's Egg: A gigantic orb shows up at the beginning and end of the story. It may or may not be God.
• Tentaclear from Bakugan is a giant floating eyeball whose main attack is his dangerously bright shining.
• In Devilman, the demonic Gan Triplets traumatize Tare and instill a phobia of disembodied eyes in him.
• The Gizmon of Digimon Data Squad are something of a mechanical version of this trope.
• In The Flowers of Evil, the Flower of Evil is a giant floating eyeball surrounded by fuzzy black petals.
• The Gate of Truth in Fullmetal Alchemist has a huge disembodied eye visible in the darkness on the other side of it. Likewise, Father's original form was a black shadow-ball that could display a single eye (and a Slasher Smile).
• GeGeGe no Kitarō has Kitaro's father Medama-Oyaji the eyeball (semantic translation, "Old Man Eyeball") (it's a long story) and the evil Backbeard, an incredibly creepy-looking black ball of prickly menace who'd be truly terrifying if most of his evil schemes didn't consist of crap like this.
• Ichimoku Ren of Hell Girl can project his left eye, which is normally covered by his hair, onto any surface with this as the typical result. He uses this to good effect to freak out Aya Kuroda, the first tormentor of the series, before she's sent to Hell.
• Zell from Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko has a big eyeball on his turban that's quite icky-looking. He uses it to attack people's psyches.
• In the first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Bardiche's Power Crystal revealed a slitted eye when it gets activated. This trait seemed to have disapppeared after Fate's Heel–Face Turn.
• One of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro's 777 Tools of Hell is Evil Friday, a swarm of little eyeballs with legs that he can see through. While most commonly used for research, reconnaissance, and tracking, they're shown to have lives and personalities of their own, and one memorable aside shows that they enjoy participating in racing. Why Evil Friday? Who knows?
• The true form of My-HiME's Obsidian Lord is a giant eyeball centered within a pair of sword-like pillars.
• Odin in Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok is only seen as a single All-Seeing Eye; either floating in the sky or in a crystal ball.
• Naruto: One of Gaara's powers was the Eye of Sand, which he used for spying, as well as to see outside the shell of sand he once used to conceal a Transformation Sequence.
• "The Eye" is an insignia for the Priesthood in the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Angels Matarael and Sahaquiel are both designed with eyes as a prominent motif, without any other elements of a face present. Sahaquiel is a gigantic abstract being with two circular eyes centered by one humanoid eye, while Matarael's spiderlike underside is adorned with several fake eyes and one real eye.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion Kyubey's soul gem containment technology apparently somehow involves the use of dozens of floating devices with screens showing his signature creepy soul-piercing red eyes.
• Pygmalion had a floating eyeball in the protagonist's party. Could become big enough for the hero to ride it.

Art

• Guernica: In the top of the sky is a large eye with a light-bulb for a pupil.

Asian Animation

• GG Bond: In Season 13 episode 12, the heroes face off against a giant mushroom monster with a single eye on its face.
• In his introductory episodes in Happy Heroes, Kalo is frequently seen morphed into a Cephalothorax body shape with a single eye for a face.
• The Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf season The Tailor's Closet features several anthropomorphic versions of objects you'd find in a tailor's shop. Among them is a magnifying glass that has a single eye as its only facial feature.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering: Eyes are a rare creature type depicting giant, independently mobile eyes. The first one printed, Evil Eye of Orms-by-Gore, depicts — depending on the specific card's art — either a close-up of a narrowed eye within what appears to be something else's face or an entirely free-floating eyeball, while Evil Eye of Urborg is a floating eye with nothing beyond a narrow rim of flesh around it.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: A few cards have eyes with no faces: "Relinquished" and "Thousand-Eyes Idol", which can be fused together into "Thousand-Eyes Restrict". These cards have zero Attack/Defense, but "Relinquished" and "Thousand-Eyes Restrict" can steal monsters from an opponent's side of the field and effectively use them as meat shields.

