Nothing Is Scarier

There is absolutely nothing to fear...

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

— H. P. Lovecraft

Silence Is Golden... Except when it isn't.

This is a Horror trope where fear isn't induced by a traumatic visual element or by a physical threat, but by the sole lack of event. When properly done, it can result in terrifying moments. It does so for one simple reason: the creator refuses to show us just what it is that's causing this horror, but we desperately wish to know, so our imagination fills in the blanks and our minds provide the content, using whatever the individual considers scary.

It often has to do with where the events are happening, generally because said place is inherently scary, but sometimes merely because of the way it is filmed or described.

This trope generally comes in three flavors:

• The classic version, where the moment serves to build up suspense and tension, until something scary suddenly jumps at you from elsewhere. It has been done a million times, and is often poorly executed, ending up with the killer/monster/whatever apparition being less scary than the preceding sequence.^note Stephen King once said that the actual presence of the "big scary thing" itself tends to be the cause of the letdown — whatever they actually show is unlikely to be worse than what we were expecting. Even if it is, it's not going to have nearly as much impact on a viewer who's been anticipating it for the last minute or so. Many times, what the directors do is make the character look around with some small light source (flashlight, cellphone, camera flashes) for a mysterious noise, then turn around right when the suspense reaches its peak. Of course, they sigh when they see nothing, and then they turn around again, and WHAM! Both of these methods alternate between being the norm, in that they can still keep the tension high, even when expected.
• The full version is when there really is nothing happening, but the result can be several magnitudes scarier than the classic version, because the audience is left to imagine what could have happened.
• The third variation is where there's nothing there... nothing there... nothing there... and then you realize there is something there, and it's been there all along. Perhaps the most common method of showing this is Nobody Here but Us Statues, when not played for comedy. Another variant (which has admittedly become discredited as Technology Marches On) is The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House.

Scare chords and cues may be used to reinforce the effect, but it seems to work best when there's no music at all. The camera might slowly close in on the "nothing", either as a character musters the courage to open the door, enter the dark depths, or cowers abjectly at the impenetrable darkness.

This trope can be used in combination with several other tropes; Through the Eyes of Madness, Darkness Equals Death, Quieter Than Silence, Leave the Camera Running, Mind Screw, Kill the Lights, and Obscured Special Effects are some examples. Since the space is empty, it may also appear as a part of Space Madness, usually as the second variant. Anything will do as long as the result is scary. Paranoia Fuel is a near-must.

In Real Life this trope is why it's terrifying to walk through a familiar dark room by yourself, through the woods or a secluded street at night. This is one horror trope everyone is familiar with. It's also a reason why the Silent Treatment can be an especially damaging punishment, both emotionally and sometimes even physically. Sensory deprivation can result in panic attacks or even visual/auditory hallucinations for some people, as the lack of stimuli makes the subconscious mind "hungry" for input, causing the brain to create its own to fill in the gap.

Compare and contrast Cat Scare, Creepy Basement, Gory Discretion Shot, Jump Scare, Monster Delay, Unseen Evil, and The Unreveal. One of the counterarguments against leaving nothing to the imagination, and sometimes an argument against Gorn as well. Dead Air can be this for radio. The Spook and the Diabolus ex Nihilo are often characterized by this trope. It often overlaps with Half Empty Two Shot (a two-character shot where one character is conspicuously absent) when it's Played for Horror.

Interestingly, this is probably what makes people afraid of whatever The New Rock & Roll is.

Not to be confused with Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here, Empty Room Psych, or It's Quiet… Too Quiet. Contrast Nothing Is Funnier, where leaving details to the viewer's imagination is used for comedic effect.

noreallife

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Other Examples:

Advertising

• In this video, if you follow the instructions of the video, you don't notice the moonwalking bear.
• One Spanish PSA campaign against child abuse used lenticular lenses on its posters to achieve this effect. From an adult's point-of-view, they only see the picture of a sad child and the words, "Sometimes, child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it." Children, however, see bruises on the boy's face and a hidden message urging them to call the listed number if they're being abused. Empowering for survivors of child abuse, an eye-opener for everyone else. In a more meta case of this trope, the linked article brings up the possibility of toy companies exploiting this discovery to market directly at children, without the knowledge of parents.

Arts

• Many people have admitted to finding the famous painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth terrifying for this very reason. There's nothing in it more overtly sinister than a woman lying in a field with her back to the viewer, looking across the horizon at a distant farmhouse, but the surreal, desolate landscape, gloomy, desaturated colors, her strange, oddly twisted posture, and above all, the question of just what the hell is going on combines to make an atmosphere that's almost inexplicably foreboding. Many of his◊ other◊ paintings◊ also qualify for similar reasons. Tellingly, he was cited as a major influence on the visual design of Silent Hill 2.
• The painting Deimos by Serbian artist Dragan Bibin depicts a scared dog looking at an open door to a pitch-black room. The viewer doesn't know and can't see what's in the other room, but the tension in the room is palpable.

Audio Plays

• The BBC Doctor Who audio drama Dead Air plays with this trope. The recording opens with a cheerful woman telling you that you're about to listen to a piece of history, the very last recording of a Pirate Radio station from the 60s. What follows is the Doctor telling you "If you can hear this, then one of us is going to die." The Doctor then goes on to narrate a story which is pretty standard Doctor Who fare. A nasty alien entity which is composed entirely of sound has taken over the pirate radio ship and is killing everyone aboard before going on to conquer all of Earth. Throughout the recording there are instances of static bursts, occasional distortion in sound, jumps in the recording that give you snippets of odd music that was on the tape until the Doctor recorded over it, and at one point a tinny voice overlapping the recording begging for help. In the final confrontation between the Doctor and the big bad, the Doctor traps the monster in a recording, the very one the audience is listening to. The monster taunts that as soon as anyone listens to the recording the monster will be free, and the Doctor announces that no one will ever listen to the recording, because he put a warning on the tape to not listen to it. With such a warning in place, who could possibly be stupid enough to listen all the way to the end of the recording? The Doctor then says a cheerful "Goodbye!" and the tape immediately cuts to a distorted portion of blaring music which clicks into static. The story ends with the sound of a tape running out...
• Used to great effect in the Big Finish Doctor Who audio Scherzo, where the Eighth Doctor and Charley are trapped in a White Void Room and slowly lose all of their senses except hearing, including their sense of time. That the listener already only perceives the story through hearing punches it up to almost unbearably tense.
• The radio adaptation of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream adds an extended dialogue scene between AM (voiced by Harlan Ellison himself, yet again) and Ted, where AM shows him sights and sensations from the Earth That Was, telling him to pick a flower. AM then goes on a tangent about said flower, speculating that it was grown by a gardener who was raising them to give to his wife - "and where is that wife now? Ah - in the backyard with the kids. Ted, remember those little babies..." and then Ted freaks out, with AM laughing at him about how he can make them all disappear with a snap of his fingers. It isn't described if the mere memory of how things used to be was what made Ted horrified, or if AM did something to the family before making them vanish.

