Hide-and-Seek Horror

Run, run, run! Creep up on my grave!
Run, run, run! Stalk the night away!
Scuttle off into the night, but what'll be behind you?
Don't you speak! Hide and seek!

— "The Hide and Seek Song," Ready or Not (2019)

Ah, hide-and-seek, that most classic of children's games. It's a way for children to have fun with their friends, a method for parents to distract them by telling them to hide somewhere, and it's also...a horror motif?

Hide-and-seek is surprisingly popular in horror media or as a plot device to inject a bit of horror into a situation. The reason is simple: it's easy to compare the game to a person trying to hide from someone or something (a monster, a serial killer, a Psychopathic Manchild or whatever) that wants to kill them. It's also a mechanic or mode in some video games, where the player has to hide from an enemy NPC or other players.

This trope has two principal variations and a less common third:

• One or more people are trying to hide from a "seeker" who wants to kill them. Expect the seeker to cheerfully announce, "Found you!" as a Pre-Mortem One-Liner.
• A normal game of hide-and-seek goes horribly wrong when someone hides in a place that ends up killing them. They might never be found, or their body is only found years later.
• A parent and their young child are hiding from something dangerous. To avoid scaring them, the parent pretends they're playing hide-and-seek and that they must hide so well that no one can find them.

Related tropes:

• Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: A character searching for another character says this phrase or a variation thereof to coax them out of hiding.
• The Compliance Game: If the parent is pretending they're playing hide and seek, these two tropes overlap.
• Deadly Game: Better hope you picked a good hiding spot...
• Death of a Child: The idea of a child dying in a freak accident while playing something as innocent as a game of hide-and-seek is every parent's worst nightmare.
• Dwindling Party: The seeker picks off the hiders one by one.
• Gone Horribly Right: "They'll never find me in here!"
• Haplessly Hiding: A character makes themselves hidden, only to find themselves at the receiving end of humiliating humor or harmful suffering.
• Hide and No Seek: A parent distracts their kid by playing hide-and-seek and telling them to go hide.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: A childhood song or game turned sinister.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The combination of a children's game and horror is irresistible to these characters.

While this trope can and has happened in Real Life before, most examples involve the deaths of children, so we respectfully ask: No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Advertising

• In this anti-child abuse PSA by the NSPCC, a little girl playing hide-and-seek with her friends at a birthday party is compared to a scared, abused child hiding in a closet. The narrator says solemnly, "For an abused child, hide and seek isn't a game."
• "Back-To-School Essentials" is a PSA where kids talk about the back-to-school supplies their parents got them and how useful they are in the context of a school shooting, with the last one being a young girl texting "I love you" while hiding in the bathroom as the shooter gets closer.
• Dumb Ways to Die: One of the "dumb ways to die" is using a clothes dryer as a hiding spot, which ends as well as one would expect.

Fan Works

• Ready or Not: Elia and her children are being hunted down by Lannister soldiers. To avoid scaring her young daughter Rhaenys, Elia tells her they're playing hide and seek and she has to hide from the men hunting them. Rhaenys hides under her father's bed but is killed anyway and becomes a supernatural monster/avenging spirit who kills Tommen, Myrcella, Tywin, and Cersei when they hide under the same bed at different times years later.
• Vengeance of Dawn: Hard Candy sings a hide-and-seek song about being hunted by zebras while the zebra soldiers of Grevyia are launching an attack on Canterlot, pulling ponies out of their houses and dragging them out into the streets to be chained up.
  Hard Candy: Close your eyes, don't look up, here comes a zebra to gobble you up...
• In this Five Nights at Freddy's comic, the murdered child possessing Bonnie stalks and kills the security guard while thinking they're playing hide-and-seek.
  i'm a rabbit. that means i'm fast.
  and i'm good at hiding!
  you can't catch me!
  he can't catch me!
  found you

Film — Live-Action

• A variation of this happens in The Conjuring. The family likes to play "Hide and Clap", in which one person is blindfolded, and the others clap to indicate where they are. The first time they do this, they accidentally discover the Creepy Basement; and the second time, the ghost boy Rory joins in the game, by clapping.
• Ready or Not (2019): Grace marries into a family with a tradition of playing board games, which are chosen by drawing a card from a mysterious puzzle box. When she draws the "Hide and Seek" card, she's roped into a Deadly Game where the entire family is hunting her down while armed to the teeth, and she has to hide and survive until dawn.