Comic Books

• A proto-superhero from 1939 named The Eye is literally a floating giant eyeball.
• An evil alien (masquerading as a superhero) Wandering Eye in the comic Wildguard: Casting Call.
• Also plays a role in V for Vendetta.
• Several characters in comics, such as Marvel's The Orb, wear eyeball-shaped helmets, usually with a laser or other weapon in the pupil. Oddly enough, these characters are always villains. Wonder why?
  • The second Orb, while he looks very similar to the original, does not wear an eyeball shaped helmet. That's actually his head.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • The Eye of Ekron, the floating, intelligent weapon of the Emerald Empress. However, as 52 revealed, there is an Emerald Head of Ekron which is looking for the eye. In "The Girl of No Tomorrow", Supergirl's super-senses ascertain the Eye is thousands of years older than Earth, and it is apparently but subtly influencing the Empress.
  • In The Great Darkness Saga, the lawyer assigned to Chameleon Boy is some weird kind of headless alien worm with a cluster of big eyeballs permanently floating around its body.
• The Justice League of America villain Starro is a Faceless Eye attached to a five-tentacled starfish-like body.
• The Evil Eye from the strip of the same name in the British comic Whoopee was just that; a disembodied eye that floated in the air, trying to get people to do bad things by 'zapping' them with some sort of evil ray, and taking delight in the mischief.
• Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Part of the Empurata process involves the victims having their faces surgically removed and replaced with a new, completely featureless head that usually features one blinking light standing in for their eyes. Of the most prominent empurata victims, Whirl has an Expressive Mask where his single eye can squint and warp to convey emotions, while Shockwave doesn't benefit from such a mask because he has barely any emotions to begin with.
• The Great Planner from Funky Koval takes the form of a massive eye-like sphere.
• Shakara: The Psico are extraordinarily powerful telepathic and telekinetic aliens with frail bodies and a floating eyeball for a head. Commander Kreech notes after brainwashing an entire species that he'd laugh if he actually had a proper orifice.
• A very odd subplot from 1970's Thor comics involves Thor discovering that the eye Odin sacrificed to gain wisdom has survived as an independent being in some strange dimension, just floating there as a giant sentient eyeball.
• O.M.A.C.'s partner, Brother Eye, is a sentient, computerized satellite that looks roughly like an eye, staring down at Earth.
• In Cindy and Biscuit, the "Bad Girl" entity has an eyeball for a head.
• In Monica's Gang, the parody of The Lord of the Rings has as its antagonist Sousauron, who prior to becoming a Faceless Eye was known as Maurisauron.
• Just like its source material, in Paranoia the all-seeing insane Friend Computer is represented as a digital image of an eye.

Comic Strips

• One strip of The Far Side had an eye called "Mr. Pembrose" resting on a psychiatrist's couch.
• In the FoxTrot strip that ran on March 15, 2002, Jason and Marcus had obtained giant novelty eye masks (similar to those worn by The Residents) just so they could tell Paige to "Beware the eyes of March!" (And possibly also freak her out, in which case they failed.) They genuinely didn't realize the saying was "Ides of March".

Eastern European Animation

• In Russian animated film Clinic, the third nightmare has an enormous monster that's just a disembodied eye floating above the hospital. It's implied the eyes the doctor keeps in his office are the monster's offspring.

Fan Works

• Elementals of Harmony: The honesty elemental's single eye occupies the whole face area.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, the Emerald Empress and her tool, the giant, floating Emerald Eye of Ekron, reluctantly join Mordru's ploy to destroy the Legion of Super-Heroes. During the war, the Eye transports allies and turns enemies into lizards or blasts them into paralysis.
  The Emerald Empress's mystic, floating eye phased them in just outside of the presidential palace. [...] She telepathed a command to the Emerald Eye of Ekron. It spewed forth a burst of green energy that pushed the guardsmen against a wall and held them there, immobile.
• In Imperium Ascendant, Tzeentch takes a form similar to a giant eyeball when the Emperor confronts him.
• No stars in sight: A Jupiter-sized floating eyeball is one of the Eldritch Abominations that Ikharos encounters when he exits the Exodus colony ship while it was inside a Negative Space Wedgie.
• Romance and the Fate of Equestria has Spectatus, who is an alien being consisting of nothing but floating eyeballs and a dagger-toothed smile.
• A crossover between Good Omens and the Discworld by A.A. Pessimal has the Angel Aziraphile and the Demon Crowley sent on a fact-finding trip to a world run by a pantheon of Gods. ^note  Jesus Christ himself has just reminded them of the line about "In my Father's house there are many mansions", and has sent them to discover the essential truth of there being a multiplicity of Mansions. They land on the Discworld. They arrive in the sky above Cori Celesti, abode of the Gods. The first thing they encounter are the disembodied flying Eyes which are Blind Io, Lord of the Gods. These recognise Ambassadors from the divine set-up of another world, but very firmly and emphatically, escort them to one of the entrances to the Discworld's Hell, where the tour begins.

Films — Animation

• Planet 51 has these as the alien invaders (on an alien world) in a movie set in the classic sense of 1950s B-movies and it features a whole bunch of them in the closing credits (of the actual film).
• Two submissions in The Mind's Eye series. Both "Too Far" from Beyond and "Nuvogue" from The Gate feature segments with large, bare eyeballs acting like perfectly normal people. Mostly, they seem to like watching TV. They even come in varieties: one segment features a teenage eyeball moving out of its folks' house, and another shows a whole family right down to a dog eyeball on the floor. "Nuvogue" becomes especially cringe-worthy when, after a pair of eyeballs short out their TV from constantly bouncing on the remote to change the channel, one floats over and starts tackling the TV in order to fix it.
• The Spot from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has a round black blot where his face should be that expands and contracts with his mood. When combined with his white skin, it makes his entire head resemble an eyeball.