Comic Books

• In the graphic novel Blankets, Craig Thompson mentioned a story about a babysitter who did something horrible to him and his little brother. (It's not hard to figure out just what it was...) However, the Babysitter's eyes are never shown. It's a very powerful method to inspire fear - the viewer never sees the full image of the babysitter, making some wonder what the babysitter's gender was, until later.
• DC Comics had a horror anthology title in the '80s called Wasteland. Due to one error or another, issue #5 was published with issue #6's cover. When the real #6 came out, it was numbered "the real number six", and the cover, apart from framing elements, was pure white. For a horror comic, it worked quite well.
• Figment: As the doglike Chimera's fears are "barked" to her rather than spoken in English and there are no visual clues as to what they could be, the reader can only guess what scares her enough to leave her crying Tears of Fear.
• The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil: We never find out what there actually is or what exists across the sea. We never find out why There ended up invading in the form of Dave's beard either, which is actually addressed in-story.
• In Supergirl storyline Death & the Family, when Kara rushes into the hospital, she desperately notices she can hear every single sound in the building... but she cannot hear her surrogate aunt Lana Lang's heartbeat and breathing.
• Ultimate Spider-Man: There is a noise in the back door. Ben and May thought that it was Peter, who usually uses that door. They call for him... and nothing. Silence. They both realized that something was wrong, because of the kind of silence. Then, the burglar appears, with a gun.
• The Walking Dead has this in one of its most infamous defining moments in issue 66. Rick and his group have outsmarted the group of cannibal hunters that have been stalking them and although they promise not to eat them, they will still kill them. Rick tells the others to hold them down, and then the comic cuts to the aftermath. All we see are the bloody weapons they used on the hunters and the mess left behind before the group throws the dead bodies into a fire. We never find out exactly how the hunters were killed, but this event is referred to several times by the group members, wondering if they went too far and what they have become because of this moment.

Comic Strips

• FoxTrot: Done for comedy in one week-long series of strips. After Peter smashed Jason's lunar module model, Jason vowed vengeance within twenty-four hours, something that made Peter fear for his life. He spent the whole day sneaking around, jumping at every little noise, and spent the night lying in a pile of dog doo after eating twigs for dinner just to hide (after his mother grounded him for two weeks for driving everyone nuts). Once the 24 hours were up, he thought he had escaped Jason's plan... But then realized he hadn't. Jason had done enough by doing nothing at all. ("Let's do this again sometime," Jason remarked, when Peter realized it.)

Fan Works

• Battle Fantasia Project: In the Italian remake there's a mention of the White Dragon of the Anglo-Saxons trying to force the centaurs of the Lands of Myth into becoming his minions. He disappeared, and, thanks to those who knew dying without telling anyone, nobody knows what the centaurs did to him.
• Concerning a Drifter: What happened to Ryuuko isn't described in full detail but it's obvious by implication. Likewise and invoked when Satsuki (and Houka) come across an illegal website, the which is only described as "total depravity" and, while watching a video, she had "no words" for what she had seen, both of those things not being named (besides the video's title being apt).
• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series: The final room in the haunted fun house has nothing but a few doors and an exit... unless you count the fake Monster Clown behind one door or the creepy poltergeist girl that shows up later.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami invokes and inverts this at one point. Ami is forced to discipline her minions for attempted murder. As the preferred method in the Dungeon Keeper universe is bloody, horrific torture- that she absolutely can not, will not do, she created a selective fear charm (useing a tracking spell and a general fear trap as a basis). She then knocks out the offender (and a Dark Mistress who wanted in on the fun) once they wake up, the fear charm hits them and they are informed that Ami wiped their memory of the torture to preserve her technique for next time. Their imaginations do the rest.
• The Elements of Friendship: In Book II, Celestia and Selena infodump a lot of information on Discord to the Main 6, Spike, and Paper Mache. Then Discord suddenly speaks up, running a claw across Celestia's cheek. It turns out he's been floating in plain sight the whole time and nopony noticed him.
• Fairy Tales and Hokum: In the Pyramid of Ahm Shere, Jonathan and Tom (plus a couple of Mooks) are separated by a cave-in triggered by an explosion, and pygmy mummies attack Tom's section of the room. Jonathan only hears screams and calls for help, then silence.
• Fist of the Moon: A downplayed version works in the heroes' favor. The senshi all have a disguise field that protects their identity, and everyone from Genma to Amazon elders unanimously agree that being unable to remember someone's face while looking straight at them is very unsettling.
• From The Fog: Herobrine is absent for the first three days in a new Minecraft world, with the only implication of his existence being randomly spawning structures and trees that have recently been chopped down^note Specifically, the logs gone with the leaves slowly decaying, like a player harvested the tree recently, all building up to the moment when he does decide to show up.
• Hours 'Verse: All we see of Lavenza being split into the twins is her being dragged away by the Archangels and the sounds of her screams.
• The King Nobody Wanted: One of the primary sources of concern among the Dothraki following the fall of Vaes Dothrak is that they don't actually know what's going on beyond the fact that something killed everyone in the city and that khalasars keep disappearing. The groups that moved away from their ancient roaming grounds, either following Drogo's pilgrimage or pursuing other foes, still encounter news of one another, but behind them, in the Dothraki Sea, there is only a vast silence and the unknown fates of those who stayed, about whom nothing is ever heard.
  "And besides" said Drogo, "has anyone heard anything from Kharo of late? He went to Vaes Dothrak, he had his mother declare him the Stallion that Mounts the World, he sent out messengers and then... silence. The Sea seems almost to have swallowed him up, as it has so many other khalasars since the Doom began."
• The Last Equestrian Doom Patrol: "Nobody was there." An impossible entity capable of eliminating even the Mane Six (and terrifying the Physical God princesses), and who is (maybe) capable of turning out to have been there all along, and now it's too late to flee.
• Lost, Found:
  • In chapters nine and ten (and, like many other examples, laced with Fridge Horror), we find out that some time ago, there was the first test subject and, according to Nui, due to the experiments, the girl, "Child 00-000-000-0001", was left as something "not human" and that "animal" could be the closest they could call her, which makes one wonder as to what the experiments did to that girl and what they could have done to her and Ryuuko. What doesn't help that is that a good many of the test subjects died.
  • The experiments themselves. Outside of a few details, we don't know what they are or why they're being performed.
• Natural Histories: At one point in "The Fountain", something terrible and powerful approaches the timberwolf pack. It is never seen, remaining hidden by the undergrowth, and is only described as a large shadow, a stench of death and magic, and a presence that intimidates the wolves, before, still unseen, it retreats.
• Nine Days Down: In "Wandering", while trying to find her way out of a cave, Twilight is hit by the this variant when she hers growling from the darkness and realizing that something has been following her.
• Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: In Acts III and IV, Hokuto somehow knows enough about Tsukune and his True Companions, as well as their past battle with Kuyou, to be able to play both sides for his Evil Plan. Not only that, but he was also aware that the Artifact of Doom he needed for said plan was hidden in Yokai Academy, that Kenzo knew where Felucia's Soul Jar was located, and finally where Tsukune's family lived. We never do find out how he knew so much despite first appearing in Act III; he just does.
• Robb Returns: In chapter 97, it is shown that the Hightower has, deep in its basement, a mysterious gate which, ever since magic returned to Westeros, has been glowing sick green and causes such uneasiness on anyone standing near enough that guards are limited to two-hour shifts so they will not go crazy. But the worst thing is that something is trying to break that gate open.
• Party of None: An insane Pinkie Pie lets it slip that she's been spying on Rainbow Dash months prior to imprisoning her. From Dash's perspective, every single time, there was nothing there when she went to check.
• A Peaceful Afterlife: Inverted! Charlie has Kira take an interview and spread his identity to take away the mystery of his Mr. Clean persona. He goes from a complete unknown who makes people disappear for HOLY DIVER to just some (powerful) demon. This takes away the main reason HOLY DIVER wants him back under his employ.
• Walking into a completely empty, safe area during a Containment Breach
• The Pokémon Black creepypasta has this for the ending. After defeating Blue for the final time(and possibly killing him), the player is then given a Distant Finale, with their character as an old man, wandering a Kanto that is now completely empty. All NPCs are gone, with the Instant Gravestones from those who were killed being the only sign there was any other life in Kanto before, and there are no wild Pokemon to be encountered. Once the player returns to their bedroom, and stands on the very spot they started the game on, they're treated to a reel of every Pokemon and trainer that they had killed during the game, after which Ghost shows up, and claims their life, just as it had done for all of the player's foes.
• Pony POV Series: The first Big Bad of the Reharmonized Series, Loneliness, is a Shapeshifter and Trixie's Enemy Within. We never find out if any of the forms she assumes are her true one, if she even has one, or what she is. Is she a figment of Trixie's imagination? A split personality? An Eldritch Abomination? Some kind of parasitic monster? We don't know, and Word of God has invoked Multiple-Choice Past on her so we'll probably never find out. Made even worse by the fact there's a complete chapter between our first notice of her existence and actually seeing her. It's quite effective at making her legitimately terrifying.
• Royal Heights has the Elite undergoing their first Vision under the Headmaster's guidance which is a literal look into pure nothingness. It's meant to help them understand that nothingness takes place of everything that once existed but all it really does is terrify them.
• Towards the Sun: the Fire Nations is terrifed of Aang being able to take away people's bending. Many of the palace servants (and later the entire country) have no idea how Aang's energybending works and unsure whether Aang needs to touch people to take away bending. Due to the Fire Nation's spiritual importance on firebending, they see it as Aang ripping out part of people's souls. With public knowledge that the Avatar supported Iroh's usurpation of the popular Fire Lord Zuko and Zuko wasn't able to bend throughout the Agni Kai, Aang is terrifying. What little they know of the Avatar further demonizes him.
• The Weaver Option: One of the objectives during the raid on Commorragh is to ensure the Oblivion Gate remains sealed. What exactly lies on the other side is never revealed but later author notes explain it's the entrance to a pocket dimension containing something for which the term "eldritch abomination" is lacking. The Aeldari at their height couldn't destroy it and even the Drukhari weren't deluded enough to try and mess with it.
• Wizard Runemaster: When Harry and company explore the bottom half of Karazhan (which is a direct mirror of the above ground tower), they find absolutely nothing for most of the journey. Just a lot of evidence that there used to be many horrific things locked away there.
• Young Justice: Darkness Falls: Darkseid's fate for his son Kalibak is never mentioned, but it's mentioned that all of Darkseid's minions mention that they'd prefer 50 lashes to being sent to where he is now.
• A Delicate Balance: When Rarity visits Twilight after the latter's unsuccessful approach at Applejack, she notices that all the charts and graphs that used to cover the insides of library were gone, nothing. She is rather startled.
• SCP: Overlord: We never find out what Besson saw that made him shoot himself.
• X-Men fanfiction Devil's Diary has Stan Lee relate how Doctor Doom ambushed him and Jack Kirby (as seen in Fantastic Four #10). During their meeting, Doom took his mask off, and both of them looked away as quickly as possible. Stan didn't want to elaborate on what his face looked like. He doesn't want to remember.
  Stan Lee: I didn't see too much. Both Jack and I had to turn away. Jack saw more action than I did, in the War. He'd seen guys burned up, crushed, shot, beaten to death, all of that. And he told me he'd never seen anything quite that bad. I don't even like to watch Twilight Zone because of that. I might see something to remind me. All I can say is, we were glad just to see that metal mask again when he put it back on."
• In From Beyond (RWBY), Blake gets increasingly worried as she heads towards where she saw Jaune land but hears nothing from him. When she gets there she finds that Jaune is dead with a Grimm eating his body.
  Blake: Curse, moan, scream... rant about your landing. Anything.
• Hearts Aflutter: While Taylor is in police custody, she meets Maiko, a teenaged member of the ABB, who asks what she's in for. Taylor explains what the police found in her diary, which detailed all of the things she would've liked to have done to the Trio in Revenge. While we are not told what she fantasised about doing, it's enough to scare a hardened gang member into sitting as far from Taylor as possible in the cell, afraid.

