The Faceless

"And as years passed and there were fewer in the city (and none beyond it) who remembered my face, the wildest stories got about as to what that veil hid."

— Orual, Till We Have Faces

A variant of He Who Must Not Be Seen: The audience never gets a good look at this character's face. Specific variants include characters which are (almost) always...

• Shot or drawn using an Unreveal Angle.
  • Shown from behind.
  • Shown behind something else.
  • Shown with the frame cropping out their face.
  • Shown from far away, so we can't notice any noteworthy details.
• Shot or drawn with P.O.V. Cam, where we can only see what they see.
• Standing in shadow, have their Face Framed in Shadow, or are silhouetted.
• Wearing a mask, helmet, One-Way Visor, hood, or otherwise Never Bareheaded.
• Only ever appearing onscreen from the shoulders down, usually done to emphasize how much taller this character is than the rest of the cast; parents and grandparents in works that focus on their offspring are particularly susceptible to this.

Closely related are:

• Those with Eyes Always Shut or Eyes Out of Sight.
• Those who always wear Scary Shiny Glasses or Sunglasses at Night.
• The Ghost, who is never seen at all.
• The Blank, who literally doesn't have a face.
• The Voice, who is not seen but only heard.

There are several reasons for writing a faceless character, depending on their role in the plot. For a recurring character, hiding their face lends an air of ambiguity to the character and their motives. If said character is a villain, this additionally serves to make them seem more threatening. Often the villainous Faceless are a Diabolical Mastermind, The Man Behind the Man, or even an Unseen Evil.

Non-recurring faceless characters tend to be Cannon Fodder Faceless Goons, whose facelessness removes their individuality, their humanity, and the audience's squeamishness about their deaths. Real-world famous people/roles may not be shown, to prevent the work from becoming dated.

Occasionally, a faceless character will be dramatically revealed. This generally happens at the end of the story, or at least the character's tenure in it. The Reveal may try to surprise the audience by showing a Nerd in Evil's Helmet, The Mole, or even no face at all. Perhaps we will see a Nightmare Face—common for villains—or perhaps they were Beautiful All Along, or maybe They Look Just Like Everyone Else!

The Faceless exist to increase drama or impress people. Contrast this with the Faceless Masses, which is done for the artist's convenience, while the Scenery Censor hides other body parts, to please Moral Guardians.

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Example Subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Western Animation
• Real Life

Other Examples:

Advertising

• In Venezuela, there is this beer ad that features a Ms. Fanservice known as "la catira Regional" ("the Regional blonde", for the brand of the beer), that's always in a bikini or some revealing outfit. But everybody is more concerned about why she never shows her face: would she be ugly? Would she be a man...? And, not happy with making the whole country be worried about this matter, after years of teasing they make this, where you can see her face very briefly for some seconds. Isn't it cruel?
• A recent advertising campaign for the acid reflux medicine Aciphex features either people shown only from the nose down, or people who have their faces from their nose up conveniently obscured by objects like a lamp, cupboard door, and a car front hood.
• In commercials for 4C during their "official iced tea/bread crumbs of the Davis family" campaign, the Davises faces are never shown.
• In commercials for Shedd's Spread, we never see the faces of the couple talking in the commercials. Normally just their hands and arms are shown.
• In many recent commercials for IBM, the people being interviewed are not shown on camera.
• Converse recently launched their "Made By You" campaign showcasing people's customized Chuck Taylors. A short film sometimes shows up as a Youtube pre-roll ad featuring numerous wearers. However, none of their faces are shown.
• The Energizer Bunny provides an interesting case, as while most of his face is visible, his eyes are often blocked off by his shades. Even when making fun of The Lone Ranger, his eyes are still largely obscured by the mask they use. The recent CGI commercials turn the sunglasses into an Expressive Mask of sorts, eliminating the need for proper eyes to be seen.
  • One holiday ad has the bunny take off his shades to reveal... another pair of shades.
  • That being said, there are several plush toys out there that give him eyes (A given, as they'd look awkward otherwise), but its inconsistent as to whether they're beady or traditional cartoon-style eyes.

Arts

• No people Terry Ananny ever painted have faces.
• Every single artwork in Pottermore involves this trope. All of the identifiable characters in the art (even minor characters) are depicted with either their faces away from the camera, their faces obscured by scenery, or their faces shown highly in the distance. There are the rare occasions in which people are shown with their faces unobscured, such as students whom are participating in the duelling club and members of the Wizengamot, but those are only extras of whom have no clear identities.
• The Problem We All Live With: The marshals escorting Bridges are only seen from the shoulders down, emphasizing them as representative of an institution and her as the focus of the painting.
• The Sistine Chapel's altar painting only depicts God's lower torso and feet. While it's standard practice to avoid showing the full form of God for the viewer's sanity, this is an odd choice since several full-body paintings of God, face and all, lie on the ceiling above the altar.

