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Rule of Scary
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Like the Rule of Cool and the Rule of Funny, the Rule of Scary says that if it's creepy enough, it doesn't matter how illogical it is. All that matters is that it creeps you out. Most effective formulas for scary: Mixing the paranormal or abnormal with the mundane and familiar. Even if the Willing Suspension of Disbelief remains intact, blatantly scary things are easy to shrug off when they are happening in a completely unrelatable situation. But when the same elements are placed side-by-side with familiar settings and elements, suddenly The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You. Even with flawless special effects a Starfish Alien in an Eldritch Location can be mere Narm, but invoking the Uncanny Valley with a Humanoid Abomination in an Abandoned Hospital can be downright terrifying. Ending on a note or element no sane person would. You'll find humans are psychopathic. What is funny, notched up, is scary (and still kinda funny). Exempli gratia: "How about a magic trick? I'm gonna make this pencil disappear..." Vividly showing (or describing) something scary which directly affects the human body. Body Horror is a part of this, but this is not always Body Horror. eg, The Matrix using humans as "living batteries", or some portrayals of viruses. Artistic License – Biology is a major factor in this. Not showing anything, and leaving some things unexplained. This works on the (fairly reliable) premise that no expensive special effect or clever writing can ever top what the viewer imagines to fill in the blanks. Used well, this method creates suspense, enhances the ultimate reveal, and can magnify a simple Jump Scare into a Brown Pants Scenario. Often combined with Hell Is That Noise and Obscured Special Effects. Offscreen Teleportation, Unreveal Angles, and implausibly agile monsters using Air-Vent Passageways are all classic methods of keeping the scary unseen as long as possible. The plot aspect often involves His Name Is..., Conveniently Interrupted Documents, Apocalyptic Logs, and/or Plot-Based Photograph Obfuscation. Just making something mindblowingly scary and showing it in all its well-lit horrific glory — the hardest to pull off, as it risks highlighting even minor Special Effects Failures unless done superbly, and often has to overcome the lack of menacing atmosphere. On the rare occasions it is done well, however, it can be absolute Nightmare Fuel, all the more jarring because both viewers and characters tend to associate well lit areas with safety — which is not always the case. Numerous particularly well-done instances of this form can be seen in The Walking Dead, with walkers as likely to attack in open fields in broad daylight as in dark basements, making for prime Paranoia Fuel. If you cannot tell from the listings below, this is overwhelmingly a Film trope. Whether this is because producers don't care about silly things like logic, or they just don't have enough time to explain every little idiosyncrasy, is a debate that will rage on for as long as the medium exists. See also Hand Wave, Nightmare Fuel. Compare Fridge Logic. Offscreen Teleportation is a Sub-Trope of this, as is Body Horror. Contrast Narm, Nightmare Retardant, Rule of Cute, which negate a work's potential for fear. Also contrast Realism-Induced Horror, which seeks to instill fear in audiences through plausibility. |
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Five Nights at Freddy's: The series' main premise and gameplay mechanics run on this. Why would animatronics at a children's pizza parlor be able to move around when all they're supposed to do is perform on stage? So they can get close enough to kill you. Why does it use power to keep the doors closed? So you can never be truly safe. | |
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The ending of the "Amelia" segment of Trilogy of Terror: There's no explanation as to why being possessed by a spirit formerly contained in a Zuni fetish doll would mean you'd also inherit the doll's razor-sharp teeth... but the final shot of the movie, Amelia slowly giving a Slasher Smile to the camera, is definitely scarier for it. | |
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This trope is why, in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and its sequels, villain Freddy Krueger wears a red and green Christmas sweater. Wes Craven had read that those colors together tend to mess with viewers' eyesight, and produce a generally unsettling result. Also, Freddy's glove. It isn't nearly as efficient as an axe, a machete, or hell, a gun would be as a way to murder people. But it hits the middle ground between Rule of Cool and Rule Of Scary quite nicely. Also, Freddy's glove was intended to be as much a torture device as a killing tool. In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare you can see a variety of gloves in his basement, including one with what looks like rusty nails for knuckles and one with straight razors attached to the tips. Also, he specifically killed young children. What would terrify a child more than that? And since Freddy exists in nightmares, nothing he does has to be practical and can be as terrifying as possible. Freddy is basically Rule of Scary incarnate. To a lesser extent, this is true of most slasher movie villains. Halloween's Michael Myers uses a kitchen knife, while most of the murders in the Friday the 13th films are done with a machete and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was committed with chainsaws (and sledgehammers, a surprising amount of the time), and there are other films with names like The Nailgun Massacre and The Driller Killer. Slashers use everyday, utilitarian objects as weapons because it's scarier than using a gun, even though a gun would be easiernote Amusingly enough, Michael Myers actually does use a shotgun in one film... to stab his victim. This trope also covers their common powers of Offscreen Teleportation. Halloween actually tried to justify this in one of the later sequels by revealing that its killer actually had magical powers the whole time, explaining some of his more improbable feats. Audiences weren't happy, feeling that it was better when it was operating wholly off of this trope, with no justification. |