Films — Animation

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire pulls the Hitchcockian "show you the ticking bomb and wait for it to go off" version to great effect when the Leviathan is hunting the Ulysses submarine through the underwater caves. The audience sees it pretty clearly (especially in a chilling shot where we see that its mandibles are larger than the entire Ulysses), but the characters don't, cranking up the suspense and lulling the audience into a false sense of security before the inevitable happens.
• Man from Bambi. We never see the hunters. Ever. The result is one of the creepiest villains of Disney history. Especially effective is the silence of the scene of Bambi's mother's killing, since the hunters are so stealthy that we don't hear a sound from them until the shot that slays Bambi's mother rings out - yet the mother still knows they're coming (perhaps she can smell them).
• At the end of Beauty and the Beast, Gaston is chasing after the Beast, following him across the roof, running past a row of gargoyles in the darkness. Then one of the gargoyles moves...
• In A Bug's Life, Hopper and his gang don't appear until they break into the underground hideout in the ant hill and are referred to as “they” and “them” by the ants.
• The opening scene from The Fox and the Hound plays out eerily similar to the scary scenes from Bambi. As the credits roll, we are treated to a dark forest and Ominous Fog where the only sounds are at first the occasional bird chirp, frog croak, only for them to be replaced by dogs barking, and eerie music. Then, Tod's mother shows up, running from a hunter, the music speeds up and gets louder and more drastic, and yet we never see the hunter or his dog, save for barking, and two gunshots at the end.
• Finding Nemo:
  • The opening scene with the Barracuda. We don't get to see what happens to Marlin's wife, Coral, but it's easy to imagine, and it is horrifying.
  • The trench scene, one of the most effectively ominous moments of the film as the characters never enter the terrifying trench and find out what lies inside, apart from the skeleton of a fish at its entrance. Ironically, the trench was said to be the safer route and the wide open space ends up proving more dangerous.
• In The Jungle Book (1967), Shere Khan the tiger does not physically appear until two-thirds through it. Before that, he is all built up so you know how formidable he is. It is not Shere Khan himself but his reputation as a ferocious man-eater that compels the wolves to send Mowgli to the man-village.
• The Lord of the Rings: Unlike the Peter Jackson versions, Sauron is never seen in full. The most we ever get is his shadow, that of a man in a horned helmet, but everything else is kept a mystery. Even so, there's always fear in peoples' voices whenever they talk about him.
• Although it's hardly a noisy film, The Prince of Egypt tells most of its story through its epic, sweeping score, so the audience gets very acclimated to hearing that even when very tragic things are happening. Even the Ten Plagues of Egypt are depicted through (an admittedly awesome) musical montage, all except for the last and worst of all of them, where (no pun intended) the whole movie goes absolutely dead silent. After more than an hour of bright colors and emotive music, it is unbelievably eerie to watch the whole land of Egypt go grayscale as the Angel of Death descends to Earth in complete silence, with no sound effects on the audio track AT ALL except for a soft whispering wind as it blows through the streets and the almost gentle sighing of its victims. It ends up being far, far more terrifying and haunting to watch than the plague of rats, frogs, boils, and raining hellfire only a few scenes earlier.
• Pooh's Grand Adventure features Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and Rabbit on a quest to find Christopher Robin, and the primary threat on their journey is the Skullasaurus, a beast Owl warns lurks in the "Great Unknown" beyond the Hundred Acre Wood that they know. Sure enough, not long into their journey, the gang is haunted by hellish roars off in the distance, and some very close. We don't see the Skullasaurus during these encounters, but that's what makes it so scary. It turns out that there was never a Skullasaurus; the roars were actually the roars of Pooh's hungry tummy.

