Sinister Nudity

Tomie, could you put some clothes on? It was fun to begin with, but now you're starting to creep people ou— oh sweet Jesus.

In fiction, nudity is often used to titillate or amuse audiences. However, just as often, it can be used to color perceptions of a character for sinister ends.

When a frightening or villainous character is shown to prefer nudity as a state of being or use it in pivotal scenes, it could be to demonstrate the character's separation from society at large by way of embracing taboos or rejecting convention. It could show the character's lack of shame or empathy, in that they don't care what people think enough to wear clothes. Or it could just be a way to make them creepier for its own sake.

This is often played for Fan Disservice, as the unnerving nature of the character deliberately undermines any potential for titillation. For good measure, actually showing genitals or attributes is entirely optional, especially in the case of more openly inhuman characters. In horror, this can be paired with Psychosexual Horror.

In the case of mentally ill villains, this can be combined with the Naked Nutter (and it often overlaps due to Ax-Crazy); in the case of characters who were once human, this will overlap with Posthuman Nudism... and in combat, this will frequently be used in conjunction with a Full-Frontal Assault.

Compare any of the tropes in the index for sexualized villains, especially Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains, where the villain's skimpiness or nudity is supposed to be both sinister and titillating.

No Real Life Examples, Please!. In the real world, nudity is not an objective sign of villainy or horror, and any cultural perspectives on such things usually belong under the "Myths & Religion" folder anyway.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Akame ga Kill!: After Cosmina gets shot through the chest, Dorthea strips her down nude and eventually mutates her into a more hideous man-eating beast that heals itself.
• Berserk: The nameless female apostle from the first official issue has visibly no form of clothing, having discarded it following her transcendence from her original human self. However, she is far from a pleasant individual as she only poses as a nude woman to bait men into becoming her feast.
• Birdy the Mighty II: Lee Shanfa is often seen nude while fighting. One of her goals was trying to force Chigira into a monstrous transformation by any evil method whether it be strangling him or threatening the lives of the household he resides in.
• Engage Kiss: Asmodeus takes on the form of Shu's mother with no inch of clothing worn and is out to bring forth the apocalypse.
• Gate: In the anime adaptation, Prince Zorzal is introduced naked and in the act of raping Tyule, an act he continues even as a Senator tries to talk to him.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stardust Crusaders: In the Judgement arc, the seemingly revived Sherry ends up becoming an example of this once her Body Horror as a flesh-eating zombie is revealed: she's completely naked aside from Barbie Doll Anatomy and some Godiva Hair.
  • Diamond is Unbreakable: After realizing Hayato knows his true identity, Yoshikage Kira steps into the shower the same time as Hayato, fully naked as he secretly tries to murder him.
• In Make the Exorcist Fall in Love, Asmodeus, Demon Lord of Lust, makes no attempt to hide her monstrous nature and is the only one of the Demon Lords to constantly be in the nude. She's introduced using her powers as The Pornomancer to brainwash dozens of women into trying to rape Father, a 12-year-old child at the time, with no regard for his actual consent. While Father manages to compose himself by tearing out his own eye in penance, the event leaves him with a Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality.
• Tomie: Tomie herself shows up nude from time to time, but she proves herself much too deplorable for anyone to appreciate her nudity; such instances demonstrating this usually involve making men into murderers or committing suicide. She even has them kill her to have more bodies to use.

Art

• The Seven Deadly Sins (Dix): The embodiment of the capital sin Lust is presented as a prostitute liberally showing her breasts as if tempting the audience. However, she wears a creepy, depraved expression and is ugly. She's an allegory for how pre-war Nazi Germany would sell its decency to get more power.