Films — Live-Action

• The Lord of the Rings: Sauron's emblem is the fiery Lidless Eye. He's physically depicted as such in The Movies— which makes him a living Clear Eyes ad, only without Ben Stein, and therefore, slightly less frightening.
• The B-Movie, The Crawling Eye, aka The Trollenberg Terror.
• One of the monsters in Voyage Into Space was a giant disembodied floating eye.
• The 1993 movie Freaked contains two faceless, machine gun-wielding Rastafarian eyeballs.◊
• The movie Small Soldiers featured Ocula, a creature with a single giant eye, a neck/eyestalk, and three legs.
• The eyes in the darkness at the beginning of Suspiria (1977).
• As mentioned in the description above, possibly the most iconic use of this trope for an insane AI is HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The President's Analyst has a scene (that's curiously gone missing) where James Coburn is shocked to discover there are indeed spies following him including his girlfriend and freaks out, seeing disembodied looming eyeballs everywhere (with footage pulled from the 1961 3-D movie "The Mask").
• Horrific: The monster in the Terror Vision segment is a giant floating eyeball.
• Flight of the Navigator: When David meets the other living specimens aboard the Trimaxion Drone Ship, one of them is a creature inside a darkened tank which initially appears to have a face — but when it opens its "mouth", it reveals itself to be a giant eyeball (and lets out a piercing shriek that sounds a lot like "eyeyeyeyeye...")
• In Patrick Still Lives, whenever the title character uses his powers, the image of his disembodied eyes appears on screen.

Literature

• The Lord of the Rings and the Eye of Sauron. To quote Saruman: "His gaze pierces cloud, shadow, earth, and flesh. You know of what I speak, Gandalf: a great Eye, lidless, wreathed in flame." Unlike in the movies, it's not made clear that Sauron is simply embodied as one big eye, but the Eye does manifest as described at least in the Mirror of Galadriel, and about the only thing seen of Sauron in his tower is his gaze, like an evil searchlight. From other material, it seems he's not exactly embodied at all.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events's odious Count Olaf has a tattoo of an eye on his ankle, and eyes are a recurring motif throughout the books.
• Animorphs has Crayak, a red-eye being first glimpsed in the dying visions of a Yeerk in Book Six. It's one of several ShoutOuts to the The Lord of the Rings.
• A gigantic flying one shows up in the Choose Your Own Adventure book "The Perfect Planet," terrorizing the locals who believe it to be a portent of doom from their own mythology. With the right choices, the reader finds out the "Evil Eye" is really just a disguised alien warship taking advantage of local superstition to conquer the planet Utopia.
• The Eye In The Door by Pat Barker. It wasn't a real eye, just a peephole to spy on prisoners, but it had a similar effect.
• Umbridge keeps a magical eyeball in her door in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That one was especially disturbing, since it confirmed that Moody was indeed dead and Umbridge took his eye.
• The repressive theocratic government of Gilead, in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, employs internal spies known as Eyes to monitor the population, and their logo is (what else?) an eye.
• Similarly, in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar's Imperial Security uses the Eye of Horus for its insignia.
• The Ringworld has eye storms, caused when a meteor puncture in the Ring bed drops air pressure sharply; Coriolis effects shape the surrounding cyclone into a miles-high lidded eye shape. The first time the protagonists saw one, it gave Speaker to Animals a Heroic BSoD due to his odd religious upbringing.
• In "The Haunter of the Dark" by H. P. Lovecraft, the eponymous creature (one of Nyarlathotep's many avatars) does have a body (some kind of winged, tentacled Living Shadow / Eldritch Abomination type thing), but its distinguishing feature is a huge three-lobed burning eye.
• Discworld:
  • The god Blind Io has no eyes on his face, but a whole host of flying eyes (complete with wings and trailing optic nerve...) which can see anywhere in the world.
  • There is also a passing reference to a painting whose eyes "followed you not only around the room, but also out of the gallery and all the way down the street".
• In Kingdoms of Light by Alan Dean Foster, the Sea of Blue is in fact a colossal eye, known to the creatures of that sea as the Eye of the Beholder.
• Stephen King's The Stand has Randall Flagg using a disembodied eye to spy on some of the good guys.
• In Victor Hugo's poem La Conscience, Cain is driven mad by an eye constantly watching him wherever he goes (representing his guilt over killing his brother). He ends up sealing himself into a grave to escape the eye, leading to the ending verse, which has become famous in French literature: "The eye was in the tomb and stared at Cain".
• Alien in a Small Town: The alien Jan, rather than a head, just have a huge eyestalk with a jet black "eyesphere" on top. See the image on the book's page.
• The titular "Eye in the Sky" in the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name is the gigantic, all-seeing eye of God that is in part a manifestation of a old man's worldview. Several people were transported into his mind after a particle accelerator accident forms a gestalt consciousness.
• In Eisenhorn: Malleus, there’s a mutant thug with a giant eyeball for a head.
• Lone Wolf: In the bonus story of the reprint of Book 7, Tavig faces down a creature called the All-Seeing One, a roughly humanoid creature whose head is just one big eye.

Live-Action TV

• Angel had the psychic/psychotic surgeon in "I Fall to Pieces", and he used his eyes and other detached body parts to spy on the girl he was stalking.

