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Fright Deathtrap
- 328 statements
- 63 feature instances
- 49 referencing feature instances
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Murder Is the Best Solution; sadly, it's not always practical or possible to simply shoot the target. Either because they want to avoid being incriminated in the murder or have no corporeal body, the murderer will use a Fright Deathtrap to figuratively and literally scare someone to death. The Fright Deathtrap consists of scaring someone at just the right moment so they end up dead in circumstances that Occam's Razor will imply was an accident rather than foul play or the supernatural. This usually requires a bit of set-up, though; the murderer has to know the victim's routine, surroundings, and/or reactions well enough to manipulate them into a nearby danger, often one they have to identify or place themselves. For the sake of The Perfect Crime, it should be something that was always there, but a harmless gift (or abandoned object) serves just as well if it's in a place that can help kill the victim. A few common variants: Deadly Fall: Scaring a person at the top of a staircase so they fall and break their neck. Run to your doom: Scaring a person into fleeing into a deadly trap, oncoming traffic, or another enemy. Often, they'd have lived if they simply stayed put or moved slowly. Deer caught in headlights: Scaring a person motionless so that they ignore or fail to dodge or escape an approaching danger or falling object. Scared Stiff: The victim is in such poor health, either mentally or physically, that the shock of a good scare itself may be enough to push a near-fatal condition over the edge. This isn't anywhere near foolproof, of course, and runs the risk that failing to scare the victim into a Fright Deathtrap puts the thwarted murderer out in the open. If he could die a second time, a ghost might die of shame at being as ineffective as a Peek-a-Bogeyman. The would-be victim now knows someone (or thing) is out to get them. ...Unless the would-be murderer used a spring-loaded cat as the scare. Then again, maybe the murderer was going for a long-term frightfest... Compare Tricked to Death and Psychic-Assisted Suicide for other variations on the theme of killing someone by manipulating them into a lethal situation. Not to be confused with Gaige's robot pal. As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware. |
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| Fright Deathtrap / int_10bc0a19 | type |
Fright Deathtrap | |
| Fright Deathtrap / int_10bc0a19 | comment |
A young Lord Vetinari does this to Lord Winder in Night Watch. The Properly Paranoid Winder is expecting to be poisoned or otherwise assassinated, and his nerves are so on edge that the sight of an Assassin walking calmly towards him while everyone else at the party does nothing is enough to cause him to die of fright. In this particular case, the assailant could have killed the victim with conventional means, but it just happened that they didn't need to. | |
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| Fright Deathtrap / int_1f0e1967 | type |
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| Fright Deathtrap / int_1f0e1967 | comment |
In the film Deathtrap (adapted from the play by Ira Levin) wife Myra Bruhl is literally frightened to death after witnessing a staged murder victim return from their grave. She collapses from a fatal heart attack, and the conspirators shake hands over the body. There's an ongoing attempt to induce an earlier heart attack in the lead up to the 'murder' itself. The husband looks like he's going to commit murder, releases the tension with a "Just Joking" Justification, then suddenly chokes his victim to death. | |
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The Hand That Rocks the Cradle combines this with Asthma Peril when Mrs. Mott boobytraps Claire's greenhouse roof to slam shut with enough force to rain glass all over Claire's friend, Marlene. Upon finding her corpse, Claire suffers an asthma attack and is unable to recover from it due to Mott having emptied all her inhalers. Claire manages to survive the ordeal but is hospitalized. | |
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Astrid: Wilfrid Tarquin's death while delivering opening statements in a corruption trial in "The Haunting". He was literally scared to death (via takotsubo cardiomyopathy) by seeing a man he had murdered decades ago in the gallery (it was actually the man's similar-looking son, who just meant to frighten him into confessing). | |
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Bones: The Season 3 episode "The Mummy in the Maze" gives us Peter Geller, an EMT who moonlights as a Serial Killer. His main M.O. is abducting girls from an amusement park the week before Halloween, injecting them with a cocktail of heavy stimulants, and then scaring them, usually by dressing as clown and stalking them, until their hearts give out. He then mummifies the corpses and uses them as props in the annual Halloween Maze. He's killed by Booth in the climax of the episode, after he misjudges how good a shot Booth and doesn't take adequate cover during a gun fight. | |