Comic Books

• Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth:
  • Clayface is always naked, horribly emaciated, and compelled to spread his "disease", being essentially the Preston Payne incarnation of Clayface minus his usual protective exoskeleton. The sight of him advancing down the corridor and stripping the paint from the wall by touch alone is so horrific that even Batman is noticeably scared.
  • Maxie Zeus is encountered as a Naked Nutter bathed in electric-blue light, genitals in shadow, as he electrocutes a guard that he's been keeping hostage. For added horror and disgust, it's implied that the reason why he's nude is that the constant ECT has caused him to lose control of his bowels... and he's also collected his feces in an oak barrel and tries to offer it to Batman as a divine gift. Once again, Batman decides he'd rather not deal with any of this and hightails it out of there.
• Girls: The titular characters are aliens who are constantly naked, reproduce by laying eggs, and reach maturation quickly. They're also not bound by any human morality and are quite lethal.
• Hellboy: The Queen of Blood is introduced climbing out of the box where her dismembered body was stored, nude and dripping with blood. She later wears an open cloak which never really hides the fact that she isn't wearing anything else. All in all, her nudity appears creepy and inhuman rather than appealing.
• The Sandman (1989): Despair of the Endless is always naked, and often appears in a semi-villainous role alongside her sibling Desire; for good measure, she's often depicted as a short, pale, obese, and horribly troll-like figure.
• Stormwatch: Father, the first villain of Warren Ellis's run, is a mass-murdering Implacable Man, a Straw Nihilist with no flesh on his face who quotes Nietzsche while killing people. He's also an invulnerable Artificial Human — he doesn't need clothes and isn't at all interested in wearing them.
• Supergod:
  • One of the covers features one of the eponymous man-made deities — a naked humanoid entity with wings made of countless severed human hands — kneeling over a screaming scientist in a scene deliberately played for horror.
  • The Iraqi supergod, Malak al-Maut, is a glowing, perpetually-nude being, albeit with no genitals... and just to make him even creepier, he ends up driving his creators to suicidal insanity and destroying most of Tehran in his escape from the lab.
  • Maitreya, the Chinese supergod, is similarly always naked — and unlike many of the other deities, he wasn't manufactured from scratch but Was Once a Man. As such, it's made abundantly clear that he's still anatomically correct, though his groin is kept in shadow... and he's also one of the most disturbingly organic of the gods, using his powers of biomanipulation for numerous displays of Body Horror.

Fan Works

• The Mountain and the Wolf: One Chaos warrior named Kruissla Iron-skin is always naked, his name comes from the fact that his skin is so thoroughly pierced with tiny iron barbs in the shape of Slaanesh's symbol (including his nether regions) that from a distance he seems to be wearing armor. According to the Wolf, there's one for every kill he made (not necessarily against a Worthy Opponent either).
• Star-Crossed Crusaders: The 7th Stand User: During the final battle against Vins, she resurfaces from getting buried by a bookshelf while she was on fire, blocking the path of the heroes trying to escape. She's naked as a result of the flames burning her robes, and it's played for intimidation given the Victory Fakeout, all the burns on her body, and that she's dead set on killing Hitomi, Alicia, and Berlin. How she's able to withstand all that is because she's a vampire.

Films — Animation

• Fantasia: Among the various demons that Chernabog summons to serve him during "Night on Bald Mountain" include harpies, which are all topless and can be seen tossing damned souls into the flames.
• Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas: One of the hazards that Sinbad and crew must face is the Dragon's Teeth: a region of jagged rocks where numerous ships have crashed and lay derelict and rotting. Not helping are some naiads, essentially nude mermaids made of seawater that lull the men aboard Sinbad's ship into a stupor. Any crew that pays no attention to steering the ship is bound to smash into the jagged rocks, where the naiads can claim the booty with ease.

