And haunts these waters still for spite."
The Other Wiki calls it "standard diving dress
". Most people (assuming they recognize it at all, which sadly fewer and fewer people do) call it a "hard-hat diver suit", or a "helmeted diver suit", or perhaps "that thing divers used to wear before SCUBA gear". For over a hundred years, from its invention in 1829 to after World War II, this heavy waterproof suit with its bulky, distinctive copper or bronze helmet was the only practical way for men to work underwater for long periods of time. Even today, with all the minisubs and Remote Operated Vehicles and other high technology at our disposal, a modern variant of this suit remains the best choice for certain underwater tasks.
In fiction, the hard-hat diver suit can be effectively used as a source of horror. Its metallic and bulky composition completely covers the body of its wearer, making ambiguous who or what is under it and giving an inhuman and almost robotic appearance to the wearer, and the window on the diving helmet can be used to give the impression that the diver has no face. In addition, the hermetic nature of the suit might give a claustrophobic feeling, and the fact that it is used to walk on the sea floor evokes the fear of the dark depths of the ocean and what hides there.
Perhaps the suit is used by a ghostly undead sea diver. Maybe it is being worn by an unseen Humanoid Abomination. Perhaps the suit itself is haunted and moves on its own. Or maybe the divers are perfectly normal and harmless people and their suits just unintentionally scare the characters. In any case, the reaction this trope evokes is one of eeriness and otherworldliness.
The fact that this equipment is rarely used and seen nowadays, except in museums, also helps in creating an atmosphere of an anachronistic and rusty technology emblematic of a historical era — in this case, the 19th and 20th centuries — such as in Steampunk and Dieselpunk aesthetics. Thus, this trope can be used in settings inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Ocean Punk settings.
Occasionally, the glass of the helmet might be opaque to obscure what is inside in order to make it more mysterious and unsettling, sometimes emitting a navy green color. If the story is from the perspective of sea creatures and the suit is mundane in reality, this device may overlap with Humans Are Cthulhu.
Compare Space Suits Are SCUBA Gear for when space suits have characteristics shared by these diving suits, such as exposed air tubes, and Cyber Cyclops, in which suits with one-windowed helmets may give this effect. See also Creepy Mascot Suit, another full-body outfit that can be scary due to the way it hides the wearer's face, Ghost Ship, for a setting in which this trope can be used, and Eldritch Ocean Abyss, for other unsettling underwater presences.
Examples:
- Batman (Grant Morrison): King Kraken is a supervillain who was a deep-sea diver until being disfigured in an accident, after which he turned to piracy and became the Wingman's recurring enemy. His costume deliberately uses this trope, with a bulky mask with glowing eyes he uses both in his underwater crimes and to obscure his face.
- Sub-Mariner: In-Universe. Namor's first appearance in the comics involves him encountering two divers in bulky suits and not recognizing them as men but as robots. Assuming they are a threat to his underwater realm, he kills them both.
- In Luca, Alberto briefly scares Luca by wearing this diving dress when both are on their sea monster forms underwater.
- In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, a wicked diver who is only ever seen wearing old-fashioned SCUBA gear is one of the antagonists, who captures sea creatures and dries them so he can sell sea-themed accessories in his shop. From the perspective of the protagonists, he is a giant called "The Cyclops" due to the glass of his helmet resembling an eye.
- For Your Eyes Only: The JIM suit henchman of Kristatos who attacks James Bond and Melina in the wreckage of the St. George Spy Ship. While the JIM suit wasn't old-fashioned back then (though it might be by now), the scare factor of the attack is very much played up with the suit's pincers and Vader Breath.
- Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed: One of the costumes Scooby-Doo and Shaggy accidentally brought to life was Captain Cutler's ghost, keeping his appearance of a glowing green diving suit. He appeared to get the modified control panel from the Mystery Inc., but luckily, Fred floored the Mystery Machine backwards, causing the ghost to fly into the air and fall into the lake he was hiding in.
- The Spiderwick Chronicles: In Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, one of these is visible in the gullet of the giant sea serpent, suggesting that the unlucky diver was Swallowed Whole. It's period-appropriate for the early-20th-century era in which Arthur Spiderwick conducted his research, but it definitely adds to the eerie and otherworldly nature of the image.
- Skool from Un Lun Dun animates an old diving suit as a way to get around — inverting the trope, as Skool is an intelligent school of fish that found one of these suits, filled it with water, and uses it as a way to explore the surface. Skool's silent, looming presence still lives up to the trope, despite being one of the good guys.
- The Crystal Maze: In the fourth series, one game in Ocean World involves the contestant having to enter a "submersible" in a darkened room, and rescue the crystal from a deep-sea cage. The cage also contains a dead diver in an old-fashioned suit, which adds to the creepiness of the game, as the contestant must also avoid bumping their submersible into two sharks circulating the room.