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The 'Run to Your Doom' version is used in the opening of the Grimm episode "Sweethearts". The Victim of the Week is suffering terrifying hallucinations that cause her to run onto a bridge and into the path of a car. She might have survived, but the monster shows up to finish her off. | |
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In Justice League, "Only a Dream", Dr. Destiny's Dream Weaver powers do not cause physical injuries, but can cause fatal amounts of shock and pain. And this works on victims who are perfect healthy or even superhuman. | |
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A Diplomatic Visit: May or may not have been the intention, but as Luna recounts in the epilogue of the third story, Diplomacy Through Schooling, Umbrea - the former Lady of Nightmares - once tormented an individual with nightmares that eventually proved too much for his heart, putting enough of a strain on it that he literally died of fright in his sleep. | |
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The Scared Stiff version is used the Ellery Queen episode "The Adventure of the Pharaoh's Curse", with a fatal fright being delivered to a man with a weak heart. | |
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In Maher-Shalal-Hashbaz, the Proctors took advantage of their rich uncle's ailurophobia and heart disease and bought a ton of cats under a false ad. They set the kitties loose in his room during the night, and a fatal heart attack ensued. The cats were drowned afterwards, and only one escaped. Fortunately, the owners of the cat that escaped had befriended a traveling salesman, who got really suspicious. | |
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Specimen 1 from Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion is simply a group of cardboard cutouts of cute-faced creatures that jump out with a Scare Chord. By themselves, they are harmless asides from making the character stop for a brief moment (and giving the titular jump scares to the player) but as the game progresses and the player finds the other specimens, Specimen 1's jumpscares become more effective as a deer-in-the-headlights style trap. According to the in-game profile, Specimen 1 has killed 4 people via heart attack. | |
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Attempted in one episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) by a ghost villain, who appeared in the middle of the road while his target was driving. But his target knew he was a ghost and just drove straight through him. | |
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One episode of the Poirot TV series features a Gold Digger who attempts to make use of her husband's heart condition to scare him to death with a ghost story. When he proves sturdier than she thought, she shoots him and uses the ghost story to make it look as though she is being deliberately frightened by someone else. | |
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Dungeon Keeper 2: The Jack-in-the-Box trap looks like a magical item box, but triggers and scares nearby Worker Units to death when they try to collect it. | |
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The Mickey MouseWorks short "How to Haunt a House", which subsequently aired as part of House of Mouse: At the beginning, we hear Goofy getting hit by a car so that he can be a ghost and demonstrate how to haunt a house, with Donald Duck as the hauntee. After many amusing attempts that end in failure, he finally succeeds in scaring Donald, who runs out the door, is also hit by a car and comes back inside as a rather angry ghost. | |
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The Shadow: The Shadow adores this trope. He uses his powers to cause hallucinations that make the villains kill themselves or their partners, or just freaks them out so badly that they're driven to do something suicidally stupid. In "The Three Ghosts" the villain is trying to do this to his wife, and apparently did it to his last one. |
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Elementary: The 'Run to Your Doom' version happens in "Hounded" when Charles Baskerville is struck by a truck while fleeing from what a witness describes as a huge glowing animal. | |
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In World of Warcraft, Fear is one of Status Effects that does no damage by itself, but a few dungeon bosses count as this trope: they fear the Player Characters, making them run around at random so that they risk running into a group of unengaged mobs and aggroing them. Onyxia is the most notorious for this, as her lair contains two pens with whelp eggs, which players who are feared run into and are overcome by whelps. | |
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In the Golden Age, heroes occasionally did this, although usually unintentionally. The original Green Lantern (Alan Scott) terrified a villain into confessing that he had masterminded blowing up the bridge that Scott had designed, killing everyone on board the test train except Scott - and then the villain drops dead of a heart attack. | |
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In Higurashi: When They Cry, during the last part of an arc, Mion is hiding under Keiichi's hospital bed, waiting for a chance to attack him when he's alone. But, much as it is a surprise to say, first, the REAL murderer was Shion, and second, in the first of the answer arcs, it's revealed that it was actually a hallucination that caused him to see the same thing over and over again until he finally died of a heart attack. In the original visual novel, Keiichi actually realizes that he's hallucinating. | |