Literature

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Played for laughs in Dog Days. Greg and Rowley have a sleepover and watch a horror movie. In the middle of the night, they hear a small voice coming from the closet that says, "I'm hiding...can you find me?" They run up the stairs in terror and Greg tells Dad that the house is haunted and they have to move immediately. Dad roots through the closet and discovers that the noise is from a talking doll named Hide-and-Seek Harry.
• Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: In "The Bride" from More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a minister's daughter is getting married and decides to play hide-and-seek with her guests. She decides to hide in her grandfather's trunk in the attic, but as she's climbing into it, the lid comes down and knocks her unconscious, and she suffocates to death. When nobody can find her, everyone thinks she's run away. Years later, a maid enters the attic looking for something, opens the trunk, and screams when she finds the bride's skeleton.

Live-Action TV

• Are You Afraid of the Dark?: In the episode "The Tale of Old Man Corcoran", brothers Jack and Kenny are invited by a local group of kids to play with them a nocturnal game of hide and seek in a local cemetery. They agree to do it, but better watch out for gravekeeper Old Man Corcoran! The group of kids are all ghosts whose "hiding spots" are their own graves. Marshall, their leader, almost convinces the brothers to hide with him in an open grave, which is his own. At the end of the episode, Old Man Corcoran scares the brothers and reveals the kids they were playing with were all dead since the man dug their graves himself.
• Criminal Minds: In "100," the season-long Big Bad has found the safe house where Hotch's wife and four-year-old son have been put for their own protection. Hotch and Hailey know he isn't going to get there in time to save both of them. But to give Jack a chance, Hotch tells him (over the phone), to "work the case" with him and stresses that he needs Jack on the case with him. Jack seems to understand what this means and takes off immediately, happy to be given the grown-up responsibility. Foyet calls after him that he'll be right up to find him. He isn't seen again until after Hotch arrives and beats Foyet to death with his bare hands. Turns out Hotch was exploiting Jack's childlike misunderstanding of his job; a flashback shows Jack thinks "working the case" means hiding in the blanket chest in the home office. Hotch knew this is an unlikely place for Foyet to look, and it would buy him time to get there. Sure enough, that's where Hotch finds Jack, unharmed, after he eliminates the threat. Jack, unaware his mother has just been killed and he nearly was, too, proudly tells Hotch he "worked the case, Daddy, just like you said."
• In Punky Brewster episode "Cherie Lifesaver", the children are playing hide and seek when Cherie hides in an old refrigerator Henry has thrown out but not taken the door off yet. She is pulled out in time and revived by Punky using CPR. The episode—along with being a Very Special Episode about CPR— both explains and shows the dangers of hiding in old fridges.

Music

• In Creature Feature's song "Such Horrible Things," when the narrator is six, he plays hide and seek with the neighbor boy and gets him lost in the forest, never to be found.
  When I was six
  I used to trick
  The next-door neighbor's son
  In the woods we would run
  Time for fun
  Hide-and-seek has a cost
  He would be forever lost!
• Vocaloid: In SeeU's "Hide and Seek," a young boy hides from his sister, who is apparently trying to find and kill him. She has a big Slasher Smile when she finds him, but then he kills her and stares right at the viewer with the same Black Eyes of Evil as her.

Puppet Shows

• Fraggle Rock: A variation occurs in the episode "The Terrible Tunnel". The Storyteller tells Wembley and his friends the legend of the titular Terrible Tunnel, which in ancient times, sucked Fraggles into it, trapping them inside. It took the efforts of the brave Fraggle knight Sir Blunderbrain to free them, at the cost of getting trapped in the tunnel himself. After hearing the story, Wembley becomes It in the Marco Polo-like game Hidey-Ho and due, to being blindfolded, answers the calls of the tunnel's ghostly voice, thinking it's the voice of another Fraggle.
  Wembley: Hidey!
  The Terrible Tunnel: HOOOOOO-oooo!

Theatre

• Murder In The Dark: Whilst stuck in the farmhouse former pop star Danny Sierra and his brother William reveal they hate the song "Three Blind Mice", cause when they children their babysitter used to love playing a twisted version of hide and seek she dubbed "Murder in the Dark" where she turned off all the lights in the house, had them hide then stalked them with a torch whilst wearing a horrible witch mask and if she found them, she would pin them down and pretend to stab them to death, all whilst singing the nursery rhyme. The memory which still terrifies them both now decades later. As it turns out having to relieve this particular fate only ending his actual death is the final stage of Danny's eternal damnation before the cycle starts again for him.

Urban Legends

• The Legend of the Mistletoe Bough is an urban legend about a wedding where the family decides to play hide and seek. The bride hides in a trunk in the attic, but it slams shut and locks, leaving her to suffocate. When nobody can find her, everyone presumes that she has run away. Years later, her skeleton is discovered in the trunk, still clad in her wedding dress.
  At length an oak chest, that had long lain hid,
  Was found in the castle—they raised the lid,
  And a skeleton form lay moldering there
  In the bridal wreath of that lady fair!
  O, sad was her fate!—in sportive jest
  She hid from her lord in the old oak chest,
  It closed with a spring!—and, dreadful doom,
  The bride lay clasped in her living tomb!