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F.E.A.R.. How is Alma able to rape the player character and become pregnant when she's an undead psychic ghost? Who cares, because it's absolutely terrifying. Using her power to reanimate her dead body, which was released from it's confinement at the end of the first game. |
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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's town of Holstenwall looks very structurally unsound. Of course, there's a good reason for that. | |
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The Matrix utterly obliterates the laws of thermodynamics. Although it is a case of Executive Meddling; it was originally supposed to be human brains linking up to make a giant supercomputer... Not that a supercomputer using human brains in a network would make significantly more sense. | |
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Heroes: Sylar, early on, literally has no definition other than this rule, though this becomes less and less true as the series went on before vanishing, never to return, by season 2. Why does he need to remove the brain? How did he just appear right behind you? How'd he survive/come back to life? What, exactly, are his powers? | |
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Any objections people had to the reinterpretation of Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins from a university professor to an asylum manager were forgotten the moment we saw his mask and his use of a chemical that can literally be called "Nightmare Fuel". | |
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The Suffering. Why are those malefactors suddenly appearing and murdering everyone on the island and in the city? One theory in-game is that when too many atrocities are committed in one place, the monsters come. Thus, the possibility the events of the game could happen anywhere. It's a small world after all... |
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Eternal Darkness has a statue that turns its head to look at you, even when your sanity is at its highest. It serves no purpose, other than to creep you out. | |
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The xenomorph's life cycle from Alien, based on the way a spider wasp lays its eggs, as facehuggers implant embryos into their victim's chest. The xenomorphs have LEGO Genetics, as illustrated in Alien³, so the embryo's host also provides the fertilization. Similarly, the Xenomorph's quick growth to adulthood, despite lacking any apparent source of food, or the laws of physics. The only important point is that the tiny creature they were hunting for has suddenly gotten much bigger, more dangerous, and is now hunting them. | |
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House of Leaves. Why does any of it happen? Does any of it happen? |
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The SCP Foundation basically defines this trope, often describing the effects of its various horrors in emotionless clinical detail, and just when you think it can't get any worse they [DATA EXPUNGED], forcing your mind to follow the list of [REDACTED] to the logical conclusion that █████████. | |
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Tales from the Darkside: The Movie could make one wonder how an above average size domestic cat is able to fit in a person's mouth, even before crawling all the way down the throat. | |
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Condemned 2: Bloodshot. Why did those mannequins move to block the door behind you? It's just a hallucination, caused by Sanity Slippage machines that are literally everywhere. Now, why are Sanity Slippage machines literally everywhere? Ancient Conspiracy. Why would an Ancient Conspiracy want Sanity Slippage machines literally everywhere? This trope. That's why. | |
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About the only consistent detail regarding the Slender Man is that he is freakishly tall, impossibly skinny, faceless, and has arms that are in some way related to tree branches and/or tentacles. Oh, and he's scary. Aside from that, nobody has quite the same interpretation of him, which just adds to his Eldritch Abomination mystique. | |
