The Trees Have Faces

"The trees in this forest are weird, aren't they? I've heard sometimes they smile wickedly... I'll tell you, if I see a tree smiling, I'm gonna run in the opposite direction!"

— Goombario, Paper Mario 64

It's fairly common in fiction to see trees depicted as having faces, or at least face-like structures, in their trunks. This is typically inspired by how real trees can often seem to have faces due to patterns of knots, scars, holes or broken limbs suggesting eyes, noses and mouths, often in scowling, leering or exaggerated expressions.

Fictional takes on this often exaggerated the resemblance of these features to human faces, giving trees much more detailed features and faux expressions. Often, trees may be depicted as entirely hollow, with breaks in their trunks forming their faces. Other times, a jagged mouth-like opening may reveal a dark space from which gleaming eyes peer out at the world. It isn't unusual to also have low-growing, leafless branches sticking out from these trees and bearing remarkable resemblances to clawed or skeletal hands, further adding to the anthropomorphism.

More often than not, this is only a visual detail, meant to make a particular place seem eerie, spooky or otherwise unsettling. Some depictions may however go further and have the trees actually be able to see and speak. In some cases they may well become actively aggressive, overlapping with When Trees Attack, but more often than not they'll simply be harmless, if creepy, parts of the background. Occasionally, people who are turned into trees may retain twisted versions of their former faces as the only mark of their former state.

Some cases will depict this as taking place largely in a character's head, with the exaggerated faces and menace of the trees being a byproduct of confusion, fear and suggestive shapes and shadows; in this case, what's seen on screen isn't "really" what's present in the fictional world, but rather the character's perceptions displayed as the work's point of view. Once things calm down or day breaks, the monstrous trees will return to the much less frightening shapes they actually hold.

While stands of these trees can be found growing wherever spooky vibes gather, they are especially common in Halloweentown and the darkest Enchanted Forests. In video games, they're often common scenery in The Lost Woods and Big Boo's Haunt. If the trees have functional limbs in addition to the faces, you're likely dealing with Treants. More benevolent and aware specimens are likely to be a Wise Tree.

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Examples

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The trees in the dark forest that has Wolffy's home in it are consistently portrayed as having spooky faces.

Fairy Tales

• "Mother Holle": When she arrives in Frau Holle's domain, the main character stumbles upon a talking apple tree with a long-nosed face.

Film — Animated

• Boo to You Too! Winnie the Pooh: Piglet sees trees around him gaining faces and growling at him during a panic.
• The Brave Little Toaster: When the appliances stop for the night in the woods, Lampy finds a hollow tree they can use for shelter. But when he shines his light inside it, it reveals a scary face on the tree which scares the others. Lampy then sees it from outside and runs away as well.
• Disney Animated Canon:
  • The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad: In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow segment, Ichabod Crane imagines the trees having monster faces as he becomes increasingly scared as he rides alone through the forest (and one of the trees has an actual monster-face-shaped hole, but the "eyes" that are staring at him from it are only a couple of fireflies).
  • Pocahontas: Grandmother Willow is a sentient willow tree that talks to the protagonist by morphing part of its trunk into the face of an old woman. Unlike most cases of this trope, she's both very real and a kind and benevolent being.
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: When Snow White is fleeing through the dark depths of the forest, the trees appear to take on very creepy, monstrous and menacing faces, seeming to reach for her with their scarily gnarled, arm-like branches. As the forest becomes much more sunny and idyllic at the end of her flight and once she meets the forest animals, this seemingly and accurately represents a young girl's panic and confusion when she finds herself lost in the forest at night.

Film — Live-Action

• The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy and the Scarecrow encounter some apple trees that are intelligent, can talk and move their branches, and have human faces. The Wicked Witch of the West is shown nearby before this happens, implying that she animated the trees.

Literature

• Chronicles of Ancient Darkness: When Torak and Renn go to the Deep Forest in Book 5, they encounter many trees in which faces have been carved and human teeth have been placed.
• The Midnight Library: "An Apple a Day" concerns a young boy steals an apple from a neighbour's orchard, turning out to belong to a local witch, then he starts his horrifically slow transformation into an apple tree with his face on it.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: In Grandmothers and Other Fearsome Encounters a character is turned into a tree with a facelike pattern on its bark.
  Upon the the trunk of the newly grown tree, the bark was formed in the shape of a face, with blind eyes and a mouth set into a silent scream
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Weirwood trees, rare plants usually only found in sacred woods and in the Haunted Forest, do not naturally have faces, but followers of the Old Gods traditionally carve them into their trunks. These are usually snarling, scowling, or otherwise meant to be frightening or unsettling. In addition, the weirwoods' naturally bone-white bark and red leaves naturally make for an otherworldly appearance even absent the faces, and the trees' dried, blood-red sap gathered around the roughly carved features further adds to their unsettling effect.