Films — Live-Action

• American Psycho: Patrick Bateman is very prone to going around his apartment in various stages of undress, usually while contemplating horrible things. Over time, these scenes become progressively less alluring and more unsettling as Bateman's Mask of Sanity slips further — until he finally ends up pursuing one of his victims through the apartment with only a pair of sneakers and a strategically placed chainsaw between him and total nudity. He's also partially covered in blood because he killed another victim just moments before.
• Barbarian: The Mother is a feral, deformed, woman conceived from Villainous Incest. She brutally murders Keith and then kidnaps Tess and AJ. She is also completely nude throughout her entire screentime.
• The Descent: The Crawlers infesting the caverns are always naked, in keeping with their primal, animalistic natures, serving as a disturbing contrast between the fully clothed spelunkers they're trying to kill. For good measure, the nudity makes it immediately clear when a female of the species has shown up — right before she goes Mama Bear on Sarah for killing her child.
• Die Hard 2: William Sadler's character, Col. Stuart, is introduced to the audience doing naked Tai Chi in his hotel room, looking as lean and mean as the T-1000 (whose actor, incidentally, had a bit part in the film). The only thing Stuart is wearing is a gold watch, which at one point just happens to block the dictator's face on the TV screen in front of him, foreshadowing the financial connection between them.
• Event Horizon:
  • Dr Weir is continuously haunted by malevolent hallucinations of his dead wife, Claire, and in all of her appearances on camera, she's completely naked save for a thong, but without the bra... because she killed herself in the bath. As such, her scenes are played for horror and tragedy rather than titillation, especially when her eyes snap open to reveal empty sockets. For good measure, she also turns out to be conjured up by the ship to drive Dr Weir insane; her final scene features her gouging Weir's eyes out with her fingers.
  • In the finale fresh from being flung out into space, Dr Weir is "brought back" by the ship, albeit stark naked, bald, and covered in bloody runes. He shows no interest in getting dressed, preferring to torture Captain Miller with his newfound powers.
• The Faculty: The first pod person and originator Marybeth is completely naked when she switches between her alien form and human form, and she stays naked for the rest of the scene when she's trying to convince the characters to join her.
• In Forbidden Zone, the evil Princess serves as a Torture Technician for her mother and spends most of the movie haughtily strutting around in little more than panties and stockings.
• Gamer: Ken Castle enters the rogue killer Hackman into the Slayers game to take down Kable. In prison, Hackman introduces himself to Kable in the locker room naked, covered in blood from a fellow inmate he Killed Offscreen.
• The Human Centipede: Soon after sewing three victims together into the titular "centipede", the Mad Doctor Heiter goes Skinny Dipping in front of them. It's a sign that he no longer sees them as people but as his pet. (No, not pets.)
• It: Chapter Two: When Mrs. Kersh reveals herself to be another form of It, she strips nude and chases after Beverly as a hideously distorted version of herself.
• It Follows: though the title monster is invisible to everyone except the target(s) of its pursuit, it's often perceived as an either partially or completely naked human being. On one occasion, its target was able to see it standing totally naked on the roof of a house.
• Lifeforce (1985): The space vampires tend to run around completely naked (except for while they're possessing other people)... and considering that they can consume the life force of human beings by touch and reduce their victims to zombies in the process, it's best to run away rather than ogle them.
• The Lord of the Rings: Sméagol started out as a fully clothed hobbit, but as he got corrupted by the Ring, losing his sanity and turning into Gollum, he stopped wearing clothes apart from a tiny Loincloth that is just enough to cover the essentials.
• The Pale Man of Pan's Labyrinth is a perpetually naked Monstrous Humanoid responsible for the murders of many, many children... though thanks to his advanced age and emaciation, his genitals are hidden beneath a layer of loose skin.
• In Red Dragon, vicious serial killer and rapist Francis Dolarhyde is often seen nude around his house... and at the houses of his victims. This tendency reaches its logical conclusion when he kidnaps Freddy Lounds as punishment for badmouthing him in the tabloid press: as part of Dolarhyde's grand reveal of his "Red Dragon" persona, he strips naked to reveal the tattoo of William Blake's The Great Red Dragon And The Woman Clothed With The Sun on his back... and by flexing his back muscles, he makes it look as if the dragon is alive. This incident ends with Dolarhyde biting off Freddy's lips and setting him on fire.
• The Shining: Jack Torrance is drawn to room 237, which Halloran specifically warned Danny to never enter due to it being a focal point for the Overlook's evil. Inside, he watches as a beautiful naked woman steps out of the bathtub, approaches him, and starts to kiss him. However, when he looks in a mirror, he sees that she's actually ancient, visibly rotted, and looks like she was drowned. He screams and stumbles away from her, and she approaches him again, smiling and with her arms outstretched, her nakedness now disgusting and terrifying instead of sultry. This imagery carries into Doctor Sleep, as both Danny and Abra see her in her naked corpse form whenever she shows up.
• In The Silence of the Lambs, one of Buffalo Bill's most unsettling scenes features him casually sewing his "woman suit" while completely naked, idly humming along with music on the radio and completely ignoring the screams of his newly captured victim at the bottom of the well behind him.
• In Species when the human-alien hybrid metamorphoses into her adult form, she takes on the appearance of an attractive nude woman. When she gets a hold of some clothes, she uses her disguise to infiltrate the local community in order to mate and propagate her kind.
• Starry Eyes concludes with Sarah accepting the producer's Deal with the Devil and being reborn as a beautiful, naked, succubus-like superbeing. She remains nude for most of the finale, but it's played for horror rather than titillation, for Sarah has clearly had the last of her humanity driven out of her — a fact she proves by using her newfound powers to deliver a Kiss of Death to Tracy while still completely naked.
• Terminator:
  • The Terminator first introduces the detail that time-travelers have to make the journey to the past completely naked. As such, the heroic Kyle Reese has his humanity emphasized by his hurry to find clothes as soon as he arrives, while the Terminator's inhuman nature is brought home not just by his gigantic musculature, but by his robotic lack of shame over arriving nude and his willingness to murder two people while still in the buff.
  • Played with in Terminator 2: Judgment Day: the T-800 arrives naked and is casual about it as ever, but he's the hero this time around, so the ominous Terminator theme quickly gives way to country music as he obtains clothes from a biker bar without actually killing anyone. The T-1000, on the other hand, is played for definite menace by suddenly appearing out of nowhere and assaulting an unsuspecting police officer while still naked, the camera taking pains to emphasize his slim, athletic build in contrast to the T-800.
  • Also played with in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: the heroic T-850 has his nude arrival played for laughs since he has to mug a male stripper for clothes, while the T-X appears distinctly off-putting while wandering naked down the street and murdering a motorist for her clothes.
• The VVitch:
  • When she isn't shapeshifting or hidden by illusions, the eponymous Witch is always encountered stark-naked in her ancient true form... and these face-to-face encounters number among the most openly horrific in the film, usually ending with someone being murdered or worse — as is the case with Samuel, Caleb, and the twins.
  • At the end of the film, after losing her entire family, giving in to despair, and writing her name in Black Phillip's book, Thomasin strips nude and wanders off into the forest, where she joins an entire coven of witches — all of them naked and chanting nightmarishly.