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Half of the non-zombie creatures in Resident Evil. Giant zombie spiders are creepy, even though you might wonder why a tarantula would grow several hundred times its body mass, but not other zombies. Oddly enough, it seems that only mammals can become zombified; the T-virus seems to just make insects, reptiles, and plants get bigger and more aggressive. Birds seem to just become more aggressive without becoming larger or putrefied. There hasn't been any concrete explanation in canon, but the real reason is obvious: Giant insects and reptiles are more freaky than non-giant ones. For that matter, the motives behind the actions of the Umbrella Corporation hardly ever make sense. It's as if their strategic planning sessions consist of people saying "Hey, I wonder what would happen if we injected zombie juice into one of these!" Then again, this is a company where getting into the men's room requires fetching the four parts to a family crest on the door, each of which is heavily guarded and hidden at a different corner of the map. The pre-rendered backgrounds only allowed for fixed camera movement in the older games for the Playstation (and this was the case for many other PS1 games at the time). Many argue that this technical limitation actually added to the scary atmosphere compared to the later games, as the player usually cannot see what is attacking them from certain areas. This applies similarly to the Dino Crisis games. |
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Silent Hill: The mannequin in Silent Hill 3 that screams and has its head break off, complete with blood, when you happen to be looking the other way? No real reason for it, but it's creepy. Stanley Coleman. Finding his little notes for Heather is completely optional, and has no real impact on the plot, except to provide serious Paranoia Fuel. |
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The process of assimilation into the Borg Collective also "benefited" from this treatment, especially in First Contact; Instead of simply grabbing you and teleporting you away to be converted into a Borg at their leisure, they forcibly inject nanites into you and leave you to slowly turn into early-stage Borg from the inside out, adding elements of The Virus and Zombie Infectee. "Don't let them touch you" indeed. | |
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The Dark Knight Trilogy: Any objections people had to the reinterpretation of Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins from a university professor to an asylum manager were forgotten the moment we saw his mask and his use of a chemical that can literally be called "Nightmare Fuel". The very fact that the Joker has any capacity to do anything like what he does let alone to the extent that he does, ever, breaks most common sense, but damn isn't he funny and scary for doing it. The song The Dark Knight Is Confused sums them up perfectly: The Joker's goons are schizos who are nevertheless dependable and self-sacrificing and for a guy who doesn't look like he had a plan, he musta organized these attacks on an evil day planner. |
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Similar to the Condemned example above, what is up with the mannequins in Nightmare House? Or the shadows in the hallway? Are the zombies even real in the first place?. Doesn't matter, it's still damn scary. | |
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Moonflowers is an Urban Fantasy that runs on this, as its main antagonists are The Wild Hunt. Their leader (aptly titled the Hunter) wears a gigantic deer or Irish Elk's skull with burning red eyes, which he uses in an animalistic way by ramming his opponents with the antlers. He's tormenting a random American family for no confirmed reason, and is currently preparing for a ritualized serial-killing spree called the Fairy Raid--of which the only two survivors of a past Raid were chanced upon by a deity. Which fits with the source material, as Celtic Mythology is very emphatic on how dangerous The Fair Folk can be. Later on, it turns out that the Hunter is the mythical Horned Hunter, which in this story means he's a straight-up force of nature. And Nature Is Not Nice. | |
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The mannequin in Silent Hill 3 that screams and has its head break off, complete with blood, when you happen to be looking the other way? No real reason for it, but it's creepy. | |
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In Tales from the Crypt, when the Twist Ending begs the question of how a man who is supposed to "live forever" has died and been sent to Hell. There is a possible answer, but they don't even hint to it... | |
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Why can't the blind crawlers smell the tasty humans hiding a foot away in The Descent? Because they're too busy being terrifying, that's why. | |
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Call of Cthulhu has a strange mixed relationship with this. On the one hand, most of the monsters defy physics and evolution entirely, and are often made far more frightening for it. On the other hand, this makes sense because many of the monsters are aliens, and often extradimensional beings that don't follow normal laws of physics. Also weird with actual adventures, as they're typically set up as mysteries that do have actual explanations that persistent players can find, but player characters are so fragile and limited they're likely to die, or retreat, before uncovering much of the mystery. Most questions will remain unanswered, making it at least appear to be Rule Of Scary at work. |
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Annyseed: Why does Count Tarrorviene have red scabby rings around his eyes? And how come Uncle Tarkwin doesn't have them, yet is the same age and species as Tarrorviene? Also, just how did they get that conveniently designed blood machine into that castle keep, and manage to plug it into his shoulder blades whilst he (most likely) fought for his very existence? It doesn't matter, it's creepy, so let it be. | |