- The Hipgnosis artwork for 10cc's Deceptive Bends album has both the band members and an unknown guest star character wearing old diving suits. In the book The Work of Hipgnosis: Walk Away Rene, Storm Thorgerson explains how he and his partners decided to make the cover image a Visual Pun based on "the bends of a diver", which led them to exploit this trope.
I thought immediately of the diver's suits from the 20's and 30's and how amazing they look, not only for their bizarre metallic helmets but also for the whole 'monster' feeling that they evoke. Since you can't see either the face or the body you've no idea what the occupant really looks like.
- Transformers: Generation 1: Octopunch is a Decepticon Pretender (in other words, a villainous robot inside an organic power shell). While Autobot Pretender Shells were designed to look like humans in armor, Decepticon Shells were designed to look like monsters. Octopunch's shell is designed to look like a man-mutant hybrid in an old-fashioned diving helmet with a horrifying visage barely visible beneath it and he's known as "the terror of the deep."
- BioShock:
- The first game introduces the iconic Big Daddies, men who were heavily spliced with the ADAM mutagen and outfitted in unique, heavily-armored, and intimidating diving suits to be protectors for the Little Sisters in the underwater city of Rapture. This turns them into massive imposing armored monsters/mutants that have superhuman strength, endurance and speed, "speak" only in low creepy moans (almost sounding like whales), and typically carry weapons like drills and rivet guns (other Big Daddy armaments would be introduced in the sequel). While we never see the Big Daddies without their suits, Story Breadcrumbs indicate that their creation involved a lot of Body Horror, so that's probably for the best.
- Its sequel BioShock 2 introduces Subject Delta of the Alpha Series, two new types of Big Daddies (the Rumbler, which has a shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, and the Lancer, which is armed with the Ion Laser cannon), it also introduces the Big Sisters, Little Sisters from the first game who weren't rescued by Jack, all grown up in the eight years since. They're a lot more nimble, acrobatic, and aggressive than the Big Daddies, making liberal use of Plasmids as well as their supersized arm-mounted ADAM syringes, but are outfitted in diving suits all the same. They're responsible for kidnapping little girls from the surface to act as the newer generation of Little Sisters.
- The first game introduces the iconic Big Daddies,
- Haunt the House: In Terrortown, there is a diver in the Cruise Ship area with an old-fashioned diving suit. When he dies and becomes a ghost, the diver retains his helmet even while scaring people.
- League of Legends: Nautilus takes this further than the above examples by being physically merged with his diving suit, which happens to be massive and heavy, thereby making him a Mighty Glacier, and his red eyes and weaponizable anchor only adds to his nightmarish appearance. Retcons and additions to his lore build on this by also making him about forty feet tall and capable of dragging ships down to the bottom of the ocean.
- Shovel Knight has Treasure Knight, a member of the Order of No Quarter, who has a suit of armor inspired by an old-fashioned diving suit. An undersea pirate, he lays waste to the underwater in search of treasure, disturbing the fauna and fishing community in the area. While already a towering and imposing figure, his desire to control the seas has him also with the dangerous Teethalon under his captured command.
- Team Fortress 2: One of the Pyro's cosmetics, Neptune's Nightmare, is an old-fashioned diving helmet with a cartoony green skull visible in the visor.
- X-COM: Terror from the Deep has the Calcinites — old-timey diving suits inhabited by strange, green blobs armed with metal claws. Ironically, they're only found in land-based Terror Missions.
- One of the endings of the Clickhole Clickventure "Death Attends The Matinee has the mysterious Diver appear wearing one of these. The Diver then drags the player into the ocean and shows them how he is married to all the fish.
- SCP Foundation, "SCP-1861 - The Crew of the HMS Wintersheimer": The HMS Wintersheimer appears to be a World War I era British submarine. Its crew consists of animated diving suits that can talk. The crew tries to get people to enter the submarine, after which the people are turned into more crew like themselves. If a crew member ever takes off their helmet, it's revealed that there's nothing inside the suit except water, eyes and jaws.
- So This Is Basically...: One episode talks about Danny Phantom and shows a scene where Danny fights off a ghost in a diving suit saying puns as he fights, said diving suit-wearing ghost is most likely a reference to Captain Cutler from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.
- In the first episode of The Little Rascals, Butch wears one of Captain Mildew's diving suits to scare Darla and the boys out of the abandoned house.
- In Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, the ghost of Captain Cutler appears as an old-fashioned light-green deep-sea diving suit covered by glowing seaweed. As the Mystery Gang discovers, the ghost is actually a very much alive Captain Cutler, who had faked his own death so he could pretend to be a ghost and steal the yachts of the region, but his uniqueness and importance as one of the first monsters appearing in the series have gotten him several appearances and cameos throughout the Scooby-Doo franchise.
- Hard-hat diving suits are still used in certain applications, albeit the modern ones don't look as creepy◊ since they have larger visors and are colored bright yellow or orange for safety reasons.