Literature

• Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigation: In The Stinger for episode 10, we see Minami in the shower, crouched down, her arms wrapped around herself. She has a flashback to meeting Hanabusa, and then we're shown a shot of her back, which has a scar in the shape of a butterfly that Hanabusa carved into the girl. This is the first bit of Foreshadowing that Minami is still in the thrall of Hanabusa, especially since butterflies represent death in the symbolism of the show.
• "The Chadbourne Episode": Ghouls prefer to go nude, but will wear clothes to go undetected among humans. The chauffeur's wife likely wears clothes when she abducts Truman Curtiss but all other times she doesn't. Her children don't wear clothes either. The chauffeur himself wears clothes while working for the Rustum Dadhs, but goes naked when his family moves to the Merritt Family tomb. Canevin encounters him at the cemetery wearing only a coat and trousers that he evidently slapped on in a hurry.
• Codex Alera: The more advanced Awakened Vord Queens resemble naked women wearing only capes. Far from being sexy, they're quite eerie.
• The Dinosaur Lords:
  • When Melodia encounters the Angelic Abomination worshiped by the Garden, the fact that everyone involved is naked (and the Angel's skin looks diseased) only increases the horror.
  • The people of Paradise have a more relaxed approach to nudity (loincloths and feather boas are a perfectly acceptable court dress, though some would prefer that the old and decrepit cover up more), so full public nudity is used by some people with a point to make to emphasize their earnestness.
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: ghouls, including those who used to be human, like Pickman, do not wear clothing. The "sinister" part is downplayed, since despite their unpleasant dietary habits and sanity-roll inducing appearance, ghouls are friendly and helpful to Carter.
• In E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Golden Pot", the climax of the book involves the villainess, an old hag, throwing off her clothes, leaving herself "in hideous nakedness", and fashioning a garment out of the pages of her foe's library.
• In The Magicians trilogy, magicians who botch especially powerful spells are consumed by their own power and transformed into deranged, psychopathic beings of pure magic. In keeping with their total disconnection from humanity, they're always completely naked... and given that they appear to be made of blue flame and gleefully ready to kill anything they meet, the effect is intended to be more unearthly and frightening than sexy.
• Modern Faerie Tales: In Ironside, when Ethine is being held captive at Corny's house. Corny passes out pajamas to her and Luis and she changes into hers right in front of the two guys, making them uncomfortable. This is part of a sequence that emphasizes her creepy faerie nature.
  ... [Corny] froze as Ethine stripped off her dress with complete nonchalance. The blades of her shoulders were covered with what looked like the buds of wings, pink against the handkerchief white of her skin. As she slid his boxers up her thin legs, she looked over at him and her eyes were chilling in their emptiness.
• Nightside: The Eldritch Abomination Lilith manifests as a navel-less nude woman in shades of grey. The body is nothing more than a concession to the physical world she's invading, and she's both Nigh-Invulnerable and indifferent to human mores, so clothes aren't a priority.
• The Terror: Mr Hickey is found dancing naked in the Arctic wasteland. At first, this scene is played for dark laughs, as Lt Irving believes that he's succumbed to Polar Madness. However, it's soon revealed that Hickey is naked because he wants to murder Irving without getting blood on his clothes, and he's dancing so he can keep warm until Irving gets close enough for the killing blow. Once this becomes clear, naked Hickey is described in almost inhuman terms, being more like a malevolent goblin than a human.
• The Troop: In the finale, Shelley is infested by the parasites and swiftly reduced to Nothing but Skin and Bones by the Devourer Worms. When Max and Newt are lured down to the basement to retrieve the boat's sparkplugs from him, Shelley has stripped naked to wait for them with the intent of eating them alive and is described in absolutely nightmarish terms.
• Sword Art Online: Combined with Posthuman Nudism in the case of Big Bad Quinella, who dispels her dress during her villainous apotheosis and remains nude throughout the final battle except for some Godiva Hair. After Kirito chops off both her arms, she tries to strangle him to death with said hair, by the way.

