Don't Go in the Woods

"Beware, beware, the Forest of Sin
None come out, though many go in."

— The Minpins

In horror/thriller/fantasy movies or literature, holidays, outings, or travels in woodsy locations never seem to bode all that well. This trope is Older Than Dirt, with the wilderness being viewed as dangerous for much of human history.

When people go deep into the woods, horrible things ensue. They are inhabited by inbred hillbillies, barbarian tribes, psychopathic killers, wicked fairy folk, monsters, and dangerous animals of every sort. Malevolent eyes gaze from every shadow. Perhaps even the trees themselves attack them. The woods could be cursed. There are strange noises in both the day and the night. Deer skulls litter the ground. People disappear. People go insane.

Rarely do horror and thriller movies of this flavor end happily; often everyone ends up dead, although there may be a Final Girl. This has almost gotten to the point at which such movies almost have Foregone Conclusions. Other genres like the Rescue series are more hopeful, with the rescue team racing against time to find the person.

A Sub-Trope of Deadly Road Trip. The darker equivalent of the Horrible Camping Trip. For a doomed wilderness expedition, see River of Insanity. Can overlap with Wild Wilderness, but with much darker overtones. See also Enchanted Forest, for when forests are portrayed as enchanted, mysterious, and full of strange things, which may or may not overlap with this trope. For other wooded environs depicted as dangerous and hostile places, see Hungry Jungle and Swamps Are Evil. Closely related to Nature Is Not Nice, where the wilderness, in general, is inhospitable for human beings. See also The Lost Woods for forest-based video game settings.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Alien Nine features the Forest of Spaceships, a wooded area where aliens of all colors and danger levels reside. None of them are truly sapient enough to communicate with and all of them are deadly to humans. The protagonists' advisor, Megumi Hisakawa, only intended on bringing them there once they've built up enough mental and physical resistance to the aliens they face on a daily basis, but the back half of Volume 2 is devoted to them having to go there anyway once Yuri Otani somehow got in by herself.
• Beauty and the Beast of Paradise Lost: When Belle was a kid, she insisted on going to the forest, dismissing the rumors about a beast that kidnapped beautiful young women to steal their faces. Her mother, who was with her, was kidnapped by the monster, and Belle spent the next five years blaming herself for that, but it could have happened even if they hadn't visited the forest, because the monster also attacked the villages.

Comic Books

• Robin (1993): When Tim Drake takes a road trip into the Ozarks to follow a gun runner to his source he stumbles across an Eldritch Abomination that twists people's memories in order to pass as human. When their disguise is broken they kill everyone in their path until they've bound a new person to form a new one, wiping their mind and making them rely on her. The thing has left a number of weird societies in its wake including a bunch of mentally scared former cannibals and a group of "pacifists" who regularly meet to try and kill the mute child she's bound herself to that recovers from any harm so long as he's close enough.
• Soulsearchers and Company: In issue #5, the woods outside of Mystic Grove are magically transformed into fairy tale forest, with all of the attendant threats: including the cannibalistic witch from "Hansel and Gretel".
• Superman/Supergirl: Maelstrom: Kal-El takes his cousin on a camping trip in an alien jungle, assuring it is not dangerous...despite of being full of hostile humanoids, ferocious giant predators, weird monsters and poisonous flora.
• Through the Woods: In keeping with traditional tales and horror stories, going into the woods is a bad idea. Fittingly, the comic cover features a forest with a red moon, the trees' branches looking like Creepy Long Fingers.
  • "Our Neighbor's House": The girls' father leaves for the woods to go hunting, instructing that they leave for their neighbor's house if he doesn't come back in three days. Sure enough, he doesn't return, having died of the extreme cold. Later, after losing her sisters, Beth travels through the woods alone to her neighbor's house. Instead of the neighbor as she expected, she meets the man with the wide-brimmed hat, heavily implying that both Beth and the neighbor are dead.
  • "The Nesting Place": Bell is explicitly warned against the woods near the house of Clarence and Rebecca. She ignores the warnings and ends up discovering a cave pool where "Rebecca" has become a host for a monster that kills and inhabits people's bodies, and has been looking for other victims for her children to inhabit.
  • "His Face All Red" makes frequent mention of strange things coming from the woods. Nobody bats an eye at the thought of a monster coming out of the woods to attack their livestock, and later it seems that a Doppelgänger of the murdered older brother comes out of the woods and begins trying to take the brother's place.
  • "A Lady's Hands Are Cold": Much of the story takes place in an extravagant mansion that is isolated by the surrounding forest. However, the trope is reversed: The danger takes place inside the mansion itself, which is haunted. At the end, in trying to evade her husband's first wife, now a vengeful corpse hellbent on having the husband all to herself, the second wife flees the mansion and into the surrounding woods where she is safe, though understandably traumatized. The husband, meanwhile, returns home from a hunting trip in the woods to find the first wife he killed waiting for him, and he is gruesomely murdered.
  • "In Conclusion": The young girl confidently ignores the dangers of the woods and makes it to her mother's house without incident. She goes to bed confident that she can avoid whatever's out there... only for a shadowy wolf standing right outside her window to point out that even if she made it this time she still has to travel through the woods again and again, and while she has to be lucky every time, he only has to be lucky once. Actually seeing just how dangerous the woods can be seems to deeply traumatize and terrify her.
• Wendigo Wood: The titular forest is said to be home to the Wendigo. It's home to LOADS of them.

Fairy Tales

• Many stories feature a Wicked Stepmother and/or Abusive Parents sending their children specifically to the woods to die, whether of starvation or in hopes they'll be eaten. However, in some tales the woods actually hide more benevolent/neutral creatures who help the protagonists.
• "Babes in the Wood": A wicked relative leaves the children to die in the woods so that said relative can inherit the children's estate. In the original, the children die and the birds come and cover them with leaves. After the appeal of this light tragedy wore off, there were many subverted versions made where the children survive somehow.
• "The Cat on the Dovrefell": The woodlands on the Dovrefjell are full of dangerous and obliviously evil trolls.
• "The Drummer", one of the versions of "The Swan Maiden" tale: The woods surrounding the glass mountain are home to dangerous man-eating giants.
• "Hansel and Gretel": A people-eating witch waits in the woods.
• "Hans the Hedgehog": Applies to the two kings, who get lost there on the way home and have to ask for Hans' help to get out.
• "Little Otik": The forest surrounding the main characters' village is home to hungry, man-eating wood monsters.
• "Little Red Riding Hood": A people-eating wolf waits in the woods.
• "Morozko": The old woman sends her stepdaughter in the woods to die. However, the woodlands are home to Father Frost, who is willing to be benevolent and helpful... as long as you are not a rude disrespectful ass, so incurring its wrath.
• "The Three Flowers": Three huntsmen go into a huge forest where their sister has been hidden away by a witch. They run into strange creatures, one of which is stalking her sister, and become turned into beasts when her sister plucks three enchanted blossoms.
• "The Three Little Men in the Wood": The main character does not want to go into the woods near her house because she would freeze to death. Said woodlands are also inhabited by dangerous magical beings.
• "The Turnip Princess": The prince follows a bad pathway which takes him to a thick wood where he becomes hopelessly lost. Seeking shelter in a cave, he finds several cursed creatures, one of them unwilling to let him go.

Fan Works

• At the Edge of Lasg'len: The inhabitants of Lasg'len stay out of the forest at the edge of the village. Those who stray in tend to come back out with no memory of what went on inside, and there have been stories about the Elves that live there for centuries. As it turns out, the stories are totally true.
• Lucy's Secret: Lucy's dream at the beginning features Edwin the vampire living in a Transylvanian forest.
• A Minor Miscalculation: Satsuki is eventually forced to track down the berserk-form Ryuko in the middle of Aokigahara. The setting gives her great anxiety even before Ryuko springs out and nearly kills her.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: In the Agatha & Sam Gaiden sidestory, the titular characters have to venture in the Drowning Woods at the base of Mt. Silver when Agatha's younger brother runs off on his own. Like the above example, it's also based on Aokigahara and infested with evil Ghost-types.
• Popped: Rainbow Dash and Applejack venture into a dense forest in an effort to find a missing Pinkie Pie. Things don't exactly end well for either of them.
• We Are All Pokémon Trainers: Tagg lives next door to an area known as the Sea of Trees, which happens to be based on Aokigahara, the forest infamous for being the second-most popular spot for suicides in the world. It's infested with Ghost types and the souls of those who have died in the forest.