• Doctor Who:
  • Daleks have a periscope of varying design over the years in their giant-pepper-pot-of-death power armour, matching their single biological eye.
  • The Ambassador from Alpha Centauri who appeared in a couple of '70s stories is basically a big eyeball on legs.
  • "The Eleventh Hour": The Atraxi are in fact nothing but giant floating space eyeballs, held aloft by a vaguely snowflake-shaped ring.
• Doom Patrol (2019) has a two-parter featuring the Decreator, a giant eyeball in the sky that destroys all matter in the universe. It can only be defeated by the Recreator, who is also a giant eyeball.
• Garth Marenghis Darkplace episode Skipper the Eyechild features the titular monster baby who is mostly eye. Skipper's eyeball father also appears.
• The Ultra Series have a few examples, usually as a sneak preview for the Monster of the Week:
  • Ultraseven: Annon is an eye-like entity separated from his body when he arrived on Earth via a crashed rocket ship. Before he can reunite with his body, he primarily appears in the form of a single eye.
  • Ultraman Ace: Right in the beginning of episode 5, the sky cracks open, as it usually does whenever monsters from Yapool's Dimension comes into the human world, but all there is to be seen is a single, bug-like eye. Which belongs to Giron Man, one of Yapool's servants, who is silently observing the city and planning his later assault on the human world.
  • Ultraman Leo: The monster, Alien Akumania, travels in the form of a giant floating eyeball before morphing itself into monster form. Said eyeball can also create horrifying illusions.
  • Ultraman Gaia: Gan-Q, literally "Eye Monster", firstly appears as a giant eyeball on the surface of the earth, which absorbs attacks like a black hole, before revealing itself to be a giant monster covered in eyes.

Magazine

• Analog: The October 1930 cover has a man struggling against an apparently invisible enemy. Only their eyes and right hand are visible, but they seem to have a neck that can be strangled.

Music

• The Tom Waits song "Eyeball Kid" from Mule Variations is about a child who is born as just an eye and details his life as a successful circus freak.
• The Alan Parsons Project's "Eye In The Sky", from the album of the same name, is a person telling their significant other (in a very creepy and vindictive fashion) that he/she knows the other's been cheating and is tired of pretending to be ignorant of it. The cover of the album... the Eye of Horus.
• The music video for Gotye's "Coming Back" features a bunch of aliens with giant yellow eyes for faces.
• The members of Sakanaction are shown playing with their heads covered by giant eyeball masks in the video for "Endless".
• One of the many enemies of The Aquabats! is the Floating Eye of Death. It's mentioned in the title of their third album, The Aquabats! vs. the Floating Eye of Death and Other Amazing Adventures (and is also mentioned in the second song off that album, "Giant Robot Bird-Head!"), and shows up in an episode of The Aquabats! Super Show!.
• The cover of the Einstürzende Neubauten album Ende Neu consists of Blixa Bargeld's right eye apparently embedded in an otherwise featureless expanse of pink flesh.

Mythology

• The Graii from Classical Mythology were a trio of hags who lived "north of the North Pole" with only one eye amongst them, which they who would trade around when they wanted to see something. Perseus gets ahold of it and squeezes it in his hand until the hags give him information he needs to continue his quest.

Pinball

• Data East Pinball's Tales from the Crypt uses eyeballs for the KEEPER targets.
• In KAZe's Necronomicon, the "Arkham Asylum" playfield features a deep red eye staring out from the middle of the playfield.
• The "Tower" table in Ruiner Pinball has roaming eyeballs as one of the enemies.

Tabletop Games

• Call of Cthulhu has Groth, a planet sized eyeball that floats through space.
• The Dark Eye: Gotongis are demons resembling large eyeballs with batlike wings.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The lich-slash-god Vecna could transform an especially devoted cultist into one of two emissaries named for the two powerful artifacts named for him, this one being The Eye of Vecna—a humanoid figure with a gigantic eyeball where a human head used to be possessed of telepathic awareness that allows him to finish the sentence of others as the least of what he can do.
• Everquest: One class of monsters is a group of small eyeball ISLANDS! (their upper lids are covered with cracks and mountains). Another monster was a gelatinous, red-veined eyeball that attached itself to ceilings and used its wet tentrils to snatch unwary prey.
• Paranoia: Friend Computer is usually represented as a monitor with a single giant eyeball.
• Warhammer 40,000 The symbol of Chaos (an eight-pointed star) is often depicted as having an eye or a skull in the center of the star. The Eye of Horus, an emblem of the Black Legion, is an eye incorporated into the eight-pointed star.

Toys

• Flick-to-Stick Bungees: Tulka/Takin from Bionic Bungees, and their American equivalent Plinian, have a faceless eye.
• Several characters in the Gogo's Crazy Bones series have a single eye as their only facial feature. Examples include Satori from the Evolution series and Uyu and Goomi from the Power series.
• Star Monsters: Siruos, Skimuz, and Nanor have one. Siuros's bio speculates that it might have fallen into a pipe, hence its weird eye and pipe-like head and neck shape. Skimuz collided with a lighthouse, while Nanor landed between two snakes' nests and peeks out over the water, its body shape giving it the appearance of a periscope.
• Keetongu of BIONICLE has a big red eye at the end of a long stalk but no face. As a subversion, in universe this is actually a fake eye and his real eyes are hidden behind it. The film Web of Shadows opted to redesign him with an actual (albeit very small) face, including a tiny mouth under his eye that's now blue.