Web Comics

• Nuzlocke Comics Fan Works: In Goddamn Critical Hits, when Dusty was a Wurmple, he liked to play hide and seek with his sister. One time, he was the seeker, but he couldn't find her, until he came across her wrapped up and about to be eaten by a Spinarak. They only escaped because he was able to blind it with String Shot.

Video Games

• Among Us: In Hide n Seek Mode, the Crewmates have to hide from the Impostor, who is trying to find and kill them.
• The Coffin of Andy and Leyley: One of the first scenes establishing just how deranged Ashley is is a flashback to her and Andrew as kids, in which she asks their friend Nina to play hide-and-seek, then tricks her into hiding in a box that she bullies Andrew into locking. She then leaves Nina inside the whole night to punish her for having a crush on Andrew, and is gleeful when she dies of suffocation, using the incident to blackmail Andrew into never leaving her side.
• Dead by Daylight has one player trying to seek out four other players trying to escape from a map. When the hunter finds the players, he needs to wound them, then carry them to a hook for a sacrifice to an entity.
• Have a Nice Death (2022): In life, Pump Quinn suffocated to death in a garbage bag while playing hide-and-seek.
• It Steals: The Hide and Seek level initially plays with the trope by making you start as the seeker, and the main monster "hiding" from you as you try to collect orbs. If you spot him, he'll say "I'M IT" and begin to play the trope straight as he becomes the seeker after giving you a head start to sneak away from him. Should you be found, the monster will scream "FOUND YOU!", and you have to run away from the monster as it charges toward you, until the monster stops and begins to hide again, putting you in the seeker role again.
• OMORI: One section of Black Space 2 has you playing Hide and Seek against your own reflection, it starts with you having to find mirrors throughout the map until it leaves the mirror and start trying to find you.
• Pocket Mirror: In Princess Fleta's Dollhouse, Fleta will eventually decide to play hide-and-seek with the heroine G. Initially G just has to find her, but when it becomes G's turn to hide, the dollhouse starts turning dark and twisted as the 30 seconds count down. If she finds G, she promptly kills her.
• Poppy Playtime: In the second chapter, Mommy Long Legs has the player play several games to gain parts of a code to escape. The final game she has them play is hide and seek, though this is a thinly veiled attempt to hunt them down and kill them after they were forced to cheat in the previous game, which is Mommy's Berserk Button.
• Silent Breath: One type of Humanoid Abomination that player faces is the Blind Sister, who speaks in a distorted voice, requesting a game of hide and seek. After announcing themself as the seeker and the player, they start counting down from ten, and upon doing so, will attempt to find the player and kill them until their duration timer is over.
• Sonic.exe: When Tails finds X, the level is titled "Hide and Seek". Tails has a bit less than a minute to get as far away from X as possible, but X ends up catching up to him and killing him no matter what you do.

Web Video

• In the Analog Horror video "Buy a Friend!", one of the things you can do with your friend is play hide and seek, which is demonstrated in the video. The stick figure hides under the bed from the friend, who has grown Creepily Long Arms. The narrator says "Found you!", but the stick figure is gone and there is only a blood splatter. The camera jitters around for a few seconds before a scary white masked face appears with a Jump Scare, ending the video.
• Gemini Home Entertainment: In "Games For Kids", the first game the video discusses is a normal version of Hide and Go Seek, while the third game is the "Sardines" variant. The last game, however, is called "Feed the Woods". The video tells kids to sneak out of their homes at night, go deep into the woods, and then scream at the tops of their lungs. It then says that the game ends "when the woods are fed," represented by a police car with its lights on (presumably looking for the kids) suddenly getting attacked by a Woodcrawler.
• In the "Hide and Seek" episode of the Taiko no Tatsujin Web Video Series, Don plays hide and seek with his twin brother Katsu, but while he's hiding, Katsu walks by, stands around with an empty Blank Stare, and walks off without acknowledging Don at all. Don stays hidden for the rest of the day before going home, still terrified, only for Katsu to show up upset at Don for not coming to find him. Don realizes that he was the one who was supposed to be the seeker and had forgotten, which would explain why Katsu hadn't come looking for Don... but then Katsu says that he'd also been hiding the entire time, meaning who had been the one Don had seen earlier...?

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10! 9! 8! 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2! 1!

Ready or not, here I come!

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