Film — Animation

• The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad: The Headless Horseman sequence from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow segment. Discovering that Ichabod's weakness is superstition, Brom Bones decides to sing the tale of the legendary Headless Horseman to scare him. The horseman supposedly travels the dark, spooky woods on Halloween each year, searching for a living head to replace the one which he has lost. The only way to escape the ghost is to cross a covered bridge. On his ride home through the woods, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman. After being chased through the forest and nearly decapitated, Ichabod, remembering Brom's advice, rides across the covered bridge to stop the ghost's pursuit. But as he looks back to see his ghostly pursuer vanish, the horseman stops and throws a jack-o'-lantern at him.
• Beauty and the Beast: In one scene, Maurice accidentally takes the wrong turn in a forest, heading down an ominous-looking path rather than the brighter looking path. It's not long before his horse gets spooked and runs away, leaving him to be pursued by hungry wolves. Later, after leaving the Beast's castle when frightened and rushing into the woods, Belle encounters the same wolves who would've killed her had the Beast not shown up to save her.
• Mavka: The Forest Song: The villagers don't go in the forest Mavka and the other Nature Spirits inhabit, for they believe them to be demons. They're not, but some like Ondina can be very territorial and eager to defend the local nature out of bad past experiences with humans.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The dark forest sequence can be considered a subversion, given how all of what Snow White thought were monstrous trees (due to Poorly Lit Pareidolia) turn out to just be cute little woodland critters, though not before briefly appearing to be animal monsters.