Live-Action TV

• H.R. Pufnstuf: There are talking trees on Living Island. In the series crossover with Mutt And Stuff, Pufnstuf gives two talking trees named Sid and Marty to the dog school.
• Through the Dragon's Eye: The Book Tree is a talking tree who offers the search help in the form of riddles, and houses both a maze and a library inside himself. In the final chapter, he urges all the other trees to sing in order to keep them going after their long journey.
• Yo Gabba Gabba!: Everything talks, including the trees in Brobee's realm. In one episode, a tree thanks Brobee for cleaning up a mess.

Video Games

• Adiboo: Magical Playland: One of the trees has a human-like laughing face.
• Broken Age has a sentient tree near Shellmound. However, it doesn't have a mouth until Vella chops one into its trunk. It's not too happy about that, though.
• Commander Keen: In "The Secret of the Oracle", the trees in the background of the forest areas have faces.
• Don't Starve: Some of the trees found in forest biomes spawn as Totally Normal Trees, with trunks dominated by wide-open, tusked mouth holes and a pair of scowling eyes, with dark wood and a cluster of short, leafless branches. They groan when chopped, and produced logs with frowning faces.
• Epic Battle Fantasy:
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 3: The Haunted Tree enemies have dark patches for a mouth and eyes.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: GLOBs look like tree stumps with a big hole in the trunk for a mouth and two smaller ones with orange pupils for eyes.
• Fox N Forests: The Season Tree has a face with a large nose, and large green moustache.
• Fran Bow: The titular character turns into a tree with a face when she lands into Ithersta, a land inhabited by anthropomorphic roots and insects. Initially, Fran can't move in this state, but Palontras, the medic of Ithersta, helps her gain legs and arms to use until she turns back into a human.
• Golden Force have a forest level where trees in the foreground and background have faces on their barks. Unsurprisingly, the boss of said level is a demon inhabiting a tree.
• Griswold the Goblin has a furious tree with a scary face, who's holding a little girl's teddy bear. He refuses to relinquish it unless Griswold gets rid of the lumberjack threatening to cut him down like he did the former's best friend, who is also implied to have a face.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft: The trailer for the Witchwood set shows trees developing glowy, menacing faces whenever the protagonists look away.
• illWill (2023) have you crossing a forest of giant mushrooms with faces on them. Some of those faces even regularly regurgitate a shower of poison that can damage you on contact.
• Kingdom Rush: The Rotten Forest tower is a grove of malevolent trees with glowing green eyes.
• Kirby: The recurring boss Whispy Woods is an apple tree with a face. Its trunk has two holes that act as eyes, a third hole that functions as a mouth, and a branch that doubles as his nose.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: The trees in the Dark World all have faces. Most of them are inanimate, but some are Forced Transformations. The living ones will happily talk to you if you interact with them, but if you dash into them they'll spit bombs at you.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The trees of the Tabahl Wasteland are grey-barked, gnarled things with short, leafless branches and trunks split by jagged holes that give them impression wicked, grinning faces.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: Yoll Graveyard is filled with dark, leafless, stumpy trees with smirking faces on their trunks.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The trees of the Lost Woods have wide, leering faces formed by jagged eye- and mouth-like openings in their hollow trunks. This comes into play in one of the three Korok trials, where Link must follow a precise path and leaving it will warp him back to the beginning; the correct path is found by following the "hungry trees", which have large iron nuggets jammed into their "mouths". At the end of the same trial, Link must also "feed" one such tree by placing a shield into its mouth.
• Lord of Gun uses this trope as a subtle foreshadowing. At the end of the swamp level, the final area has a gigantic tree in the foreground whose bark suspiciously resembles a distorted human face, but is otherwise ordinary and motionless as you take down enemies around the area. But when the screen is clean of enemies, the tree's face suddenly moves, revealing it to be a fire-breathing Tree Demon. Cue boss battle (See it here).
• Mortal Kombat: The Living Forest is a forest made up of trees with faces that frequently growl.
• Moshi Monsters has a talking tree that lives in the woods and gives advice in exchange for water.
• The Other: Airi's Adventure: The Withered Trees in the Forest have black horizontal cracks in their trunks for a mouth and two smaller holes above them holding yellow pupils for eyes.
• Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside:
  • When Sam first enters the Land of Darkness, he is caught by a forest of sentient trees with faces who confiscate his flashlight, lunch box, and mask. The tree who holds the rope he is caught in lets him borrow her rope and actually feels bad about him losing his things, encouraging him to explore the Land of Darkness to find them. Oddly, they’re always in the possession of characters who were nowhere near these trees, so how they got those items is anyone’s guess.
  • After Sam helps Otto the Rowboat overcome his fear of sinking, Otto can take Sam to Darkness' garden on the other side of the river. This garden is guarded by a forest of sentient trees like the ones seen earlier. These ones don't take Sam's things, but they are very snooty and only let trees into the garden. Fortunately, Sam is able to fool them by wearing a hollow log on his head.
• The Perils Of Rosella has a spooky forest of malicious, leafless trees guarding access to the three witches. All of them have sinister, scowling faces on their trunks, and there's no way past them safely without the giant woodsman's ax.
• Shrek: The second game features trees with faces as regular antagonists. There are two types of them: those that spit fruits at the player and those that throw acorns at them.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Shuffle:
    • One of the enemy monsters in Emerald Coast is a sentient palm tree, with a face on the coconut and palm leaves for hair. If the value of the number on the card the player draws is less than that of the Palm Tree's card, the Palm Tree will attack the player by using its fishing pole as a club.
    • The final boss monster in Nature Zone is a giant sentient tree with a face on its trunk. It guards the seventh and final Precioustone Piece in its mouth, and if the value of the number on the card the player draws is less than that of the Giant Tree's card, the Giant Tree will attack the player by poking it with its roots.
  • Sonic Adventure 2: The hollow trees in Pumpkin Hill and Sky Rail have faces carved into them. These, however, are inanimate and purely part of the background.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: The Treevils, enemies found in the game's forest area, resemble crawling trees crowned by a ring of short, leafless branches and with trunks split by a pitch-black gash from which glowing eyes gaze out at the world.
  • Paper Mario:
    • Paper Mario 64: A tree with a face can be found in Forever Forest, where it serves as one of the markers for the correct path that Mario must follow to find his way through the woods.
    • Paper Mario: The Origami King: The living trees in the Whispering Woods are shown to almost all have eyes, with the Sap Sisters in particular having womanly physiques and armlike branches. They are led by Ol' Grandsappy, a large stump with a mustachioed face who can open paths for Mario in the woods despite otherwise being immobile.
  • Mario Party 6: Several minigames take place in a haunted forest close to a town plaza (implied to be part of Faire Square), and the dark trees have glowing eyes. Their most notable role is played in the minigame Trick or Tree, where four trees of varying heights will begin switching their positions rapidly, and it's not possible to tell where the tallest one will remain after the minigame begins (since the camera will only show their heights before they move); therefore, the two dueling characters have to choose each one tree to climb and hope it to be taller. Each character has only 10 seconds to choose, and whoever climbs a tree whose top is higher than the other's will win.
• Village Monsters: One of the residents is Ygette, a living tree with a trunk on her face.

