Nothing Is Scarier / Western Animation

Examples of Nothing Is Scarier in Western Animation.

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Wait for it...

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Nothing at all

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Dougal and the Blue Cat, 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.
• 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.
• 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...
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

There all along!

• 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.
• 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...
• 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.

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