Primal Fear (trope): Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

A baby rabbit, even one that has never encountered a bird before, will still cower at the sight of a hawk's shadow.

Naturally, writers of [[Horror]] fiction like to [[Nightmare Fuel|exploit these]].

 

 

{{examples}}

== Sadism and Squick ==

 

 

* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! GX]]'' combines this with [[Ho Yay]] [[Stalker with a Crush]]: Yubel's profession of love to Judai via mass murder and bloodshed while possessing his almost-love interest Johan gets into an entirely new area of [[Slash Fic]] BDSM weird, especially when the possession gives Johan and his monsters a new [[Fashionable Evil]] look. ''And'' the fact that Yubel is a demonic ''hermaphrodite''... Oh, and did I mention that the dub version has a little girl's voice? Or the fact that, until it got resurrected, it was a disembodied hand that attached itself to its hosts? And this card was supposed to be Judai's favorite card as a kid? Let's face it: Yubel as a whole is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

** Oh, and as of the end of Season 3, she's part of Judai's soul. If Judai ever starts dating, the results may be far from pretty.

* The entire Eclipse from ''[[Berserk]]'', which also throws in Monsters and Evil Beings and Being Eaten Alive for added spice. The climax of the Eclipse in particular, where {{spoiler|Casca is raped by a demonic god who used to be her former commander Griffith, while Guts, the man who loves her, who has just chiseled off his own arm to try to save her, is held down by a mess of monsters and forced to watch it happen without being able to do a thing about it}}, is Sadism and Squick at its nastiest in the saga so far.

* The Anti-Spiral in [[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]. You're thinking this of all shows wouldn't count, but the scene where he deconstructs poor [[The Ingenue|Nia]] [[The Woobie|Teppelin]], which already carries heavy [[Naughty Tentacles|rape-like undertones]] in the show and is seriously [[Nightmare Fuel|nightmarish]], gets ''[[Rape as Drama|even]] [http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/9784/vlcsnap2010013015h05m42.png worse]'' in [[The Movie]]. "[[Does This Remind You of Anything?|I want to get into that body of yours]]," [[Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil|in]][[Moral Event Horizon|de]][[Complete Monster|ed]]. ([[NSFW]])

 

* The whole idea behind ''[[A Nightmare on Elm Street]]'' was to make a film and boogeyman who is a compendium of all the primal fears that are known to be the subject of nightmares for people in every single part of the world (drowning, falling, being chased and finding yourself unable to run away, being forced to watch helplessly as a friend or loved one is victimized, etc.), and actually uses those nightmares to get to them. The only universal nightmare that seems left out is end of the world dreams.

** That might be because, as he's tied to the dream world itself, its ending is ''his'' primal fear.

* ''[[The Human Centipede]]''. That is all.

 

* On ''[[Top Gear]]'', the presenters have to face their worst fears to get out of Bolivia: heights, insects, and [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|manual labor]]. While the last two are played for laughs, their efforts to navigate Yungas Road (a terrifying mountain pass nicknamed "Death Road") put them frighteningly close to disaster several times.

 

* You wouldn't expect to see LFO here but the video for their song "Freak" features a group of dancing Japanese schoolgirls whose playtime shenanigans rapidly devolve into a vicious schoolyard brawl. The fight culminates in one girl being pushed over, hitting her head and having a fit. The way her violent convulsions are synchronized to the pounding music is particularly unsettling.

** The visit to [[Uncanny Valley]] doesn't help, either.

** And the fact that she looks like she's trying to [[Rape as Drama|escape something]].

 

* The second half of the first act of [[Diablo 2]] takes place in the dungeons under the Rogue's Monastery, which has now become the stronghold of the demon queen Andariel. Here the player gets to see what exactly happened to all the Rogues who didn't get corrupted into Andariel's minions, as there are plenty of various torture devices with the corpses of naked, dismembered women all over the dungeons and blood smeared accross the walls. The culmination is Andariel's lair, where the first room has a giant pit in the center which is full of blood and corpses followed by her throne room with the naked bodies of the Rogue's impaled on spiked pillars as ''decorations''.

 

* Rampage from ''[[Transformers]]: [[Beast Wars]]'' was ''supposed'' to be scary, but, especially in his debut episode, he might have proven a bit ''too'' scary for some younger audiences, coming across as basically Hannibal Lecter as a [[Transforming Mecha]].

** Tarantulas, from the same series, was also quite creepy. He's [[The Mad Hatter]] without the whimsy, and very much a sadist, which is hinted at with this exchange:

'''Tarantulas:''' Oh, my filters will adjust. It's the ''act'' I enjoy more than the nourishment. }}

* ''[[Courage the Cowardly Dog]]'': Cousin Fred the barber from the episode "Freaky Fred" is a particularly disturbing example, but still manages to be endearing in some bizarre way, mostly through his cheerful rhyming narration throughout the entire episode. He ends every few verses of his poems with a long, exaggerated "na-aaaaughty..." to describe his own behavior. He is locked in the bathroom with Courage and takes their time together as a chance to shave him, while recounting his life story and his obsession with cutting people's hair off. The scene reaches its utmost creepiest when a haunting chorus of "la-las" starts to accompany the already eerie music.