Asian Animation

• In Happy Heroes, Big and Little M.'s commander is only ever seen from the back, or otherwise has his face completely obscured from view whenever he is on-screen. In Season 12, we do get to see some of his face; he has a big bushy mustache, but his eyes are still obscured from sight due to a shadow coming from his hat.

Comic Strips

• Beetle Bailey — Bettle's eyes have never, ever been seen. Even before he was in the army, he had a hat pulled down low to hide them.
  • Mort Walker mentioned Beetle's eyes as being "India ink"-colored.
  • In one MAD parody someone finally sneaks up to Beetle and rips his hat off. His face is much like you would expect, except that it turns out he was hiding a tattoo on his forehead reading GET OUT OF VIETNAM.
  • In one actual strip, Lt. Fuzz noticed that he never saw Beetle's eyes, so in order to get a look at them, Sarge snuck behind him and yelled "BOO!" making it fly off his head. Unfortunately, Beetle was wearing sunglasses.
• Big Nate: Chester, who we almost never see except for his arm in some occasions. The most that we've ever seen of him at one time is his body from the neck down. He's implied to have a mustache, though. According to Word of God, he never drew him with a face because he thought it would be too hard to draw.
• Spots from Dick Tracy was a criminal who had a floating array of dark spots in the front of his face where his eyes should be. Spots was killed in a street shootout with Tracy, the spots on his face dissipating upon his death, but his head was turned away from the reader, so his face still remained obscured.
• Despite it being a very political strip, politicians almost never appear in Doonesbury, and are either represented by abstract symbols (a bomb for Newt Gingrich, a waffle for Bill Clinton, a giant hand for Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc), speech balloons coming out of the White House/Congress, or, in some rare cases, a face hidden in shadows, obscured by camera angles, and so on. Donald Trump is the only president cartoonist Gary Trudeau actually draws in full, and this is only because the strip established him as a "seen" human character in the strip long before his political career.
• The face of Mr. Pembroke, the boss of Roger Fox in FoxTrot, is never seen. usually being just off-panel, with his desk and his hands (and sometimes a cigar) visible. Portraits of himself in his office likewise have the face cropped out.
• Lena the Hyena in Li'l Abner, who was the world's ugliest woman - the area around her face initially had a blank space with the words "Deleted by Editor." Al Capp held a contest for readers to draw Lena's face. Basil Wolverton won with a spectacularly grotesque portrait in his distictive "spaghetti-and-meatballs" crosshatching.
  • A tone-downed version of her later appeared in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
• Tiffany's father Tom Farrell in Luann. The few times he’s seen he normally has his back to the viewer, but at one point his face was concealed by his own word balloon, his face is finally seen in the June 22, 2020 strip.
• In Peanuts, there was a series of strips where Charlie Brown goes to summer camp and tries to befriend a kid in the bunk next to him. The kid is always shown with his face turned toward the wall, and never says anything other than, "Shut up and leave me alone!"
  • Adults are never shown on Peanuts. The only exception were some adult bodies, but not faces, that were visible when Lucy was in a golf tournament, and this was back in the strip's early days.
• The title character of The Phantom is a very strange example; he wears a mask in his heroic identity, as most superheroes do (in fact, he was likely the one who started the trend), but even in his civilian identity of Kitt Walker, he wears a fedora, sunglasses, and a trench coat with the collars turned up. The readers have never been able to see his unmasked face clearly.
• Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Lord Splendid Humility subverts usual unicorn vanity by refusing to show himself, so the cast mainly interact with his horn as it protrudes from whatever bush he's hiding in.
• For the longest time, both Don and Marcie from Safe Havens were never shown above the neck to emphasize their height. Eventually, though, their faces were shown, Don's when his son was born, and Marcie when Rosalind finally meets her (After a series of experiments left her at six foot three).
• Downwind Jackson in the Smilin Jack comic strip, whose face was always turned away, usually to gawk at women. Creator Zack Mosley established that Downwind was a handsome ladies' man, but decided to leave his face to the readers' imagination.
  • MAD did a spoof that revealed his secret - he's actually an ugly little man who is chased by women because he happens to have a $100 bill stuck between his front teeth.