Video Games

• DESTINY: The Fallen worship eye-like floating purple robots called servitors.
• Kingdom of Loathing: One of the monsters found in the Caliginous Abyss is "an eye in the darkness," a giant bloodshot eye staring out at you from a patch of deeper darkness within the sea. Its attacks mostly boil down to several variants of menacing glares, carefully modulated to give you existential crises, unnerve you or fill your field of vision.
  Within the darkness there is a deeper darkness. And within that deeper darkness is an eye, an ancient eye, an eye whose white has turned yellow with age. An eye as wide as a man is tall, shot through with thick red veins. An eye devoid of reason, full of malice and rage. Its stare makes you wish the world would end so that horrible eye would close forever.
• MARDEK: Chapter 3 has giant-floaty-eye monsters called I-Orbs and Black Eyes, as well as several sessile-eyestalk monsters with varying powers. Despite appearances, these should not be taken lightly.
  It can see right into the very core of your soul. It judges you, and looks for your fears and weaknesses. It doesn't really do anything with any of this knowledge though.
• The Legend of Zelda has many enemies like this, bosses and otherwise.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Patra is an enemy in the form of a swarm of winged eyeballs.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has Moas, flying eyeballs with no other appendages, some of which are invisible without the right item.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has three bosses along these lines:
    • Vitreous, the boss of the Misery Mire, is a giant eyeball surrounded by a cluster of smaller eyeballs.
    • Kholdstare, the boss of the Ice Palace, is just an immense eyeball frozen in ice.
    • Arrghus, the boss of the Swamp Palace, is a giant tentacled eyeball.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: Slime Eyes consist of two gelatinous eyes fused into one.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Wizzro is a creepy, decrepit, phantom-like wizard that was locked inside a cursed ring. Half of the time, his only facial feature is a single red eye. The other half, it morphs into a creepy red mouth.
• Castlevania
  • Castlevania: The Adventure, and Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge had rolling eyeball enemies that were explosive.
  • In the WiiWare game Castlevania The Adventure Rebirth, this enemy makes a return appearance. A huge version of it is even the boss of the first stage.
  • And the Buckbairds (probably a Shout-Out to the GeGeGe no Kitarō villain) were a staple enemy ever since Castlevania.
• The Reaverbots of Mega Man Legends are all monocular.
• Altered Beast (1988) has its Level 2 boss.
• A level in Zeliard features enemies that are just giant eyeballs, capable of rushing at you at high speed.
• Waddle Doo, an early enemy in the Kirby games, as well as Dark Matter, Zero, 02, and Dark (Nebula/Zero).
  • The Kirby series loves this trope more than that. Most of the time as scary. Most of the final bosses are an eye or multiple eyes without a face. Other common enemies are this trope, but hardly scary.
• The Mutant core from Chaos Heat starts off as a gigantic pulsating floating eye as the first phase of it's Sequential Boss battle. If you destroy it, the floating eye shrinks, assimilates itself with other mutations, and pulls a Bishōnen Line transformation into a far more humanoid second form to continue fighting.
• Rularuu Watchers in City of Heroes. Giant eyeballs with teeth-edged eyelids. The also tend to gaze around in sync when idle, indicating even more that they are all connected to the same mind. They attack with Eye Beams and a sort of terrifying chomp attack. With really good accuracy, being, yanno, giant eyeballs.
• Plane vs Eye from MySims.
• The briefing image of the Overmind in Starcraft is a creepy tendril-covered eye floating in red goop. It's a remarkably expressive eye, swivelling around and shaking about in tune with the Overmind's "speech"
  • In Liberty's Crusade, Kerrigan and Liberty come across something matching this description in a Zerg hive, just outside the hatchery room. Canister rifle is applied with haste.
• Mr. I, an enemy from the Super Mario Bros. series, who first appeared in Super Mario 64.
• NetHack and Angband have floating eyes. Their power is paralysis and they are usually harmless when encountered alone.
• Demon's Crest features the hidden boss Ovnunu, a collective of eyeballs suspended in green jelly.
• Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior includes several eyeball-themed monsters, in particular the Darkeye. And an eye monster in a boot called a Skipper.
• Grandia II has the Eye of Valmar. The manifestation of the Eye itself looks more like some sort of pineapple that opens to reveal some eyes and tendrils, but it employs floating eyes that have the power to put people into an endless sleep. It's also That One Boss.
• The GeGeGe no Kitarō Famicom game has a Backbeard as a boss, which was also in the manga.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens: Ghost Eye enemies are invisible flying eyeballs, revealed only by use of Seer Dance, or the dust from bumping into things.
• The Old God C'Tun from World of Warcraft is a bossfight with two stages. The first stage is against the Eye of C'Tun, which is (surprise, surprise!) a humongous eyeball that can fire an Eye Beam which kills players in one hit. After defeating the eye, his body rises from the ground for the stage two of the fight. Also in Warcraft, the warlock/ogre mage spell Eye of Kilrogg summons a floating green eye that serves as an extension of the caster's sight.
• Many Pokémon, including the Magnemite family and Unown. Duskull is strange, as it has one pupil, but wears a human-skull-mask over it. In the 3D Pokemon games, Duskull's eye switches from eyehole to eyehole whenever it wants to. Its body also appears hollow inside, implying that its "eye" is more like a lamp wavering back and forth inside, perhaps being its soul or something.
  • While Jirachi has a face typical of other "Cute Legendaries," its Third Eye is in its stomach.
  • Roggenrola is either this or has a hole where its face should be. Its evolutions imply the former.
• The "Mind's Eye" creatures in 3 in Three.
• Turbo Overkill have Syn's default form, where it appears as a gigantic holographic eyeball without a body, using it to scan you in a cutscene. Syn's eye takes more physical form during the boss fight.
• The "Orbs" from the obscure Sierra Manhunter Adventure Games.
• The Mother Brain from Metroid, especially in the Zero Mission remake and Super Metroid. Also, from Super Metroid is Phantoon, who has a large eye which seems to be inside a mouth.
• Ameno-sagiri, the fake final boss in Persona 4.
• The Evil Eye and Electro Swoosh enemies in EarthBound (1994).
• Exorcist Fairy has a giant eye growing in the middle of a cavern's wall as one of the bosses. Who doesn't have any attacks of it's own, but can periodically summon smaller eyeballs on it's left and right which can shoot even more exploding eyes.