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The supernatural elements in Twin Peaks all operate on a kind of nightmarish dream logic. There's no explanation for why the Black Lodge looks like a waiting room, or for why all the spirits seem to feed on a kind of demonic creamed corn, or for why one of the main villains is a demon named BOB who looks like an extra in a bar scene and can turn into an owl or something. Additionally, the camerawork and sound design often make seemingly normal objects — the ceiling fan over the Palmer family's staircase, or the traffic light outside the Double R Diner — seem like the embodiment of pure evil, for no clear reason. (Although Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me reveals that there's a good reason the fan is imbued with evil: BOB always switches it on before entering Laura's room to rape her.) Of course, this is what happens when David Lynch is your showrunner. | |
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By and large, BioShock is not a horror game. It's a narrative-driven game with fairly standard baddies, albeit much more thought-provoking than most. That did not stop the developers from randomly throwing in scripted events where enemies suddenly appear right behind you or things that shouldn't be alive suddenly become so. The general lack of this elsewhere in the game and total subversion of logic is exactly what makes it so effective. The first shotgun is under a spotlight in a very dark room. Beside the shotgun is a dead splicer with surgical scissors in her eyes. If you grab the shotgun, the lights turn off making the entire room pitch black & you hear running footsteps. The spotlight turns back on but the other lights stay off so you can't see anything more than several feet away. Splicers start attacking from all directions. After you kill them all, you hear the footsteps again & the lights turn back on. You never find out who did that or why. |
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Watching Tetsuo: The Iron Man can bring up many questions, such as "How is the protagonist able to live with all that metal growing out of his body?" or "How are the rocket jets in his ankles fueled?" or even "How is this even possible?" The answer to all these is because Shinya Tsukamoto hates you and does not believe in this peculiar idea you call "sleep". | |
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The Blight from Red Markets does not obey the known laws of biology, chemistry, or even physics as it infects and transforms its victims. It behaves like a bacteria, virus, fungus, and parasite simultaneously, but looks like homogeneous black "stuff" at every level of magnification so its structure can't be studied; it has no identifiable cellular, molecular, or atomic structures. It sprung up across the world at the same time, with no identifiable origin or Patient Zero. Unreliable reports of aberrant infections further complicate attempts to understand and fight back against the Blight. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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The Shining is scary enough on its own, but much of the score is modernist classical music that sounds terrifying in context. What makes it this trope is that much of the score wasn't actually written to be scary. For example, a piece that begins with a loud mechanical clattering sound, followed by indistinct murmuring and shouting, which first appears when Dick Halloran is murdered and Wendy starts to be able to see the ghosts in the Overlook too, is the opening of the second part of Krzysztof Penderecki's "Utrenja- Ewangelia", a piece of liturgical music. That ominously murmuring crowd of voices, which many viewers interpret as the voices of the indigenous people whose burial ground the hotel was built on, are actually rapturously declaring the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the salvation of the world! Another Penderecki piece used in the film in multiple scenes, "The Dream of Jacob", is only an audio picture of the idea of a staircase extending to heaven and angels climbing endlessly up and down. The pieces are simply so abstract that out of context they function to heighten the Surreal Horror of the film despite depicting benign holiness in their original settings. | |
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In Tarzan, a lot of license is taken with Sabor the leopard, to make her as horrifying as possible; she has slit pupils like a domestic cat-even though real leopards have round pupils-sparse rosettes that look more like jaguar spots, her vocal effects sound like a mix of leopard, mountain lion and tiger sounds, and the fact that she was already full-grown when Tarzan was a baby, and was still alive by the time he was an adult; if anything, age had only made her more dangerous. | |