Film — Live-Action

• Antichrist: A couple retreats to a cabin in the woods after their baby falls out of the window while they are having sex. There, the wife goes Ax-Crazy, hits her husband in the testicles and attaches a millstone to his leg, and then cuts her clitoris off. He's forced to kill her and burn her corpse. Something to do with a fox, a deer, and a bird. Also a more subtle, disturbing, and creepy take on the trope, as it manifests as evil acorns, forest animal stillbirths, and waking up with ticks all over your hand even before the genital mutilation.
• Beware the Woods: Don't go into the Colorado woods where a murderous old lady resides. And especially don't go if she thinks you look like her dead daughter.
• In The Blair Witch Project, the evil in the woods of Burkittsville is never explicitly shown or explained, but it involves a dead child killer, the ghosts of the children he killed, and a witch or hairy creature that can mimic the voice of her victims. Things don't go well for a trio of film students who get lost in the woods.
• The Burning: Cropsy's main killing spree starts when the campers go on an overnight canoe trip and are camping in the deep woods.
• Cabin Fever: The kids go on a trip to a cabin in the woods and contract a flesh-eating disease.
• Capps Crossing: Specifically, don't go into a part of the woods called "Capps Crossing", even if you're lead there tracking a geocache. David will kill anyone he finds there.
• A Classic Horror Story: A group of carpoolers are driving through the Southern Italian forest when they swerve to avoid a corpse in the road, crash into a tree, and find themselves in a field with a house, being harassed by Malevolent Masked Men who want to sacrifice them all. Or rather, don't go in the woods with Fabrizio, unless you want to die in his latest Snuff Film.
• Clawed: In this movie, there's a local legend about Bear Claw Mountain being inhabited by a creature known as The Shadow Of Death, who kills anyone that traspasses on its habitat. Said legends are 100% completely true.
• Dead Night takes place around a cabin inside the snowy Oregon woods wherein a Humanoid Abomination is plotting something sinister. Predictably, people die.
• The Decline: A group of survivalists go to an isolated cabin in the forests of northern Quebec belonging to a survival instructor called Alain for a two-week training exercise. After one of them dies in an accident; Alain and an ally start hunting down the group who want to report the death to the authorities as they try to get out of the woods. Also, Alain has filled the area near his cabin with traps.
• Deliverance: Four yuppies go on a canoeing trip in the backwoods of Georgia and run afoul of the local hillbillies. One of them gets raped, another dies when going over a waterfall, and the three left alive have to defend themselves from a sniper up on a cliff.
• Desolation (2017): Abby, her son Sam, and her friend Jen all go hiking in the woods to spread Abby's dead husband's ashes from the top of a mountain. After that, they get stalked by a quiet hiker that Sam spotted across the lake from them earlier.
• Dog Soldiers: A bunch of British marines on a training exercise in the forest get attacked by a pack of werewolves and are forced to hole up in a cottage, which turns out to be owned by one of the werewolves themselves.
• Don't Go in the Woods, about a group of campers who venture into the woods and come face to face with a deranged killer.
• Eden Lake has a young couple go to the English countryside, where they're set upon by a deranged band of children and teenagers. It turns out their parents in the nearby town are even more deranged.
• Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain: The first people killed by the Cannibal Clan are an American couple camping in the woods. Later the Crusty Caretaker Gary keeps telling the students to not go in the woods after dark, and to keep to the paths. His concern seems a trifle misplaced as the cannibals have no issue with leaving the woods in search of victims.
• The Evil Dead (1981), where a group of college students go to a cabin in the woods and accidentally unleash demons from a Tome of Eldritch Lore. Tree rape, Demonic Possession, and (eventually) Time Travel ensue.
• The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow: The woods of northern Ontario are where a Secret Circle of Secrets/Mystery Cult get up to the dirty business of worshiping ancient death-goddesses, and its heavily implied that Human Sacrifice is a part of that worship, as an Occult Detective examines a seemingly innocuous photo of a group on a camping trip.
• Feral (2017) is about six teenagers who go on a camping trip, and then have to hide with some guy in his house from some kind of vicious creature who's really the man's infected son.
• The Field Guide to Evil: "Beware the Melonheads" is based on legends of a Cannibal Tribe of children with enlarged craniums supposed to dwell in the north woods of America. A family rents a cabin deep in the woods to relax and refresh their family ties. When the young son says he has met a strange boy in the woods, the parents dismiss it as his imagination. And then the son goes missing...
• The Final Terror is set in a forest where a killer with a messy hair chases campers.
• In Force of Nature: The Dry 2, five women take part in a corporate hiking retreat and only four come out on the other side.
• The Forest (1982): Crazy cannibal hermit hunts people for food. There are also ghosts.
• Friday the 13th: Two-thirds of the installments, where generations of teenagers visit the infamous forestbound Camp Crystal Lake and/or its environs, and come up against the vengeful, hulking zombie of a drowned boy named Jason Voorhees (or his equally vengeful mother, or some random copycat killer). They're always being warned. They always ignore the warnings. They always lose the use of vital organs.
• Grizzly: A T-rex-sized bear makes life hell for the campers and rangers of the national park it decides to turn into its stomping ground. At one point, a female ranger who is supposed to be keeping watch for it decides to go off trail into the woods to soak her feet in a stream, which segues into her taking a waterfall shower in her skivvies. The bear appears and Fan Disservice ensues.
• Grizzly Rage: Four college students drive into the woods and quickly get targeted by a vengeful mutated bear.
• Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers: Michael Myers chases the protagonists into an eerie, foggy woodlands with a car. When he crashes the car, he gets out completely unscathed and proceeds to stalk the victims through the forest with a butcher knife.
• House of Wax (2005): A bunch of teenagers, on a road trip to catch a football game, wind up in a seemingly deserted town in the middle of a forest, and fall prey to a pair of serial killers who turn all who come there into wax statues.
• Just Before Dawn: A bunch of twenty-somethings camp out deep in the woods and meet death at the hands of two killers.
• Lemon Tree Passage: Most of the action takes place in dense bush at night, when the protagonists go searching for their missing friends and become easy prey for the malevolent force looking to pick them off.
• Lesbian Vampire Killers: Two down-on-their-luck young men go to the forests of Britain for a holiday and end up holed up in a cottage under siege by Lesbian Vampires.
• Letter Never Sent: Four geologists travel deep into the Siberian wilderness to hunt for diamonds, only to be caught in a harrowing struggle for survival after the forest catches fire.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park hits this in the third act when the characters have to cross the Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor territories to reach the old camp in the center of the island. Ironically, the moment the trope is played the most straight is when one of them leaves the group to go to the toilet and gets killed by a Zerg Rush of Compsognathus.
• Madman: Most of the "killer prowling for his prey" scenes happen in the forest surrounding the camp where the main cast work as counselors.
• Mother's Day: A trio of women go on a camping trip, only to be abducted by a family of psychopaths.
• My Little Sister: The woods in which Tom and Sheila are camping with their friends are the stomping grounds of a man known as "Little Sister". If he catches people in his woods, he takes them to his home to torture them, cut off their faces to find a new face for his father...'s dead body, and also kill them.
• Night of the Demon: Holden breaks into Karswell's estate house late at night looking for crucial information and is found out. Karwsell suggests he leave by the front door and out the drive, but Holden insists he'll go back through the woods he came through. As he leaves Karswell sighs "I told him not to go through the woods...he just wouldn't listen!" Holden encounters...something in the dark...
• Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight: The film follows a group of teenagers who've been sent to a camp to get away from technology. They go on a three-day hike in the woods, and end up running into a pair of murderous twins who are possessed by some kind of black alien sludge.
• Pan's Labyrinth: In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a little girl whose mother is married to a fascist captain goes with her mother and stepfather to a retreat in the forest, where she gets wound up in (possibly imaginary) antics involving the fauns and fairies who live about the estate, discovering the secret to her past in the process. Ultimately subverted in that the forest-dwelling fey creatures are good, despite being incredibly creepy.
• Picnic at Hanging Rock, more of a Mind Screw than most such movies. A teacher and group of students venture into the Australian wilderness on a picnic. Something out there claims the girls one by one, and they're never seen again. Sort of an Older Than They Think take on The Blair Witch Project.
• Pig Hunt: The protagonists' pursuit into the woods takes them through fields of marijuana and into the muddy landscape of Big Wallow, involving weaponry, the violent Tibbs brothers, tortured animals, a kukri-toting hippie, vengeful rednecks, and throat-slitting young women who grow pot by day and worship the giant boar at night.
• Preservation: A woman, her husband, and her brother-in-law go on a hunting trip in a state forest: ignoring the signs saying that the park is closed. Overnight, all of their gear is stolen and the trio find themselves being stalked by a group of maniacs bent on Hunting the Most Dangerous Game.
• Prophecy: The main cast are stuck in a forest in Maine (actually Canada) which is home to a killer bear that has been mutated by pollution from a local paper mill.
• The Redwood Massacre is about a bunch of teenagers going to spend the weekend at an infamous murder site, only to end up at the mercy of a Sackhead Slasher.
• The Ritual features four friends taking a hike in Sweden to honor the memory of a fifth recently deceased friend. They decide to take a shortcut through a forest. Unfortunately, said forest is home to an ancient Nordic god monster, possibly a daughter of Loki, and a village of people that worship her and give her human sacrifices.
• Rituals centers around five friends who go on a camping trip into the isolated Canadian wilderness, only to find themselves methodically hunted and picked off one-by-one by a disfigured hermit.
• Rovdyr: Four friends (for given values of friendship) plan a weekend hiking trip in the woods of Norway's far north. On the way there, they are abducted and knocked unconscious. When they wake up, they discover that have dumped deep in the woods and are now the prey for someone who is Hunting the Most Dangerous Game.
• Rust Creek: A Kentucky college student makes the mistake of taking a detour through some forested back roads and getting lost. She runs afoul of some Hillbilly Horrors who take advantage of the fact that they are miles from civilization.
• Shrooms follows a group of American students and their English guide who are stalked by a Serial Killer while out in the woods looking for psilocybin mushrooms in an isolated Irish forest. The killer might be real, a ghost, or just the product of their mushroom-induced hallucinations.
• Simon Says involves a typical scenario of a group of teens deliberately looking for a remote location with bad history. Two strange guys tell them a story of a couple of twins, one of whom goes Axe-Crazy and kills the other twin and their parents. The teens then meet a creepy long-nosed store owner (obviously, the same Axe-Crazy twin) and head to the woods. Needless to say, the guy starts attacking them. There is another group of campers (adults, this time) who are killed by him in-between killing the teens.
• Sleepaway Camp. Set primarily in a summer camp in Upstate New York, but at one point bunch of kids and a counselor venture into the woods. Most of the kids never came back.
• Strange Magic: The fairies and elves are warned to not go into the dark forest or they'll be locked away forever by the Bog King.
• There's Nothing Out There, complete with Lampshade Hangings a-plenty. There's even a scene where a van load of kids from a different movie show up.
  "Isn't this the camp by the lake?"
  "No! This is the cottage by the pond!"
• Ticks has ticks mutated by herbal steroids swarming a forest.
• Timber Falls: A couple goes camping in the mountains and falls prey to a pair of deranged fundamentalist religious maniacs.
• In the cowboy movie Track Of The Cat, Robert Mitchum and his brother go out into a snowy forest to hunt down a mountain lion that has been preying on their cattle, and which Mitchum's character believes might be a supernatural creature. Not a horror film, but the hunt goes very badly for both of them.
• Tucker & Dale vs. Evil parodies the trope: The preppy college kids camping in the woods think the hillbillies inhabiting in a rundown shack in the wilds belong here; in fact, it's their 'holiday home', they're fixing it up, and most of the confusion stems mainly from the college kids being prejudiced, elitist Wrong Genre Savvy snobs who misinterpret the motives of the in-fact quite friendly and harmless (if not incredibly bright) hillbillies. It doesn't stop a lot of them dying in hilariously gory ways, however. Tucker and Dale even believe that the kids are part of some deranged murder-suicide pact.
• The Village (2004) had this, with people being warned to stay out of the woods because of the monsters. When the girl protagonist goes to get help, she gets chased by them. They turn out to be not real, but she only finds that out later.
• The Virgin Spring: Two young Swedish women enter the spooky forest. They encounter a creepy old man in a cabin who might be Odin. Then one of them is raped and murdered by a pair of shepherds.
• The Watcher in the Woods, where a summer in the forest turns into an encounter with a wandering spirit and forces from another dimension.
• Welp involves a Belgian Cub Scout troop going into French woods, where one of the Scouts begins to suspect a feral boy is stalking them. He's right to a degree, but it's actually a whole lot worse...
• The Widow (2020): The movie is about a rescue team in the year 2017 searching the forest near the town of St. Petersburg for a missing teenager named Nikita. The woods are infamous in the town for being haunted by a vengeful spirit called "The Lame Widow", who's known for taking people who wander into the forest, and what few she returns being stark naked when found. No points for guessing for what they run afoul of while out there.
• The Windmill Massacre: The tourists have to trek through the woods to reach the mill after their bus breaks down (and falls into a canal). Most of the deaths occur in the woods rather than the mill.
• The VVitch: A puritan family in 1630s New England become convinced that they are being tormented by a Wicked Witch who lives in the woods outside their farm. Eventually, however, the horror moves out of the woods and into their home. The movie ends with the eldest daughter, and probably the last surviving family member, walking into the woods to become another witch after making a Deal with the Devil.
• The Wizard of Oz has the spooky forest around the Witch's castle, with a sign famously reading "I'd turn back if I were you!"
• Wrong Turn has a group of teenagers (and a former medical student) run into inbred cannibal hillbillies in the woods. The setting was also carried into the first two sequels, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End and Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead.
• You Might Be the Killer is set at a remote woodlands camp, 25 miles from the nearest town, which comes under attack by a slasher villain.