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Dead Man's Gun: In "Buryin' Sam", Sam—who has a weak heart—dies of a heart attack when his beleaguered assistant disguises himself as Sam's business partner, whom Sam had murdered earlier. | |
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Used unintentionally in Child's Play 3. As Chucky is about to attack his next victim with a knife, yelling a battle cry with his face looking like it's covered in blood (actually lipstick), his would-be elderly victim is so scared he has a fatal heart attack and is scared stiff. Chucky's actually upset he didn't get to stab the guy. | |
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Phantasmal Killer and related spells in Dungeons & Dragons cause the target to imagine being attacked by their worst fears come to life. If they fail both a will save to disbelieve the illusory assailant, and the fortitude save to avoid having their heart stop, they drop dead on the spot. | |
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Benoit in Man Bites Dog is a Serial Killer who often kills old people to rob them. At one point in the movie, he notices that his intended victim has a heart condition, so to save a bullet he pretends to be interviewing her for TV and suddenly shoves his gun to her face and screams at the top of his lungs that she's going to die. She drops dead on the spot. | |
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Les Diaboliques is probably the Trope Codifier, in which Michel and Nicole conspire to give his wife Christina a heart attack by Michel getting "killed" and pretending to be a zombie to scare his weak-hearted wife to death. | |
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In The Sims 2, Sims can be scared to death by ghosts if their needs are low when the ghost scares them. This is particularly common with pregnant Sims since they often already have low needs due to pregnancy. | |
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In the Batman mini-series The Legend Of The Batman, it's revealed he's accidentally done this twice. The first time is when he confronts Joe Chill, revealing his identity to him. In a panic, he runs and confronts his cohorts, who shoot him when they realized he's the reason Batman exists. The second time is when Batman decides to confront the mobster who ordered Joe to murder the Waynes. Having no other costume except his father's Halloween costume, he wears that to confront the mobster and, his memory being jogged by it, the mobster runs right into a semi thinking that the ghost of Thomas Wayne had arrived. | |
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Murdoch Mysteries: In "The Curse of Beaton Manor", the killer poses as the ghost of the Victim of the Week's brother, hoping to either induce a fatal heart attack or drive him to suicide. Ultimately it does both, as the victim suffers a heart attack while climbing on to a window ledge. | |
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The ghost in Haunt the House can frighten the guests so much to the point that they end up jumping out of the windows. However, defying this trope (scaring the guests into leaving the house through the door) is the only way to get the highest ranking, as killing any guest results in their ghost sharing the same house with the player's ghost in the ending. | |
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The Scared Stiff variant is attempted in an episode of Monk, where someone wants to keep the Worlds Oldest Man from reaching his next birthday. | |
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The Elysian Box in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box seems to function this way. Rumors surrounding the box say that it kills all who dare open it, and the game begins with the death of Layton's old mentor while investigating the rumors it turns out that the box's "power" actually comes from the victim being exposed to a type of fume that causes the inhaler to be highly susceptible to suggestion to the point of perceiving whatever he thinks might be in the room as actually being there. Schrader actually recovers from his death at the end, but it's speculated that he may have been one of the lucky ones who wasn't say, chased out of a tenth story window by the imaginary thirty-foot python lurking in the box, much like the Young Sherlock Holmes example. | |
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The Run to your doom variety is used frequently in Young Sherlock Holmes, as several older gentlemen who pissed off the wrong Egyptian cult as younger men are drugged with blow-darts, causing them to see terrifying hallucinations and run into traffic, leap out out third-story windows, etc. | |
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The Futurama episode "Ghost in the Machines" has Bender (as a disembodied software ghost) attempt this on Fry as part of a deal with the Robot Devil. | |