== The Shadow of Death ==

 

 

* ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'' has the sequence where the Wicked Witch shows Dorothy an hourglass, proclaiming "This is how long you have left to be alive!" It doesn't help matters that the Witch never specifies ''why'' that hourglass marks what's left of Dorothy's life...

* The [[Robin Williams]] film ''[[Jack (film)|Jack]]''. No real creepy visuals, but the concept that this boy is physically aging rapidly is quite disconcerting. Particularly at the end, when {{spoiler|he's graduating high school and he is physically in his 70s.}}

 

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "The Time of Angels", Amy gets {{spoiler|infected with the image of a Weeping Angel that's trying to break out of her, which would kill her in the process.}} And it makes her count down as it gets stronger. Why? [[For the Evulz|For fun.]]

 

* From ''[[The Brave Little Toaster]]'', "Worthless" is a blues song about cars remembering their glory days just before their feeding to a trash compactor. The titular refrain implies that no matter what they did, they ultimately are, no matter who they were, "worthless". A good example about how a [[Tear Jerker]] moment can still be scary in a distant sense.

 

* And then there was Papa Shango, the wrestling voodoo shaman. Especially for some of the things he "did" to the Ultimate Warrior.

 

* ''[[Super Paper Mario]]'' features a [[Big Bad]] who wants to destroy all the worlds. It's a standard villain thing, and you usually manage to discover the [[Plot Coupon]] in each world before he can destroy it... except one. In the happy ninja world full of honorable men in a cartoony version of medieval Japan, you get delayed... and the world falls apart around you. You re-enter the world and where there was once dozens of people, there's now whiteness. A seemingly infinite expanse of whiteness, with only the [[Everybody's Dead, Dave|occasional pile of dust dotting the landscape]].

** [[Bonus Dungeon|It comes back]] after you finish the game though.

* ''[[F.E.A.R.|Project Origin]]'' has this in full force when you step out of the ruined warehouse into post-nuke Fairport, complete with destroyed landscapes, distant fires, crashing jets, and the ''still standing, burnt-to ash corpses of civilians caught in the fire of the explosion.'' Most of them in poses of terror or attempting to flee. And it gets worse later on, when, under Alma's psychic influence, you start seeing apparitions of the people killed in the nuclear explosion, starting with a couple, then a dozen, and then ''hundreds''....

 

 

* One episode of ''[[Tiny Toon Adventures]]'' had Elmyra, an animal lover whose affection was [[And Call Him George|always disastrous for the target animal]], mourning her late pets (all of whom she accidentally killed)... whereupon they rose from the dead [[Zombie Apocalypse]]-style, drawn as hideous zombies, and came after her. Their being zombified didn't prevent her from lavishing her destructive affections on them, however. One truly scarring moment shows her grabbing a zombie dog and washing it in a sink, only to have nothing in her hands afterwards; this implies the dog ''fell apart in the sink''.

* The ''[[X-Men (animation)|X-Men]]'' animated series featured a two-part episode with a "Spirit-drinker" that Lady Deathstrike [[Sealed Evil in a Can|accidentally released from an alien prison ship]]. It does [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|exactly what the name suggests]]. What made it creepy, though, was the way the energy or gas or whatever that it was made of would occasionally take the form of the face of one of its victims, begging for help in faraway, ghostly voices.

 

 

 

 

* ''Balloon Land'', an obscure, albeit cult-classic, 1930s cartoon in which a land of balloon people are terrorized by the evil Pincushion Man, who pulls pins from his own pincushion body to pop the hapless denizens of Balloon Land. Some might remember this from the old, pre-''Playhouse'' Pee-Wee Herman HBO special, or from its cameo appearance in (quite appropriately) ''Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders''. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKp7akCjiF4 Watch]

** Like the balloon people ''themselves'' weren't creepy enough...

== Monsters and Evil Beings ==

 

* ''[[Fern Gully]]: The Last Rainforest'' has a very creepy musical number by the villain Hexxus entitled "Toxic Love". It even has some sexually provocative aspects to it...

** [[Your Mileage May Vary]] on this one. Some people found Hexxus to be the coolest, most entertaining part of an otherwise overly [[Anvilicious]] movie simply because of how over-the-top he was. His [[Tim Curry|voice actor]] may have played a big part in that...

* The Xenomorph from ''[[Alien]]''. It's faceless (save for a grinning maw of fangs), tall, unnaturally slender, looks insectoid and skeletal at the same time, has a misshapen and elongated head, long spidery fingers, a tail which is something that a humanoid shouldn't have (which harkens to the idea of atavism which makes it all the more animalistic), it's jet black in colour, is highly intelligent and the fact that ''people give birth to them''. It's basically the personfication of rape.