Jokes

• An old joke: A man and a young boy are walking through a forest. The boy says, "I'm scared." The man replies, "You're scared? I'm the one who has to walk back on my own!"

Literature

• Afterglow (2015): Shannon and her friends, Drew and Marcy encounter an entity who gave them life-changing hallucinations 25 years before the story begins, in the Olympic National Forest. Shannon is still tormented by small-scale hallucinations, while Marcy dies before the story begins, and Drew goes crazy, eventually becoming Godhead. It's also where Josie's second confrontation with Godhead occurs.
• ALiCE (2014): The woods around the town are implied to be full of monsters, while Christopher only encounters a few in the town, and they usually aren't seen, just heard.
• Dark Angel (1996): While walking home from school beside the woods, Gillian hears a child crying from somewhere in the trees. It's freezing and getting dark, so against her better judgment Gillian heads into the woods to find what she assumes is a lost kid. While searching near the creek, Gillian ends up falling in and almost drowns, then dies of hypothermia (she gets better and meets her supposed Guardian Angel there). It's later revealed Angel was the one crying like a child to lure Gillian into the woods. Gillian also recalls that a local child named Paula went missing in the woods a year ago and it turns out her body is buried in the woods, after Angel accidentally killed her while performing a dangerous spell (he'd in fact gone out to the woods to do the spell specifically because he thought it would be safer).
• Fangs Of Endearment, a Dave Barry Twilight parody: One character tries to warn the protagonist (who, in a deliberate show of Genre Blindness, decides to grab the Idiot Ball instead) not to go into the woods, and describes how a lot of hikers have died mysterious, violent deaths there recently:
  "I mean, sure, we usually get two or three violent-dismemberment hiker deaths a week around here; that's going on as long as anybody can remember. But a hundred and fifty-eight dead in two days seems like a lot. Doc Smelkins examined all of the body pieces we were able to find, and he ruled out natural causes such as hookworm."
• Galaxy of Fear: Spore: The woods of Ithor, forbidden to outsiders on account of, among other reasons, carnivorous trees. Tash and Zak find out their ball has gone in there, and for once it's Zak who's inclined to be cautious and Tash who just goes in.
  "It's so peaceful, I'm sure there's nothing dangerous here."
  The sentence had barely left her mouth when a bunch of vines wrapped themselves around Zak and pulled him into the air.
• The Grace Year: The grace year girls are convinced that there are ghosts (not true) and wild animals (true) in the woods. The biggest danger to them is the poachers hunting them to sell their parts (believed to be magic) in the black market. One of the girls runs off into the woods to cry after being bullied, and ends up captured by a poacher. They can hear her screaming for hours. When the screaming stops, Tierney is relieved her suffering is over.
• The Great God Pan: Some of Helen's earliest victims are driven to madness after going in the woods with her. (She is the daughter of the pagan nature deity Pan, who is depicted as a very dark force.)
  "Ah, mother, mother, why did you let me go in the forest with Helen?"
• Harry Potter: The Forbidden Forest. The students are not allowed in for their own protection as the forest is host to a wide array of dangerous magical peoples and creatures, such as the proud violent centaurs who consider the forest theirs to the exclusion of wizardkind and for whom "betrayals" like teaching human children are to be met with a painful execution and the maneating Acromantula.
• Heralds of Valdemar:
  • The Kingdom of Valdemar has the Forest of Sorrows; subverted in that though it certainly is dangerous... that's only if you have evil or cruel intent. A toddler would be safe in there but a group of bandits would get torn to pieces.
  • The Palegis forest has the Tayledras invoking this for many reasons. Including the fact it is actually a very dangerous place to be.
• The Doctor Who novel The Way Through The Woods has a forest that the locals try to avoid, even building roads that go kilometers out of their way to avoid it, because an alien werefox crashed his spaceship there thousands of years ago, and the damaged vessel caused time (and space) distortions, meaning people that go in never come out. They just end up going in circles until they die. Of course, the human population doesn't know most of this, they just know that no-one who went in ever came out.
• A Hole in the Fence: The Epnoi Forest has been designated as a Forbidden Zone for generations, and its edges are relentlessly watched by patrol guards who stop intruders from entering and discovering what lies within the wood.
• The Howling (1977): There are rumours that the heavily-wooded valley Drago resides in are haunted or cursed, with Karyn learning there have been many strange deaths and disappearances over the years and the locals from the surrounding towns give the area a wide berth. Karyn keeps hearing something howling in the woods and she's not convinced it's a coyote or an owl like Roy claims. Karyn's dog goes missing in the woods and Karyn finds her remains not far from the house, convincing her there's something dangerous out there. A young couple out on a hike are killed by a wolf on an isolated trail, raising more alarm bells for Karyn when she realises they're 'missing'. She soon shares Inez's belief a werewolf hunts in the valley... and hoo boy is she right.
• How to Survive a Horror Movie has this as a Running Gag; it claims that going into the woods is basically the equivalent of painting a target on your back.
• The Inheritance Cycle: The forests of the Spine. It's said that "though the trees were tall and the sun shone brightly, few people could stay in the Spine for long without suffering an accident." It's also mentioned that, around a hundred years before the current storyline, King Galbatorix lost half his army in there; it's eventually revealed in-story that this mass-disappearance was a huge ambush by the Urgals who inhabit the Spine, leading to a total rout of the soldiers, and the Urgals are a bit miffed that no one knew this.
• Lone Huntress: Everyone on Gaia already lives in the woods (because almost the entirety of the planet's sole continent is given over to a massive rain forest with kilometer high trees), but they prefer to live in the canopy layer, deemed relatively safe in comparison to the understory and the floor. Trips to the floor are regarded as so dangerous that survivors traditionally receive a tattoo to mark their courage.
• Nowhere Stars: Forests and wilderness are the domain of Harbingers, nightmare creatures that feed on human suffering. In the cities, where Harbingers have to contend with Keepers, they confine themselves to Wounds, only emerging to ambush or hunt humans from the shadows. In the forests, they don't bother, wandering openly and making war on each other. You could wander into one's territory and not even know it until reality starts twisting around you into a nightmare, and by then it's usually too late.
• Messenger: Forest decides to kill people, seemingly at random — and that's on a good day. It becomes even more malevolent to reflect the personalities of Village's inhabitants.
• The Minpins: The Forest of Sin. Truth be told, the only really threatening thing in the forest is the fiery Red-Hot Smoke-Belching Gruncher, and it becomes much more calm once he's been dealt with.
• The Monster Bed: The narrator warns the reader against the Withering Wood, claiming that an assortment of fearsome creatures live there (gnomes, trolls, fairies, pixies, and Dennis and his mother).
• Once: By his cottage childhood home of Little Bracken, Thom Kindred, on a nostalgic walk through the woods, is steered, by soil-disgorged leering dwarfs, into a wasps' nest. Later inverted, when Thom learns most of the forest-dwelling faerefolkis to be benevolent.
• Septimus Heap:
  • The Forest is filled with carnivorous trees, wolverines and nasty witches, and not a place to enter without caution. Septimus and Nicko get almost killed in Flyte in this Forest.
  • In Queste, the forests of the Low Countries are also implied to be dangerous.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The prologue of the first book and several chapters of the later ones take place in the Haunted Forest just North of the Wall. Already dangerous due to the bitterly cold climate and the tribes of hostile barbarians living there, the woods beyond the wall become even more dangerous due to the arrival of Others and their army of the dead.
• The Sword of Shannara: We don't recommend heading into the Black Oaks. There's wolves in there. Ironically, in trying to avoid it, the main characters stumble into the wraith-haunted Mist Marsh.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Mirkwood, haunted by a weakened shade of Sauron and a swarm of giant spiders. There are Wood-Elves living there, but they come across as far more sinister than many of the other elves in Middle-Earth.
  • The Old Forest on the borders of the Shire, which is intelligent and actively hostile, as a result of being one of the last survivors (along with Mirkwood and Fangorn) of the old-growth forests that once covered most of the continent, the rest having largely been destroyed by Sauron's armies and by human expansion during the Second Age. It's full of thorny bushes that let people deeper into the forest but close up when they try to leave, it's actively tried to expand into settled land in the past, and in its depths waits Old Man Willow...
  • Fangorn Forest had a pretty bad reputation, probably due to the Ents' (a race of ultimately benevolent, though still dangerous, tree-people) proclivity for taking down anything that might be a threat. Even Aragorn was wary of it. It's mostly due to the Huorns, trees that have woken up or Ents that have almost turned into trees (the process seems to go both ways). They aren't very intelligent, but they can move — as fast as bullet train if needed — and aggressively pursue anything they perceive as a threat if there are no Ents around to herd them.
  • In the First Age there was the Forest Elf realm of Doriath. Technically, it was one of the safest places at the time in Middle-Earth due to a magical barrier created by its Queen Melian, meaning evil creatures couldn't enter. However, the barrier meant people who weren't invited would often get lost in the woods and die. Similar to Babes in the Wood, the twin princes Eluréd and Elurín are abandoned in the woods by the servants of Celegorm when the sons of Fëanor sacked Doriath and their father King Dior was killed. Fëanor's eldest son Maedhros repented and tried to find them but was unable to. It is left unclear what happened to them, though there is a story that says the birds and beasts led them to safety.
  • The Children of Húrin: The woods of Brethil are dangerous due to the large band of outlaws living there, the Gaurwaith (Sindarin for Wolf-Men). When he joined them, Turin made the wood dangerous for orcs by turning the outlaws into La Résistance.
• Uprooted: The Wood is a living, malevolent thing that corrupts or kills all who enter. People or animals who return tend to lose their minds, become violent, and often mutate. Worse, it's sapient, able to use its corruption to manipulate events far beyond its borders. Naturally, people avoid it like the plague — which would be easier if it weren't also actively expansionistic.
• Warrior Cats: Kittypets (house cats) are terrified of the woods, and tell stories about the savage wildcats that eat bones and the dangerous animals that live out there. Most feel that if you go into the woods, you won't come out, but some of them do like to explore there from time to time, and some actually join the Clans of cats that live out there.
• In The Well at the World's End, the Wood Perilous is extremely dangerous because of the conflict between three neighbouring city-states: Hampton under Scaur, the Burg of the Four Friths, and the land of the Wheat-wearers. Anyone who passes through is likely to be killed or Made a Slave.
• The Wind in the Willows: Mole impulsively decides to visit Mr. Badger's house by himself after Rat evasively discourages the idea several times — he finds out the hard way that the Wild Wood is not a safe place for small creatures to travel alone.
• "Young Goodman Brown": The protagonist goes into the woods, and he sees his wife Faith's pink ribbon. He meets up with a Louis Cypher and sees that Faith has joined a Satanic cult, along with several other supposedly upstanding members of their Puritan community.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "It Takes You Away", the blind girl Hanne warns the Doctor and her companions about a mysterious monster in the woods near her cottage, which took her father away. Terrifying roaring sounds back up her argument. It turns out to be invoked by Hanne's missing father, Erik, who set up a speaker system outside to play the roars on a loop to keep his daughter from, well, going in the woods while he was on the other side of a dimensional portal.
• Kamen Rider Gaim: The Helheim forest in perpetually is very dangerous, infested with Inves monsters and fruits that turn unfortunate saps into monsters if eaten. It's best to travel in groups when going through this world. And also, there is a ruined city in there.
• Lost Tapes: various forests are a common setting of this found-footage horror series, and it usually ends badly for the characters featured in those episodes. "Southern Sasquatch", "Dover Demon", "Devil Monkey", "Wendigo: American Cannibal," and "Beast of Bray Road" all take place in woodlands and have high death tolls, though "Bigfoot", "Thunderbird", "Mothman", and "Jersey Devil" have few to no fatalities. For a given metric of "forest", the episodes "Swamp Creature" and "Devil Dragon" take place in a forested swamp and a rainforest, respectively.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Under the Bed", many generations of parents told their children not to play in the woods outside Buford. It turns out that there is a child-snatching monster living in them.
• Power Rangers Mystic Force: Invoked, as the people of Briarwood are superstitious about the nearby woods. It turns out that the woods is home to a number of inhuman mystical beings... but they turn out to be pretty friendly for the most part. Just what they were so afraid of is a good question subject to Wild Mass Guessing (there are several quite plausible possibilities, none stated in-show). Though this was not ultimately kept in the series, the ads showed that the magical forest creatures were equally afraid to go into the city. The final episode has both sides overcome their mutual superstitious fears... which weren't actually in the series proper.
• Revolution: In the pilot, Charlie and her brother have been repeatedly told not to go wandering because "it's not safe out there", despite being in their late teens/early 20s and obviously able to handle themselves. Justified Trope in that we don't know whether or not bandits or wild animals beyond the capability of Charlie's crossbow to take down are in the woods. And the militia appears to be just as bad of a threat, if not worse. The militia may have also imposed restrictions on how far ordinary citizens are allowed to range from their homesteads, just as Medieval serfs (and plantation slaves in the pre-Civil War South) were bound to the estates of their masters. Get caught without a pass and you may wish the bear had eaten you first...
• Strange: In "Dubik", an evil presence lurks within the trees in a forest in Eastern Europe — a forest from which wood ends up being shipped abroad.
• Supernatural: In "Wendigo", campers disappear in in the Lost Creek Wilderness.
• Taken: In "Acid Tests", Louise Rankin frequently tells her daughter Wendy not to go into the woods because of the Half-Human Hybrid Lester. Ironically, when Wendy does wander into the woods in search of her dog Champ, Lester tends to her after she falls out of a tree and breaks her leg.
• Twin Peaks: The aptly-named Ghostwood Forest around the town, which contains a portal to the hellish Black Lodge, and is creeping with vaguely-defined evil and terrifying demonic owls.
• The X-Files:
  • "Darkness Falls" is about Mulder and Scully's nice trip to the woods — or so Mulder thought at first. Not only do they have to deal with eco-terrorists who sabotage their car, radio, and other equipment, but they discover that certain mysterious and deadly bugs are responsible for loggers' deaths. They nearly don't make it out.
  • "Detour": Mulder and Scully face "moth men" — predatory creatures who are barely visible and who try to protect their space. Several people get lost in the woods, and the creatures also come back for those who have been in their territory. Mulder and Scully are stranded in the woods and discover a creepy pit with human bodies and injured people.