Live-Action TV

• Atlanta: When Darius explains to Earn about the chaotic figure called "Florida Man," we see several of his supposed exploits; the last is Florida Man eating another man's face while nude.
• Dateline: At least two predators have stripped down, thinking they're about to get nasty with an underage minor. Then Chris Hansen appears, and begins an interview with these guys, trying to fathom what makes them amoral and perverse.
• Dexter: In the Trinity Killer's first appearance, he runs a bath, takes his clothes off... and lies in wait for the actual owner of the house, whom he drags into the bathtub with him and exsanguinates.
• Game of Thrones: The Red Priestess Melisandre has very little shame or hesitation in getting naked, and most of her nude scenes tend to be portrayed as unnerving if not outright horrific: she strips down to give birth to a Living Shadow assassin, lay a Honey Trap to trick Gendry into a Blood Magic ritual, and reveal that she's an ancient crone who sustains her youth with a magic amulet.
• One of the first clues given that Nicky Whelan's surrogate mother character in Inconceivable is not the sweet innocent she makes herself out to be is when she takes a topless swim in her host family's pool at night.
• Justified: Quarles strips naked to torture Donovan in Season 3. It's not clear if it's because there's going to be a sexual component or "just" to avoid getting blood on his clothes.
• Discussed to a worrying degree on Mock the Week when legal restrictions on defending a home against intruders were under discussion. Certain panel members decided the best way to confront a burglar was naked, and... a little too happy to see them. Specifically, with an erection at half-mast. Not a full erection: that was deemed "too weird."
• Smallville: Lex Luthor finds obsessive college student Samantha Drake in his home, and she drops her robe to seduce him, naked underneath. While she's very attractive, he's disturbed that she shaved her head to look like him (and even more disturbed to learn she plans to assassinate his political opponent).

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: In one instance Khan Malvina Hazen stripped naked on a planet wide broadcast. She then cuts her arms, and covers herself on her own blood. This is her way of saying that she will bathe on the blood of her enemies, and Malvina is by far one of the most cruel and unhinged Clan characters to date. Which is saying a lot in the setting where at least one such character is bound to show up once or twice every hundred years.
• Mage: The Ascension: In the Infernalism sourcebook, many images feature Dark Age-era Nephandi characters naked, usually in contexts designed to make them appear otherworldly and threatening. One of the character templates, the Wildling, is depicted as such, though her breasts and crotch are hidden by her Primal Stance. At first, she looks surprisingly normal considering she's a Wild Child all grown up, but the hate-crazed snarl on her face immediately subtracts any potential for titillation. For good measure, the character notes make it clear that she's in the habit of Hunting the Most Dangerous Game while in other forms and using her magical control over animals to force wild beasts to have sex with her, so the nudity is a very bad sign.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • In the Bygone Bestiary sourcebook, a few of the more humanoid entities in the book are depicted nude in order to make them seem more upsetting. The Ghul, for example, is portrayed naked in its Shapeshifter Default Form, both so that the reader can clearly see its telltale hooves and to emphasize the fact that the Ghul can also be a sexual horror to its victims once it's finished killing and eating them. Thankfully, the depicted specimen's groin is hidden both by a Censor Shadow and its own immensely thick lower body hair.
  • The Midnight Circus adventure "The Wasteland" features a charming image of two horribly emaciated-looking women, completely naked and with their backs to the reader: one of them is eating a live spider, and the other is clutching a plank with a few nails driven to it. The text soon reveals that these are the Rampall Sisters, two Hollow Men formori working for the Malfean Nephandi Rod Lightner in his dealings with the Circus. For added horror, they're described as looking attractive from a distance, up until you notice the withered builds, the decomposing skin, the bite marks from autocannibalism, and the spiders crawling out of their bodies...
• Vampire: The Masquerade:
  • Ur-Shulgi of the Banu Haqim is a terrifyingly powerful Methuselah of the Clan who likes to emphasize just how inhuman he's become over the course of his millennia-long unlife by refusing to wear clothes except on special occasions. For added horror and revulsion, ur-Shulgi is an eyeless Undead Child Covered with Scars.
  • The Baali Clanbook kicks off with a Baalite child vampire brutally torturing a Pedophile Priest he hopes to recruit, beginning with an Orifice Invasion of live maggots and rapidly escalating to Body Horror. In both the narration and the accompanying images, the kid is completely naked (groin out of view, thankfully) and covered in scuttling insects that routinely crawl in and out of the boy's orifices.
    • In the same Clanbook, Baalite vampires from various points in their history are occasionally depicted nude in the accompanying images, usually while committing atrocities and made to seem as inhuman as possible.
  • In keeping with the Gangrel Clan's image as animalistic and borderline-Feral Vampires, their revised Clanbook features several images of them naked, usually while caught in the act of fighting, feeding, or just looking really creepy. One of the most notable is an image of the clan's Antediluvian, Ennoia: she's nude except for a few vague Censor Shadows around her breasts and groin, and of all the disrobed Gangrel in the book, she at first appears to be the most human... except for the fact that she's flanked by two huge wolves and her face is so hidden by shadows that it appears almost featureless, making her come across as a Humanoid Abomination — which she is.
  • In the revised Lasombra Clanbook, the character template "Angry Young Man" ^note also the book's viewpoint character, Andrew Emory is depicted naked except for the mass of Living Shadows pooling around his groin; as a dedicated member of the Sabbat, his nudity is meant to demonstrate his increasing distance from humanity.
  • Tzimisce are not above casual nudity, in keeping with their nature as terrifying vampiric posthumans. As such, their Revised Clanbook features an image of a lone Tzimisce wading through the mud of a WWI-era battlefield, surrounded by corpses, completely naked except for a few shadows... and looking right at the reader.
• Warhammer 40,000: Daemonettes are minor daemons of the Chaos god Slaanesh, which embodies excess of sensation in all its forms. They represent the most openly and bizarrely erotic aspects of Slaanesh's nature and are usually depicted as Humanoid Abominations that mix an alluring and beautiful female form with horrific features such as inhuman limbs, spikes/tentacles in place of hair, fangs, and long alien tongues. They are also typically depicted as wearing little to no clothing, which both enhances their strange seductiveness and makes the contrast between their human and daemonic features even more stark.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse:
  • Book Of The Wyrm features quite a few images of Wyrm-affiliated individuals naked, all of them designed to look as monstrous as possible. One early example features a female Black Spiral Dancer caught in the act of transforming into her Crinos form; she's naked, crawling on the ground with breasts out of view, and sporting an absolutely deranged look on her partially transformed face.
  • Lady Yul, the Maeljin Incarna of Toxins, continuously grows pregnant and births monstrous toxic entities; as such, in Book Of The Wyrm, she's depicted naked and heavily pregnant. Also, she's up to her waist in filth, splattered with blood, wearing an absolutely repulsive-looking grin, and sporting a tiny handprint pressing against her belly from the inside.
  • Freak Legion features several fomori depicted in various stages of undress, and given that their Bane-possessed bodies are often hideously disfigured, the results are commonly played for horror and disgust:
    • One image displays a completely naked woman who might look alluring if not for the cancerous growths covering her body, the drool pouring down her lower lip, and the expression of pure hatred on her face.
    • The accompanying image for the "Second Head" Taint features a scantily clad woman opening her bodice to reveal a monstrous face growing out of her right breast. Incidentally, said face is depicted in the act of licking another female fomori (who is clearly not into it).
    • The "Fomori Families" entry has a charming shot of two members of the aforementioned Wyrm-tainted clans: both are more reptilian than human, complete with lamplike eyes and lipless grins, and they're both naked (one with her back to the reader, the other with his genitals hidden by his crooked legs). Also, the female of the two appears to be pregnant and is sitting on a human corpse in a rather... suggestive pose.
    • Normalites are always depicted as naked and more akin to hunting hounds than human beings, having been driven to all-consuming hatred as a result of Pentex's Bane-tainted "cure" for homosexuality.
  • The image for Howling Shamblers (Bane-possessed Garou who linger on after death) features one of the dead ones caught in the act of taking a bite out of the unlucky victim. The Shambler is naked, oozing with decomposition, and the victim has hacked off her arm and head — but that hasn't stopped the now-severed head from remaining latched onto the victim's thigh.
  • Rage Across Appalachia features an image of a naked, heavily muscled man apparently meditating in the Lotus Position, feet crossed over his groin... and a gigantic tentacled Wyrm-affiliated Eldritch Abomination hovering above him.