 

* ''[[The Strain]]''' version of vampires. In their early stages, they act and look like simple and basic, if pale, zombies. In later development, they are completely devoid of hair, nails, ''genitals'', and lips. Their teeth are razor sharp, and their eyes black. They don't feed by biting: they shoot out a scorpion-like stinger as long as they are tall and pierce your blood vessels with surgical precision (deploying the stinger means stretching their mouth into a long, mirthless grin and dislocating their jaw like a snake). Their middle finger develops long and clawed. Their skin is pure white, and the worms that course through their body can be seen wiggling under their face. Mentally, the mature ones are at least as intelligent as humans, but the newly-turned ("Revenants") aren't lucky enough to get a [[Hive Mind]]. They are bound, body and soul, to serve the will of the ancient they are descended from. Their instincts drive them to [[Adult Fear|find the ones they loved in life and turn them.]]

 

 

** The wailing alone (which you could even hear if you turned the volume of your TV down) made playing this game a torture.

* ''[[Touhou]]'', and its fandom loves [[Playing with a Trope|playing with this trope]]. Normally, [[A World Half Full]], the monsters are cheerful and friendly... they just have a [[I'm a Humanitarian|taste for human flesh]] that they try to keep down most of the time. In the [[All There in the Manual|supplemental material]], ''[http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Perfect_Memento_in_Strict_Sense Perfect Memento in Strict Sense]'', however, the [[Youkai]] are portrayed as the "average" human of Gensokyo sees them: horrors that will kidnap and devour any who they might catch with no warning, and with almost no way to defend yourself. [[Fanfic]], meanwhile, can be anything from [[WAFF]] to [[Cosmic Horror]].

****** [[You Cannot Grasp the True Form|... I'm h... a.. p.. p y.]]

*** [[Hope Spot|Paula's prayer was absorbed by darkness.]]

* The creatures of ''[[Silent Hill]]'' have been explicitly designed to vaguely remind people of manifestations of a variety of primal fears, while resembling rotten corpses and being covered in blood. As well as being covered in very overtly sexually discomforting symbolism.

* Most monsters in the ''[[Shadow Hearts]]'' series are either Lovecraftian sin-against-creation terrors, or patchwork abominations of body parts stuck/grafted/growing in places or angles at which there ''really'' should not be parts.

 

** It's even worse in the book, largely due to [[Mood Whiplash]]; it's the last story in a book that, up to that point, had been fairly lighthearted. The Existential Dread does not help.

* Inque, the [[Voluntary Shapeshifting|shapeshifting]] saboteur in ''[[Batman Beyond]]'' has a creepy [[Spider-Man|Venom]] feel to her, to be sure, but then she goes and ''[[Orifice Invasion|pours herself down Terry McGinnis' throat]]'', almost ''drowning'' him... and ''then'', he ends up ''vomiting'' her out of his lungs. If any fan of the show wasn't creeped out by that scene, at the very least when they first saw it, then they are sick, sick little monkeys... [[Fetish Fuel|or just into that sort of thing]].

** Probably because, the first time he does it, he then expands his body until the person who he forcefed himself to ''exploded.'' And the second time, he tries it on Vegeto who manages to keep Buu localized to one area of his body so he could pound the crap out of him, turning him into huge, outrageous tumor-like lumps traveling across the warrior's skin.

 

 

== Snakes ==

 

* Disney's version of ''[[Aladdin (Disney film)|Aladdin]]'': Jafar [[Scaled Up|turning into a giant cobra]].

** Not to mention the [[Body Horror]] variant that Mirage visited upon Jasmine by slowly turning her into a Naga in the series.

* ''[[Anaconda]]'', or any film with oversized snakes aside from ''[[Snakes on a Plane]]'' which was just plain [[Rule of Cool]]. Things you hate are always worse micronized or supersized!

 

* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' has the Thresher Maws, which are ''skyscraper-sized'' giant worm-snake monsters that pop out of the ground and can kill tanks in a single hit.

 

* ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'' contained an episode in which Spongebob's pineapple was haunted by a ghost. The ghost tried several mildly scary things in order to disturb Spongebob, and, towards the climax of the episode, appeared as a huge snake which vomited out a grotesque, huge baby's head. Intended to be a parody of an over-the-top horror movie, it nevertheless managed to be incredibly horrible.

 

 

== Bugs and Spiders ==

 

* ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]''. "Carrots, peppers, and bugs"

** Defused in this case as the bug Misty is angry at is an adorable, big-eyed little caterpillar. Although some of the other bugs in the Pokemon franchise...

 

* ''[[Creepshow]]'' again. The segment "They're Creeping Up On You" features a lot of cockroaches, used to utterly horrific extent, which is made all the more jarring by the goofy, [[Camp]] tone of the rest of the film.

 

* In T.A. Barron's [[The Lost Years of Merlin]] we have the Grand Elusa. Legend tells that she is always hungry and 'fiercer than a cornered giant'. When Merlin first encounters her, she is in the form of a tiny white spider the size of a thumbnail. She has the power to change size at will, and often adopts a form twice as big as a horse. Oh, and she is ''always'' hungry, to the point that it is wise when speaking with her to bring a meal that she can consume (in miniature form) while you talk. Additionally, she has mastered the power of [[Teleporters and Transporters|Leaping]], and can chew through stone (both of which she uses to save Merlin from the living stones). To summarize, she is a gigantic spider who can eat anything, who is always hungry enough to consider it, and who can appear anywhere on the island at will. All this, and she is among the ''helpful, benevolent'' forces in Merlin's journey in Fincayra.