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InThe Walking Dead (1936), three of the men responsible for Ellman's execution die as a result of seeing him coming for them without him laying a hand on them. Smith trips over a table and shoots himself with his own gun; Blackwood panics and runs in front of a train; and Merritt suffers a heart attack and falls out a window. | |
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Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not: In "The Adventure of the Sacrifice Stone", Dr. Roylott speculates that Lady Sarah intends the red-bellied black snake to frighten Miss Dalrymple to death than as an actual Animal Assassin. Holmes disagrees, pointing out that their client is hardly a hysterical young woman who will keel over at the sight of a serpent. As it turns out, Lady Sarah is insane and probably believed her scheme would work. | |
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In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Terror is a status effect that causes instant death if its effect accumulates to full. Enemies that can apply these are rare, but are worthily nightmarish creatures to boot. | |
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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Averted with "The Girl Who Stood On A Grave", where it's a complete accident. She goes out to stand on a grave and stick a knife into it, only for something to grab her and keep her from fleeing. When she's found dead the next morning, it turns out that she had accidentally plunged the knife into her dress, which made her panic and die of fright. | |
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Whodunnit? (UK): In "Future Imperfect", the Victim of the Week is murdered when the travel tape he was supposed to experiencing is swapped for a tape of a tiger attacking, triggering a heart attack. | |
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In "The Blue Geranium" from The Thirteen Problems, a woman is told by a fortune teller, "Beware the full moon. The blue primrose means warning, the blue hollyhock means danger, the blue geranium means death." At the next full moon, one of the primroses on her wallpaper turns blue, and at the full moon after that, one of the hollyhocks turns blue. The woman dies of a heart attack on the night of the third full moon, with the implication being that she was frightened to death by the threat. She was actually poisoned by her nurse, who switched her bottle of smelling salts with cyanide crystals. The nurse set up the whole blue flowers motif as camouflage—she herself was the fortune teller in an elaborate disguise. | |
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In Hitman (2016) mission Situs Invertus, one of the ways 47 can assassinate Erich Soders is to walk up to his operating table and look at him in the eyes. Just knowing how screwed he is when he sees who he knows as the world's finest assassin is enough to make him go into a cardiac arrest and die. Justified in that he has a serious heart condition (in fact, the operation he went in for is a heart transplant). | |
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A "Deer in the headlights" variant happens in "The Tell-Tale Heart", where the protagonist jump-scares his victim and freezes him with fear long enough to suffocate him with a pillow. | |
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In The Tingler, the theater owner's mute wife is frightened to death while alone in their apartment - hints suggest it may have been the work of coroner Vincent Price who may have 'medicated' her with LSD to get a 'scared to death' subject for his work but it turned out to be the work of her husband, caught red-handed with the spook show props that killed her. | |
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Night Gallery In "The Ghost of Sorworth Place": A ghost appears near the top of a flight of stairs. A man pursuing the ghost tries to grab it but falls through it and down the flight of stairs, breaking his neck. In "Something in the Woodwork", Molly nags the ghost into scaring her ex-husband to death (which she has reason to think will work, given his bad heart). It works, but then the ghost possesses the corpse. |
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In The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case, Small is able to frighten Major Sholto to death just by leering through the window at him. | |
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In The Bloody Olive, Werner and Sam exploit Mylène's heart condition and make her die of a shock to collect the insurance and inheritance money. | |
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Criminal Minds: One unsub kills via a combination of the "Deer in the Headlights" and "Scared Stiff" variant. He poses as a psychiatrist trying to help his victims with their phobias so that he truly understands what scares them, drugs them to intensify their fears, and then traps them in an appropriate situation. Since the fears tended to be things like "drowning" and "being buried alive," the fear wasn't the only direct cause, but the claustrophobic victim didn't suffocate, so it was a major factor. | |
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In Curse of the Headless Horseman, one of the hippie chicks is spooked by the Horseman and somehow runs in front of a campervan that is the only moving vehicle in the whole carpark. Another one dies, seemingly of heart failure, when she encounters the Horseman while tripping on acid. | |