Music

• The plot of Rob Cantor's song "Shia LaBeouf" begins when the protagonist gets lost in the woods with a non-functioning phone. It's unfortunate that the eponymous "actual cannibal" lives there.
• The Kinks song "Wicked Annabella" warns:
  Don't go into the woods tonight
  'cause underneath the sticks and stones
  are lots of little demons enslaved by Annabella
  waitin' just to carry you home
• Queens of the Stone Age:
  • "Someone's in the Wolf": "Once you're lost in twilight's blue, you don't find the way, the way finds you".
  • "Mosquito Song" implies that the cannibals are waiting in the forest.
• A song by the Swedish techno-bluegrass band Rednex, called "Is he alive" tells about a Humanoid Abomination that plays the fiddle and hides in a mine in the woods.
• "The Teddy Bears' Picnic"; especially the last verse:
  If you go down in the woods today you better not go alone
  It's lovely down in the woods today but safer to stay at home
  For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain
  Because today's the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic
• A song from Finnish heavy-metal band, Terasbetoni, is called "Älä mene metsään" ("Don't go in the woods").
• The music video of Voracity by Japanese pop-rock band Myth & Roid shows a rabbit mask-wearing Humanoid Abomination haunting creepy woods. Later, it starts pursuing a little girl that entered the place in manner reminiscent of Ju-on and does something to her when it catches up.

