Basic Trope: Fear is not induced by some traumatic visual element or obvious threat, but by the lack thereof.
- Straight: The scariest scene in Alice and Bob: The Movie is where Bob walks down a dark hallway where nothing happens.
- Exaggerated:
- Downplayed:
- Nothing happens, but it's a very short sequence and the hallway is warmly lit.
- Something disturbing happens in the hallway. But the audience is never shown a full picture of what it was. Only short, confused, and scared glimpses of Bob at best.
- Most of the lingering hallway walk is perfectly quiet and there is no monster, but radiation poisoning causes Bob to start bleeding from everywhere and collapse in agony. The horror is enhanced from it being invisible but the effects are still traditionally gruesome.
- Justified:
- The scene has little to no sound, and the camera is on Bob's face the entire time, not showing anything else.
- The monster realizes that biding its time and screwing with Bob's head will frighten him way more than jumping out of the shadows at him with a roar every 30 seconds.
- Inverted:
- Alone with the Psycho
- The sequence focuses exclusively on the monster, to the exclusion of the cast.
- Noodle Incident. Some things are funnier when left unexplained.
- Nothing Is Funnier
- Subverted: Bob walks down a hallway, but there is a monster at the end of it...
- Double Subverted: ...but it's actually a photograph of a possibly-all-too-real monster taken in this very corridor...
- Parodied:
- There are two monsters in the film. One is a regular monster, out to eat the protagonists. The other monster is named Nothing. It's scarier than the other monster. Nothing is literally scarier.
- Alice and Bob are terrified while walking down an empty corridor, but when they get to the end and a monster finally does jump out they all breathe a sigh of relief and laugh as it starts to munch on them.
- Alice and Bob are walking down a dark, creepy corridor in an abandoned hotel. Alice is scared because she thinks that something will suddenly jump out and kill them. Bob is scared because a long walk down a plain hallway might bore him to death.
- Zig-Zagged: What appears to be a monster jumps at the camera, only to be an extreme close-up of a cockroach. Then the real monster jumps out, which turns out to be an optical illusion. Then the real monster shows up, only to be another extreme close-up of an ant... then the real monster appears. It's not an extreme close-up or optical illusion this time.
- Averted: The monster is clearly presented from the start and shown throughout the sequence.
- Enforced: "Our model designer sucks. Let's just shoot an empty hallway and let the audience's imagination do the work."
- Lampshaded: "I wish the monster would just attack us already."
- Invoked: The monster purposely hides from Bob to feed on his fear, knowing it will produce enough emotions to sustain it.
- Exploited: The monster spends so much time doing nothing and creating tension that Bob's already jogged to the end of the hallway and it missed its chance.
- Defied:
- Bob looks down an empty hallway and decides to keep going in another direction.
- Bob dumps an entire magazine of bullets or hurls a grenade into the dark area just in case there's a monster lurking there.
- Discussed: "If we go down this hallway, the monster's just gonna jump out at us after keeping us in suspense."
- Conversed: "And there's this absolutely creepy scene by the end when Bob has to walk to the exit and he has no idea where the monster is, or if it's even still alive..."
- Deconstructed:
- The audience realizes that the monster will eventually show up, and so they wait for it without being afraid.
- The audience eventually realizes that there is no monster, and so they stop being afraid.
- Reconstructed:
- ...But it's taking an awfully long time, and the audience's bravado begins to waver...
- The audience is prepared to wait quite a while for the monster to appear. That's why it pops up just a few seconds after the protagonists enter the corridor.
- Bob dumps an entire magazine of bullets into the dark area just in case there's a monster lurking there. But then he walks down the hallway and is never seen again with whatever happened to him never being explained.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Even the victims never see what's killing them. Nobody knows what's hunting them, what it looks like, or how it kills. They're understandably terrified. And then it turns out that what's been killing them is either something that's been visible through the whole movie, but never seemed to be a threat, or is something that there's a reason not to see, like a disease.
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