Folklore

• The ever-popular campfire story "The Hook" tells of a couple making out in a car. They hear over the radio that an escaped killer with a Hook Hand has been seen in the area. After they leave and arrive at the girl's house, they find a hook hanging from the handle of the car door. (And yes, the "man door hand hook car door" meme originated from a mangled retelling of this urban legend.)
• "The Boyfriend's Death" similarly starts with a couple making out in the car. The boy steps outside to investigate some noises but never returns. In the pitch darkness, the girl only hears an odd sound and then an irregular tapping against the top of the car. Terrified, she locks the doors, hides, and waits there through the night. When the sun comes back up, a local sheriff arrives and tells her to walk over to his car without looking back — but of course she does look back. In some versions, she sees her boyfriend's severed head impaled on the car's CB antenna. The tapping sound was his blood dripping onto the roof of the car. In other variations, the tapping is the boyfriend's foot tapping against the car roof, as he's been hanged on a tree, or a scraping sound in a similar scenario — only this time he's upside down, so the noise is coming from his fingernails. But the scariest version of all has the killer himself standing outside the car and beating the boyfriend's head against it like a drum, meaning that he could have gotten into the vehicle at any time.
  • Fridge Horror makes the last version even scarier. The Sheriff obviously knows that the killer is right there, since he'd have been looking right at him and he told the girl to not look back. Is the Sheriff working with the killer? Or does the Killer wield so much power that not even the Sheriff dares try to arrest him, even when catching him in the act?
• The urban legend "Aren't You Glad You Didn't Turn on the Light?" and its variants.
  • In the most popular version, a girl on a university campus picks up some books from her dorm. Knowing her roommate is asleep, she leaves the light off and grabs her books in the dark. When she returns home later and does turn the light on, she finds her roommate dead and a note written in lipstick on the mirror: "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light?"
  • Another variant involves a woman being woken up at night by an odd sound. She reaches toward the foot of the bed, where the sound originated, and when something licks her hand she decides it's only the dog and goes back to sleep. The next day, she finds the dead dog hanging in the shower and a lipstick note on the mirror: "People can lick too."
  • There's a variant of "People..." variant with a different ending: she wakes up, sees the message, but her dog is fine alive, and she can still feel licking... then the killer reaches up from under the bed and kills her.
• The story "High Beams" has a young girl driving home when she notices a large truck following her. She tries to shake it, but it won't go away; occasionally, the truck driver turns on his high-beam headlights for no apparent reason. When the girl gets home and her parents call the police, the truck driver—a huge, bearded man—emerges from his vehicle with a gun and refuses to move from the driveway. The cops show up to arrest him...at which point he says "Not me. Him," pointing to the girl's car. They open the back doors and find a man hiding there with a rope and a knife. It turns out that the attacker was hiding in the car the whole time, and the truck driver was only following her to protect her. Whenever the high beams turned on, the attacker had risen up behind the girl and was preparing to strike; he dropped down and hid again when the beams shone.
  • Another version of this one has the station attendant ask the woman to come inside as there's a problem with her card then once inside he tells her there's a maniac in her back seat and she needs to call the police.
• Another famous example that named a trope—"The Babysitter." The titular character is taking care of her charges or, in other versions, has put them to bed, when the phone starts ringing. Every time she answers, a man either laughs insanely or gives a message like "I'll be there soon," "Have you checked the children?", or "I'm getting closer." The babysitter calls the police, who tell her to keep the guy on the line for as long as possible so they can trace the call. After he calls back and the girl (because it's always a girl) talks to him, the police call back and scream at her to get out of the house—the mysterious calls are coming from an upstairs extension! The girl runs from the house, at which point the killer begins to head down the stairs for her. In some versions, the girl escapes with the children; in others, he's already killed the kids and wants the babysitter to come upstairs so he can murder her, too.
  • In another version of the story, the girl is babysitting and there's a creepy clown statue that stares and unerves her, even seems to move ever so slightly. She calls the parents and asks if she can cover it up or move it so it doesn't bother her. Then the parents reveal they don't own a clown statue and tell her to get the kids and run.
• A lesser-known but still-creepy story has a woman returning home from work to discover her beloved dog choking on something. She immediately rushes the animal to the vet, who tells her to go back to her place while they perform the operation. Upon getting back, she sees the phone ringing off the hook. It's the vet, who tells her to run—the obstruction was a pair of fingers. A burglar is in the house; the dog bit off his fingers and sent the man hiding somewhere, probably hiding in a closet at that moment.

Jokes

• A man is driving down the road and breaks down near a monastery. He goes to the monastery, knocks on the door, and asks to stay the night. The monks graciously accept him, feed him dinner, and even fix his car. As the man tries to fall asleep, he hears a strange sound. The next morning, he asks the monks what the sound was, but they say, "We can't tell you. You're not a monk." The man is disappointed but thanks them anyway and goes home. Some years later, the same man breaks down in front of the same monastery. The monks again accept him, feed him, and fix his car. He hears the same strange noise that he had heard years earlier and asks what it is, but the monks reply, "We can't tell you. You're not a monk." The man then asks how he can become a monk. The monks reply, "You must travel the earth and tell us how many blades of grass there are and the exact number of sand pebbles. When you find these numbers, grasshopper, you will become a true monk." The man sets about his task. Decades later, he returns and knocks on the monastery door. He informs them that there are 145,236,284,232 blades of grass and 231,281,219,999,129,382 sand pebbles on the earth. The monks reply, "Welcome. You are now a monk. We shall now show you the way to the sound." The monks lead the man to a wooden door, where the head monk says, "The sound is right behind that door." The man reaches for the knob, but the door is locked. The monks give him a key that's attached to a 10-key ring, and he opens the wooden door. Behind that door is another door made of stone. The monks show him which of the 9 other keys opens that door. The man opens the stone door, only to find a door made of ruby. Again, the monks show him which key to use. Behind that door is another door, this one made of sapphire. So it goes until the man has gone through doors of emerald, silver, topaz, amethyst, and gold. Finally, the monks say, "That key right there on your key ring unlocks the last door." The man is ready. He unlocks a jade door, turns the knob, and behind that door he is amazed to find the source of that strange sound. But we can't say what it is, because not everyone on this site is a monk.
• The "Jesus is watching you" joke uses this as the punchline: "Jesus" is the rottweiler watching the burglar from the darkness, presumably waiting to strike him.