Webcomics

• Not a Villain: Page 480 shows the result of someone destructively attacking a tree on the Guelia Isola. They get forcibly turned into a tree with a face.

Web Games

• Trick or Treat Beat!: Some levels contain a tree larger than most trees in the game. These large trees usually have a face on the trunk.

Web Original

• Neopets has the Brain Tree, a spooky tree with a face and a large exposed brain instead of leaves, that appears in the Haunted Woods that become accessible during Halloween events.
• There is an infamous online advertisement showing a tree with a humanoid face, with the caption "If you're over 25 and own a computer, this game is a must have!". It's been used for different games such as Stormfall: Age of War and Throne: Kingdom at War. Its creepy unsettling face and strange slogan made it subject to much Memetic Mutation.

Western Animation

• In Hanna-Barbera's animated series of Abbott and Costello, the episode "Wizardland" has stage magicians Bud and Lou encounter a talking tree. It was the disguise of a powerful genie, who challenges Bud to a magic duel.
• Go, Diego, Go!: In one episode, Diego encounters talking coconut trees on his way to bring the red-eyed tree frogs back to their home.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In the pilot episode, when the ponies are crossing the Everfree Forest, Nightmare Moon ensorcels some trees to have frightening faces in their trunks that frighten the main characters, until Pinkie's irreverence towards the trees makes the others break out in laughter, breaking the spell and allowing them to continue on.
• Over the Garden Wall: Edelwood trees weep black oil instead of sap and have twisted, ugly faces; several characters are startled when stumbling upon them. They become much more disturbing when we learn that the edelwoods are the souls of people who lose hope in the Unknown, used as fuel for the Dark Lantern.
• Xiaolin Chronicles: Barkey Le Bois, who used to be the Xiaolin Dragon of wood of his generation, is at present a sentient peach tree with a face who becomes angry when anybody tries to eat his fruits.

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