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In Ironclaw necromancers can push a Dying character over the edge with a Scare stunt. It's also one of the potential random effects that can result from casting black magic. | |
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Stargate Atlantis: in one episode, the Neglectful Precursors artifact of the week turned out to be a nanovirus that kills people via Mind Rape that makes them see progressively more terrifying nightmares until they die of cardiac arrest. One particular death we see on-screen has the victim being so terrified that she jumped off Atlantis's central tower in the dream and dies in the real world the instant she does in the dream. | |
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In Illbleed, many of the traps are meant to scare the target instead of physically injuring them. Your character will die of shock if their heart rate gets too high. | |
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Star Trek: Voyager: In the episode "The Thaw", five people are trapped in a virtual world with a malevolent program that looks like a clown. It can't affect their bodies in the real world, but it still manages to kill some of them by scaring them enough (specifically, he had figured out that the experience of being killed is stressful enough to cause heart attacks). | |
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Solar Pons: In "The Adventure of the Frightened Baronet", the villain is attempting to make the title character believe he is being haunted by an Indian spirit in an attempt to have him either declared insane or to scare him to death. | |
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The Brokenwood Mysteries: The aptly-titled "Scared to Death" features the Victim of the Week dying after emerging from a scary ride at his own A&P show, seemingly having been killed by fright. He was injected with poison during the ride. | |
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MacGyver (1985): "Deadly Silents" used the 'Scared Stiff' version. The villains set up several stunts (a suitcase full of snakes, leaving him Chained to a Railway, etc.) to attempt to trigger a fatal heart attack in an elderly silent movie star. | |
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Charmed (1998): In one episode, a demon who appears every 1300 years, kills his victims randomly by turning their fears into reality and frightening them to death. | |
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In "The Killer" — the first episode of the '80s revival of Mission: Impossible — Drake does this to Tom Copperfield; shooting him with a hallucinogenic drug that causes him to think that he is on fire. In a panic, he throws himself off the balcony of the penthouse. | |
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Axe Murdering with Hackley: When the sheriff's daughter sees Hackley about to attack her, she lets out a long scream of fright... and then falls over, dead. Hackley is worried by this, since it's the kind of death that's hard to attribute to him, meaning he might not make his quota and lose his job. Which is what happens the next day. | |
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In Ghost (1990), Sam's very limited ability to interact with the physical world means that his primary means of fighting both of the film's villains is based in poltergeist scares. Both villains of the film meet their karmic ends this way, one by running into oncoming traffic and the other when his own panicked actions break the window he's trying to climb out of into deadly shards of glass - although judging by Sam's reactions, neither death was what he'd intended to accomplish with his hauntings. | |
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In Scream of the Banshee, the Banshee kills her first victim after being released by scaring him until he had a heart attack. | |
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How Sir Charles Baskerville was killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles (by the scared stiff variant). Though an accidental victim, Seldon was killed by the deadly fall variant. | |
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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: If the player is a Nosferatu, the old lady running the Surfside Diner will pass out if they try to talk to her. A low-humanity Nosferatu can yell "I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!" instead, upon which she will die of a heart attack. | |
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The Fighting Fantasy adventure, House of Hell, have you assuming an ordinary civilian stuck in a haunted mansion, and forced to spend a night there. You get a new stat called "Fear" which increases until it breaks maximum, at which point you'll be literally scared to death. | |
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Star Trek: The Next Generation has a variation in the episode "The Offspring": when a Starfleet admiral threatens to separate her from her creator/father Data, Lal's overwhelming fear of the separation results in a cascade failure that leads to her suffering a total systems failure. | |
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