Podcasts

• Shows up frequently in The Magnus Archives. A lot of the little mysteries behind the various monsters and nightmarish situations are left unexplained, with the most prominent example being that we never get to know what exactly Maxwell Rayner's pet monster is, or even what it looks like. That said, it doesn't show up as often as you might expect from an audio medium since most of the episodes take the form of audio recordings or written statements, which tends to at least provide visual descriptions and coherent storytelling from traumatized people, helped by the fact that the main characters serve an entity whose power lends itself to uncovering hidden information and parsing knowledge out of people's minds. It shows up more commonly when the events are happening in the present, as the characters feel no need to describe what they're seeing at any given moment, such as what exactly the Angler Fish looks like or what it does to make its waxworks and taxidermied shells.
• The hosts of Sick Sad World theorize that the reason Jack the Ripper is so legendary is that we'll never know the truth about his identity or all his victims.
• Often used in Welcome to Night Vale, something which the purely audio-format makes particularly effective. We don't know what exactly re-education, Valentines Day or Street Cleaning entails, but we can imagine that it is terrible.
  Cecil: Listeners, the only thing more terrifying than seeing the devil is no longer being able to see the devil.
• Played with in episode 33 of Welcome to Night Vale. Teenage Cecil describes a flicker of static that seems to be getting closer each time he turns on his tape recorder, and his mother hiding from him and covering all the mirrors in the house. In the last scene the thing is coming for him, and we get no description of what it is or what it's doing to Cecil, other than tearing, gurgling sounds as though the thing were eating him. The mirrors are uncovered in the last scene, and Cecil doesn't know who did that, and the flickering movement is most visible in the reflection. Then the listener might remember a bit from a previous episode... "Or better yet, destroy all of your mirrors. As my mother used to tell me, 'Someone's going to kill you one day, Cecil, and it will involve a mirror. Mark my words, child!' And then she would stare absently through my eyes until I giggled."

Pro Wrestling

• On the November 11, 2005 WWESmackDown, there was a scene with Edge and Lita backstage with Edge talking about how SmackDown! General Manager Teddy Long putting him in a Street Fight against Batista can't happen and that he was going to talk some sense into Batista and that he was going to put some security on the door so nobody could come into the room. Edge walked out and the room got briefly dark before lighting up again and THE BOOGEYMAN popped up from behind the couch! He told the scared Lita, "Close your eyes! I'm the Boogeyman, and I'm coming to get you!", sending Lita screaming from the room.

Puppet Shows

• Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons: The Mysterons are never seen on-screen. They are represented visually by twin rings of green light that they cast onto the scenes of murder and destruction from which their facsimiles emerge.

Radio

• Quiet, Please (1947) uses this in the very first episode, entitled, fittingly enough, Nothing Behind the Door. The protagonist and his friends try to rob a small house on a mountainside, only to find that there is literally nothing behind the door, as in, a completely empty void. Anything that passes through the door simply ceases to exist.

Roleplay

• Edensphere had an event based around Silent Hill. Basically, Sam Vimes, there called Stoneface, and Cecil Harvey, there called Paladin, ended up there, and, after various monsters and creepy children happened came this part. Note that "nothing" is always struck out.

Theatre

• Punchdrunk Theater Company's Hitchcock inspired, haunted-house-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-1940's Noir ballet of Macbeth Sleep No More. The audience is given a creepy ''bird'' mask told not to talk and set loose in the 100 room, five floor, Mckittrick Hotel to find their own way through a series of beautiful, unsettling rooms. You're allowed to touch/eat/read/open anything you find and follow the performers at will. It's instantly terrifying. Nothing will ever jump out at you or even attempt to scare you and there's no conventional Haunted House elements, besides the atmosphere of dread and general creepiness of the design. After a while you get into the swing of things, the place becomes familiar and you can start to really enjoy exploring or following the story- but the first twenty minutes after getting off the elevator, faced with room after creepy room, with no direction and separated from your friends, is pants-wettingly, paralyzingly scary. Part of what they do is get groups in the elevator together and the deliberately separate them as much as possible. You are alone. You are lost and confused. Meanwhile a variant of Macbeth is going on around you.
• This is the undercurrent running through "Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)" in Jesus Christ Superstar. It's not the torture and death that awaits him that disturbs Jesus the most; it's the uncertainty of what will happen after his death, which is guaranteed by his Father's silence on the matter. Definitely an unspoken acknowledgment of Cessation of Existence, not only for Jesus but, by extension, the entire human race.
  Jesus: But if I die
  See the saga through and do the things you ask of me
  Let them hate me, hit me, hurt me
  Nail me to their tree
  I'd want to know, I'd want to know, my God...
  I'd want to see, I'd want to see, my God...
  Why I should die.
  Would I be more noticed than I ever was before?
  Would the things I've said and done matter anymore?
  I'd have to know, I'd have to know, my Lord...
  I'd have to see, I'd have to see, my Lord...
  If I die, what will be my reward?
• The Propeller Shakespeare Company, an all-male Shakespearean troupe based in England, did this to remarkable effect in their production of Richard III. It was set in a Bedlam House, and featured horrifically gory murders that kept escalating until someone was being eviscerated with a chainsaw in a barely-concealed Gory Discretion Shot. But the scariest murder of them all occurred with the two young princes. Richard hires an assassin to get rid of them; the Company imagined that assassin as a mute Psychopathic Manchild with a broad, empty-eyed grin and toys sitting on his belt. The sequence played as follows: the princes (played by puppets) put on their nightcaps and went into a small space under a flight of stairs; the assassin emerged from the shadows and followed them; the stage was totally silent with the exception of a ticking clock...and then, after a minute, the assassin exited the space, now clutching the nightcaps. We have no idea what he did to the boys, or how long it took—our imaginations paint the picture for us, and it is terrifying.