Mythology & Religion

• Norse Mythology: The Iron Woods, full of trolls, jötnar, witches, giant wolves, and jötunn witches who shapeshift into giant wolves.

Pinball

• Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast: The mode "Fear of the Dark" displays the viewpoint of a person fleeing a shadowy creature with Glowing Eyes of Doom in a foggy forest.

Podcasts

• Binary Break has the Witch Woods, which have gained a reputation lately for having monsters prowling within them. Ironically, when they actually find Witchmon, she herself attacks them because of those same rumours and accuses them of being said monsters.
• The Fallen Gods has the Shoiken Grove that grows around the Tower of Sorcery in Palanthis. It’s said to be cursed, as everyone who enters is never seen again. They're populated by living shadow monsters, and even if the adventurers manage to reach the Tower there are even worse horrors awaiting them.
• In Strange Woods has a mundane version of this trope, as the Whitetail National Forest is vast, deep, and easy to get lost in on good days, and when coupled with snowstorms, this results in Jacob's death.
• TANIS takes place in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The titular Eldritch Location is said to be located somewhere within those woods and has a pronounced effect on those who go into it or even get too close. Many of the tales told during episodes feature men and women turning homicidal and/or suicidal after exposure to it, ranging from random fur trappers in the nineteenth century to Charles Manson.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Jim Gaffigan: If you ever get up to go to the bathroom at night while you're camping, you might as well say to your friends "Nice knowin' ya! You want to get killed with me, or do you want the Serial Killer to get you when you come looking for me?"
• Norm Macdonald has a bit where he notes that nothing good ever happens in the woods and that no missing girl ever comes bounding out of the woods perfectly fine.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: Forests are the home of green dragons, manipulative bastards who deceive foes and reveal their true colors to lesser beings. Other inhabitants include larger and more dangerous versions of real-world animals such as dire bears, dire wolves, and dire boars.
• Summerland has the Sea of Leaves, a supernatural forest that spontaneously covered the world one day. Travel through it from the few communities left is extremely ill-advised since the psychic Call it emanates causes any human who hasn't suffered massive emotional trauma to degenerate into one of the mad hermits or the savage, feral cannibals that already live in it.
• Warhammer:
  • Pretty much every forest in the Old World is filled with brigands, wolves, goblins, giant spiders, mutants, beast men, minotaurs, cockatrices, chimeras, or even worse things. The Enchanted Forest of Athel Loren is in some ways the least scary because the xenophobic Wood Elves will just shoot you full of arrows — if you're lucky. You're at least equally as likely to get lost on twisted, maddening paths that lead only where the forest wants them to lead, at which point all manner of suck will happen, especially once the dryads get their hands on you.
  • There is a forest in the Empire called the Witches' Woods, which is inhabited by Wood Elves. No one is allowed to enter the woods on pain of death, not even the province's Elector Count. No one knows what's in the forest, but best guess is Wood Elves that will turn trespassers into target practice.

Theater

• Evil Dead: The Musical opens with the song "Cabin in the Woods" .

Video Games

• Bug Fables: The Far Grasslands are the bug equivalent to a dangerous forest, being a wild patch of backyard where the grass has grown incredibly tall. It looks like a peaceful, tranquil sort of area... until you run into the dangerous monsters that populate it such as Wild Chompers and Mantidflies. It's also part of the dangerous, warmongering Wasp Kingdom's territory, and shares a border with the even more hostile Wild Swamplands. Unsurprisingly, one of the few friendly NPCs you can find here is a paranoid wreck due to living in such a hostile environment, and the first meeting with him results in the battle due to him fearing that Team Snakemouth came to harm his family.
• CLOWN (2020): One of the clown-haunted maps to hunt for cards in is a forest.
• Fallout 4: In the Far Harbor expansion, the Island's woodlands are shrouded in a radioactive Fog of Doom and home to baddies such as Mutant Wolves, Fog Crawlers, Trappers, and the Children of the Atom.
• In Fear the Moon, the heavily wooded area where the friends set up their camp is rumoured to be the territory of a monster called the Wolfman. While this is dismissed as a just a spooky story, the woods are undoubtedly eerie, with lots of fog, a dilapidated shack with creepy messages graffitied on the walls and a dead bird in the shed, an abandoned house with a dark past and several missing person cases associated with the area. As the night goes on, the friends also start to realise there may be some truth to the Wolfman legend.
• Fever Cabin is set in a forest full of zombies. The Player Character is in an old hunting cabin therein, trying to survive five nights until a group of survivors comes to get them.
• Flesh Birds: The birds in the forest have become a ravenous swarm that attack, murder, and eat any human they come across because some "hippies" turned them on you and your coworkers when you wouldn't leave the forest.
• Forest of Drizzling Rain: The forest is home to a deadly youkai and the ghosts of her victims.
• Ghouls Forest, a series of Game Mods, has the player chased through the woods by assorted monsters.
• In Silence: Four people are stuck in the woods one night with a horrifying monstrosity that will kill them if they don't either fix their car and drive away, or open up the armory and kill it.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The only ones that can somewhat safely enter the Lost Woods are the Kokiri accompanied by a guardian fairy. Everyone else becomes one of the undead monsters that roam the forest. Link may have entered the woods a few times before getting a guardian fairy, but always in the company of Saria, which makes it possible her guardian fairy worked for both.
• Limbo: The first act is set in an eerie, fog-shrouded forest full of monsters.
• Night in the Woods: The titular woods are home to an incorporeal, teleporting, kidnapping entity that begins to stalk Mae once she becomes aware of it, and is later shown to be a member of a murderous cult that was empowered by their eldritch god.
• Oakwood: Dinosaurs wander about in abandoned camp in the woods. They eat any camper they find.
• The Path instructs you not to go into the woods, and because this is an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, you know what's waiting there... but on the other hand, if you follow instructions and don't go in, nothing of note happens. So, even with a warning not to do it, and knowing what waits for you in there, you have no choice but to go in if you want a satisfying game-experience...
• Pokémon Sword and Shield: The Slumbering Weald is a vast, eerie-looking forest shrouded in huge amounts of fog. Residents of Postwick generally avoid going in there for good reason, and the first time you and Hop head in there to rescue a Wooloo, both of you get lost in the dense fog. But that's not even the scary part — the scary part is when you encounter the legendary mascot as soon as you wind up lost, and end up going into a Hopeless Boss Fight against a beast that you know absolutely nothing about. And all this happens right after you get your starter.
• Raw Footage: The protagonist explores a forest said to be inhabited by a mysterious creature. They're trying to get video evidence that it exists, only everyone else who tried the same before wound up dead.
• Resident Evil 4, likewise, has its first act in and around a small woodland village in rural Spain, where a Puppeteer Parasite has turned the townsfolk into technically living zombies.
• Skinwalker Hunt: The game has you playing as a Native American hunter who's been hired to take out a Skin Walker that's been killing tourists and causing the wildlife to become aggressive.
• Slender: The Slender Man haunts a forest that the protagonist finds themself stuck in.
• Spirits of Anglerwood Forest: The children of Anglerwood Forest are told by their parents not to go in the woods at night. Stories are told around the area of children that encounter strange creatures or go missing in the woods. By the end, we know that something corrupted Ezra and took his spirit into the woods. After that, corrupted Ezra made the woods a much more dangerous place to be.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has the Red Forest. Based on the real Red Forest in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (which turned to this color after the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster killed the trees), the area is a place where even stalkers in large and well-armed groups fear to go, and the only permanent inhabitant is Forester. Radiation hotspots and anomalies are numerous, large packs of mutants (including a respawning Boss in Mook Clothing) roam the area, the safe roads are controlled by Monolith and, once one goes through all of that, they find themselves straight into the area of effect of the Brain Scorcher, turning them into Zombies or Monolith soldiers.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: The planet Voss has a forbidden area known as the Nightmare Lands, a twisted forest surrounding the Dark Heart, home to an ancient evil entity. If you don't get killed by the monsters and crazy people roaming the forest, you're likely to be driven insane by the heavy Dark Side presence infusing the place.
• Taishox Alice: Both Red and Snow White where told not to leave their house as children in their respective routes.
• Until Dawn: Eight friends take a winter getaway at a hotel deep in some mountainous, snow-covered woods haunted by a psychotic killer and infested with wendigos. It doesn't end well for any of them.
• A Walk in the Woods: The forest the kids are camping in is inhabited by a monster and his inhuman children. The kids need to find each other and get out of the woods before they become more of the monster's children.
• Wick: The forest is haunted by five murderous ghostly children. In-game collectibles imply their supernatural abilities predate their deaths and that two of them may have never been human to begin with.
• Witch Hunt takes place in an expansive, dark forest surrounding a small colonial town, where a sinister witch has been creating armies of scary creatures that have been terrorizing the residents. Among its horrors include a werewolf that killed the player's horse, the Witch herself, a tree monster that her invincibility is tied to, giant spiders, zombies, and shambling skeleton creatures.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Duskwood region is extremely creepy and quite dangerous. The local NPCs ominously warn you to keep to the roads and only travel by day (though it doesn't make a lot of difference because ... well, how do you think the area got its name?) One of the loading screen tips advises you to keep to the roads if you want to avoid monsters. A sound piece of advice, actually, as monsters and other enemy NPCs usually prefer to wander off-road.
  • Silverpine Forest is pretty much the same. Sandwiched neatly between the Werewolf kingdom of Gilneas and the Zombie kingdom of Tirisfal, you can't take two steps away from the road without blundering into something that's been horribly mutated or cursed.