Films — Animation

• Annabelle's Wish: Agnes's lawyer. Only his hands and the back of his chair are seen.
• The Boss Baby: Tim and Theodore Templeton's faces as grown-ups are deliberately kept out-of-frame in the epilogue.
• Hey Arnold! The Movie: The mysterious informant “Deep Voice” is covered up wearing a trench coat with their face not shown. It’s revealed that Deep Voice is none other than Helga Pataki.
• Monsters, Inc.:
  • An in-universe variant happens to Mike Wazowski, who for some reason, always has his entire face covered up in whatever media he's appeared in, such as a commercial, a magazine, and even the DVD! (The hole in the middle of the DVD was actually placed in a way so that it too covered Mike's face).
  • A more straight example would be a Godzilla stand-in named Ted, who is apparently so tall that he can only be shown from the legs down and clucks like a chicken (he was originally going to sound exactly like Godzilla himself, but the idea was refused due to copyright reasons). A blooper at the end of the film actually revealed that his upper body actually belonged to Rex, here portrayed as a normal-sized Tyrannosaurus rex instead of a plastic toy.
• The gangsters' leader from The Return of Hanuman.
• Sleeping Beauty: Aurora's face is never shown in the early scenes when she was a baby.
• Toy Story:
  • Played with in the first film, where Andy's mom is typically seen from a Knee-High Perspective as a pair of legs, or from a distance where she can't be easily made out. This is averted in the following films, in which adults are clearly seen along with the kids and toys. However, in the fourth film prologue, she is again only seen in glimpses.
  • In the first 2 sequels, the flashback sequences avoid showing off Emily and Dasiy's faces in full, showing them from either a (blurry) distance or side glimpses.
  • Somewhat played with regarding Molly. In the original trilogy, her face is clearly visible (as a baby in the first 2 films, then a tween in the third film), but in the prologue of the fourth film (taking place before the third film), when she and her mom are selling Bo Peep, neither are seen in full.
• Treasure Planet - We viewers never get a good look at poor Jim's Disappeared Dad; some people on the Internet have taken advantage of this for video crossovers and/or fanart.

Manhua

• The previous DM in Infinity Game. He states this is because his face would mean nothing to the NPCs as it's just the face of a stranger. It's never revealed.

Manhwa

• In Witch Hunter, we have North and Edea Florence. In the latter case, it only lasts until Chapter 31.

Pinballs

• Cousin It from The Addams Family.
• The green-skinned alien Tube Dancer toy in Big Bang Bar doesn't have a face... nor any other anatomical detail, either.
• The Nihilists in The Big Lebowski have their faces replaced with indicator lights.
• In Full Throttle, the player's character is always shown wearing a head-covering motorcycle helmet.
• In Stern Pinball's Harley Davidson games, the Mystery Rider is always seen wearing a helmet that completely covers his face.
• Pin*Bot's face is covered by its visor. Even with it up, however, there's no face to be seen.
• TRON: Legacy has Clu and Rinzler, as well as Daft Punk. Most prominent in the third release of the game, as the backbox translite features Clu's faceless black helmet front and center.

Radio

• Madame Boss, Giovanni's mother and the previous leader of Team Rocket, is depicted this way in Pokémon: The Birth of Mewtwo. The artwork shows her body but shades out her face.

Roleplay

• Reyven Samoth in The Gungan Council, who probably doesn't even have a corporal face at this point. Darth Apparatus also used to run around with a mask or obscured face until recently.

Tabletop Games

• Apocalypse World features the player character class 'The Faceless,' a mask-wearing thug. If their mask is removed, it's always treated as The Reveal, stunning everyone nearby and freaking the Faceless out.
• In Exalted, the god Nara-O is always covered in thick dark bandages that completely obscure his features. As the god of Secrets Known To One Person, it is suspected that if any being besides himself was to know his appearance, he would cease to exist.
• Games Workshop games:
  • In Warhammer, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000, the preferred form of the Changeling’s is that of a multi-armed Daemon with its face covered by a heavy hood. It is said that the Changeling has taken on so many forms over its existence that it cannot even remember what its true face and form looked like.
  • In Warhammer, Balthasar Gelt, the Supreme Patriarch of the Imperial Colleges of Magic, has never been seen without a gold mask and heavy robes since an explosive Magic Misfire in his laboratory. Whether he's hiding skin transmuted to gold, Facial Horror, Chaos mutations, or worse is a matter of in-universe speculation.
  • Warhammer 40,000 specific examples:
    • Harlequin Shadowseers wear face-concealing, featureless masks in combat (and outside of it?), ensuring that the last thing the enemy sees will be the reflection of their own face (though the implication is that it goes beyond a reflection, and the enemy literally feels as though they are fighting themselves). On that note, all other Harlequins use masks as well, but theirs have actual theatrical expressions.
    • One of the defining physical characteristics of Eldar Wraith-Constructs is that they typically sport smooth, featureless heads.
    • The Angels Sanguine never remove their helmets, refusing to show their faces to those outside their Chapter. It is rumoured that the reason for this is related to a dark secret that lies in the catacombs beneath their Fortress-Monastery.
  • In the Warhammer 40,000 RPG Dark Heresy, Eloeholth the Faceless is a possible main villain.
• Magic: The Gathering: Arcanis the Omnipotent wears a hood that conceals his face, and Eldrazi of the Ulamog lineage have heads covered entirely in bony plates. Honourable mention to Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver, a planeswalker whose entire head is transforming into black mist, who isn't The Faceless yet, but is well on their way.
• In the Pandemic expansion On The Brink, the Bioterrorist is depicted clad in a chemsuit, with no indication of hir sex or ethnicity.
• Starfinder's kasathas have a taboo against showing their mouths in public. They are always shown in illustrations with their lower faces covered with scarves.