 

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'' had the Racnoss, a species of giant, carnivorous spider-things which roam the galaxy eating everything they can find, not to mention the invisible mind-controlling beetles hitching rides on people.

* ''[[The X-Files]]'' had an episode that opens with agents finding an incredibly disturbing, dessicated corpse in the bathtub of an old dilapidated house. Turns out that {{spoiler|there was a man with a parasitic tarantula living in his neck, that would come out and consume people like spiders do.}}

 

* The giant caterpillar in the Gusty Garden Galaxy of ''[[Super Mario Galaxy]]''. The way it's almost realistic in appearance in a game with an intensely cartoony art style creates an effect similar to the [[Uncanny Valley]], and it makes some genuinely disconcerting high-pitched noises. The enormous nose and buck teeth do little to diminish this.

* Armogohma in ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]: Twilight Princess.''

* ''[[Drakan]]'', and ''Drakan: Gate of the Ancients''. Those goddamn giant spiders, especially how they can sometimes pop into view and fill the entire screen if you're running 'towards' the screen away from a group and one just so happens to start descending from the ceiling and clip right in...

* ''[[Borderlands]]'' - One word: Scythids. Grotesque alien potato-bug creatures which grow to enormous size.

*** [[Fridge Logic|Which begs the question]] -- [[Face Full of Alien Wingwong|how do they reproduce]]?

* In ''[[Legacy of Kain]]: Blood Omen 2'', one of the enemies you face in the Eternal Prison are [[Giant Spider|huge spiders roughly the size of large dogs]], who spend their days eating the crazed, blinded inmates and covering the walls with their webbing. Similar enemies in the game are giant, bug-like demons that spit acid and have razor-like front legs. In the Canyons, it's shown that they too spin webbing, and {{spoiler|encase their human victims in there to save for later. Some of the cocoons are actually ''moving'', and if you get close enough, you can hear ''struggling and gurgling''.}}

* Muncher Marathon in [[Donkey Kong Country Returns]]. Part way through the level you awaken a whole swarm of creepy black spiders that end up chasing DK and Diddy Kong all the way to the end of the level, and literally eat them alive if they catch them. The sheer quantity of spiders in the level is disturbing.

 

 

 

 

* A lot of things in the ''Lost World: [[Jurassic Park]]'' arcade games, but especially the giant crocodile that ambushes you while you're crossing a lake (''on a rickety floating bridge!'')

* Not really an animal, but the first appearance of those shadowcats in [[Devil May Cry]] is a real brick-shitter. Phantom would probably qualify for Spider if this wasn't an action game, as well. (Seriously, just imagine the moth boss in Silent Hill replaced by Phantom with low lighting...)

 

 

== Giants ==

 

* ''[[The Chronicles of Narnia]]'': [[I'm a Humanitarian|Harfang.]] [[To Serve Man|Just...Harfang.]]

 

** In the final battle, where Baby Bowser, in an eerily designed toy room, attempts to ride (and therefore injure) Yoshi. After he has been defeated, the aforementioned wizard turns him into Big Bowser. Big, meaning the castle he had occupied is completely destroyed by his transformation, and he could probably crush Yoshi with a single finger/claw. The transformation and battle is accompanied by rather horrifying music, and the battle is pretty much Yoshi trying to hit him with large eggs to push him back, while he is slowly coming towards you. When he is hit, he is indeed pushed back, only to then run at full speed towards Yoshi, who is standing on a small ledge (which is being destroyed by the boulders that fly in the air from Bowser's roars). If Bowser comes close enough, his stomach knocks Yoshi off the ledge. This can be extremely scary when one is desperately trying to get him further back, knowing that he will run at full speed afterwards.

* The King of All Cosmos from ''[[Katamari Damacy]]'' is an unnervingly odd guy to begin with. But failing a stage results in him becoming a [[Looming Silhouette of Rage|giant looming shadow]] that shoots lasers out of his eyes while the Prince runs around, scared witless. Not pleasant.

*** In ''Katamari Forever'', this actually becomes a minigame where you dodge the rocks he's shooting out of his head for as long as possible. You can even earn a trophy for doing it long enough.

* Although not a living being, the fourth stage boss in that dark dark desert in ''[[Omega Boost]]'' is downright ominous. Especially the first time you realise he can split apart, and then his huge red cyclops-eyed head starts following you in the darkness illuminating the night with lasers of pure red hate. What's that you say, how can a mech in a shooting game be disconcerting in the least? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Zs9DJon6g Just check it out.]

 

 

== Being Eaten Alive ==

 

* What happens to {{spoiler|Mami}} at the hands of a monstered-out Witch in the [[Wham! Episode]] of ''[[Puella Magi Madoka Magica]]''.

 

* Don't anybody bring up ''[[Honey, I Shrunk the Kids]]''.

** The scene where poor Nick is about to get eaten with his dad's cereal becomes doubly creepy when you consider that the dad in question (up until Quark bites his leg [[Just in Time]]) is ''completely oblivious'' to this due to Nick being only a quarter of an inch tall.

** In the third movie, "Honey We Shrunk Ourselves", Wayne and his brother were almost eaten several times by oblivious teenage girls.