Video Games

• Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain: When Kain faces off against Dejoule during her boss fight, she casts aside her cloak which reveals her buck-naked body as she attempts to kill him.
• The Succubus of Castlevania is a common enemy that first appeared in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as a minor villain and boss out to feed on Alucard's life-force in his nightmares. She's commonly depicted as an Evil Redhead with demon wings and an Impossible Hourglass Figure, dressed in long silk gloves, a topless corset, silk stocking, and nothing else, leaving her crotch on full display shown to their victims. ^note  Of course this got changed in some artworks and figures, especially in their 3D pachinko versions and some merchandising Though this is sometimes played for titillation, in the original, it was more played for horror thanks to the nightmare in which the battle was set and the Succubi's gleefully predatory behavior around Alucard.
• Dante's Inferno:
  • Lucifer commonly appears as a bald, naked, spindly wraith made of black smoke (though no genitals can be seen through the fog).
  • Temptresses, the demons of Lust, are naked except for a vague skirt around their waists. They also sport massive wounds running from their stomachs down to crotch level; as their introduction demonstrates, this wound occasionally splits open to reveal a huge, suspiciously phallic stinger.
  • Cleopatra, the boss of the Lust Circle, is also topless — on top of being a giant purple demoness with Unbaptized Infants crawling out of her nipples.
  • The Gluttons are all naked — but are so morbidly obese and filthy that it's impossible to see any genitalia. For added revulsion, they also sport mouths instead of hands and More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
  • In the finale, when Lucifer is able to manifest a physical form no longer bound by Cocytus, he takes on the appearance of a typical devil complete with goat's legs and hooves... and no clothes, so his big floppy penis is on full display.
• Dead or Alive 4 introduces Alpha-152, a stark naked Energy Being cloned from Kasumi and created to exterminate all that cross paths with her.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Broodmothers are completely naked with their multiple breasts on full display, and as that they're monstrous tentacled baby factories who will send their Darkspawn children to kill you on sight, it's very much played for horror. The fact that the one you meet used to be a Dwarf woman by the name of Laryn before she was captured and brutally converted by the Darkspawn only adds to the nightmare fuel.
    • Subverted in the case of the Lady of the Forest: a mysterious spirit taking the form of an unearthly woman with Black Eyes of Evil, she always appears naked except for Godiva Hair, and given that she's the leader of the werewolves currently preying the Dalish elves, she definitely seems dark, unearthly, and suspicious. However, it turns out that she's actually a benevolent entity who honestly wants a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Dalish.
  • Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening: The Big Bad of the story is the Mother, another Broodmother this one a former human. Like all Broodmothers, she's stark naked, and on top of being a Naked Nutter, she's the most aggressive of the intelligent Darkspawn loose in Amaranthine.
• Diablo: The Succubi are female demons who lure men to their deaths and are consistently portrayed as being beautiful and well-endowed, but how much skin they show depends on the game. In the original game and Diablo III their breasts are exposed, although sometimes in III they wear metal nipple covers connected by a chain. In the original Diablo II, their breasts and privates are covered but their butts are exposed, but in Diablo II Resurrected, they now wear midriff-baring clothes. In Diablo IV, their clothes only show some cleavage.
• Doom puts clothes on lower-tier formerly-human hitscan enemies, namely the zombie riflemen, shotgun sergeants, and hefty chaingunners. The hellspawn, however, from imps up to and including the cyberdemon, go about unclothed as they launch fireballs and rockets at the player. Only the revenants have tattered clothes, while even the vaguely humanoid archviles traipse about naked.
• Elden Ring: The superboss Malenia enters battle wearing a simple light armor set that appears entirely too modest for someone of her reputation, but when her first phase is defeated, she taps into the power of the Scarlet Rot that plagued her from birth, losing all of her clothes and armor in the ensuing transformation. It turns out, her affliction has caused large parts of her body to rot away, so despite once being an Amazonian Beauty, her nudity is much more horrifying than titillating, especially as her second phase sees her get far more aggressive and gain new attacks. Her dialogue even lampshades this as the camera pans across her naked form for the first time:
  "You will witness true horror. Now, rot!"
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Beast II's transformations into her Titan and Draconic Corpus forms lack the fairly small amount of clothing from her humanoid form, but these two forms are much too monstrous in appearance to be titillating. Before the extermination of mankind at her hands was prevented, almost everyone encountered during her singularity had died and there are hints at the Sumerian Underworld's destruction by the time she gets sealed back up in the Void Space.
  • In Arcade, Beast VI/S serves as the new main antagonist and has her mostly nude body (including her breasts) covered in blood akin to body paint. Her endgame consists of all life being exterminated.
• Fear & Hunger:
  • A good number of enemies are in varying states of undress. Most prominently and infamously the prison guards, whose loincloth does nothing to hide their absolutely massive 'stingers'. This is entirely Played for Horror, to emphasize the enemies' maddened and feral nature, and very often the threat they pose.