Tabletop Games

• One of the Dungeons & Dragons trap compendiums includes a room with a timer and a button on a wall. When the party enters, the doors are slammed shut and the timer begins to countdown. The button restarts the timer. Cue the party frantically looking for a way out, leaving someone to reset the timer repeatedly. The catch is, when the timer reaches zero, the doors open without any ill effects. The fact that the adventurers were so scared of what was to come was the trap. It's only when they steel themselves and prepare to face what was to come that they get to leave.
• Eclipse Phase: the Gatecrashing sourcebook gets a lot of mileage out of alien worlds that are uninhabited but have the ruins of a lost civilization on them; extinction is a major theme in the game, and as a result a lot of areas are left completely depopulated. Some of them go the extra mile, like the planet where there's a massive, self-repairing virtual reality network, with easily enough storage space for the minds of an entire planetary populace... but the network seems to be empty, with simple programs and predesigned environments but no actually intelligent beings, and no-one is quite sure why.
  • Note that there is one known living sentient alien race, the Factors, who for some reason they haven't explained do not use Pandora Gates and strongly advise transhumanity against using them either.
  • There is also the belief that the Solar System's Gates were built by the TITANS, those hyper-advanced A.I.s who almost wiped out transhumanity, which makes one wonder who built the others systems' Gates. The GM-only section confirms that it was the TITANS, and that they were infected by a virus of extraterrestrial origin, which has infected many other civilizations before transhumanity's. Whether any of those civilizations survived is left up to the GM, as well as other things like the Factors' true motivations (are they survivors, witnesses, agents of the Viruses creators?), or if the Virus was intended to exterminate or assimilate seeing how the TITANS forcibly uploaded or mutated many of their victims.
• Numenera: The game occasionally uses this to emphasize the feeling that the player characters are dealing with very dangerous things vastly beyond their understanding. As an example, Nibovian guides are entities that pose as humans and gradually work their way into people's trust, eventually knocking them out with airborne pheromones and sealing them in transdimensional cocoons that transport them to Reeval, the Nibovian home dimension, where... something happens. The description doesn't say what that is or why the guides want it to happen, only that their victims are never seen again.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! does this with the monsters 'The Thing in the Crater', where all we see is a deep crater filled with lava, and 'Dweller in the Depths', where all we see is a dark cave with stalagmites and stalactites everywhere, aside from very vague silhouettes of something in each.
• Rogue Trader: Even in a terrifying Crapsack World like the Warhammer 40,000 universe , something that stands out are the Halo Devices. These are objects indistinguishable from normal jewelry but somehow have the ability to make you immortal... at the cost. Wearing one will de-age you back to your prime, make you stronger, grant you a Healing Factor, and make you The Needless, but as the device more permanently bonds with you, it also turn you more and more unstable. You'll gradually end up an insane, hard-to-destroy, vaguely insectoid being with an insatiable desire for human tissue. That's par for the course with 40k, but here's the kicker: nobody knows where Halo Devices come from. While mutation is a favorite of Chaos, the devices will not bond with chaos-worshipers, the possessed, or even with psykers. They have no apparent connection to any of the major players in the galaxy and can't even be scanned to figure out what they're made of. What is known is that they've been found in ruins on ancient worlds orbiting dead stars, but with no trace of who lived there, how or why they made these things (if they did), what they used them for or why they disappeared. In a galaxy where Eldritch Abominations are a fact of life, somehow this is even worse.

Web Animation

• In Zero Punctuation's review of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Yahtzee states that the form of terror Nothing is Scarier invokes (although he does not refer to the trope by name, instead using a humorous example), "is best, because your imagination is doing all the work. All a good horror game needs to do is hand you a piece of sandpaper and shout encouragement as you vigorously massage your own undercarriage."
• In the Creepypasta Suicide Mouse, the majority of the titular episode is just Mickey Mouse walking past some buildings while odd noises play. It somehow managed to make an employee who was watching it commit suicide.

Webcomics

• Parodied in Adventurers!: Faced with the video game version of walking around a dark, dangerous hole in the ground, Gildward is clueless.
• Awful Hospital: Dr. Man, at least from what little we've seen of him, is what appears to be a normal human doctor. He's a bit odd-looking for a human, but not unrealistically, and compared to everything else in the hospital he's incredibly ordinary. After all that's come before, being relatively normal is what makes him scary.
• Eddsworld: In this comic strip, Edd is left visibly shocked after navigating the Internet. We don't see what he's found, and whatever he saw is left to the reader's imagination.
• In Girl Genius, Volume Five, two men from the troupe scout ahead, and return riding as fast as they can, and there's no pursuit. Worse, when Lars and Augie tell the story, this is when they note that something is very wrong.
  Augie: Took us a while to figure out why. No animals. No birds. We left the road to look around. There were no signs of life. No active burrows, no fresh nests. No fresh tracks. No droppings. No bodies. No bones. Nothing.
• Rank Amateur's prologue has a brief walk through an abandoned spacestation "where it all started." What happened there and what it started hasn't yet been explained. The only information given is that it's a 'covert' research facility.
• Discussed and parodied in Skin Horse after Tip becomes a werewolf. Unity references Jaws and Alien, both classic movies that took a very long time to show monsters that ultimately turned out to be disappointing. "The monster's always a letdown because it's not as scary as the idea of the monster! Y'know what you are? You're a plywood shark!"
• In Stand Still, Stay Silent, chapter five. Sigrun, Emil and Lalli are investigating an old community space. Cue creepy dark space, corridors that appear to be blocked from the inside, and freakin' hospital beads all over the place. Creepiness dawns, but Sigrun assures the boys that there are no signs it's a nest... and then she finds Meat Moss, a sure sign that it is a nest... and then Emil bumps into two trolls.
• In xkcd, Black Hat Guy hires Rick Astley to show up at a party... and just stand there.
• In Homestuck, we have Doc Scratch's warning to Karkat:
  [Don't turn your back on the body.]
  • When he turns around, none of the bodies have moved.
• In-universe example from Sluggy Freelance: Torg comes back from the doctor's office and announces that he's had a "magic flap" installed; no one's quite sure what a magic flap is, but imagining what it might be freaks everyone the hell out.
• Shen Comix gives us The Brain Mechanic. He's alone around there... he thinks.
• In Kill Six Billion Demons, The Rant for this page has an account of a caravan that took shelter from a sandstorm in ruins implied to be where Gog-Agog was once imprisoned. The sense of unease it created was so great three of them died in the sandstorm trying to find anywhere else to rest, but nothing happened when they stayed there.
  Graves: It was one of the most harrowing and uneventful nights of my career. The company parted soon after. We lost the stomach for the work.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent turns it into form of (creeeepy) art. It's not that the troll was there all along — that's clearly visible. It's when you look closer and then you start seeing just why the trolls are so creepy... They're made of people... and there are still human faces on them... full of terror...