* ''[[The Brothers Grimm (film)|The Brothers Grimm]]'', the scene where the little girl plays with a horse that was fed spiders by the woodsman. It sucks her in with a spidery cocoon and sucks her down. You see its shadow swallow her... and the the horse tramples around outside, and you get a very good look into its mouth, to see the little girl sliding down its gullet into darkness.

* The Sarlaac from ''[[Return of the Jedi]]'', which takes it one step further and ''digests'' you alive.

* The 2005 remake of [[King Kong]] with the giant leech coming up and swallowing one of them whole...*shudder* No wonder that scene was cut from the 1930's version.

 

* The occasional book version of ''[[Little Red Riding Hood]]'' can be absolutely terrifying, depending on how it's drawn.

 

* Similarly, the "cellular peptide cake (with mint frosting)" in an episode of ''[[Star Trek]]''.

 

* The Big Bass in ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]. 3'' and especially ''Super Mario 64'', which would ''snatch you right off the surface and swallow you whole in one gulp'', is especially disturbing.

** And let's not forget that "Like Like" monster, which not only swallowed you but also ''ate your gear.'' Frequently in environments where that fireproof tunic was all that's keeping Link alive ...

* ''[[Cosmos Cosmic Adventure]]'' has a particularly bad version, where the last level of episode 1 (after the Final Boss!) is a big funnel, with a giant mouth at the bottom. All you can do is grab the walls, slowing your descent. You'll still slide down slowly, closer and closer to the waiting jaws. (The beginning of the second episode takes place in the stomach of the monster.)

** In the final level, there is an optional chase where a large spiked undefeatable enemy is chasing Yoshi across a rocky, lava filled area, as the screen ever so slowly moves to allow him more more area to move. It doesn't help that before entering this chase, if the player wants to receive helpful information, all they get is RUN AWAY!!! in dramatically huge font.

** For a bit of [[Nightmare Retardant]], or extra fuel, try to look at the game from the perspective of a random Shy Guy.

*** Yoshi himself displays this trope in almost all of his incarnations.

* The Water Dragon. The ''friggin'' Water Dragon in ''[[Okami]]''. Not only does it eat you (but thankfully spits you out) as you escape from the [[Nightmare Fuel|Sunken Ship]], but later as you ride on Ocra, it continues to try to do so, leading into some pretty horrifying chases, complete with terrifying music.

* The Galdon boss fight in ''[[Star Fox (series)|StarFox Adventures]]'', which requires you to get eaten several times by Galdon - an [[Eldritch Abomination]]-type creature. Upon being swallowed, you get treated to a "wonderful" view of the creature's insides, all whilst you wade around in some sort of stomach-fluid, pummeling a uvula-type appendage, until you're ejected from it's body. See it [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOR8lXbbMjk here].

* [[Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest|Cubivore]] is an odd example. Your goal is to survive in a cute little cube-based world, hunting other cube animals for food and mating to produce upgraded offspring. The overarching goal however is to become the apex predator of the area and have the honor of the alpha female selecting you to be eaten alive. You are then reborn as the next species in the evolutionary path.

** Oh, they only try to throw you in the thinner. They don't eat you, if that's what you think. They actually really seem to like their "Uncle Mickey", and you can distract them by turning on the TV's all over the area they're in. It's really cute, actually.

* Dr. M's giant fish from the third [[Sly Cooper]]. You fight it as Dimitri and it has an attack where it tried to suck him into his mouth. Thankfully he spits him back out, but when that's the attack your hit with when Dimitri needs one more hit, [[Nothing Is Scarier|your treated to black while the screen cuts back to the beginning of the fight]].

* ''[[Alice: Madness Returns]]'' has a cutscene at the end of Chapter 4 where it ends with a first-person view of Alice being fed into the grotesque jaws of the Queen Of Hearts.

 

 

== Blood and Guts ==

 

* ''[[Joe and Mac]]'' is a cartoonish game involving cavemen and dinosaurs, with bright colorful graphics and much silliness, so the last thing players expected was a level which takes place inside the body of a T-Rex. The level features moving villi, large red blood cells visible in the background, and worst of all, a giant beating heart. A ''realistic'' beating heart, not a cartoonish one.

* In ''[[F.E.A.R.]]'', you get some....rather graphic scenes where Alma and the Replica have gone on rampages, including places where skeletons with the blood and flesh and organs boiled off of them lie in poses of sheer agony, and an elevator shaft piled high with dead bodies. In the sequel, you actually have to crawl through a ventilation shaft where the Abominations have been dragging ATC mercenaries and dismembering them, resulting in errant arms, legs, and hands scattered about.

* Most of the death animations from [[Dead Space (series)|Dead Space]] involve this as every different type of necromorph has a different way of dismembering Isaac in graphic detail.

 

* ''[[Captain N: The Game Master]]''. One episode took place inside Kevin's body, with quite nasty looking views of his internals, with the idea that Kevin would die from some foreign virus if he was not saved from the inside. If that's not bad enough, Kevin's "soul" is shown inside his heart, strapped down to a table and being menaced by the anthropomorphized virus.

* ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' has Hama the Waterbender in "The Puppetmaster". One Word: [[People Puppets|Bloodbending]]. There's also that sickening ''squish'' sound made when she's under the full moon and her arms' veins pop out.

== Enclosed spaces ==

 

* [[The Enigma of Amigara Fault]]. [[Nightmare Fuel|"DRR...]] [[And I Must Scream|DRR...]] [[Body Horror|DRR..."]]

* The second volume of ''[[Trigun|Trigun Maximum]]'', of all things, hits this in the very first chapter. A group of about 40 officers have their bodies taken control of, and are forced to all squeeze into a box on the back of a truck made to hold one (very large) man. The result of them all squishing themselves together is pretty implied when you see the blood pouring out of the bottom of the truck.

 

* ''[[Buried]]'' is about a man buried alive and he spends the entire film trapped in the wooden coffin waiting for rescue.

 

* [[Beatrix Potter]]'s ''The Tale of the Roly-Poly Pudding'' involves Tom Kitten getting trapped behind the walls of his own house and being caught by a pair of rats, who proceed to tie him up with string and roll him into a kitten-roly-poly. Terrifying, even though (or perhaps because) the rats were a quarter of Tom's size.

* The previous Trope Illustrator: A British children's book, ''Far Flung Adventures: Corby Flood'' has a scene where a group of criminals tries to kill 8 year old Corby by rigging her mechanized bedroom in such a way that her bed will fly up against the wall and flatten her, pressing her against the wall and unable to move. The book describes how she could barely breathe, and has to tap on the wall to get her parents' attention so they can free her.

* ''[[The Weirdstone of Brisingamen]]'' by Alan Garner has a sequence in which the children are working their way through a long, narrow tunnel deep underground. How narrow? They can just fit with one arm over their head. If it gets any narrower, they'll be stuck. They can't back up because there's two of them and two dwarves (?) all one after the other, and they can't talk to each other, and it's too narrow. They come to a hairpin-bend and have to creep round so they're on their backs. Then they reach a point, shuffling through the pitch black, narrow tunnel on their backs with one arm trapped by their side and one trapped over their head, where they feel the tunnel ahead dip and fill with water...

* In ''Kingdoms of the Wall'' by Robert Silverberg, one of the female characters (who had gone through sexual abuse at a relatively young age) tells [[The Hero]] that she has had several disturbing dreams of a possible afterlife - namely {{spoiler|being trapped in her own corpse, being unnoticed by all, while suffocating, being unable to move, and [[And I Must Scream|unable to scream]].}}

 

* There are a ''ton'' of tight, enclosed areas in the ''[[F.E.A.R.]]'' games, most of which don't actually have any scares or attacks in them....which makes the moments where Alma ''does'' jump you even more startling and terrifying.

* Most of ''[[Condemned]]: Criminal Origins'' takes place within enclosed tight places, which are not only claustrophobic, but filthy and crawling with insane vagrants. Special mention goes to Appleseed Orchard House...

* In [[Fahrenheit (2005 video game)]], Carla, one of the detectives on the case of tracking down the main character, is claustrophobic. This comes into play when she has to go down into the dark, cramped basement of the police station to look up an old case file. The player has to manage her breathing while trying to find the file otherwise she will freak out and run outside.

 

* The scene in ''[[Winnie the Pooh]] and the Honey Tree'' where Pooh gets stuck in the hole has probably inspired more than a bit of claustrophobia in young kids. He was later stuck inside a [[Nightmare Fuel|beehive]].

* In the [[Justice League]] episode "Only a Dream" the [[Not So Harmless]] Doctor Destiny traps several members of the League in [[Your Worst Nightmare|their worst nightmares]]. [[Superman]] loses control of his powers and kills his friends, [[Green Lantern]] becomes alienated from his human roots, [[The Flash]] becomes trapped in superspeed forever...and Hawkgirl is ''buried alive in a coffin''. Seeing the [[Badass]] warrior woman pounding on the coffin walls incoherently shrieking in fear was incredibly disturbing.

** Especially since, thanks to [[Foreshadowing]], she's the only one who's completely beyond her friends' ability to help.

 

* A variant on enclosed places: Thor Heyerdahl visited Easter Island, and part of his research involved a lake in a volcanic crater. The lake had become covered with a mat of vegetation thick enough that you could walk on it ... most places. If you stepped on a thin spot, you might fall through into the water. And if you didn't come right back up before the hole closed, you might not be able to find it, and you'd be trapped underwater, running out of air....

 

== Sudden Sights and Sounds ==

 

* Viacom's dramatic [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOdmFtG4EYY&NR=1 "V of Doom"] [[Vanity Plate]] from the 70s and 80s was the cause of many a nightmare among kids of the time.

* Across the pond, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AOSJd_vv1M Yorkshire Television also had a "V of Doom" ident] that terrified generations of children across Britain. Must be something about chevrons.

* Nothing wets the pants quite like the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5fVJwc8hiE old Paramount logo]. Musician Dominic Frontiere deliberately intended the theme music for this vanity plate to be frightening, even giving it the nickname "Closet Killer." Yes, that's exactly what you want to hear after your favorite television show fades to black... some good 'ol [[Psycho Strings|stabbin' music!]]