  • The Guards' nudity is also Foreshadowing for future revelations about the titular dungeon, as the fact that they're still wearing loincloths (albeit too high to actually cover anything) and carry forged (but badly maintained) weapons implies that they weren't always like this.
• I'm On Observation Duty: Among the many anomalies that you have to catch and report through the cameras as you play, there are Intruder anomalies, active humanoid anomalies... and the majority of these Intruders will appear without any clothing to make their sudden appearance more terrifying. Even the variants with female bodies are completely Played for Horror. More often than not, they'll attack your camera and end your game if you keep looking at them for too long.
• Kid Icarus (1986): Syrens were initially depicted as being topless in manual art and are underworld monsters sent by Medusa to kill Pit when he reaches the final level. Subverted in Kid Icarus: Uprising, where they were redesigned with a breastplate for censorship reasons.
• In Mass Effect 3, the Reapers convert certain Asari victims into Banshees, tall and painfully emaciated-looking cyborg creatures with powerful biotic abilities... and unlike all the other husks in the game, the Banshees still have enough of their biology intact to make it clear that they're stark naked, playing the usual Asari sex appeal for horror — not to mention a generous dose of Fan Disservice given their corpselike bodies and LED nipples.
• The psychopathic twins in Outlast always appear stark naked and will happily hunt down the main character if he isn't lucky enough to have a gate blocking their path. Next to Dr. Trager (who at least has an apron to cover his junk), they're the most openly malevolent patients at Mount Massive.
• The Stalker in Outlast II is always naked, though it's a little difficult to recognize at first given that he's missing a good deal of his skin and sporting numerous additional limbs, and the fact that he rarely gives Blake a chance to get a good look at him before he goes on the offensive. As it turns out, the Stalker is naked because it's a Mental Monster representing the sexual abuse that Jessica suffered and Blake couldn't prevent.
• Rosetta and the Well: Pygmalion turns victims into topless Mermaids and possesses their bodies in order to add more victims to his list by telling false stories through his puppets which can actually decay, serving to make it more gross and horrifying.
• The Secret World:
  • The Draug are all naked eldritch undead and all of them are hell-bent on using the innocent people of Solomon Island to propagate their species. The nudity becomes especially noticeable in the case of the Broodwitches, who have their breasts on display at all times... along with their decomposing flesh and tentacles.
  • When not in disguise, Succubi appear completely naked, which only draws further attention to their unearthly physiques. Plus, they're almost always out to kill you and eat your soul; even the one friendly Succubus you encounter is depicted as otherworldly and threatening, especially when she starts propositioning you.
    You, me... on a beach of razor-fossils... the Vultures of Leng plucking your nerve-endings like a fabulous instrument... Call me some time?
  • Elbis himself is a perpetually-naked Angelic Abomination ruling over the natives of the Hell Dimensions as an Evil Colonialist, and gladly goes into battle without donning a shred of armour.
• Shin Megami Tensei: While several demons — hell, even the Angels — are Stripperiffic, Lilith, always an least an Arc Villain in the games she's present, very much takes advantage of this trope. While she is capable of looking like a normal woman, her true form is that of a completely nude woman with snakeskin patches on her skin, and hands and feet with only three digits, hugging a huge snake. Shin Megami Tensei IV gives her a far more monstrous form, but her torso remains that of a naked woman.
• In StarCraft, after Kerrigan's infestation, she goes around naked and looks vaguely like an angel from a distance. However, her nudity only serves to showcase the Body Horror she's been subjected to. Both her jaws are dislocated forwards, giving her face a chimpanzee-like look (and when that heals, her skin turns grey-green and appears to be rotting around her mouth), her hair is replaced with segmented, bony tentacles, and her zerg exoskeleton forms around her torso (between collarbone and groin) in a way that looks uncomfortably like a corset made of living bone. By StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, she's clad in nothing but glistening, purple musculature, except for her face.
• Terraria: Nymphs and Lamias are enemies that have the appearance of nude women. Nymphs disguise themselves as helpless travellers, but stay naked even when revealing their true appearance as green and covered in blood. Lamias have perpetual Red Eyes, Take Warning instead.
• In Tsukihime when Ciel was possessed by Roa she only ever wore a cloak with clasps around her neck. It represents both her inhumanity in this state as well as how depraved she was since besides killing her victims she was also sexually assaulting them.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines:
  • During the mission to Gallery Noir, you encounter a series of paintings depicting Caine's biblical origins. Following his murder of Abel and his transformation into the first vampire, Caine is always seen naked and streaked in blood, as is Lilith; for good measure, both have been made to look as creepy as possible.
  • Andrei the Tzimisce's fleshcrafted creations are all naked, which becomes especially noticeable in the case of the Vozhd, an entity made of three human beings fused together to form one monster — all three of them naked and still possessing enough of their anatomy to look really disturbing.