Webcomics

• Charby the Vampirate: One need not be human to be endangered by entering the forest of Kellwood, although most humans seen in it are summarily killed and eaten by the monsters therein and the fact that it is ''much'' larger than it looks on human maps or when flying over it or walking around it would make it an easy place to become hopelessly lost.
• Cursed Princess Club: Subverted. The forest below the cliff on which the Pastel Kingdom palace is built has a reputation for being haunted, which the eponymous club exploits to keep their activities secret, but there's no indication of anything intrinsically dangerous about it.
• The Dreamwalker Chronicles: There are a number of human-eating monsters in the forests, and while some of the supernatural entities encountered are benevolent the one that attempts to help the main trio while they're in the woods ends up being killed himself.
• Ears for Elves: Elon gives Myari this warning after she's wandered into the dark, dangerous forest without him.
  Elon: Why must you always put yourself at risk like this? We all know how dangerous the forest is!
• The Queen and the Woodborn: The Shimmerwood is an enchanted forest inhabited by creatures from Slavic folklore, including the anthropophagic witches Baba Roga and Baba Yaga. Crossing the boundary demarcated by the stones bordering the Godsroad puts unwary mortals at the mercy — or lack thereof — of the titular Woodborn.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The staple and prevalent background scare. Enhanced by the fridge horror of the fact it's not just the woods outside the settlement walls — it's the entire known world. If the scene showing the landscape during the train ride isn't a dead ringer for this trope, nothing is.

Web Original

• Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel): One episode covers mysterious killings and disappearances in American and Canadian national parks. And suffice to say, don't go into the woods unless you want to end up like these people. This trend is continued in a later episode, where sightings of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti living deep in the forest are mentioned, complete with the deaths of several hunters, loggers, factory workers, and outdoorsmen.
• The Call of Warr: Everyone, save Vid, is afraid of the woods — the trees specifically because they heard voices coming from the trees and couldn't find their way out. The small town they reach is completely surrounded by trees, so they consider themselves trapped until rescue. When Gravesite decides they should go into the woods to find Durkin, even Prince, who was previously mocking Glintz-Terry's fear of trees, is horrified and opposed to the plan.
• Don't Walk Home Alone After Dark: In The Pine Creepers, the narrator and his friends like to go camping in a clearing in the pine woods surrounding their town, though the narrator is unsettled when Jordy brings up a story his dad told him about people seeing strange creatures – known as Pine Creepers – in the woods, round about the same time people started going missing. The narrator tried to dismiss it as a story, but later that very night he finds out the hard way that it's true.
• Nyx Crossing takes place in a forested area, which appears to be an Eldritch Location.
• SCP Foundation does it in SCP-899. It's a bad idea to go near it if you're an adult. It's even worse if you're a child. And if you're a teenager going through puberty [DATA EXPUNGED]. And this is before the SCP-899-1 manifestations appear...
• Ink City: The forest bordering Ink City is home to mindless ink monsters and other threats, and also holds the Fourth Wall. Assuming you make it that far, it's best just to leave the Wall alone... touching it leads to bad things. The City's first major Event involved a large group of residents venturing into the woods only to discover exactly WHY that was such a bad idea.
• Off the Page and into Life: The locations page reveals that the Hanging Woods, which everyone avoids due to a town legend of a man that hanged himself there, and general creepiness. It's unknown if the woods are really dangerous or if it's all paranoia and rumors, mainly because no one's willing to go and check. At any rate, we do know that the reincarnation of The Big Bad Wolf himself lives there...
• The Onion: In -- 52615 Report: Leading Cause of Death Still Venturing Beyond the Pines, disregarding this trope and venturing into the forest — whether by losing your way on a foggy night, looking for a shortcut despite repeated warnings not to, or just waking up in the middle of the night and heading straight for the forest — turns out to be the leading cause of death among Americans.
  "The report, which analyzed the nation's mortality data from the past decade, found that wandering past the tree line and entering the shadowy depths that lie therein results in approximately 650,000 deaths each year."
• RWBY: The various forests of Remnant are home to the creatures of Grimm, who will attack any human they can find. While it makes it handy for aspiring Hunters to go out and train, the forests are so infested that human civilization has barely expanded beyond a few small states, and going out into the woods alone and unarmed is basically a death sentence, as Yang and Ruby almost found out the hard way when they were children.
• The Slender Man Mythos: The Slender Man sure loves his pine forests, but he's not averse to other kinds of trees.
  • A specific example is in Everyman HYBRID; in the episode entitled Joke's Over, Evan, Vince, and Jeff see the Slender Man in the woods. Evan chases after him, with Vince and Jeff following. Slendy vanishes and they suddenly find a circle of black bags. Vince cuts one open... and there's a few pints of blood in there.
  • Marble Hornets narrows it down a bit — while the Operator can show up just about anywhere, wandering into the woods in Rosswood Park is practically guaranteed to end in a run-in with him.
• Story of the Blanks is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan-game/creepypasta that uses the Everfree Forest (see Western Animation below) as the key to the storyline. In a nutshell, Apple Bloom wanders into the Everfree until she discovers a Town with a Dark Secret hiding in its depths. In detail? Apple Bloom follows a mysterious filly to Sunny Town, a town in the depths of the Everfree where no adult pony has a Cutie Mark. Determined to find the filly who led her there, Apple Bloom eventually finds a creepy house on the outskirts of town... where she finds the charred bones of a filly in the fireplace. Fleeing back to the town, she finds the ponies have become creepy, undead monsters, who admit to killing the filly for getting her Cutie Mark and declare they will "protect" Apple Bloom from a similar fate. Apple Bloom just barely manages to flee with the aid of Ruby, the Cute Ghost Girl who inadvertently lured her here. What makes things worse is that the story is minimalistic; we have no idea what happened (beyond the gruesomely obvious) or how Sunny Town ended up the way it did... which may be part of the reason why the game is so scary.
• Taerel Setting: Some of Taerel's woodlands are inhabited by hostile kin'toni clans. There is also the Torsh Dense Taiga Forest, filled with poisonous gas.
• There's a Man in the Woods: A Bratty Half-Pint named Sid makes up a lie about there being a murderer in the woods next to the school so he can have the honeysuckle bush at the edge of the woods all to himself. His lie snowballs into a moral panic that ends up getting the teacher fired for not doing enough to protect the kids from the nonexistent killer (as if that's his job and not the job of the police), all while the teacher's claims that Sid is lying fall on deaf ears. The unjustly slandered teacher turns from a Nice Guy into an Addled Addict, and eventually decides that if everybody else is going to play along with Sid's lie, then so will he... by making it true.
  Do you hear that, Sid? There's a man in the woods.
• Unwanted Houseguest: The Houseguest says on several occasions that his audience should leave because Aberfoyle Woods become dangerous after dark. There's no indication that the danger applies to him when he's forced to take shelter from the Shadow Demon.
• Whateley Universe: The wooded areas around the titular Superhero School are exceedingly dangerous. Aside from the oft-hostile Genius Loci known as The Grove, the area is dotted with Eldritch Locations, and patrolled by the native Werefolk who own the land Whateley Academy sits on.
• White Stag Education: The depths of the Pine Barrens are where the Masked Strangers live, try to kidnap/kill hikers, and hold rituals involving an Eldritch Abomination called the Adversary. The park rangers are trained to keep visitors safe by, among other things, painting blaze markers on trees, removing deceptive blazes put up by the Strangers, and occasionally killing Strangers.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: "The Picnic": To get to the picnic area, the class has to go around the Forest of Doom (Yes, that's what it's called). Gumball and Darwin misunderstand it as going through the Forest of Doom, so they do. They get lost and have to run from very, very bizarre predators like a teal deer with fangs and a rooster head and giant cyclopic bear with antlers.
• Amphibia: The forests of Amphibia are filled with giant insects, birds, reptiles, and fire-breathing beavers, all of which are dangerous to the frogs as most of them are big enough to eat them.
• Kaeloo: In the Halloween Episode, Kaeloo warns Stumpy not to go into the forest. Stumpy ignores her, finds a cemetery which for whatever reason was inside the forest, and ends up accidentally causing a Zombie Apocalypse by raising the dead.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The ponies of Equestria treat the Everfree Forest as an Eldritch Location, looking at it with fear, and preferring to avoid it when possible. Turns out, the forest isn't so bad... it just happens to be an Eldritch Location for them only, because the plants and animals fend by themselves without pony aid, and the weather is not under the control of the pegasus ponies; which clashes directly with the rest of the pony-ordered, cheerfully civilized Equestria. It is of note, though, that Everfree Forest does contain a lot of genuine danger in the form of dangerous creatures such as manticores, cockatrices and Ursas, as well as assorted nasty stuff like Poison Joke — a plant which causes humorous afflictions on those who come in contact with it based on its own warped sense of humor — and tends to offer some exotic new danger every time it's visited. It's just not as unnatural as the ponies believe. Zecora, meanwhile, lives quite happily in the forest.
• Over the Garden Wall: Wirt and Greg encounter a number of strange threats in the forests of the Unknown, including the Beast.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil has "The Forest of Certain Death" from "Diaz Family Vacation", a Mewni landmark which is just as bad as it sounds.