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In Psycho, Mrs. Bates' rocking chair acts like a swivel chair around the end of the movie, entirely for the benefit of a very creepy shot. Audiences were okay with this. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. How does a giant snake living underneath a castle stay alive for over 1000 years without eating any of the students? Most likely, A Wizard Did It, but that's actually a perfectly satisfactory answer here. Some of Voldemort's achievements in a few of the later books go against established laws of what magic can and can't do in the setting. Rather than making the audience call bullshit, though, this just makes Voldemort more menacing, because he's doing things that he shouldn't be able to do. |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Jurassic Park (1993): Many of the dinosaurs were deliberately stylized to be more menacing. The velociraptors are a particularly evident example. Why in blazes would a door lock ever be tied to an electrical grid in such a way that it cannot be manually operated? There's no sane reason for that whatsoever apart from this trope.note But it does reflect but one of the numerous oversights Hammond and the park designers made, probably for reasons of some silly technological gimmickry It also explains why Tim and Lex keep a tight grasp on the Idiot Ball several times: if they didn't do incredibly stupid things, the dinosaurs wouldn't be able to menace them constantly and create tension. |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Oddly enough, Godzilla could be said to fall under this trope, in some of his darker incarnations. In reality, a dinosaur his size could be killed with a single airstrike, or, more likely, by his own weight, but when you start to realize that he's actually an unstoppable natural disaster that just happens to be shaped like a dinosaur, you realize how screwed the world is. Some of the films almost feel like Cosmic Horror Stories. | |
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The game designers responsible for the Ravenloft D&D setting knew this trope as "The Bill Rule", naming it for design-team member William W. Connors. He summed up the concept by suggesting that Ravenloft DMs should, when faced with an in-game choice between options, always ask themselves: "Which would be scarier?" | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Also, ReDead from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Why these dried-up zombies wanted to dry-hump your face was never explained. Beneath the Well, and the Shadow Temple. Spontaneously sinking ghost ships, fake walls, floors, and platforms, autonomous giant guillotines, an invisible boss that fights by beating on a giant bongo... the list goes on. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Playing a mortal in Chronicles of Darkness (as distinct from an actual hunter) will typically mean that encounters with the supernatural will be left unexplained and seemingly nonsensical. Supernatural characters generally have a better chance of figuring out what's going on (although there's always an exception...). | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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The pre-rendered backgrounds only allowed for fixed camera movement in the older games for the Playstation (and this was the case for many other PS1 games at the time). Many argue that this technical limitation actually added to the scary atmosphere compared to the later games, as the player usually cannot see what is attacking them from certain areas. This applies similarly to the Dino Crisis games. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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In the Feast films, we never find out exactly what the monsters are. All we know is, they like eating things and raping things. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Fatal Frame has quite a bit of this. Why do ghosts have to get close if you want to inflict maximum damage? Because it's scary. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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GOHOME runs on this to the point of Black Comedy. Sometimes enemies will literally pop up from nowhere, and there are very few set rules to the world they inhabit. Why are you being chased by a ghost with a swollen head while Ear Rape orchestral music plays every time she chases you? No one knows. Is it creepy? Definitely. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers. How did those floating rocks in the future get up there in the first place? | |
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Doki Doki Literature Club! starts out as a cutesy Romance Game but then takes a turn into horror. Things get really dark, and then they get really weird. By the time you find out what the hell is going on, it all makes sense... except no, some of the specific disturbing imagery isn't really explained by anything else than that it was there to freak you out. Some of the most disturbing things do make sense, though, with the rest being just additional flavouring. | |
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The Night of the Hunter applies this to the villain's Offscreen Teleportation. Asks one character, "Don't he never sleep?" | |
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To a lesser extent, this is true of most slasher movie villains. Halloween's Michael Myers uses a kitchen knife, while most of the murders in the Friday the 13th films are done with a machete and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was committed with chainsaws (and sledgehammers, a surprising amount of the time), and there are other films with names like The Nailgun Massacre and The Driller Killer. Slashers use everyday, utilitarian objects as weapons because it's scarier than using a gun, even though a gun would be easiernote Amusingly enough, Michael Myers actually does use a shotgun in one film... to stab his victim. This trope also covers their common powers of Offscreen Teleportation. Halloween actually tried to justify this in one of the later sequels by revealing that its killer actually had magical powers the whole time, explaining some of his more improbable feats. Audiences weren't happy, feeling that it was better when it was operating wholly off of this trope, with no justification. |