 

* Creepers in ''[[Minecraft]]'' are infamous for their habit of sneaking up on you silently, hissing loudly, and exploding (which usually kills you or seriously depletes your health).

* ''[[Morrowind]]'' damn cliffracers.

* The ''[[Resident Evil]]'' series likes this. In the first game (Gamecube version), there is a hallway lined with windows. The first time you walk through it, you hear a pane of glass crack. Not break, just crack. {{spoiler|You make it all the way through and nothing else happens, so you might think it was just [[Nothing Is Scarier|creepy ambient noise]]. The second time through the hallway, you're halfway down when three zombie dogs crash through the windows and maul you with no warning.}} [[HSQ|Holy shit.]]

 

* Screamer videos pretty much run on this: you are instructed to find the "secret" of an unremarkable picture, or to solve a puzzle. However, after a certain amount of time (Or when you do solve the puzzle), something will pop up and... Well, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|scream at you]]. Possibly the cause of many a small heart attack.

* ''[[Marble Hornets]]'', and [[The Slender Man Mythos|such videos like it]], often use sudden bursts of static and video distortion, even during normal conversation and unremarkable events.

== Existential Dread ==

 

* In ''[[Alice in Wonderland]]'' after Alice drinks the potion and begins to shrink, she worries that: "It might end, you know, in my going out like a candle." In ''Through the Looking Glass'', Alice is shown the sleeping Red King, and has the following conversation with Tweedledee:

''Tweedledum'': If that King there was to wake, you'd go out - bang! - like a candle! }}

* ''[[Neuropath]]'', full stop. You are not what you think you are. You have absolutely no free will and your mind can be manipulated completely.

* This is what [[H.P. Lovecraft]] wrote about. In his universe, you are nothing and never will be. The entire human race is gonna be gone soon enough, and will be forgotten. In fact, the human race is nothing more than a mistake. The Elder Things just didn't see us as a nuisance. The only reason we exist is because of apathy. Combined with the fact that total reality failure can come at any second due to Azathoth waking up, it's all the more bleak.

 

* Altaïr gets in on this during the final Codex page in ''[[Assassin's Creed II]]''.

* The moon in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask|Majora's Mask]]''....nuff said.

 

* Odd for a comedy show, [[The Nostalgia Critic]]'s fears about self-worth and wasting his life will hit hard anyone who's also scared that their life is drifting by without them.

 

== The Dark ==

 

* [[Nightfall]] by [[Isaac Asimov]] is the story of a planet where night only arrives every 2049 years. The suddenly falling darkness drives people insane and collapses most of the civilization.

 

* The Vashta Nerada from the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' two-parter "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead". ''The dark itself is trying to kill you'', and it can even block out sunlight. You sure that shadow near you was there a moment ago?

** There's also "Blink", which involves aliens who look like statues. They can't move if someone is looking at them, but travel at amazing speeds as soon as you blink. If they catch you, they will knock you into the past, forcing you to live to death. ([[Paranoia Fuel|Say, where's the nearest statue to you right now]]?)

*** Not only that, but torches and any light source within usable radius won't work because the angels will drain the power. Unless you're being chased outside during the day, you're screwed.

 

* Iron Maiden's "Fear of the Dark".

 

* ''[[Zork]]'''s "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." Note that the game presents it not as a possibility, but as a certainty. Which it is; after a random number of moves in the dark (usually less than 10) you die.

* ''[[Amnesia: The Dark Descent]]'' works this trope perfectly. So well that players really start to be afraid of dark corners. And they should...

* ''[[Minecraft]]'' has darkness become extremely dangerous. Once the sun goes down, the light level is low enough for monsters to spawn in the field and attack you. Caves are not safe either since light doesn't reach it unless you make a hole in the ground above to let light through.

 

* In ''[[No Rest for The Wicked (webcomic)|No Rest for The Wicked]]'', November is [[The Insomniac]] [http://www.forthewicked.net/archive/04-15.html because the darkness feels like it's smothering her.]

 

== Heights and Falling ==

 

* At one point in ''[[1408]]'', in order to escape the titular room, John Enslin attempts to climb out a window 13 stories up, stand on a ledge maybe six inches wide, and shimmy twenty feet across to the next room, with plenty of camera angles to show just how high. Twenty-five feet later, he realizes [[Complete Monster|the room]] is still tormenting him when doesn't encounter a window. The camera zooms out reveal a massive wall ''completely devoid of anything but the ledge and 1408's windows''. While going back, a ghost jumping out the window shocks him, and he only manages to avoid falling to his death by clinging tightly to the ledge. He barely manages to get back in before the window shuts on him.

 

* In [[Companions Quartet]], the main character Connie Lionheart is shown to be afraid of heights.

* In [[The Silver Chair]], There is a part in the first chapter of the book where Jill has Eustace by the arms, trying to pull him up from a cliff's edge, and notices he looks white as a sheet. She looks down and sees why.

** To make it worse than that, imagine you can see through the clouds to the actual bottom, which is much farther below the clouds than you are above them. It's so far down that you can't tell if the bottom is water, woods, rocks, or grass.