Theatre

• In the stage version of Soviet rock opera Juno and Avos, Count Rumyantsev always wear a creepy golden mask, although he's rather a symbol of a heartless Imperial bureaucracy then an actual villain.
• In classic stage versions of Peter Pan, the crocodile was never seen, but represented by an offscreen ticking from Hook's watch he swallowed.
• Matt Cameron's play Ruby Moon features an unseen character called 'The Wizard', who always wears a mask and creeps around the cul-de-sac knocking on people's doors.

Visual Novels

• Caster in Fate/stay night, played for an ambiguous and mysterious enemy. You can see her mouth, chin and lower cheeks, but most of her emotions have to be expressed through body language. When the hood finally falls off, it's revealed that she's actually incredibly beautiful... but she just skewered and is bleeding to death.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies has the mysterious villain known as the phantom, an emotionless assassin who can perfectly disguise themselves as anyone. They have done this so many times that the phantom has actually forgotten who they really are, and in the end suffers a Shapeshifter Identity Crisis.
• Tsukihime: In the original visual novel, Shiki's face is never shown except as a child. Since the game is told from his perspective, this makes sense; he only shows up on-screen during unlocked images, but never with any detail above his mouth. This is exploited in the side-story Alliance of Illusionary Eyes, which follows someone pretending to be Shiki, since although he looks different he matches how Shiki is described in Tsukihime. Averted by everything afterwards, such as Melty Blood and Carnival Phantasm, where his face is readily shown.

Web Animation

• An Adventure of Sheep and Chicken: The only creature/person in the video who has a face is Chicken.
• Dingo Doodles: Gothi always wears a flat rectangular slab of wood over her face. For a long time, the only time she has ever taken it off was to replace it with a fancy party mask. When this mask got damaged in a fight only a single eye was exposed. It is not until episode 15 that we finally get to see her face during a flashback, and it is revealed that she covers her face because she has No Face Under the Mask. It was cut off, leaving her with nothing but eyes, nostrils, exposed muscle tissue, an a mouth with no lips, where her face used to be.
• Most of the cast of Red vs. Blue, since it's a Halo-based machinima. In Season Three it's revealed that not only do the troopers of Blood Gulch never take their helmets off even when off-camera, but Church has no idea whether Tucker is black or not (though Tucker's more annoyed Church never learned his first name). The Animation Bump of Seasons 9 and 10 lets us finally see most of the Freelancers bareheaded during the flashback sequences, though with a few exceptions. Agent Washington almost never takes his helmet off, even eating with it on, though in one shot we get to see the back of his head (he has short blonde hair, by the way). The Director doesn't wear a helmet, but the camera avoids his face until the Season 10 finale, and the reveal that he and Carolina have Family Eye Resemblance. The only time Maine has his helmet fully off, Sigma is obscuring his face, and we later get a shot when he's putting his helmet on, revealing himself to be Bald of Evil and have the Meta's symbol tattooed on the back of his head.
• Trick Moon: The villain Dr. Bleak is seated on a throne with his entire body in silhouette.