• One level in Paranoiascape sees you battling an entire field of gigantic, floating eyeballs that surrounds you from all sides.
• Soul Edge developed a Faceless Eye when the series changed names to Soul Calibur, and retains it in all its "awakened" forms.
• The second stage of the original R-Type has swarms of small enemies who look like eyeballs with undulating tails.
• The Rhombulans in Elite Beat Agents are led by an eye in a polygon. It narrows when it gets pissed off.
• The Dark Castle games include giant floating eyeballs as enemies. Some are wreathed in perpetual flame; others cry tears of acid.
• Shaddai, one of YHVH's avatars in Shin Megami Tensei II
• Ichimokuren in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army and Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon.
• In Deus Ex, one of the evil AI's, Icarus, is represented by a single eyeball connected to some kind of organic machinery.
• Wild ARMs 3 loves this, having three bosses that fit this bill, Mono-eye Titan, Hecto-eye Titan, and Heimdall. The first two are faced consecutively without a chance to save in between, and the third is a powerful Super Boss.
• Witcheye sees you playing as one. You're a witch transformed into a floating eyeball and must find a way to revert yourself back.

• Speaking of Guitar Hero, Neversoft's corporate logo◊ from 1999 to 2014 has a faceless eye that was impaled with a spear for their "O". Most of their Vanity Plates for the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games (including the short-lived Underground sub-series) play with this; not so much for their Guitar Hero plates.
• And speaking of Rhythm Games, one of the Rock Band venues has a gigantic image of an eyeball (which appears to look in different directions during the performance) at the back of the stage. Surrounded by rings of teeth with tentacles coming out of the back of the stage.
• The Eyeballus Jiggium plants in Banjo-Tooie.
• The Wise One of Golden Sun fame is a rock... with a bright green eye embedded in it.
  Garet: Yeah, I know it's a rock, stupid!
• The Suezo monsters from Monster Rancher were essentially this. They got mostly psychic attacks, and eye beams.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Ahriman family of monsters are flying creatures that are over 50% eye.
  • Bigeyes from the first game are disembodied pairs of eyes.
• In La-Mulana, a large floating eye chases you through the lowest level of the Endless Corridor. You cannot harm it until you kill a hideously weird thing entirely made of eyes.
• Wizeman in NiGHTS into Dreams…, more or less. His eyes are in his hands, not his face.
• The alien enemies of early FPS The Colony were eyeballs atop geometric solids, because the computing horsepower of 1988 didn't allow for 3D humans like the programmer had wanted.
• In Eversion, normal enemies turn into faceless eyes in world X-4.
• The personality cores form Portal are all talking spheres with one eye in the centre. The most notable of the bunch is Wheatley from Portal 2.
• .hack: Corbenik's third and final form is a massive floating eye, with hundreds of similar eyes flying about in the background (which is weird, since Corbenik's first two forms were a seed and a leaf... how does that trend continue to eye?)
• Heroes of Might and Magic III has two examples, both are giant eyes on tentacles, the Beholder/Evil Eye creature and the Seer's Eye, which works as a typical videogame security camera.
  • Might and Magic V has a monster called a "Beholder Bat" which is, in essence, a bat with one small eye and one huge eyeball attached under it. And it shoots lasers that inflict fire damage. Seriously.
• The Gran Centurio of Yggdra Union features a disembodied eye as its pommel jewel, which is unnerving if you notice it, but not brought up in the storyline of the main game. The side materials inform us that yes, this is actually someone's eye, which he himself tore out to use in the sword's forging.
• The Geth, Mecha-Mooks who form the forces of the Big Bad in the first Mass Effect, have long heads terminating in glowing "eyes" and nothing else except armour, with one character commenting that they have "flashlight heads". They're portrayed in a less overtly hostile light in the sequel... conveniently coinciding with a Geth "character" gaining something closer to a face. Added for good reason; Legion's headflaps were specifically installed to help it/him/them emote to players and characters, since otherwise Legion could not easily convey body language and facial expressions.
• Halo: 343 Guilty Spark and the other Forerunner Monitors are robotic versions.
• One of the player models in Quake III: Arena - Orbb - is a giant eye with legs.
• The boss at the end of Metal Slug 3's second level are six floating giant aliens with humanoid bodies, but with single eyestalks where their heads should be.
• In Parodius for the MSX, the boss of Stage 5 is GeGeGe Aunt, a female version of Medama-Oyaji.
• Terraria has the Demon Eye enemy that torments players who venture outside at night, and its King Mook the Eye of Cthulhu, which starts off as just a giant Demon Eye. It then grows a mouth.
• Half-Life 2 has the Combine's City Scanners, which are robotic Faceless Eyes that fly. Their sole purpose is to act as a surveillance system for the Combine.
• Kineticlops from War of the Monsters is a vaguely humanoid Energy Being focused around one giant eye.
• The 2011 Halowe'en update in Team Fortress 2 introduced MONOCULUS!, a giant floating eyeball which launches smaller eyeballs as rockets when it's pissed. It's backstory is that the spirit in the Bombonomicon, an eldrich tome of explosives, haunted the Demoman's eye.
• The Mogall and Arch Mogall monster classes in Fire Emblem Gaiden and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones.
