Some reasons as to why Monster Delay may appear within a given work include:
- The director wants to create a sense of Nothing Is Scarier for his intended audience, so he deliberately avoids even showing any one single part of his upcoming film's monstrous Big Bad at all for as long as he feasibly can given the initially established general storytelling parameters surrounding said upcoming film.
- The special effects used for depicting the monster in question are either costly, difficult, or possibly even both at once to effectively operate, so the studio execcutives heavily enforce the upcoming film's usage of this trope as to be able to cut down on such production difficulties as much as possible.
- The main human characters don't ever visit the specific place where at which the monster currently resides until well into the film's runtime, easily making him not ever actually show up on-screen until that happens.
- A given supernatural event such as a full moon, other celestial event, or possibly even somebody opening up a transdimensional portal must happen in order for the monster to be able to travel to where the main human protagonists currently reside.
- The monster soon learns that he can hide himself better and likewise remain scarier for longer if he constantly hides himself within the dark shadows of the night, caves, abandoned structures, etc.
- In a worst-case scenario, the monster may even have cloaking capabilities that must first be disabled in one way or another to make him become fully visible later on.
