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Got no human grace, your eyes without a face.
— Billy Idol, "Eyes Without A Face"
As other tropes indicate, eyes are very, very meaningful. It's a cliché to call them windows to the soul. This trope reminds us that alone, eyeballs are fragile spheres of gel only vaguely reminiscent of their usual purpose of subtle social cues. So a single eye completely outside the context of a face is just creepy. Bad guys often favor a singular, unblinking, Faceless Eye as an insignia— bonus points if said villain runs a dystopian society of unending surveillance. Even without an ominous Big Bad attached, the prospect of a thousand eyeballs shooting you to death with Eye Beams is fundamentally more unsettling than a thousand Mooks with Frickin Laser Beams. Fighting them usually leads to " Go For The Eye".
A cyclops character is more relatable than this kind of being, since cyclopes have a recognizable facial structure, with at least a mouth. These examples are far beyond the edges of the Uncanny Continent. It is also interesting to note that the representations of many insane AIs use this trope - most likely to underscore their creepiness.
Of course, being long past the Uncanny Valley already, these examples often also involve Technicolor Eyes, Hellish Pupils, and Red Eyes Take Warning. Contrast The Blank and Eyeless Face.
Examples
Advertising
- Vision Express, a chain of opticians in the UK, started an advertising campaign in 2009 using pairs of identically-dressed people with giant eyeballs for heads. Here.
 Is probably meant to be goofy rather than creepy, but Your Mileage May Vary.
Anime
Card Games
- A few Yu-Gi-Oh cards have eyes with no faces: "Relinquished" and "Thousand-Eyes Idol", which can be fused together into "Thousand-Eyes Restrict". These cards have zero Attack/Defense, but "Relinquished" and "Thousand-Eyes Restrict" can steal monsters from an opponent's side of the field and effectively use them as meat shields.
- At least in the anime, Thousand-Eyes Restrict brings up images of a very different body part, If You Know What I Mean. This Troper can actually send a friend into Squick comas simply by saying "Thousand-Eyes Restrict."
Comic Books
Fanfiction
- In a Ni GHTS fanfiction this troper and her friend are doing, the opposer of Wizeman, Eviru, uses his eye as his obvious symbol.
Film
- Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju's 1959/1960 Films Gaumont picture, features fun, staring creepiness that will scare anyone afraid of dolls with lifelike eyes. Real Nightmare Fuel and the source of Mr. Idol's fascination with the topic, in the first place.
- Sauron's emblem is the fiery Lidless Eye. He's physically depicted as such in The Movies— which makes him a living Clear Eyes ad, only without Ben Stein, and therefore, slightly less frightening.
- The B Movie, The Crawling Eye, aka The Trollenberg Terror.
- One of the monsters in Voyage Into Space was a giant disembodied floating eye.
- The 1993 movie Freaked contains two faceless, machine gun-wielding Rastafarian eyeballs◊.
- The movie Small Soldiers featured Ocula, a creature with a single giant eye, a neck/eyestalk, and three legs.
- Not really sure if this fits, as there's no mention of anything to compare it to or not confuse it with: The eyes in the darkness at the beginning of Suspiria.
Literature
- A Series Of Unfortunate Events's odious Count Olaf has a tattoo of an eye on his ankle, and eyes are a recurring motif throughout the books.
- Animorphs has Crayak, a red-eye being first glimpsed in the dying visions of a Yeerk in Book Six.
- The Eye In The Door by Pat Barker. It wasn't a real eye, just a peephole to spy on prisoners, but it had a similar effect.
- Umbridge keeps a magical eyeball in her door in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That one was especially disturbing, since it confirmed that Moody was indeed dead and Umbridge took his eye.
- The repressive theocratic government of Gilead, in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, employs internal spies known as Eyes to monitor the population, and their logo is (what else?) an eye.
- Similarly, Barrayar's Imperial Security uses the Eye of Horus for its insignia.
- The Ringworld has eye storms, caused when a meteor puncture in the Ring bed drops air pressure sharply; Coriolis effects shape the surrounding cyclone into a miles-high lidded eye shape. The first time the protagonists saw one, it gave Speaker to Animals a Heroic BSOD due to his odd religious upbringing.
- The Graii from Classical Mythology were a trio of hags who lived "north of the North Pole" with only one eye amongst them, which they who would trade around when they wanted to see something. Perseus gets ahold of it and squeezes it in his hand until the hags give him information he needs to continue his quest.
- The Haunter in the Dark (one of Nyarlathotep's many avatar's) from a HP Lovecraft story of the same name does have a body (some kinds of winged, tentacled Living Shadow / Eldtrich Abomination type thing), but it's distinguishing feature is a huge three-lobed burning eye.
- The god Blind Io in Discworld has no eyes on his face, but a whole host of flying eyes (complete with wings and trailing optic nerve...) which can see anywhere in the world.
Live Action TV
- Daleks have a...periscope in their giant-pepper-pot-of-death power armor, matching their single biological eye.
- MY! VISION! IS! NOT! IMPAIRED!
- Also the Ambassador from Alpha Centauri who appeared in a couple of 70s stories was basically a big eyeball on legs.
- Buffy: Beljoxa's Eye. What happened to the rest of Beljoxa?
- Garth Marenghis Darkplace episode Skipper the Eyechild features the titular monster baby who is mostly eye. Skipper's eyeball father also appears.
Music
- Experimental Rock group The Residents usually hide their faces with large eyeball masks. The only member that doesn't wear one of these wears a large black skull mask, due to the original mask being stolen and vandalized during a tour.
- The Tom Waits song Eyeball Kid is about a child who is born as just an eye and details his life as a successful circus freak.
New Media
- This You Tube video, at 2:27. "There is a giant eyeball and it is looking at us!"
Newspaper Comics
- One strip of The Far Side had an eye called "Mr. Pembrose" resting on a psychiatrist's couch.
Real Life
- The original logo for the federal government's Information Awareness Office. They had to change it after people complained about a government project to mine civilian data being represented by an all-seeing eye
- The Adelaide Film Festival features people with giant eyes for heads.
Tabletop Games
- In Warhammer 40000 games, the symbol of Chaos (eight-pinted star) is often decipted as having an eye or a skull in the center of the star.
- In Paranoia, Friend Computer is usually represented as a monitor with a single giant eyeball.
- Call Of Cthulhu has Groth, a planet sized eyeball that floats through space.
- Everquest - One class of monsters ia a group of small eyeball ISLANDS! (their upper lids are covered with cracks and mountains).
- Another monster was a gelatinous, red-veined eyeball that attached itself to ceilings and used its wet tentrils to snatch unwary prey.
Video Games
Web Comics
Web Original
Western Animation
- The Powerpuff Girls fought a spherical monster entirely covered with eyes that shot Eye Beams, and couldn't find a way to get close enough to hit it until Blossom finds a way to make it laugh, making it close its eyes upside-down, anime-style.
- The Tooth Fairy in The Fairly Oddparents conjures a giant eye with tentacles, to illustrate she should stick only to teeth.
- Dr. Zin's Robot Spy from Jonny Quest, which inspired the Walking Eye on The Venture Brothers.
- My Life As A Teenage Robot had an invisible giant eye with tentacles as the Monster Of The Week. Its vulnerability was demonstrated in a Humiliation Conga as in short order it got sand, hot sauce, blindingly focused sunlight, pointed sticks and other harmful items in its... self.
Real Life
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