• Flash of the Blade have the Soulstealer's true form - after defeating it's host body the first time, the Soulstealer then reveals itself to be a gigantic floating eye in a red realm, before animating it's host body for another battle.
• A stylized single eye is the emblem for the Haunted Castle Hang Castle Zone in Sonic Heroes. It's placed on all of the castle's waving flags and appears to be the signature of its former owner.
• The NES game Solstice has enemies which appear to be floating eyeballs with long cloaks covering what could possibly be a body.
• Alexander the Great from BioShock 2 is only seen as an eye on a screen from his personal flying guard bot.
• Ur-Example for video games in the Ur First Person Shooter, the players in Mazewar are represented as these.
• Iggy's Reckin' Balls has I-Ball, who is, well, an eyeball. His high-pitched, kind of nerdy voice lightens the creepy factor, but his painful scream upon being hurt and the fact that he grapples with what appears to be a spear (conjuring images of Eye Scream) cranks it back up.
• In Cookie Clicker, this is revealed to be the final form of Santa Claus, as of version 1.0402.
• Dimensional Doors Mod in Minecraft: In Limbo, directly above the player is always a giant red eye staring down at them.
  • Monoliths (with the same red eye mentioned above on them) are scattered across the landscape, staring at you if you are in line of sight, and will teleport you thousands of blocks away.
• Vel'koz from League of Legends.
• Catacomb Abyss features giant, man-sized blooshot floating eyes which shoot fireballs from their pupils. Catacomb Apocalypse has tiny, grey floating eyes which appear on some levels; unusually, they are not enemies, but guides who lead the player along the right path (though it's hard to keep pace with them, and easy to accidentally kill them with your fireballs.)
• Chzo is shown to have no face, only a strange pink body part and he only has one eye, which he uses to make a New Prince out of Theo near the end of the series.
• Bricks Of Egypt and its sequel has faceless Egyptian eyes as the main helpers.
• In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's story mode "World of Light", Dharkon, the Dark Is Evil rival to the Light Is Not Good villain Galeem, has a core consisting of nothing but a single slit eye.
• Several creatures in the Grow games have just a single eye on their face, the most prominent are the Tonties who even have their own game (simply called Tontie) by the same creator.
• In Creature Crunch, many of the monsters Wesley has to get past in Dr. Drod's mansion have eyeballs for heads.
• Bloodborne features a lot of eldritch monsters as bosses or enemies, and one of these that definitely fits the description is the Eye of Mensis, a mutated being that may or may not have previously been a Mensis scholar. The brain of the individual is bloated to the point that the rest of the head is gone, and the beast can kill you by just staring at you from across a canyon. The most notable detail besides its gigantic brain are the numerous eyes dotted across it which don't blink and simply stare. You can get a reward after dumping it into the basement of the Nightmare of Mensis by simply walking up to its crippled body, standing before its biggest eye, and performing the "Make Contact" gesture until it responds with a reward.
• In Broodstar, the Seer is an alien creature consisting primarily of a giant eyeball. The Augur is a similar creature which is also covered in spikes.
• Darkest Dungeon II has the Focused Fault, a massive collection of faceless eyes, as the Act 3 final boss.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater at one point has a passing reference to Black Mage invoking "my new god, Mst'r Ieb'al". Guess what he looked like.
• Angel Moxie: In the beginning, before Tristan breaks all of the barriers to release her power, Vashi appears as just a glowing, floating pair of eyes.
• Odineye from Brat-Halla is one of Odin's eyes that he sacrificed to the Well of Wisdom; it escaped and is plotting revenge for its treatment. It doesn't have a lid, but for some reason it does have a brow.
• Decrypting Rita has the Panopticon, a mysterious group of eyes floating in the void between the Alternate Universes.
• Exterminatus Now: The Patterner (one of the dark gods) and at least one of his Greater Daemons, Kevin, each have a head that consists of a giant eyeball partially surrounded by flesh for the sake of eyelids.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! has Officer Zodboink, a member of a race of Starfish Aliens with heads that look like giant eyeballs.
• Leth Hate has God, who has an eyeball for a head. For expressiveness's sake, his iris has an eyebrow and his pupil has an eyelid.
• In Lucid Spring, Pacem and Viktor's psychically-induced hallucination culminates in the bear's face turning into one giant eye. This trope shortly thereafter combines with Eyes Do Not Belong There.
• Ebbirnoth from Schlock Mercenary The fact that Ebbirnoth (and Uniocs in general) have a faceless eye is actually a minor plot point during one of the Credomar arcs-someone "headshots" Ebby, blasting out his eyeball and seriously pissing him off. Schlock realizes the mistake that's been made, and encourages the lieutenant to play dead; the sniper was human, and didn't realize that Unioc brains are kept in a bone cage in their pelvis.
• In Tower of God, Scout has a tool called Observer. In Miseng's case, it is a floating eyeball.
• At one point Vexxarr encounters some evil plant A.I.s who look like bloodshot eyeballs with some leaves and tendrils added. He also has a Starfish Alien shipmate who is composed entirely of eyestalks, and his own face consists entirely of one huge eye, which is usually glaring/scowling.