 

* Games with three-dimensional movement can induce this fear, especially when a glitch causes you to fall through the ground into the eternal abyss beyond.

** For example, you know that swirling spiral of clouds in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' that you see in the sky in ghost form? That's also on the very bottom of the world. You might get to see it yourself next time Blizzard screws up a patch and teleports you to some random position. Just make sure you have a barf bag handy.

** Similarly, when you're climbing around on the outside of the prison. Though not nearly as tall as the tower, the difference here is that when you jump onto a ledge and hear a sudden crumbling sound, that's your cue to get the hell away because the thing you're standing on most definitely ''is'' going to fall. And while high falls don't kill Cole, the deep water at the bottom will.

 

* Cautious and sensible Elon of ''[[Ears for Elves]]'' is afraid of heights (or at least, walking across a log above a river of indeterminate depth and swiftness). Naturally, lively Myari and confident Tanna don't share in this fear.

 

* Rollercoasters, or anything with a large drop, can be traumatizing even to grown-ups.

** Of course, rollercoasters play on that primal fear quite intentionally: the draw is that you get to scare yourself silly without actually endangering yourself.

** The number, speed, and duration of drops is ''random'' every time, so you can't even brace yourself properly on repeat rides. And you're technically not even being dropped, either: the "elevator" is on a giant belt so you can theoretically be ''hurled'' downwards ''faster than the acceleration due to gravity''.

* The slingshot bungee rides or bungee jumping in general, or skydiving. Take your pick.

== Humiliation ==

 

* What the mob did to Quasimodo in Disney's ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney film)|The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]''. After crowning him "the ugliest face in Paris" and carrying him about the city, they then tie him to a revolving platform and ''spin it at high speed'' while throwing garbage at him. What makes this so utterly horrible is that up until this point, Quasimodo had been so happy that he was ''crying with joy'' at being finally accepted.

 

* Similarly to the above "Hunchback" example, in ''[[Flowers for Algernon]]'', Charlie Gordon, the mentally challenged protagonist, is repeatedly humiliated by his "friends" without suspecting anything. Until, of course, [[Flowers for Algernon Syndrome|his intelligence is surgically increased]].

 

* In ''[[Bionicle]]'', a Rahkshi with fear-based powers nearly incapacitates Kopaka by showing him visions of all the people he cares about taunting and laughing at him.

 

== All Of The Above ==

 

* For such an innocent-looking show, ''[[Pretty Cure]]'' has this page pretty well covered... and then some. For instance, do you like the idea that, at a crucial moment, someone who was about to give you the ability to save your friends will suddenly decide you don't deserve it, leaving you to watch helplessly as said friends only barely pull through and the bad guys get away with the [[MacGuffin]]? Yeah, neither did [[Yes! Pretty Cure 5|Karen]].

 

* The elevator sequence at the beginning of the first ''[[Resident Evil]]'' movie. The whole thing. Bonus points because the elevators are actively being used to kill people.

* ''[[The Grey]]''. It's about people stranded in Alaska with the possibility of freezing, starving, etc. There's a horrifying scene involving heights and of course, [[Everything's Worse with Wolves|the]] [[Nightmare Fuel|wolves.]]

 

 

* All of these and more were ruthlessly exploited by the [[Reality Show]] [[Game Show]] ''[[Fear Factor]]''.

 

* The song "Yulia" by Wolf Parade, about a cosmonaut shot into space without any means of getting back home.

 

 

* In ''[[Unknown Armies]]'', there are five different [[Sanity Meter|sanity meters]], one for each type of psychological stress. Every possible scary thing falls into the category of one of five primal fears: Violence, Isolation, Self, Helplessness, and The Unnatural. Even if a character succeeds in not cracking under the stress, the mere experience of being exposed to enough fears will build up "hard marks" and eventually turn him or her into a sociopath.

 

* ''[[Bionicle]]'' has multiple examples that encompass each and every kind of fear: the chamber that brings one's worst fear to life; Irnakk, a legendary creature whose power is to subject its targets to their own fears; and Karzahni's [[Mask of Power]], which projects horrible visions of alternate futures into the target's head, [[Mind Rape|mind-raping]] them into obedience.

 

* ''Condemned 2'''s run through the Black Lake Lodge? Picture an abandoned, decrepit lodge in the middle of winter. You're alone, it's dark, and there's dead bodies, some of them half-gone with their entrails left out. As you explore the lodge, you see through a hole in the wall ''[[Everything's Worse with Bears|a bear mauling a guy and biting his face off]]'', after which it moves out of sight. Further on, the bear spots you, and it chases after you. It even ''follows you up the freaking stairs to the second floor!'' And all the while, you can hear its rabid panting and the scrabbling of its claws on the wooden floors as it frantically tries to catch you. More than once, it seems as though it's caught you, and you only barely escape through a hole in the wall. At the end of the chase, you're staring down a long hall with this rabid bear charging right at you, ready to tear your freaking face off, and you're holding a shotgun with only one round left in it.

* In [[Pokémon]], Psychic-type pokémons are weak to Bug, Ghost and Dark-type attacks, which are all related to fears. Also, the ability Rattled increases the Speed of the pokémon if it is target by an attack from one of those types.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fear Tropes]]