Game Faces in Literature.
- A non-evil variant appears in Akata Witch. All Leopard People (people with special magical abilities) have a "spirit face", that is almost like their true form. Seeing another person's spirit face is seen as almost the same as seeing them naked. However, Sunny plays this straight when she gets in a fight with another student and shows them her spirit face to scare them.
- Discworld:
- Wolfgang's pack that, while they find it convenient to hunt in wolf form, are not above frightening peasants.
- Elves without their glamours on are also quite frightening, especially the queen. Unusually, they also seem less impressive when this happens, usually described as small, pathetic, dull, and gray. There's a deliberate parallel to The Grays there.
- In Mort, Death himself goes out looking for a new job and has to deal with a clerk who is slightly condescending and who not-so-subtly tells Death that he has no useful skills. Death then forcibly overrides the man's Weirdness Censor for only a fraction of a second, allowing the man to see Death as wizards and cats are able to. Death then has to deal with a customer who had arrived to complain, eventually giving up and bribing her.
- Speaking of Death, Mort and Susan have a version of this (Mort while he was playing Death's role and Susan on a permanent basis on account of being Death's granddaughter. This involves switching from normal speech to doing THE VOICE and TALKING LIKE THIS, and something frightening happens with their face (probably their skull shows through). It tends to scare most people.
- Dracula: Inverted when the hunters see Lucy in the graveyard. With her being described as a feral cat when she's about to feed on a child. When the hunters get her attention, her features suddenly shift and she looks more beautiful to them, nearly bewitching Arthur into letting her bite him until Helsing flashes a cross at her, then the vampire features come back as she hisses at them.
- The Dresden Files:
- Red Court vampires are monstrous, bat-winged demons wearing human skins. When things get hairy, the skins come off.
- Harry himself refers to Will and Georgia's shapeshifting into their wolf forms as putting on the game face.
- White Court Vampires look like pale and beautiful humans with silver-grey eyes. When they go to Game Face, they become inhumanly pale, their eyes glow silvery white, and their beauty becomes terrifying as well as alluring. During the one occasion a White Court vampire used her full powers, her entire body glowed silver and Harry himself barely resisted throwing himself at her feet, never mind the actual target of her...abilities.
- Denarians, Nicodemus aside, each have a personal Game Face.
- According to Murphy in Aftermath, Harry is normally this awkward, geeky, weirdly dressed smartass. When things get dangerous, he becomes a dark, commanding, imperious figure in the center of both figurative and literal firestorms. Badass doesn't begin to cover it.
- It was revealed that if you ever see pale, lovely Mab with her beautiful green eyes and bright, winter-themed dresses get so pissed off her hair, eyes and clothes turn pure black, with black veins crisscrossing her skin, you better start praying to whatever god(s) you believe in that she spares your life- or at least kills you painlessly.
- In The Girl from the Well, when Okiku is in a calm and contemplative mood, she wears the appearance of the girl she was in life. When she is stalking a victim, however, her appearance becomes that of a drowned and decaying corpse.
- Veela from Harry Potter look very beautiful and can charm men into doing or saying anything to impress them, but when pissed off, they go from beautiful women to hideous avian abominations capable throwing handfuls of fire.Arthur Weasley: And that, boys, is why you shouldn't marry for looks alone.
- In The Hollows, vampires' eyes go completely black when overcome by bloodlust.
- Subverted in The Jennifer Morgue. The protagonist is working with a succubus covered by a level-three glamour that makes her look like a gorgeous woman. Eventually, despite her warnings, he insists that she reveal her real face—and instead of the hideous demon he expects, it turns out she's a Half-Human Hybrid that he actually finds rather attractive.
- The vampires in The Mortal Instruments usually drive their fangs out when they want to fight.
- Needful Things: Leland Gaunt looks like a charming and handsome man, but he's actually a demon with claws and a face that is "a horror of eyes and teeth".
- Retired Witches Mysteries: By book 3, Olivia's figured out how to use one of these to try and scare people. It even threatens the witchfinder (which is what she intended), though he claims he wasn't scared — merely retreating to get help in order to protect Molly and Elsie from her.
- El Higgins from The Scholomance does not transform physically, but the strength of her talent for The Dark Arts creates an aura about her that sets off the 'Evil Sorceress Approaching' reflexes of her fellow students. More to the point when she is angry that aura grows stronger to the point of inducing outright terror, especially if there is anything akin to eye contact.
- Second Apocalypse:
- Kellhus is a genius with literally no emotions. However, he has complete control over his entire body, including his facial muscles, so he is able to fake emotions without any difficulty. When someone finally figures out that he's been manipulating everyone the entire time and confronts him about it, every muscle in his face goes dead, like turning off a light.
- Skin-spies are shapeshifting assassins with faces that are entirely composed of "fingers" that compress together to form any face they can imagine and allow them to impersonate people. When they drop their disguise, their face falls apart into a mass of wiggling fingers around a blank center.
- Sharpe: Captain William Frederickson of the Royal American Rifles deliberately plays up his scars for intimidating effect, and always removes his wig, false teeth and glass eye before a fight to make his appearance more frightening.
- In Sheep's Clothing, the three vampires exhibit a form of this when they're hunting. The two brides show off red eyes and a mouthful of fangs, while their sire, Russeau, turns into a monstrous bat.
- Once the shit has well and truly hit the fan in The Shining, the Overlook forces Jack Torrence to smash his face in with a croquet mallet, leaving him a faceless meat puppet of the hotel's malevolent spirits.
- Gully Foyle, the Anti-Hero protagonist of The Stars My Destination, has a hideous tiger tattoo across his face. In his more refined state, he'd had the tattoo removed — however, it reappears whenever he becomes enraged as the blood pumps to his face.
- The trolls from Twilight Eyes can switch between horror and looking like ordinary humans at will, and to detect them while they look like humans, you need twilight eyes.