Web Original

• The Fear Mythos has the Eye, the original Fear of Judgement with a very creative name.
• Doc Mocks Movie Mausoleum prominently features Licky, who also works the control booth. And sings. And flirts heavily with Miss Diagnosis. Did we mention he's a giant eyeball?
• This YouTube video. "There is a giant eyeball and it is looking at us!"
• Eyeball from Otherworldly Ravenous Beast is just an eyeball with limbs, and they are one of the less creepier examples.

Western Animation

• In Code Lyoko, XANA, due to being a computer program with no real physical body, the only real signifier of his presence is the circular Eye of XANA sigil that is used on his monsters and on any electronic he hacks. The closest he gets to physically appearing is in the second last episode as a gigantic, vaguely humanoid, faceless phantom with the afromentioned eye symbol on the chest.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) fought a spherical monster entirely covered with eyes that shot Eye Beams, and couldn't find a way to get close enough to hit it until Blossom finds a way to make it laugh, making it close its eyes upside-down, anime-style.
• The Tooth Fairy in The Fairly OddParents! conjures a giant eye with tentacles, to illustrate she should stick only to teeth.
• Dr. Zin's Robot Spy from Jonny Quest, which inspired the Walking Eye on The Venture Brothers.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot had an invisible giant eye with tentacles as the Monster of the Week. Its vulnerability was demonstrated in a Humiliation Conga as in short order it got sand, hot sauce, blindingly focused sunlight, pointed sticks and other harmful items in its... self.
• Koh the Face-Stealer loves doing this.
• On Regular Show, Benson orders a surveillance system to keep tabs on Mordecai and Rigby. When it fails, he orders the company's ultimate system: a giant floating eyeball named Peeps. Peeps turns out to far more trouble than he's worth but the Park can't get rid of him because in a rage Benson didn't read that Peep's contract is a "life-time guarantee"; they're stuck with him until they die. Mordecai has to beat Peeps in a staring contest to get rid of him and if Peeps wins he gets all of their eyes (he has a ice cream scoop and pick for the job). The only way the gang wins is by Rigby shooting a laser pointer into Peep's pupils.
• Lord Hater's mooks and his Dragon Peepers on Wander over Yonder have eyeballs for heads.
• Shockwave from Transformers, in G1 it even flashed (Like Wheeljack's 'ears') when he spoke.
• Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls is this being that he's shaped like the Eye of Providence.
• An early concept for Leela in Futurama experimented with making her one of these, as opposed to the more conventional Cyclops design she ended up with.

Real Life

• The logo for CBS. Many viewers comparing notes on scary logos feel the CBS Eye is a Giant Eye of Doom — as shown here.
• Run for the hills! It's the animatronic eyeball monster!!!
• The original logo for the federal government's Information Awareness Office. They had to change it after people complained about a government project to mine civilian data being represented by an all-seeing eye
• The Adelaide Film Festival features people with giant eyes for heads.
• The Iraqi Directorate of General Security's logo◊ evokes this (appropriate for its nature). Maybe the IIS' logo, too.
• The logo for Pinkerton Government Services, Inc. (formerly the Pinkerton National Detective Agency) is a single eye.

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