Real Life

• The Roman General Quinctilius Varus was warned by several German chieftains not to lead his army into the Teutoburg Forest as the warlord Arminius was planning an ambush. Varus did it anyway, and the entire army was destroyed.
• During the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general Demosthenes once led a group of heavy infantry into hilly ground held by his light-armed enemies. Predictably, using the high ground to their advantage, the missile troops ripped the Athenians to shreds. Demosthenes's surviving men fled into a nearby forest hoping the light infantry would not follow them there. They did not. Instead, they set it on fire.
• Aokigahara forest in Japan is most famous for the numerous suicides that have happened there. However, many people have also gotten lost and never returned. Aokigahara was a popular location for suicides long before, but the suicide fad really started to get going in 1960 when the forest appeared in a novel about a pair of Star-Crossed Lovers, who killed themselves. In the last decades, the yearly average of suicides has grown increasingly, and the local authorities decided to no longer publish numbers when they hit 100 (discovered) cases in 2003. Even without the forest's grim nature as a suicide hotspot, the forest has a reputation for being a place of supernatural activity, with many stories about malevolent ghosts and eerie spirits roaming its hallowed ground. It helps that the dense tree cover and rough terrain help suppress noise, giving the impression that visitors are walking in almost perfect silence.
• Schwarzwald, also known as the Black Forest, inspired many of the more violent German folk tales.
  • Place names like Höllental (Hell Valley, leading up to Himmelsreich, or Realm of Heaven), Notschrei (Scream of Distress), and Siehdichfür (Be Aware) do of course help this.
  • And it is a local tradition to dress up as devils, witches, monsters, etc. in spring to party WILD and also scare winter away. Aversion for anyone who likes that kind of stuff.
• In some parts of California, hiking off-trail is ill-advised as you may stumble into a drug cartel operation (usually pot) and/or their booby traps. Or you might just stumble across somebody who already did... members of the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service take these warnings very seriously.
• In most large national parks, hiking off-trail is ill-advised (even for short distances) simply because the chance for you to get lost is huge, and several hikers have starved to death not a hundred feet from a major trail.
• One word: Siberia. Miles and miles and miles of endless forests in all directions, on a stretch of land big enough to cover all Lower 48 States plus Europe. Also consider this: it has the world's largest population of wolves, bears, wolverines, lynxes, boars and only gods know what else. Oh, and it's also the coldest place on Earth outside of Antarctica. Siberia consists of taiga, which is the Northern coniferous forest with spruces, pines, and birches dominant, and tundra, which is semi-desert permafrost where only the hardiest vegetation can survive. Even the Mongols dared not to venture into the taiga, let alone the tundra.
• This trope was the rule of thumb in Medieval Europe; you could be killed by wolves, bears, bandits... and if you went into the wrong woods, the local nobleman or even the crown. There is a story from 13th-century France where three students of the Sorbonne got lost in a forest... and were arrested on suspicion of poaching, and hanged without a trial by the baron (Enguerrand IV, Lord of Coucy) who owned the woods. Thankfully, King Louis IX arrested the baron and was inches from hanging him, only freeing him after stripping him of virtually all power and levying a hefty fine.
• The forests of Finland contain some of the most dangerous creatures of all: the Finnish Army. They are forest specialists par excellence, and every conscript is taught to survive and find his way in the woods. The woods provide excellent hideaways and bases for Finnish jaegers and rangers. The invading Russian Army learned this the hard way during the Winter War. The Finnish Army had an overwhelming terrain advantage, and their snipers — including Simo Hayha a.k.a. 'the White Death' — mowed down those poor devils by the hundreds.
• During Russia's Time of Troubles, the invading Polish Army was searching the countryside in pursuit of Tsar Michael I of Russia when they learned that he was hiding in a particular monastery in the woods. A local named Ivan Susanin offered a Polish detachment to guide them there, but being a supporter of Michael, instead took them so deep into the woods that none (not even Susanin) came out alive. (Actually, while Susanin is a historical figure, the wood story is most probably fiction.)
• In some zones of Mexico (particularly the states of Michoacán and Veracruz, which have the quite unlucky combination of thick forests and heavy cartel activity), it is ill-advised to travel at night through forest highways, especially if you don't know the road. Although there are safer federal highways, other, more remote roads can be very dangerous. They are dark and often neglected, and you risk falling victim to muggers playing a Wounded Gazelle Gambit (when they're not blocking the road), or worse, getting mistaken by local cartels for undercover rivals. Either way, it wouldn't end well.

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