Web Videos

• Game Grumps: The Spice World episode ends with Arin having a mental breakdown and doing God knows what to Jon. In the midst of it, the video cuts off for the final 8 seconds of absolute silence and darkness.
• Technically speaking, very little happens in Marble Hornets. "Nothing happening" will keep you awake for weeks.
  • Case in point: Entry 21. Daylight. No audio or video distortion whatsoever except around a small burrow of sorts. Yet when Jay climbs up the tower, you feel like you're gonna die!
  • The entirety of Entry 17. It's just a clip of Tim sitting around, running through some lines with J and Alex. It might take some time to notice our friend in the back◊.
  • Marble Hornets took this trope to the extreme in Entry #16 - Nothing happens, and you never see Slendy, unlike literally every other entry up to that point. It's one of the scariest entries in the series. Then you notice that midway through, the video tears. Meaning that Slendy was there all along and you never saw him.
    • Slenderman was originally supposed to be this trope. Everyone was to see his face differently and the horror is tailored specifically for them, only the camera is not a person so the audience sees only a white blur. Instead the facelessness became Slendy's defining feature but is still a good example, your mind can make his nothing of a face infinitely more terrifying.
• The Onion:
  • Towards the end of this video from the narrator says "Somehow the fear of spiders is even worse than the spiders themselves."
  • The video "(Classified) Bill Defends Against Flesh-Eating (Classified)"
    Representative Haller: Air Force units may also be directed to combat said CLASSIFIED due to their enormous size and otherworldly strengths. Should event occur in urban areas... Jesus. Uh, that's CLASSIFIED... far surpassing our darkest nightmares. Should casualties exceed CLASSIFIED body disposal actions shall be halted and associated resources shall be reallocated to CLASSIFIED underground CLASSIFIED protected birthing centers.
• In Mokey's Show - Slunder, choosing no results in Mokey doing a Death Glare with horrifying music. 4 seconds in, everything goes dead silent as you get a black screen with a message saying "HELP ME". Nothing else happens for the rest of that video.
• This horrifying video, which takes the form of a fictional "extreme emergency" meteorological report about...something to do with the moon, and the helpful "advice" it gives keep getting worse and worse. The whole thing is nothing but white text on a black screen with heavy glitching, but the horrible white noise in the background and the increasingly disturbing warnings to the viewer ("Switch off all lights", "Do not look out any windows", "Do not look at the ceiling", "Do not attempt to investigate any figures you might see out the corner of your eye") will have you sleeping with the lights on for days.
• In this episode of Frame by Frame, Kyle takes on three horror movie classics (The Innkeepers, The Changeling and Let the Right One In) to explore how directors oftentimes make what you DON'T see scarier than what you DO. The threat is outside the frame but it is very very real!
• Both shown and discussed throughout Two Best Friends Play's playthrough of the indie-horror game Phobia. Most of the video is just Pat stumbling around a big, dark, creepy old house and, aside from the looming threat that there is something horrible locked up in the basement trying to get out, nothing really happens. However the ambiance is set up so well that Pat (and the viewer) is genuinely terrified. At the end of the video Pat heads down to the basement to confront the monster, the basement door bursts open and we never find out what the monster looks like or what happens next because the game immediately crashes, which Pat uses as an excuse to end the video before he has a heart attack.
  Matt: See, that's what horror games bring to the table: doing something with absolutely nothing.
  Pat: Yeah, the absence of "thing" is what's scary.
  Matt: The absence of a threat is the biggest threat.
• Petscop:
  • As of now at least, nothing seen in a typical horror game or creepypasta is present, aside from darkness and text that seems to indicate child abuse. Most of the horror and uneasiness of the series comes from how bleak the game is, how silent the commentary can be sometimes and how little interactivity is seen in levels. Because of this, you're constantly waiting for something to pop out, which in turn is arguably the most scary part of the whole thing.
  • We don't know what the black boxes were covering in Episode 7 and 9. All we know is that it might be related to the children and it managed to shock Paul somewhat given how much time he spends on the screen and the noticeable shakiness in his voice afterwards (the one in Petscop 9 even causes him to give a Precision F-Strike.)
• The Minerva Alliance: Many of these videos will rarely (if ever) show the horror they are referring to. If they are shown, there is still some information about them withheld.
  • The "thunderstorm" from "Unusual EAS" doesn't seem to be a thunderstorm, based on the odd orders from the emergency broadcast.
  • The virus in "Unusual PSA" has no transmission vectors or symptoms shown. And when it attacks, death comes pretty quickly.
  • In "Quakin' and Shakin'", the burrower worms only get a few frames of screen time.
  • In "Community's Choice", Alazareth appears as a mass of yellowish-green light.
• Creep from minds at Fewdio Horror shows a woman talking on her cell phone while driving down the freeway at night, the rest of the car shrouded in darkness. As a car passes her by (or she's passing under a streetlight), the viewers get to see the eyes of a humanoid creature sitting in the back seat, its face between the driver and passenger seats. After hanging up the phone, a Beat happens before the woman gasps and turns around... and the video ends.