Web Original

• The musician and voice-over artist known only as Corpse Husband, who rose to prominence through group play-throughs of Among Us, due to his dark sense of humor and his unusually deep speaking voice. Corpse's real appearance is unknown. He has only shown rare photos of his hands with accessories and a strand of his hair; even among Corpse's friends, only a few of his trusted friends (Sykkuno, Boyinaband, Anthony Padilla) are confirmed to have seen Corpse's face.
• Dream: While George, Sapnap, and Bad had done facecams revealing their true face, Dream's real appearance remained unknown for a long time even after he came to fame. This has since been subverted on October 2nd, 2022, after he uploads his own face reveal video.
• On Froghand, the chances of Froge revealing his identity is close to zero, given how he wrote an entire article on how to prevent doxing.
• HowToBasic is probably the most well-known example of a YouTube celebrity who has yet to reveal their face.
• In Philler Space, Brick's face is always out of frame or covered.
• Back in the early days of his YouTube career, Zerkaa hid his face behind a mask in live-action videos. After his group the Sidemen became popular in 2014, Joshua Bradley/"Josh Zerker" stopped wearing the mask, showing himself to be a man who maintains a consistent look of combed black hair and a modestly thick beard.

Web Videos

• The Chief from Agents of Cracked is always lit from behind. Lampshaded in the first episode of the second series, when the Sarge points out that the Chief's office always has terrible lighting.
• BigStackD Casting is an Australian guy who salvages scrap metal to make his own treasure hoard. The only time his face appears directly on camera is when he's wearing a full-face respirator for his own safety. On the occasions where his reflection can be seen in polished metal, he is usually wearing a clown mask or similar.
• Binging with Babish host Andrew Rea frames each main shot he's in from his waist to his chin, in order to balance out his presence while cooking with keeping the focus on the food and the process instead of him. If his face is seen, it's only in short, incidental moments.
• The Chronicles of Syntax never clearly show The Lady's face. It's either out of the shot, covered, or too blurry/far away to be seen in detail.
• Neil, the cameraman on A Couple Of Cunts In The Countryside, often chimes in on the discussions, but was not seen on camera until the 50th episode.
• Sp00nerism from The Creatures barely shows himself on camera and when he does, his face is hidden by a comedic horse head mask.
• Daisy Brown's face is always offscreen.
• Echo Chamber:
  • The full face of Mr. Administrator is never shown — he's only shown below the eyes.
  • Zack as well; he's usually behind the camera, filming everything. Although we do see his face briefly in episode 2. It's dark enough that most of the details aren't easily distinguishable.
  • Both of their faces are fully revealed in "Coming of Age" and "Mind Screw".
• The Flying Man is always shown from too far away to make out his facial features... if he even has any.
• IGSRJ, a parody of The Angry Video Game Nerd and The Irate Gamer. Furthermore, IGSRJ speaks through a text-to-speech program, making his voice hidden too.
• Some spoof film trailers made by Italian director Maccio Capatonda (real name Marcello Macchia) feature an entity named "the little" Riccardino Fuffolo, represented by a very tall man in a black trenchcoat and a white towel on his head. His face was partially visible during a parody of The Matrix's bullet time sequence, when the towel slipped and his chin and mouth were visible.
• The Mysterious Mr. Enter used to be.
• Oddity Archive: Ben Minotte consistently conceals his face with a upended Banker's Box-style cardboard box (with a relevant screenshot pasted on it) when he appears on camera.
• RedLetterMedia: Though his face is illustrated on the website, Mr. Plinkett's face is never seen in his reviews - only his hands, present in first person perspective.
• Downplayed by Ru's Piano, which has piano arrangements of tunes from anime and video games. In most of her videos, this one for example, pianist RuRu's face is either hidden by her long hair or completely out of shot; but in some of them, this one for example, she is accompanied by violinist Kathie, and both of their faces are on public display.
• Sen, Momo and Ai Channel: The mom of the titular kids' face is never seen. If the video does show the area where her face is (like if it's focusing on Aiko if the mom is carrying her), it's usually censored.
• Eljay from The Three Virtues, a BIONICLE fan site, always has his face covered by a cardboard Miru.
• Todd in the Shadows:
  • Todd is either Face Framed in Shadow, filmed with his back at the camera, or masked.
  • His title card artist, Krin, also likes to mask herself in online appearances.
  • When the website made a video about a few of the reviewers' Real Life trip to Washington, D.C. to talk to a politician about SOPA, they just put a black box in front of his face, with a caption noting that he doesn't like his face to appear on the Internet.
• J. Geil, in contrast to the original Jojos Bizarre Adventure, is this in Vaguely Recalling JoJo
• Dr. Bob, in-Verse narrator of numerous SCP Foundation-based animated videos, always has his face off-camera, shadowed, and/or concealed. In the only case where he faces the viewer, he's wearing a scuba mask that hides all but his chin.
• Pan Piano, like Ru's Piano, does piano covers of music from anime and is always shown from the shoulders down (apart from when a face covering is being worn).

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