Web Comics

• Fate/type Redline: Oda Nobunaga, one of the primary antagonists of the series, walks around in the military base completely naked as if there's nothing wrong, with only her Godiva Hair to give some form of censorship. This is played largely for intimidation — when she first manifested, she grabbed an officer's sword and killed him, completely unconcerned that all her skin was now covered in blood.

Websites

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-096 a.k.a. The Shy Guy is an emaciated humanoid figure who usually appears "butt naked"... and any attempt to get a good look at its face will result in the creature flying into a rage and killing the offending party — even if said party is in a bathysphere at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and only looking at a photograph of Shy Guy.
  • SCP-4666 a.k.a. The Yule Man is always naked, even when encountered in freezing weather, and commonly operates by stalking isolated families throughout Christmastime before brutally murdering the ones who don't measure up to his mysterious standards — and kidnapping the children to serve as his slaves.

Western Animation

• Arcane: Downplayed when Ambessa Medarda advises/subtly threatens Jayce while she receives a massage in a spacious bathtub. Ambessa suddenly stands and approaches him stark naked, causing Jayce to flinch. The effect is less horror than to inspire dread, as her muscular body is covered in battle scars and she shows zero hesitation.
• In the Love, Death & Robots episode "The Sucker of Souls", Dracula himself emerges from his tomb stark naked and clearly not giving a damn about it, almost immediately murdering Simon soon after. In fact, he doesn't bother to find clothes at any point in the entire episode, further emphasizing his bestial, animalistic brand of vampirism.

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