Western Animation

• The Adventure Time episode "No One Can Hear You". Most of the episode is Finn and Jake alone in the Candy Kingdom. It's particularly scary because Adventure Time has a huge cast, so not seeing anybody else for almost 10 minutes never happens.
• Animaniacs: In the episode "Potty Emergency", Wakko, desperate for relief, enters a gas station bathroom. What he sees inside is not shown (other than legions of fleeing cockroaches), but the condition of the lavatory rattles his very sanity.
• In The Charmkins, whatever Dragonweed's "or else" threat is, he doesn't outright state what he'll do, instead getting a whole villain song about things he could do.
• In Code Lyoko the main antagonist is XANA, an A.I. without a body. While there have been plenty of crazy computers in fiction, XANA stands out because he not only lacks an avatar, he rarely communicates with the heroes at all. The only real representation of him is the symbol he spams everywhere. The whole effect is surprisingly creepy, especially since its clear XANA's strategies and motives are constantly evolving.
• In an episode of the 2007 George of the Jungle cartoon, Ursula is telling a scary story to the gang while they're all around the campfire. Ape persuades her to change the ending to something not very scary so that he won't have to deal with George having nightmares. She complies, and when the man in the story opens the door, there is nothing on the other side. George then spends most of the episode literally afraid of nothing.
  George: (scared) Ape, check the closet.
  (Ape opens the closet to reveal a monster with silverware and a bib)
  George: What does Ape see?
  Ape: (deadpan) A large, hungry monster wearing a bib and holding a knife and fork.
  George: (relieved) Phew. Well, better than nothing. Well, goodnight!
  (Monster happily waves "goodnight" to George)
• The Justice League episode "Only a Dream":
  • We never see exactly what Dr. Destiny did to his ex-wife. We do know, however, that she died without ever waking up.
    Dr. Destiny: And now that I'm a doctor, I think I'll perform some surgery.
  • Then there's the rather chilling scene end, with Dee himself lying on his cot with his eyes wide open, mumbling the tune to "Frère Jacques" to himself. One can only imagine what he's seeing.
• The Looney Tunes short "Scaredy Cat" features Porky Pig and Sylvester moving into a creepy old mansion that's inhabited by homicidal mice who try to kill them in typical cartoon fashion (Death Traps that always miss the mark, anvils, etc). But at one point, the comical elements stop when Sylvester sleeps in a hamper, which is silently lowered into the floor. Three hours later, Sylvester is sent back up, white as a ghost, and so traumatized that he can barely walk. We never find out what the mice did to him.
• In The Magic Roundabout, as Dougal tells Zebedee about the events of the night before, we are treated to a flashback in which Dougal wakes up and wanders around in the middle of the night and we hear the piercing sound of a cat shrieking, then we hear a sinister female voice singing "Blue is beautiful, blue is best." Nothing happens to Dougal and for now we don't see the source of either of them, but the atmosphere is chilling.
• My Friends Tigger & Pooh: In "Pooh, Light Up My Life," Lumpy thinks that he saw gobloons in the wood. Pooh points out that gobloons are never actually seen. Roo says that this is what makes them so scary.
• The Season 5 finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, "The Cutie Re-Mark" uses this. Starlight Glimmer tries to take her revenge on Twilight by traveling back to Rainbow Dash's first Sonic Rainboom in order to prevent the Mane Six from meeting, causing a Bad Future since the Mane Six weren't around to save Equestria. Each time Twilight fails to stop Starlight, the future gets worse and worse. Eventually, when Twilight takes Starlight to see the Bad Future for herself, the only thing there is a barren wasteland, devoid of anything but rocks and dead trees. They never elaborate on how this could have happened, and it's implied that if Starlight continued to change the past, then there would be something even worse.
  • A fourth-season episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic ends with this. The entire episode has five of the Mane Six dealing with the notion that there is a Pony of Shadows haunting the Castle of the Two Sisters, but when they find a dark figure playing an organ, it turns out to be a cloaked Pinkie Pie. At the very end, Spike dismisses the idea of a pony of shadows as silly, but we see a long shadow stretch across the library next door. Upon push-in, yellow glowing eyes open. And they don't look too inviting...
• There's a very creepy episode of Samurai Jack, called "Jack And The Zombies". No prizes for guessing his opponents in this one. However, it begins with him walking into a graveyard, and it is dead silent. Except for children's laughter... and a man's evil cackling... and scraping, rattling noises. It's very, very effective.
  • Throw in B.J. Ward in a brief taunting scene doing her best Witch Hagar voice. Jack never actually gets to fight her—she just states their boasting goal and leaves.
  • The ending of "The Princess and the Bounty Hunters" uses this in an unusual Villain Protagonist variation. Two-thirds of the episode is the titular bounty hunters setting up their plan to capture Jack. The climax of the episode features a full agonizingly suspenseful minute of nothing but silence, birdsong, and cuts between the wind blowing through the trees, birds sitting in the branches, and a drop of water falling from an icicle as the bounty hunters wait for Jack to appear.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: In episode 26, Professor Pericles confronts Ed Machine, telling him he wants him to deliver a message to Mr. E... before Pericles admits that he doesn't actually intend to say anything, resulting in a Scream Discretion Shot with the sound of wings flapping. It's never revealed exactly what happened, but Word of God confirms that Pericles did indeed kill Ed Machine.
• In the animated Sesame Street special The Monster At the End of This Story, Grover admits that the real reason he's scared is because he doesn't know anything about the monster at the end of the story and not knowing is very scary to him. His friends all agree to meet him at the end and that way he'll have friends around to be there when he meets the monster. Of course, as readers of the original book already know, Grover is the monster at the end.
• Parodied in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. Lisa reads Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, causing Bart to comment, "You know what would be scarier than nothing? ANYTHING!" Lisa defends it by saying people must have just been easier to scare back then, even though finding nobody outside your room when something just knocked on the door would be pretty spooky. Homer, however, is terrified.
• Soundwave from Transformers: Prime makes heavy use of this trope. Even in situations where you think he'll do something, he's usually content to just stand there and stare directly at the object of his ire (or the camera), boring into their sparks with his blank void of a faceplate, punctuating it with an occasional menacing gesture or two. Otherwise, he mostly just lurks in the background, ever watching, ever waiting...
• Teen Titans: None of the villains in the series have pasts or backstories that are explored in any meaningful depth, but minor villain Kardiak is out and away the only one who qualifies for this trope. Kardiak is a giant floating thing that resembles a human heart, complete with metallic tentacles for cardiovascular tubes, and that is all anybody knows about it. We don't know who made it, we don't know if it's fully robotic or some kind of cyborg (and if it's the latter, then why in God's name is it just a giant heart?), we don't even know if Kardiak is fully sapient. And to hammer the creepiness home, its first appearance had it try to kidnap children.
  • The episode Haunted ends with a creepy and unsettling unanswered question. The mask containing the hallucinogenic dust didn’t trigger itself. Someone outside the tower activated it. We never find out who did it.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) has an example in the one-shot villain, the Robbing Leech, who uses his Lamprey Mouth to drain a person's memories, allowing him to use that information to steal their valuables. What makes him so creepy is how little we know about him. While most of the villains in the show have at least some semblance of a backstory, he doesn't. There's little to no information on who he is, how he got his powers, or for that matter if he's even human. He's more or less just there.
• Used to a truly terrifying degree in the animated film Superman: Doomsday. The cloned Superman, who is in full Knight Templar mode, has just rescued an elderly woman's Persian cat from a tree, then goes on to give an eerily calm speech on how it annoys him that people don't take responsibility for the small things as it keeps him from focusing on real emergencies. Adam Baldwin's chilling voice acting truly sells the scene. Throughout his speech, you're on the edge of your seat wondering if he's gonna kill the cat, kill the old lady, or kill them both.
  Superman: Now you know, Persian longhairs really shouldn't be outdoors. ...It really irks me when folks don't take responsibility for the little things. Don't get me wrong—I'm here to help. But every time I have to stop and sweat the small stuff, it potentially keeps me from attending to more urgent matters. Life-threatening matters. You may wanna think about that next time you leave the screen door open.
• Done to chillingly spectacular effect in Star Wars: Clone Wars with the introduction of General Grievous. Ki-Adi Mundi and a team of heavily wounded Jedi are trapped in a crashed Star Destroyer with a massive army of super battle droids closing in...when suddenly the entire army stops in midstride as a skeletal white figure holds up its hand to halt, before a disembodied voice tells the trapped Jedi that he's going to kill them all. For the next minute and a half, we get nothing but the ominous whirring of Grievous' mechanical footsteps stalking them through the building as the increasingly panicked Jedi (Jedi!) try and fail to maintain their composure. Not only is the buildup incredible, the payoff more than justifies it when Grievous drops from the ceiling and proceeds to slaughter half a dozen Jedi without breaking a sweat.
• This is used surprisingly well in an episode of Postman Pat. When Pat arrives at Garner Hall to deliver a package to Major Forbes, he knocks on the door to find that it's open, he calls to see if anyone's home. No reply. He leaves the package on the hall table, ^note This would turn out to be Pat's sandwiches, and he had the Major's parcel the whole time. and when he turns to leave he hears a noise. He boils it down to just imagining things and leaves. When he returns later, he learns that there was a robbery, the Major's collection of toy soldiers gone. We never see the robbers nor find out whether they were dangerous or not, but the idea that Postman Pat was probably this close to being attacked by some desperate villains is very unnerving.
• Used in-universe in the Doug episode "Doug's Nightmare on Jumbo Street". Doug watches "The Abnormal", a horror movie about a shape-shifting monster whose true form is just off-screen for most of the movie. It works so well Doug can't bring himself to look during The Reveal, and he ends up having nightmares about it. Doug eventually works up the nerve to see the movie one last time and get a good look at the monster, and it turns out to be a guy in an ugly costume with a zipper on the back.
• In the early parts of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, we see a peaceful scene with Rudolph's father teaching him the ways of the reindeer. Then suddenly, the father looks up in horror at a horrific roar, and quickly hides himself and his son under a snow bank. The music gets very dark, and we see two giant, furry legs walk by accompanied by more ferocious roaring. The narrator explains that it's the Abominable Snow Monster of the North, a gigantic monster who eats reindeer, threatens the entire North Pole, and hates Christmas. We don't see the thing until halfway through the special, but the ominous specter of the beast looms over the special until his first appearance. Even then, it's led up by Rudolph and Hermie struggling through a dark, stormy night and then hearing the distant roars of the beast. Once we see the whole thing, though, it's not as scary. Though there is a scary moment where Rudolph is journeying back towards the North Pole, and we hear the beast roar again as he approaches where it's inevitably waiting.
• Used to brilliant effect in Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show. The series proper is famous for its unique, zany sound effects and bombastic music... and so the movie begins with nearly two minutes of dead silence, with not a soul in sight. Even before the sudden Wham Shot of the aftermath of a scam Gone Horribly Wrong, it's crystal clear that something seriously bad has happened. The worst part is that the audience never learns exactly what happened, just that the end result was catastrophic even by the Eds' usual standards, and the cul-de-sac kids are enraged far beyond just wanting to hurt the Eds - they legitimately want them dead. It's essentially O.O.C. Is Serious Business, except the very world itself is what's OOC in this case, with the effect being that the viewer is left wondering throughout the film, "What the hell happened?".
• A classic example can be found in Jonny Quest's The Invisible Monster: during the first half of the ep. all you see is the thing leaving a trail of destruction through the forest, and the effect is absolutely horrifying. But once the protagonists manage to douse it in paint to make it visible, it looks more pathetic than scary.

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