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One of the themes of ''From a Buick 8" actually is that some things will never be understood. | |
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In "Hush", nobody really cares that The Gentlemen look like gray glittered morticians who can float above the ground and are only single episode villains. The viewers are too focused on their unsettling smiles. It's telling enough that Joss Whedon said he was basically creating creatures that kids would have nightmares over. | |
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Technically, a faun really oughtn't to be made out of rotting wood, but Pan's Labyrinth was so disturbing that this can be forgiven. Also, the Pale Man walks really slowly and isn't all that dangerous, although this is partly justified by the implication that he's been starving for some time, without any kids to eat. Still... | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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The Hands of Blue in Firefly have a very unusual method of killing. It's one thing to use it on hated enemies, but they use it on people who merely happened to learn too much. Mercilessness aside, it's hardly practical in a hurry; it leaves distinctively marked corpses behind, which almost defeats the purpose of eliminating witnesses; and the victims scream enough to alert the more important targets into running away. But it does help us understand why River fears them so much. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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The Evil Within, likewise, becomes almost silly in its refusal to even try to muster an explanation for why you're encountering just about every horror trope in the book, from shambling zombies to a maniac wielding a chainsaw to a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl to that one dude with the safe on his head. (As Yahtzee put it, it's as if the entire design doc read "It's a horror game".) Until near the end when it's finally revealed that none of it was real, and instead you were captured and plugged into a mad-science machine that traps you in the minds—and fears—of a bunch of mental patients. In essence, the game ran on this trope in-universe as well. | |
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Rule of Scary / int_ee344d3d | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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Event Horizon. The jokes about it being a prequel to Warhammer 40,000 are not helped by the fact that, for no apparent reason, the FTL drive and the room containing it look like a shrine to Chaos, complete with Spikes of Doom on everything. | |
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Don't Rest Your Head runs off this like crazy. The Mad City doesn't operate on normal logic, but instead functions as a surreal and bizarre world that will warp and twist things for the sake of horror. It uses all three methods: mixing the weirdness of the Mad City with almost normal inhabitants, and the perfectly mundane City Slumbering; lots of fairly amusing ideas for Nightmares that are cranked up to their terrifying potential, and stories that tend to end with the most terrible outcomes possible; topped off with lots of violence, truly bizarre and creepy entities with warped bodies, and many a hero slowly turning monsters themselves. The one supplement, Don't Lose Your Mind, cranks this up even further by having a list of 26 new Madness Talents (one for each letter of the alphabet) that have built in methods of turning those that have them into Nightmares, each Nightmare being based off of a pun that somehow, despite the humor, ends up being horrifically creepy. |
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Phantasm. None of it makes much sense: something about a supernatural conspiracy to steal our dead so as to revive them as slaves on another planet. But then there's the Tall Man the mastermind who as an otherworldly creature doesn't need any motivation comprehensible to humans, those Jawa-like slaves, and that flying ball... there's something surreal about the whole thing, and it just somehow works. | |
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Rule of Scary | |
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The Cabin in the Woods is in part a critique of this trope, zig-zagging with this and actually using Rule of Funny (albeit with Black Comedy). | |
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The Borg throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation were originally made to be pale/albino guys wearing piecemeal armored suits, cybernetic implants and helmets. Pretty scary, sure. In Star Trek: First Contact they were retooled to fit a modified premise that the Borg assimilate people along with technology, so that their growing Borg drones had the appearance of decayed corpses along with spider-veins. No explanation was given for the change, it just looked much better in a movie format. Looking on the earlier episodes they don't have quite the same sense of dread. The process of assimilation into the Borg Collective also "benefited" from this treatment, especially in First Contact; Instead of simply grabbing you and teleporting you away to be converted into a Borg at their leisure, they forcibly inject nanites into you and leave you to slowly turn into early-stage Borg from the inside out, adding elements of The Virus and Zombie Infectee. "Don't let them touch you" indeed. |
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